7/13 - The Bottleneck of Fear p.17

[paige]

Even Buddhists say 'ouch' when they hammer their finger instead of the nail. :wink:

Lol, Kenneth, it will take me many more years of cultivating right speech before I'll say just 'ouch.'

I'm glad you're OK, Hans. CD, your job still sounds stressful to me, but I'm glad you're enjoying your sunrises.

The verse of Shen Hui reminded me of koan 22 from book 2 of the 'Shinji Shobogenzo', which depicts a discussion between Master Hogen and Master Gensoku. Basically master Gensoku's understanding of the verse 'A child of the fire comes in order to tend the fire.' is that fire belongs to fire, and therefore it is senseless for fire to tend to itself. That understanding is similar to Hui Neng's verse, however, it's only half the picture. Shen Hsiu and Master Hogen complete the picture in saying essentially that we must actualize our Buddha nature via practice (i.e. polish the mirror, tend to the fire). Just knowing it's there ain't enough!

I'm a big fan of Yampolsky as well, and I'm glad that we have his translation of the Tun-huang text - since the Ming translation gets so overblown. The formless verse is a favourite teaching of mine.

Some say that Hui Neng's verse was a direct refutation of Shen Hui's but I don't think so. I think that Hui Neng's stanza kind of closes the loop. The path is either gradual cultivation -> sudden enlightenment or vice versa. I think there's good advice in
(a) polish the mirror
(b) realise that there is no mirror
(c) go to (a)


Or you could switch the order of a & b...same difference.

[Gregor]

Ooops! This was my comment. . .I forgot to log in. Sorry

Wow. . .a lot of good posts about this chapter.

The biggest ideas I am taking away from the chapter are about how we become conditioned by fear, and how we actually need to polish the mirror (even though it does not exist).

I've been experimenting with a softer style of practice, as of late. . .and it merely is not adequate for my particular challenges.

Although I truly do accept myself as I am, and live with no deep regrets or guilt. I'm taking some time to look at myself deeply and make some changes to the conditioning thats accumulated over the years. I'm just glad to know there is some room for mirror polishing in a Zen life. . .its what gets us to the point where we can walk the Eightfold path more organically and naturally.

I suppose it has a lot to do with one of Jundo's earlier lessons of "acceptance without acceptance".

[Keishin]

the bottleneck of fear

Hellos to everyone:
This was a very difficult chapter for me to fully understand. I still haven't.
I got enough of it. For me, in this chapter, one piece I come away with which is exceedingly helpful (I 'knew' this before reading her words, but her words put what I 'knew' into words and I 'knew' what I knew for the first time!) I hope I'm making sense here--because this is a very wonderful thing that a writer can do--allow us to know what we already know...

That is, the contractions in my body, which are an immediate feedback loop in bodymind mean that I am not 'just sitting'. Just as thoughts arise, I find so do various contractions. To me this was almost a 'radical' realization--that contractions and thoughts are equivalent.

gassho
Keishin

[Ryumon]

We tend to be dualists - that is, to think that the mind is separate from the body. It is important to realize that the two are so intricately connected that what affects one can affect the other. They are not necessarily equivalent - your contractions and thoughts - but are certainly related.

Kirk

[Justin]

Hello all!

This is a very rich chapter, and I'm happy to see it's spawned such rich and insightful discussion. Though I didn't take much from it after the first few readings, somehow it suddenly opened up to me today and I found myself anxious to discuss it when I had a few free moments. Here are a few of my thoughts.

A newborn baby seems open and unconditioned.

This reminds me of a comment, though I forget the source, that all babies are like little Zen masters!

We relate each new threat to all of the previous ones.

This makes me think of my previous efforts to systemize what I knew. For years I traipsed from the work of one philosopher to another in hopes that I might find the system, the proper philosophical grid into which the entire world would neatly fit. When I encountered problems in life I'd make desperate attempts to find a place within the system where my problems fit, trying to shoehorn troubles into a box that denied their complexity and vitality. I was trying to relate new threats to threats I could explain.

I now realize that this is like comparing one leaf to another. Why would we want to force our lives into these tiny compartments?

We make the decision that our Self is the contraction of fear. The bottleneck of fear isn't cause by our conditioning, but by the decision about myself that I have reached based on that conditioning.

I thought this was an especially vivid way of illustrating the way that we choose to identify with our inner lives. We deny our true selves and instead point to our emotional reactions as our identities; by realizing that this false Reactive-Self is an illusion composed of nothing more than our illusory thoughts, we can open to vibrant and joyous life.

The paradox is that we have to practice with the verse that was not accepted.

I did not understand this particular story at all until this reading. The Sixth Patriarch's verse illuminated the absolute world, the world that truly Is, that Truth that we practice in order to realize. Shen Hsiu's verse illuminated the relative world that we live in on a daily basis, and helpfully directs us back to practice in order to realize the absolute.

A gassho to wills for his clear and well-written post that shed further light on this portion of the chapter for me.

We slowly gain comprehension by experiencing the bottleneck and going through it.

This is the molasses path of Zen. Slow, sweet, and eminently useful!

Gassho to all.