About
(http://www.chinapage.com/painting/shenchou/shenchou3.html)
I’m not a practicing Buddhist, and I will probably never become one. So why a website about Zen with tiny Zen and Chan poetry and wisdom words? Because I like them. This attitude towards life, this genuine respect for life is wisdom, pure knowledge of the concrete, how life IS, not thought of.
Wisdom is rare today. The West doesn’t t have the slightest clue of what pure concrete knowledge is, modern man is theorizing about life, without capturing the living, the process. Everything is schematized and generalized to abstractions. Abstractions are abstractions not life. Many have probably forgotten they exist at all. We live in an artificial world created by man and have forgotten how to meet life itself. We’ve let ourselves become alienated from nature, from reality.
Thoughts and ideas are closed, narrow, products of interests hence subjective. In other words ideas are tools, instruments, or even weapons, so one can navigate, survive and invent in order to survive physically as well as psychologicallyl. Words bring order to an empty world, but this order destroys our freedom of thought. We cling to this order and imprison ourselves in illusions. We choose reality thus denying it.
Even scientific “truths” are not real, they are an approach to reality, sometimes equal with, but they ARE not, they are lifeless symbolic representation, so called “laws”. Consequently ideas (smart or dumb it doesn’t matter)are build on reified (frozen) thoughts and concepts from yesterday, borrowed from somebody who thinks he knows. He does not know, You cannot know reality, you can experience reality but not know it. Zen is not a philosophy, and not a religion. Both are meaningssystems founded on words that define and close reality, but Zen is wordless and open. Religion, philosophy and science defies or try to control reality, Zen respects what is.It is pure and non-violent. What matters for Zen is not control and manipulation of reality but an insight so profound, that people can get out of this man made madhouse we call society so they can reach the open fields of what is.
To be not to think is the essence. So the only way to deal with Zen when you try to understand it is to liberate yourself from conventional meaningsystems and see reality directly without any interpretation schemes whatsoever. No theorizing, no conventional thoughts, no nothing but what is. A bird flies, trees are blooming, knowing is not knowing, sometimes good, sometimes bad: innocence and acceptance.
On my own experience:
Years ago, in a Chinese garden in Penang, Malaysia I had an surprising experience. It was late evening, already dark, when suddenly in a split second I entered a mental state which made me see what life actually is.
It first appeared as a strong feeling of “seeing” the presence of death followed by the intertwining of death into life. It was not a “mystic” experience at all, rather a very clear and natural insight into the living life. It was an understanding, which embraced not only life but also death, because I suddenly perceived life and death as a unity of mutual dependency.
This life/death unity created a nearly visible energy which expanded time and space. The garden with the small Chinese house, the heat, the chickadees, and the vegetation melted together into a vibrating “forever world” which had a quality of something “majestic”.
Time and space vanished and an airy vibrant reality and a feeling of having seen this for hundreds of years appeared. The oneness of the experience lifted the understanding to a level where words couldn’t reach, words became useless.
The experience lasted maybe for 10 seconds and then everything became “normal” again.
I was 16 years old and had no knowledge of Buddhism or meditation etc, so my experience was not determined by Buddhist knowledge or imaginations, which tells me, that such an experience is possible for anybody, no matter who they are or to which culture they belong. The experience was not “religious”, it was overwhelmingly “natural” and “self-evident”, nearly beyond religion.
I think the reason for the sudden change (awake?) was my youth and that it was the first time I experienced such exotic surroundings. (I am Danish). Maybe it was some kind of a culture shock, which made me completely open and aware, so much that I forgot myself during these marvelous 10 seconds.
It has probably also much to do with innocence, susceptibly and the ability to give in to life by forgetting yourself. That is youth and that is also the core of Zen.
ZenHsin
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