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Zen Buddhism






   A good Zen teacher motivates students to do something by stealing from their attachments to notions, by taking away anything they might try to hold on to as a resting place or as an expectation of some sort. The Zen teacher as skillful thief ideally leaves his students with nothing but a desperate desire to accomplish the Way, to resolve the great matter of life and death right here, right now.




   The heart sutra goes through a whole list and, item after item, negates every basic tenet of Buddhism- and it negates the negation too.



   Buddhism recognizes six realms of existence, only one of which is human. In the human realm, conceptual processing of moment-after-moment change takes place; hence, it is the realm characterized by delusion.



    Egocentric suffering, which is fundamentally neurotic, should be distinguished from selfless suffering. Because of our attachment to our notion of self, we have egocentric suffering, which tends to make us inactive, to withdraw into ourselves, to contract into a kind of death. When we let go of the self, we have selfless suffering- because life is suffering- but is active, expansive and dynamic. It is not death like, but alive with growth and expansion.



  Whenever the self is present, we contract; when the self is absent, we expand. One response is life-denying and the other is life-affirming. Selfless suffering is the function of prajna wisdom.



Life is radically affirmed by negating any notion we have of it.



   This identification with notions is particularly troublesome when it comes to finding out who or what we are. When we let go of these notions, we directly realize that we don’t know who or what we are at all, and this state of not-knowing is or what we are!




   We become completely intimate with what is, as it is, just like a fish swimming in water. Being one with the water the fish doesn’t think in terms of being either wet or dry or even of swimming in water. From the beginning we are intrinsically the enlightened state. At the same time the fish must realize that it is swimming in water. It’s not enough that we are intrinsically in the enlightened state, we must realize it.
 
 
 
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