3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Is zazen truly Zen?
Maybe relevant to all of this is that the characters for zazen are the same as sitting meditation, sitting zen or sitting dhayana 🙏🏽
I do think Dogen innovated a bit, but not on the scale some arzen people think he did.
I also think Dogen and people here seem to acknowledge no arguments against meditation, which are not that uncommon in the zen record, maybe as part of the antinomy of the tradition. For example:
I have no expedient techniques to give people, no doctrine, no method of peace and happiness. Why? If there is any “expedient technique,” it has the contrary effect of burying you and trapping you.
Comment by JundoCohen at 26/01/2025 at 01:35 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It is interesting, however, that Dogen ... despite being a great advocate of seated Zazen, also said that there was a misunderstanding in the name "Zen" as referencing the kind of Jhana practice in early Buddhism ...
Dogen wrote in Butsudo, "Thus, we should know that the way of the buddhas transmitted and received by prior buddhas is not even called Zen meditation, much less described as the “Zen school.” We should clearly understand that calling it the “Zen school” is an error in the extreme. ... What is presented here is “the unsurpassed wondrous way of the buddhas,” and the “treasury of the true dharma eye,” together with the “dharma seal of the buddhas.” At that time, they were never called the “Zen school,” nor does one hear of any occasion to call them a “Zen school.”'’ This “treasury of the true dharma eye” here has been personally bestowed by raising the eyebrows and blinking the eyes, has been handed down by the “bones and marrow of body and mind,” has been conferred to the “bones and marrow of body and mind.”" It has been transmitted and received “before the body and after the body,” transmitted and received “upon the mind and beyond the mind.”””"
He explains in Bendowa, "In the beginning, while Great Master Dharma spent nine years facing
a wall at the Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song, the clerics and lay
people, not yet knowing the true dharma of the buddhas, called him the
“brahman who takes seated meditation as the essential point.”°° Thereafter,
the ancestors of generation after generation took seated meditation
as their main focus. Seeing this, foolish lay people, not knowing the reality
of the matter, casually called them the “seated meditation school.”
Nowadays, the word “seated” has been dropped, and they just say, “the
meditation [or zen] school.” Its meaning is clear in the extensive records
of the ancestors.°’ It is not to be equated with the meditations of the six
perfections or three disciplines."