On the Tips of the Hundred Grasses

“On the tips of the hundred grasses, the ancestors’ true meaning,” said the precocious Ling-chao to her dad, Layman P’ang.

The issue of the true meaning of the ancestors is a significant one in Zen because we’re an ancestral tradition, handed on person to person and not a revealed path. Buddha, Dogen, and all the great teachers, as well as all the not-so-great teachers in the Zen lineages (in the story of Zen, at least) have rediscovered this wondrous way and recreated it’s presentation to fit the circumstances of time, place, and the particularities of the people of the time and place.

In the wondrous (and questionable!) mix of American dharma, this creative activity continues.

Donald Lopez, a Buddhist scholar and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, critiques a piece I mentioned recently, the Neural Buddhist by David Brooks (a conservative, Catholic news commentator, which has been wildly popular on the internet [me thinks we Buddhists have been marginalized so long in the American religious scene that whenever a rag like the New York Times talks about us we go utterly ga-ga]), in The Buddha According to Brooks.

Lopez writes, “What would come to be called “original Buddhism” or “primitive Buddhism,” became the domain of European and, later, American and then Japanese scholars. They would create a Buddha and a Buddhism unknown in Asia, one that may never have existed there before the late nineteenth century.”

Other scholars like Stephen Heine and Dale Wright have documented historical shifts of emphasis and essence in the “transmission” and/or recreation of the Western projection called the Buddhadharma during the 20th Century that happened in both East and West. Even the most conservative Zen practitioner today is riding the wave of recreated Zen initiated by D.T. Suzuki and a bunch of 19th and 20th Century priests.

Turns out that there is no essence to Zen.

That should come as no surprise. After all, that is the teaching of Buddha. If Buddhism had an essence that was unchanging, it would be a gross internal contradiction.

The question that interests me in our creative modern Zen is the extent to which it points to and clearly invites us to actualize the stanceless stance, the coreless core, formless form, etc., or contrarily shores up the illusion of permanence, suffering, and separation. An interesting summary of the research on mindfulness based therapies, by the way, can be found in Lotus Therapy.

As Anais Nin said (to paraphrase), we don’t see [dharma] the way it is, but the way we are.

Thanks to James Ford’s Monkey Mind for pointing me to most of the above highlighted articles.

Meanwhile, “on the tips of the hundred grasses” in the above photo is illuminated cottonwood pollen – we are particularly rich with it this year in my neighborhood. I sense that there is an appropriate metaphor here that would wrap this post nicely … but my mind isn’t quite fertile enough at the moment (groan! if you could do better let me know).