dharma<\/a> scholarship \u2026 naaaa.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe book focuses on the image of the Zen master through the years and across traditions. It includes essays on Baizhang, Dongshan, Yanshou, Dahui, Dogen, Menzan, Soen, Hisamatasu, Maezumi, and Seung.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve spent the most time so far (0h, so predictably) on Heine\u2019s piece, Dogen, Zen Master, Zen Disciple: Transmitter or Transgressor.<\/i> Heine\u2019s purpose, in part, is to discuss how Dogen liked to quote and then go beyond the gang-of-thirty or so most famous masters.\u00a0 Good stuff!\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nYou might think that we too should not just idly quoting old, dead (mostly) Chinese guys but go beyond them in our ordinariness.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nSpeaking of which, Wright\u2019s essay, Humanizing the Image of a Zen Master: Taizan Maezumi Roshi<\/i> includes a fuller picture than the usual holier-than-thou hagiographies. Drinking, sex, drowning while drunk, etc.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nI was touched by Maezumi\u2019s remorse about his mistakes.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIt also includes this wonderful story (from Sean Murphy\u2019s book):<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Maezumi was sitting on the front porch of the Zen Center of Los Angeles one evening with one of his students when a disheveled, inebriated, and extremely depressed-looking man staggered up to them. <\/span>
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\u201cWhaarsh it like,\u201d the man slurred, \u201c\u2026 to be enlightened?<\/span>
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\u201cVery depressing,\u201d [Maezumi] answered.<\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/i> \u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s also an essay on Menzan, the rascal I\u2019ve personally credited with almost destroying Soto Zen \u2013 although he did a lot of good too. In the 18th Century, he retold the story of Dogen as a pure shikataza guy (with shikantaza being distinct from koan, in his view) in order to save the lineage from the powerful resurrection of the Rinzai line by Hakuin and a new influx of Chinese monks.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ll probably have more to say about all of this down the road.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ll leave you with this lovely passage I discovered in the Jikojio News<\/i> attributed to Kobun Chino Otokawa Roshi:\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nWe don\u2019t ignore or leave samsara. The cycle of life is expanding. Like a current, the water is the same, but moment after moment it changes form and position\u2026. Like a bird cannot be air, that is the bird\u2019s suffering. The fish cannot be water, that is the fishes\u2019 suffering. Humans cannot be another thing, that is human suffering.\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThis was the Indian people\u2019s idea about life in the form of suffering. The arhat, out of this current, tried to evaporate into the air, like water evaporates, and never come back to the water, to the river. But bodhisattvas and buddhas are always willing to come back into the water, to be born as water. This is called life of vow, not life of karma. Life of vow and life of karma are the same, but one is working and one is sleeping. <\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
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