THE MASTERY
OF YOUR ATTENTION WILL COME
WHEN YOU WILL START SEEING the truth..
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads
*note* some poems from Huang Po ,the 7 feet monk with a lump on his forehead(The Blue Cliff Record claims he was seven feet tall.(Cleary & Cleary, p 73) and imposing with a small lump on his forehead “shaped like a pearl”, presumed by some writers as a result of his continuous prostrations before the Buddha. (Foster & Shoemaker, p 91).
What Huángbò knew was that students of Chan often became attached to “seeking” enlightenment and he constantly warned against this (and all attachment) as an obstruction to enlightenment: “If you students of the Way wish to become Buddhas, you need study no doctrines whatever, but learn only how to avoid seeking for and attaching yourselves to anything.” [19]
He also firmly rejected all dualism, especially between the “ordinary” and “enlightened” states: “If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and Enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own Mind. …The arising and the elimination of illusion are both illusory. Illusion is not something rooted in Reality; it exists because of your dualistic thinking. If you will only cease to indulge in opposed concepts such as ‘ordinary’ and ‘Enlightened’, illusion will cease of itself.” [20]
While Huángbò was an uncompromising and somewhat fearsome Chan teacher, he understood the nature of fear in students when they heard the doctrine of emptiness and the Void: “Those who hasten towards it [the Void] dare not enter, fearing to hurtle down through the void with nothing to cling to or to stay their fall. So they look to the brink and retreat.” [21] He taught that ‘no activity’ was the gateway of his Dharma but that “all who reach this gate fear to enter.” [22][23] To overcome this fear, one “must enter it with the suddenness of a knife-thrust”
You people are just like drunkards. I don’t know how you manage to keep on your feet in such a sodden condition. Why everyone will die laughing at you. It all seems so easy, so why do we have to live to see a day like this? Can’t you understand that in the whole Empire of the T’ang there are no ‘teachers of Zen’?”
A monk stepped forth and asked, “How can you say that? At this very moment, as all can see, we are sitting face to face with one who has appeared in the world to be a teacher of monks and a leader of men!”
Please note that I did not say there is no Zen. I merely pointed out that there are no teachers![24]
-added by danny-(I too have a lump,but not on my forehead...it's on the sole of my foot,so everytime I step on it,it reminds me of the painful human condition..thus,my compassion deepens).............................
Enlightenment
When practitioners of Zen fail to transcend
the world of their senses and thoughts,
all they do has no value.
Yet, when senses and thoughts are obliterated
all the roads to universal mind are blocked
and there is no entrance.
The primal mind has to be recognised along with the senses and thoughts.
It neither belongs to them nor is independent of them.
Don’t build your understanding on your senses and thoughts,
yet don’t look for the mind separate from your senses and thoughts.
Don’t attempt to grasp Reality by pushing away your senses
and thoughts.
Unobstructed freedom is to be neither attached not detached.
This is enlightenment.
From: The Wisdom of the Zen Masters by: Timothy Freke
The Buddha and all sentinent beings
are nothing but expressions of the one
mind. There is nothing else.
People are scared to empty their minds
fearing that they will be engulfed by the void.
What they don’t realize is that
their own mind is the void.
Here it is – right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.
