Zen

1.         Zen means the same as dhyan and is Japanese change of this word. In English there is no direct translation of the word.  It is not contemplation, which means thinking and reflection.  Even meditation is not the word because meditation involves an object to meditate upon.  Dhyan means to be so alone that there is nothing to meditate upon.  NO objet just simple subjectively exists- consciousness without clouds.  NO objects, just simple subjectively exists- consciousness without clouds a pure sky.  When this dhyan word reached China, it became chan.  When reached Japan, it became zen.  It comes from the same Sanskrit root, dhyan with Buddha the seed came into existence. 

2.         Bodhidharma escaped with the seed to China.  China is a balanced country, not like India, not like Japan.  The golden mean is the path there. Confucius ideology is to remain always in the middle neither be an introvert nor an extrovert.  Neither think too much of this world nor too much of that world.  China has not given birth to any religion, just to morality. Bodhidharma escaped to China wilth all that India had produced.  In China the tree grew to vast proportions. Tree became vast but without flower.  No flowers grew.  Flowers did not come because flowers need an extroverted country.  Just as seed is an introvert, so a flower is an extrovert.

3.         Japan is an extroverted country.  The very style of life and consciousness is extroverted. Look, in India nobody bothers about the outside world very much- about clothes, houses, the way one lives.  Nobody bothers that why India has remained so far.  For the Indian eye, life is just a gray color.  Nothing interesting in it, everything just boring.  One has to carry it somehow because of past karma.  Even if an Indian falls in love he says it is because of past karma, one has to pass through it even love is like a burden, one has to drag.  Death is a goal not life.  Life is for fools, death is for those who are wise. 

4.         You cannot find more outgoing people in the world then the Japanese, always smiling and looking happy.  Japanese is always moving in the society.  The whole Japanese culture is concerned with how to create a beautiful society, how to create beautiful relationships-in everything, in every minute thing – how to give them significance, their houses are so beautiful even a poor man’s house has a beauty of its own, it is artistic, it has its own uniqueness.

5.         To the Indian nothing matters. The temples mosques and churches in India have no hygiene, no air ventilation, nothing.  Everything goes dirt, dust, crowd; no one bothers Just in front of them you will find cows sitting, dogs fighting, people praying.  Nobody bothers.  No sense of outer. The whole tree of Zen, transported in Japan and there it blossomed in thousands of colors. It flowered.

The Seed of Zen

6.         Two ignorant persons can talk.  They talk much.  They do nothing except talk.  Two enlightened persons cannot talk.  Two ignorant persons talking meaningless because there is nothing to convey.  They are just doing a mad’s catharsis, a release. Two enlightened persons cannot talk because they know the same.  Nothing needs to be said.  Only one unenlightened person and one enlightened person can have meaningful conversation, because one knows and the other doesn’t know.

7.         Buddha after his enlightenment lived only for forty years, walking from one village to another.  Buddha one day appeared in front of his audience with a flower in his hand, sat under the tree.  The crowd waited and waited but he did not speak.  He didn’t even look at them; he just kept on looking at the flower.  Minutes passed, hours passed.  Mahakashyap couldn’t contain himself and suddenly laughed out loud.  Buddha called him and gave that flower to Mahakashyap and told the crowd, whatever can be said through words, I have told you and what cannot be told I gave to Mahakashyap.  The key cannot be communicated verbally.  I handed over the key to Mahakashyap.  This is what Zen masters call, transference of the key without scripture,, beyond words beyond mind” The whole chapter was closed.  Since then, in China, in Tibet, in Thailand, in Burma, in Japan, in Ceylon-everywhere.  Buddists have been asking for these twenty five centuries, what was given to Mahakashyap.  What is the key?” Mahakashap was the first holder of the key then six holders of the key lived in succession in India, up through Budhidharma who was the sixth holder of the key.

8.         What happened that morning? Buddha came and sat and started looking at the flower.  What was he doing? When Buddha looks at anything the quality of his consciousness is transferred.   And a flower is one of the most receptive thing in the world.  Hence, Hindus and Buddists go with flowers to put at their masters feet or in the temple, because a flower can carry something of your consciousness.  A flower is receptive.  Plants are more sensitive then human beings.  A flower is the heart of the plant.  Plants are telepathic when Buddha looked at the flower and continued looking at the flower, something of him transferred to the flower Buddha entered the flower.  The quality of his being- the alertness the awareness, the peace, the ecstasy, the inner dance touched the flower with Buddha looking at the flower-so at ease, at home, without any desire the flower must have danced in its inner being.  Then the flower was given to Mahakashyap.  It was not just a flower now.  It carried Buddha hood, it carried the inner quality of Buddha being. 

9.         Mahakashyap laughed at the foolishness of people.  They were restless and thinking, “when will Buddha drop this silence and so that we can go home”.  Laughter started with Kahakasyap and has been going on and on in the Zen tradition.  There is no other tradition that can laugh. Laughter looks so irreligious, profane.  Sadness, somehow, has been religious.  A sad child is an ill child and a laughing old man is still young.  Even death cannot make him old.  Nothing can make him old.  His energy is still flowing and overflowing, he is always flooded. Laugher is flower of energy.  Buddha didn’t condemn Mahakashyap, on the contrary, he called him, gave him the flower and spoke to crowd.

10.       The mind will say that is disrespect.  The mind has its rules but the heart does not know them; the heart has its own rule, but the mind has never heard about them.  The heart, it can laugh and be respectful the mind cannot laugh it can only be sad and then be respectful.  What kind of respect is this which cannot laugh?  Whenever a man becomes enlightened, a beauty descends, a beauty that comes from the beyond, a blessing comes to his whole being.  A man who laughs must have a big belly.           

11.       Buddha called him and told, “Hereby, I give you the key, what is the key Silence and laughter are the keys- silence within, laughter without.  And when laughter comes out of silence, it is not of this world; it is divine when laughter comes out of thinking, it is ugly; it belongs to this ordinary, mundane world; it is not comic then you are laughing at somebody else, at somebody else’s cost, and it is ugly and violent.  When laughter comes out of silence, you are not laughing at anybody cost, you are simply laughing at the whole cosmic joke.  And it really is joke.  That why I go on telling jokes.  Because jokes carry more than scripts. It is a joke because inside you, you have everything, yet you are searching everywhere.  What else should a joke be? You are a king and acting like a beggar in the street.

12.       You have the source of all knowledge and you are asking question; you have the knowing, Self and think that you are ignorant; you have the deathlessness within you and are afraid and fearful of death and decease.  This really is a joke and if Mahakashyap laughed, he did well.  Others thought Makashyap a fool, laughing in front of Buddha.  But Buddha knew that he had become wise.  Fools always have a subtle wisdom in them, and wise always act like fools.  A fool is simple, a fool is not afraid of anybody.  He will speak whatever the consequences.  A foolish man act, thought never comes first.  Whenever someone realises the ultimate, he is not like a wise man.  He cannot be.  He may be like a fool but he cannot be like a wise man. 

13.       There are two parts of inner silence, the silence do deep that there is no vibration in your being, you are, but there are no waves; you are just a pool without waves not a single wave arise, inside at the center silence and on the periphery celebration and laughter.  Only silence can laugh, because only silence can understand the comic joke.  So whatever you do becomes a festival you eat and eating becomes a celebration, you bath you talk, all becomes a celebration.  There is no sadness, it cannot exist with silence.  When silence is too much it becomes laughter.

Bodhidharma goes to China

14.       Bodhidharma was born fourteen centuries ago as a son of king in the South India in Pallavas Empire.  He was the third son of his father.  His whole concern was to know his self nature, because without knowing it you have to accept death as the end.  Bertrand Russell said that, if there were no death, there would be no religion.  There is some truth in it because religion is a vast continent, it is not only a response to death, it is also the search for bless, it is also the search for truth and it is also search for the meaning of life.  Bodhidharma renounced the kingdom telling his father, if you cannot save me from death, then please don’t stop me, let me go in search of something that is beyond death.

15.       Unlike Buddha, Bodhidhaarma initiated woman into his commune.  He initiated Pragyatara, who ordered Bodhidharma to go to China; Buddhism had reached China six hundred years before Bodhidharma. Nobody can live without a soul and once you start thinking that there is no soul, your life start losing all meaning. The soul is your integrating concept, without it you are cut away from existence and eternal life.  Just like a branch cut off from a tree is bound to die, it has lost the source of nourishment.  Buddhism immediately entered the very soul of the country.  Whole China turned into Buddhism.  On this path there is no reward because the very desire for reward comes a greedy mind.  The whole teaching of Buddha is desirelessness. Each act has to be a reward into itself; otherwise don’t do it. Your action is punishment and your action is your reward. You are the master of your destiny. Budhidharma sat facing a wall inside the temple.  He would simply look at the wall.  After looking at the wall you cannot think.  Slowly and gradually, just like the wall the screen of your mind also becomes empty.

Sosan the third Zen Patriarch

16.       Sosan is the third Zen Patriarch.  History record only violence.  History does not record silence.  Arrivals and departure are irrelevant.  The only relevance is in the being.  One of the fundamental of Zen that makes it unique, like no other religion in the world is that it does not exclude anything from your life.  Your life has to be all inductive.  A half truth is more dangerous that a total lie at least a lie is total. Life is both rest and movement.  Life is a balance between rest and movement.  When harmony is achieved between rest and movement, you come to the very centre of your life.

17.       If you are not held by externals, you will be disengaged and comfortably independent.  There is no religion externally independent.  Going to temples or church or to the synagogues, reading scripts, ancient holy books, these are all externals and there is no religion in externals.  They are dead skeletons.  The reading of scriptures is just your interpretations, not the meaning of masters.  You are just a small branch or leaf of a tree called universe.  Once you know it, there is no fear of death.  You cannot lie.  You belong to immortality.  Great contentment descends over you.  In this contentment are all the qualities of blissfulness, of ecstasy of all that is continuous dance, a festivity, a ceremony.

18.       Rinzai brought Zen from China to Japan the greatest mistake is that if you take immobility as the right state, you will mistake the darkness for your master.  Immobility is only a rest period.  Existence is motion, continuous motion.  Darkness is stable, it never goes anywhere. You bring light and you cannot see darkness, your take the light away and darkness is already there. The darkness is always here even when light is there. It is just because of the light that you cannot see the darkness.  They are continuously changing places, day becoming night, night becoming day, life becoming death, death becoming life.  Don’t hold on to anything, it will immediately change into something else.  The movement and the non movement are both in your hands, you are the watcher, neither the moving nor the non-moving.  You simply are.

The Japanese contribution to Zen

19.       There are two ways to disappear as a personality, one we call grounding and one we call centering.  There is an old definition of philosopher. “On a dark night, in a dark house where there is no light and the philosopher moreover is blind, he is looking for a black cat which is not there” .  But the search continuous and if suddenly light comes in and his eyes are cured and he thinks of all the trouble that he was taking to find the cat which does not exist, what else is there to do, except to laugh at himself.  “Fools laugh at others wisdom laughs at itself”. In Japan it finally turned out to be the peak.  The peak is that anything can be used to find the truth.  Even a warrior can use his sword, fighting with another warrior, there is no need for him to sit and meditate.  The archer can find it in his archery; the painter can find it in his paintings the sculptor can find it in his sculpture.

20.       Grounding means, you become almost part of the earth and allow the gravitation to flow in you, to flood you, particularly below the naval, two inches below to be exact.  The gravitation's come from all around and settle two inches below your naval.  Why two inches below the naval? That is the center of life; it was from there that you were connected with your mother. It was from there that of nine months you were supplied with everything that you needed, and you didn’t have to do anything at all. You were simply relaxed.

21.       The moment you become grounded as the trees are grounded with deep roots in the earth.  When your body is receiving forces from the earth and you are available, relaxed, allowing them to fill your life center, the mind stops functioning, time stops.  The mind should stop, time should stop, and you should be relaxed and allow life to take possession of you.  Whatever you are doing you will be a meditator.  Meditation is simply a silent thread inside you. You can do anything but that silent thread should not be disturbed.

22.       The misery that you see all around, the poverty, the horrible ugliness of it, is because India always believed religious life to be separate from ordinary life.  So people who became interested in religion renounced the world.  People who interested in God closed their eyes, sat in the caves in the Himalayas, and tried to forget that the world existed. They tried to create the idea that the world is simply an illusion, illusionary, a dream.  Of course, life suffered.  All the greatest minds of India became escapists and the country was left to the mediocre. No science could evolve, no technology could survive.

The Illogical Life

23.       All the scripts contain the second principle because first principal cannot be said.  They contain lies not truth, because truth cannot be contained by word.  The truth can only be experienced and lived.  All barriers are belief.  The need is that people do not want to make any efforts, they want shortcuts.  Belief is an easy shortcut. Visualize a child playing in the garden of his house, playing with imaginary lion and then suddenly be has to face a real lion escaped from the zoo.  Now he does not know what to do.  He is scared out of his wits.  He is paralyzed.  He was perfectly at ease with the imaginary but with real ones he does not know, what to do.  This is what happens to people who go on playing with beliefs, concept, philosophers and theologies.   

24.       Belief needs no courage.  Belief is the way of coward.  If you are a Christen or a Hindu or a Muslim, you are a coward.  You are avoiding the real lion.  If you want to face the real, then there is no need to go to church/temple/mosque/Gurudwara/Synagogue.  There is no need to go to priest, because the real surround you within and without, the truth is now, there is no need to go anywhere.  It has been there since the beginning. If there was any beginning and it will be there until the end, if there is going to be any end.  All know the way, few walk it and the one who don’t walk cry regularly show me the way, where is the way, give me a map, which way is it?

25.       All know the way because life is the way.  Experience is the way.  To be alive is the way to be conscious is the way, you are alive, you are conscious.  The truth by nature is a dumb experience.  All experiences are dumb because they happen only in deep silence.  If you love a woman the love happens in deep silence.  Truth surrounds you, It is in the flow of the river it is in the green leaves it is in stars it is in the dust, it is in you. Go on asking questions, How to attain the truth. The Map cannot be given because the truth gives on changing.  It is not a stagnant phenomenon.  It is continuously changing, it is alive it is breathing.  It is never the same river twice.  Truth is dynamic.  To be with truth there is only one possibility.  Drop words, language lags behind language are lame.  Only silence can move with truth.  Only silence can be fast, because silence has no weight to carry.  Words are loaded, they carry weight. 

26.       Do you know who you are? You don’t know but you know your image, you know your name, your address, name of the family, the country, the religion, you know the face reflected in the mirror.  You don’t know your real face.  Look into your original face, the face you had before even your father was born, the face that you will have when you are dead, the face that is yours, originally yours.  Our face is the mask; we don’t know who lives in body. Whenever something is borrowed, it becomes ugly.  Only the first hand experience is beautiful, because it liberates.  Mohammed was liberated because for him Islam was a firsthand experience, so was Jesus and Buddha.  Christianly and Buddhism was not handed over to them by somebody else.  It was a personal experience.

27.       What is the proof of God?  Look into the eyes of the devotees.  There is no other proof. God exists in the eyes of the devotees, in the vision of the lovers.  God is a reality, an experience, logic deal with the junk yard, the used –used by many people.  Logic deals with inference. It is good as for as the human world of intellectual garbage; the moment you go beyond, logic fails, it falls flat on the ground.  Logic is meaningless as far as the life is concerned. Life is not logical at all, it is illogical.  Life is absurd.  Logic is manmade, manufactured by the human mind.  The only way to reach to the real is to go with in.

28.       You cannot reach higher through the mind than that.  The mind is like a minor.  Dust gathers on it, clean the dust, and you know what is perfectly true, absolutely ok.  What more can there be.  What is wrong in a plastic flower?  Nothing is wrong in a way; it may be better than a real flower.  Real flower is born in the morning and gone by evening.  Plastic flower is permanent.  The real flower is momentary.  It is in your hands to make it so.  You can make it perfumed too.  But something basic is missing.  It is dead.  You can improve more than that.  This is the last point the mind can reach the mind is like a mirror dust gathers on the mirror and then it cannot reflect. 

29.       Zen insists that there is nobody who is sinner and there is nobody who is a saint. Nothing is good and nothing is bad.  All distinction is ego-created.  When you look within there is neither saint nor sinner, neither good nor bad, neither life nor death.  In that nothingness one becomes one with God.  Zen insists that if you cannot find a living master, go on searching.  There is always living master somewhere or the other.  The moment you find a living reality become vulnerable, become open.

A New Approach to Existence

30.       Zen goes beyond the ego and beyond the self.  Zen is essentially freedom from oneself.  The ultimate freedom- not to be, and to allow existence to express itself in all its spontaneity and grandeur. A Gautama Buddha dies ultimately, you die only temporarily.  The only thing needed is freedom from self.  That is not to be accepted as a belief, it has to be experienced.  It is a taste, anybody can describe sugar as sweet, but if you have not tasted sugar you will never understand what it is.  The only way is for somebody to put some sweet into your mouth.  Zen must be seized with bare hands with no gloves on.  Meaning you should enter into the world of Zen without any beliefs, without any security, without any safety.

31.       Zen has to be neither the object nor the subject.  It is transcended experience.  Duality of all kind is transcended; the observer and the observed becomes one.  It is not the question of conquering or seizing, it is a question of relaxing into yourself.  Mind is dual, always divides into polar opposites. The conquer and the conquered, the observer and the observed, the object and the subject the day and the night. It divides thing that are not divided.  Neither is the day divided from the night, nor is birth divided from death.  They are one energy.  Nothing is opposite in existence. Every contradiction is only apparent.  Deep down all contradictions are melting together.   

32.       Zen is like a telegram, a SMS, when you write a letter it is easy to start a letter but difficult to end.  A telegram is just ten words.  It is a condensed message.  Ten page long letter will not have the same effect as the ten words a telegram.  More condensed the meaning more striking.  Zen believes in essentials.  It has no rituals no chanting, no mantras, no hymns, no scriptures- just small anecdotes.  It is just a condensed and crystallized teaching.