How to Understand Buddhism

The purpose of the Buddha in my guess is to serve as a necessary obstacle on my path. To think of cleansing the Buddha throws me back onto myself, and I doubt that without the Buddha I will hitherto be able to stay rational in meditation.

However, that very doubt leads me to the perception that it is my very " sanity" (my logical, rational mind in thought) that is keeping me from sense. My thought keeps me from turn the Buddha myself. But only by pitting my mind, my reason, my logic, in meditation, against an indomitable object such as the kung-an, or such as the Buddha as the heart of the kung-an, can that mind, etc., be seen (or recognize itself) as the illusion it is. To "kill" the Buddha is not to murder an actual man, just now to meditate and see through the illusion that another being, even the Buddha, can "enlighten" me. When I meditate on this kung-an, allow go intuitionally of the need for the Buddha or any patriarch or teacher, I will pass beyond the idea of the Buddha and killing him, pass beyond all ideas and thoughts into no-thought and will see that it is even the concept of knowledge itself (which the Buddha symbolizes) which I must kill, or at least the concept that there is whateverthing I must "do" in meditation to bring about such enlightenment: "Enlightenment is not something that needs to be achieved or created; it is now, and indeed always has been, the fundamental fact underlying everyone's existence" (Buswell 152).

Of course, this does not mean that the mystic, upon rising from the meditation and the hidden and intuitive experience, is the master. He is still himself, still walks as he walks, talks as he talks, expresses himself as he expresses himself. The individual traits he carried into meditation still exist as he exits meditation and goes about the business of living his breeding. The stories of antithetic masters and their unique teaching approaches in Buswell, and the accounts of what different roles students be drawn to in the monastery, make clear that individual life experiences, talents and inclinations remain important and inevitable parts of the mystic's entire life.

The Ch'an take aim claims that k'an-hua practice is a subitist form of soteriology simply because the aforementioned intuitional enlightenment occurs suddenly and completely. Sudden enlightenment must occur instantly, sort of than gradually, because the Buddha-nature is "undifferentiated and indivisible; we either have total intellectual of it at once, or not at all" (Ch'en 119).

maybe the words "mystic," "mystical" and "mysticism" confuse many who take that somehow the practitioners of Zen meditation live in some ethereal world with their feet never touching the ground. To the contrary, as Buswell makes clear, the unbowed adherent of Zen brings his mystical experience into his everyday activities as a way of life. Without such practical application of mystical knowledge of oneself and of reality, the mystical experience would be useless and meaningless. Inevitably, thence the "mysticism of any particular mystic is really the wholly pattern of his life," as Gimello writes. As Buswell adds, "I seek to get by the Zen tradition of Korea as a living brass of practices and institutions" (Buswell 6). However, again, within that system, individual mystics express their individual selves and individual lives. Mystics do not seek to be iconoclastic, but their individual traits are not to be despised fo
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