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A special transmission outside the scriptures.
seeker242
ZenFlorida, USA Veteran
Zen is considered "a special transmission outside the scriptures, not dependent on words and speech". What does that mean?
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Everything is shining, nakedly present.
What more do we need?
Chapter XXXIII
"At that time again, Mahamati the Bodhisattva-Mahasattva requested of the Blessed One to speak on this subject: Pray tell me again, Blessed One, about the conditions whereby the word-discrimination manifests itself. Where, whence, how, and by whom do words indicating discrimination take place among the people?
Said the Blessed One: Mahamati, the word-discrimination goes on taking place by the coordination of the head, chest, nose, throat, palate, lips, tongue, and teeth.
Said Mahamati; Again, Blessed One, (87) are words to be considered different (anya) or not-different (ananya) from discrimination?
Replied the Blessed One: Mahamati, they are neither different nor not-different. Why? Because words rise, Mahamati, with discrimination as their cause. If, Mahamati, words are different from discrimination, they cannot have it for cause. Then if they are not different, words cannot express the sense, which they do. Therefore, words and discrimination are neither different nor not-different.
Then Mahamati said: Again, Blessed One, are words themselves the highest reality? or is what is expressed in words the highest reality?
The Blessed One replied: Mahamati, words are not the highest reality, nor is what is expressed in words the highest reality. Why? Because the highest reality is an exalted state of bliss, and as it cannot be entered into by mere statements regarding it, words are not the highest reality. Mahamati, the highest reality is to be attained by the inner realisation of noble wisdom; it is not a state of word-discrimination; therefore, discrimination does not express the highest reality. And then, Mahamati, words are subject to birth and destruction; they are unsteady, mutually conditioning, and are produced by the law of causation. And again, Mahamati, what is mutually conditioning and produced by the law of causation cannot express the highest reality, because the indications [pointing to the distinction between] self and not-self are non-existent. Mahamati, words are these indications and do not express [the highest reality].
(88) Further, Mahamati, word-discrimination cannot express the highest reality, for external objects with their multitudinous individual marks are non-existent, and only appear before us as something revealed out of Mind itself. Therefore, Mahamati, you must try to keep yourself away from the various forms of word-discrimination."
So what is it?
I believe the Lankavatara Sutra you mentioned calls for a “revolution on the deepest level of consciousness”. I have to go to work now, so I don’t have time to look up the quote.
I think it's an important thing to remember when we think about Dharma. The words may trigger something; they may do a good job. But intellectual hairsplitting has nothing to do with this “revolution on the deepest level of consciousness".
Imho
.
Why do you feel the need to slander other traditions?
Zen is not another tradition, it is my tradition.
After spending 39 years flying a zafu, I feel pretty comfortable poking Zen in the bum whenever it starts loosing its sense of humour. let me assure you that I remain completely monogamous to Zen poking and have never so much as pointed at another tradition.
If my poking has inadvertantly caused an uncomfortable clenching of Zen's glutimous maximus, allow me to apologize to you, for this breach in seriousness.
To cause another to clench, instead of just letting go, is to miss poke.
I'm glad my teacher wasn't a mime. That would have been so irritating. Every time you see him it would be like, yes sensei, I get it, you're stuck in a box.
I have not stopped laughing since reading this.
Your silks are in the mail.
to concepts..
you are a concept, so am I ...zen is
outside
half full
and
half empty
Zen is not another tradition, it is my tradition.
After spending 39 years flying a zafu, I feel pretty comfortable poking Zen in the bum whenever it starts loosing its sense of humour. let me assure you that I remain completely monogamous to Zen poking and have never so much as pointed at another tradition.
If my poking has inadvertantly caused an uncomfortable clenching of Zen's glutimous maximus, allow me to apologize to you, for this breach in seriousness.
To cause another to clench, instead of just letting go, is to miss poke.
I liked that.
Listening and reading words isn't going to make us enlightened.
We could gain knowledge but knowledge isn't wisdom.
There are so many ppl (especially on here) who always quote buddha and the scriptures. But whilst one is dependent on someone elses words, he remains only a devotee/follower..
But to achieve anything greater, he will have to eventually leave the scriptures alone and find his own words and own truth.. (Mainly through meditation) and that is what zen is... (Finding ones own insight through meditation)
(Zen let's us study buddhism for a while, just to get us in the right direction, but then sooner or later, we have to let go and see reality for ourselves..)
Good luck x
"Right understanding" is just as important in Zen Buddhism.... wrong understanding> right understanding> practice not dependent on understanding. We can't skip the first two or else we and up with the pop "Zen" of "just being".
Thusness:
(31 October 2010)
Hi Geis,
I 'fear' commenting about other's forum because AEN will create havoc in that forum after that...lol.
Jokes aside but I think it is still too early to say that insight of anatta has arisen. There seem to be a mixing up and a lack of clarity of the following experiences that resulted from contemplating on the topic of no-self:
1. Resting in non-conceptuality
2. Resting as an ultimate Subject or
3. Resting as mere flow of phenomenality
In case 1 practitioners see ‘The seen is neither subjective nor objective.... it just IS....’
In terms of experience, practitioners will feel Universe, Life. However this is not anatta but rather the result of stripping off (deconstructing) identity and personality.
When this mode of non-conceptual perception is taken to be ultimate, the terms “What is”, “Isness”, “Thusness” are often taken to mean simply resting in non-conceptuality and not adding to or subtracting anything from the ‘raw manifestation’. There is a side effect to such an experience. Although in non-conceptuality, non-dual is most vivid and clear, practitioners may wrongly conclude that ‘concepts’ are the problem because the presence of ‘concepts’ divides and prevent the non-dual experience. This seems logical and reasonable only to a mind that is deeply root in a subject/object dichotomy. Very quickly ‘non-conceptuality’ becomes an object of practice. The process of objectification is the result of the tendency in action perpetually repeating itself taking different forms like an endless loop. This can continue to the extent that a practitioner can even ‘fear’ to establish concepts without knowing it. They are immobilized by trying to prevent the formation of views and concepts. When we see ‘suffering just IS’, we must be very careful not to fall into the ‘disease’ of non-conceptuality.
In Case 2 it is usual that practitioners will continue to personify, reify and extrapolate a metaphysical essence in a very subtle way, almost unknowingly. This is because despite the non-dual realization, understanding is still orientated from a view that is based on subject-object dichotomy. As such it is hard to detect this tendency and practitioners continue their journey of building their understanding of ‘No-Self based on Self’.
For Case 3 practitioners, they are in a better position to appreciate the doctrine of anatta. When insight of Anatta arises, all experiences become implicitly non-dual. But the insight is not simply about seeing through separateness; it is about the thorough ending of reification so that there is an instant recognition that the ‘agent’ is extra, in actual experience it does not exist. It is an immediate realization that experiential reality has always been so and the existence of a center, a base, a ground, a source has always been assumed. This is different from 'deconstructing of identity and personality' which is related to non-conceptuality but 'actual' seeing of the non-existence of agent in transient phenomena.
Here practitioners will not only feel universe as in case 1 but there is also an immediate experience of our birth right freedom because the agent is gone. It is important to notice that practitioners here do not mistake freedom as ‘no right or wrong and remaining in a state of primordial purity’ ; they are not immobilized by non-conceptuality but is able to clearly see the ‘arising and passing’ of phenomena as liberating as there is no permanent agent there to ‘hinder’ the seeing. That is, practitioner not only realize ‘what experience is’ but also begin to understand the ‘nature’ of experience.
To mature case 3 realization, even direct experience of the absence of an agent will prove insufficient; there must also be a total new paradigm shift in terms of view; we must free ourselves from being bonded to the idea, the need, the urge and the tendency of analyzing, seeing and understanding our moment to moment of experiential reality from a source, an essence, a center, a location, an agent or a controller and rest entirely on anatta and Dependent Origination.
In my opinion, the blog that hosts the articles on “Who am I” and “Quietening the Inner Chatter” provide more in depth insights on non-duality, Anatta and Emptiness. The author demonstrates very deep clarity of ‘what experience is’ and the ‘nature (impermanent, empty and dependent originates according to supporting conditions)’ of experience.
Just my 2 cents. :-)"
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2011/08/disease-of-non-conceptuality.html
Correct view deconstructs with experience.
Whereas holding experience without right view brings about spiritual bypassing.
Of course both are needed and both are liberated.
If we are fortunate enough to attend a flower sermon, correct view can be bypassed, again if the conditions are right.
But neither view nor transmission are magic pills.
O_O
cough, splutter...
Bah! Next time...
:rolleyes:
Erm...I still don't get it.
Can anyone give a clear and straightforward response to the OP question?
A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not founded upon words and letters;
By pointing directly to [one's] mind
It lets one see into [one's own true] nature and [thus] attain Buddhahood.
Now I bet you're going to ask what that means!
:rolleyes:
Ah... that darn cat koan. No monk had the sense to give the right form-is-just-form answer...
"Master, stop being a drama queen and put down the cat. We will just bicker."
The older three slogans are:
Directly point to human mind,
see one’s nature and become Buddha,
do not depend on written words.
Zen really means Buddha Mind. There were many Zenists during the Sung who denied that their tradition was a meditation one. Zen, they argued, was a synonym for the Buddha Mind (fo-hsin). What is transmitted is none other than the Buddha Mind (the mind that is awakened). It was not sitting meditation that was transmitted.
Is it really your understanding that I feel the need to slander other traditions?
I don't feel that @how was "slandering" other Buddhist traditions. @seeker242, I've seen you be harsh about other individual's opinions about something in Buddhism. Were you "slandering" them?
For me, part of right speech is not using hyperbole...not that I always manage to live up to that.
How does one work towards the Buddha mind, if not through meditation??
Correct me if Im wrong....
Transmission outside the scriptures mean, not merely chanting the Sutras, no incense, ritualistic prostrations, vegetarian diet (Chinese Mahayana) etc.
Only meditation, as that is the core.
But as humans, we need guidelines, which mean the Sutras, otherwise people will make up their own rules, which does happens nowadays.
Transmission here merely means teachings handed down from teacher to pupil and not like something the Vajrayanists do.
This new branch of Buddhism needed some authority and these guys weren’t going to find it in the scriptures. So they came up with the idea of a special transmission which had taken place without making it into the sutras; the flower-sermon, and the story of the poetry-contest which Hui Neng so brilliantly won. And in the case of Hui Neng there was a second transmission of authority which was sort of secret, and that conveniantly explained why no-one had ever heard about it before.
For example, since earliest times, Buddhism has placed huge emphasis on the value of hearing a teaching--oral transmission. This could be oral transmission of a sutra, or of some other written work, reaching back to the Buddha or the original author. I find this very similar to the emphasis placed on lineage and transmission of music.
However, in Tibetan Buddhism, at least, while it's good to listen to audio teachings, most often that doesn't count as a transmission. Similarly, listening to audio teachings from a great musical master wouldn't be considered as valuable as taking a teaching directly, in the same room.
So what is it, exactly, that is considered important in Buddhist transmission? I'm not convinced it's only about some mysterious, magical thing that we can try to write off as superstition or power-grabbing. We know, for example, that we get more information when we're physically in the same room as someone--visual cues, back-and-forth communication, a personal relationship, hearing their words instead of reading them.
Are we sure that the non-verbal, "transmission outside the scriptures" is 100% mysterious, or is it possible that some emphasis is placed simply on the richer experience of being in the presence of another human being, what we might today call a "value-added teaching?"
I don't doubt that there is some sense of mystery, I'm just not convinced it's all about aggrandizing the teacher; my suspicion is that it has very much to do with the interaction (however silent) between teacher and student. I'm guessing that, at least in part, it's the very different, multi-dimensional communication that takes place when two people are in the same physical space, as opposed to when they're not. When one thinks of how much emphasis Zen places on the student, this makes a lot of sense.
To me, then, "outside the scriptures" can include mysterious realization-transmission, but also possibly include the tone of voice the teacher used in reading a passage (tone of voice is "wordless"), the way the teacher answered my question using his own words which are outside the scriptures, or perhaps even simply the student's own, wordless comprehension of the words he/she is exposed to. The words themselves are scripture, but the reaction inside the student's head, as the words sink in, may be completely wordless.
I'm definitely not down on mystery, but it seems to be a general law of intellectual phenomena that what has become "mysterious" over time often has a practical, less-mysterious origin. We are wired to survive, and survival skills are best taught in person. It doesn't seem mysterious to me that the transmission of intellectual or philosophical skills would follow this same evolutionary tendency.
The tale of Mahakashyapa's transmission is certainly contradicted by the Avatamsaka Sutra.
We learn from the Avatamsaka Sutra (I am using Cleary's translation, The Flower Ornament Scripture, page 1146) that great disciples like Shariputra, Mahakashyapa and others, “did not see the transfiguration of the Buddha in the Jeta grove, the adornments of the Buddha, the majesty of the Buddha, the freedom of the Buddha, the magic of the Buddha, the mastery of the Buddha, the miracle performed by the Buddha, the light of the Buddha, the power of the Buddha, or the Buddha's purification of the land...”
Because of this notable lack, "they were not capable of perpetuating the lineage of buddhas" (p. 1146).
Well, so much for Zen's big lineage! :cool:
“Then, Mahamati, sustained by the power of the Buddhas, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas at their first stage will attain the Bodhisattva-Samadhi, known as the Light of Mahayana (mahâyana-prabhâsa), which belongs to the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas. They will immediately see the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones appearing before them personally, who come from all the different abodes in the ten quarters of the world and who now facing the Bodhisattvas will impart to them their sustaining power displayed with the body, mouth, and words” (Lankavatara Sutra).
Western Buddhists will of course deny this can actually happen like a close encounter of the 5th kind.
Do you pass it on wholesale, so instant awakening for the student. Well queue up then, cause everyone will want a piece of that.
Transmission, a wrongly translated word is merely mundane 'teachings'. Nothing magical or super about it. LOL.
Did the Buddha himself transmit enlightenment to all his Arhats or asked them to meditate, study the scriptures, - find your own way, NO shortcuts. The teacher can only point to the right direction/way/path etc. He cant transmit enlightenment or awakening, he can teach the methods, yes.
In Buddhism, its simply put:
1. Study material - scriptures
2. Physical practice - meditation (not Shaolin)
3. Goal - elevated mental states (Jhanas)
Meditation/ Dhyana doesnt have anything to do with sitting?
Dont know where you read that, but The Buddha did exactly,.....that... he meditated and achieved his Jhanas.
'Meditation/dhyâna doesn't have anything to do with sitting.
Dhyâna is a super kind of introspection by which we attempt to pass through and beyond conditionality awakening to the very substance (tathatâ) from which our thoughts are composed.'
How do we attempt to pass through Dhyana? How is the Bodhi mind transmitted?
Through self meditation, the 'transmission' were only teachings on how to meditate!
Now if only I can get the bodhi mind transmission, save me a lot of time on the path, wow, a shortcut to enlightenment.
hahaha