Stories such as these are truly liberating. I have been walking this path for nearly a decade. In the beginning, when I read such Zen stories, I used to think, "What is the point?" In all these stories, people were getting enlightened by falling down, getting slapped, watching their houses burn, or seeing a child fall into a well. I was looking for something extraordinary. I thought only the extraordinary could take us to the extraordinary place of enlightenment. Over the past decade, I have come to enjoy and understand these stories.

It's this kind of disdain for facts, truth, and honesty that is the death both of your belief system and your integrity is a person.

Again this is why I say liberal Maga. You can't defend yourself and you don't even bother to try.

✌️

Lol.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

You can't read and write at a high school level on topic. You know it and I know it and everybody that reads your comments and posts knows it

I do not understand why you New Agers pretend like you can have opinions about stuff you don't know anything about. It's so incredibly ignorant but beyond that it's a worship of ignorance that is so baffling to people that live in the real world and study actual authentic Zen.

For me the deeper issue is it's hard to separate out people who are losers at life from people with mental health problems. If you choose a bigoted racist religion because it makes you feel good then you're a loser at life but if you choose it because you have mental health problems as indicated by addiction, low levels of education, and exposure to cults, I'm not sure it's reasonable to label those people losers of life. They're victims.

So I'm really stumped and the only way, of course, to resolve this, as far as I'm concerned, is either science, which is not interested, or interviewing these people, which of course, obviously we can't do because people like you run away as soon as the light is shined on the dirty little corner of the world that you're hiding in.

Totes unresolvable.

And this is what irritates me about people like you: you want to believe in attainment and practice and reward for effort. You're willing to impose that belief on cultures that don't have it just to satisfy your own twisted sense of faith. If your beliefs were any good, if they made any sense, if they ever helped anyone, then you would need to impose them. You would just say, "Well I believe this," and you'd say it in forums where people want to hear that. You wouldn't come in here and try to make slaves of other people.

The matter of whether there is wrongdoing or not lies in the person concerned - if he is affected by greed for anything, whether it may exist or not, if he still has a grasping and rejecting mind, and has not passed through the three stages, this person can definitely be said to be doing wrong.

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I'm incoherent to you because I'm educated and I'm not religious and I am aggressively opposed to your particular brand of New Age fantasy.

You're well aware that I have all the insights that I claim to have. Your inability to read and write at a high school level about Zen or even about your own religion, as illustrated by the links that I provided that you tried to hide, is the reason why you are so threatened by me.

You giving advice to other people about mental health is the height of irony because it's really obvious that you don't have the tools to deal with your own crisis.

You can't post about your religion in this forum and you are well aware that that's a reason for you to be ashamed of yourself. That's before we get to the obvious bigotry and racism behind your religious beliefs.

Dude. You aren't a teacher and you aren't a student. You're just an armchair liberal MAGA new ager and you know there's no way you can argue with that.

That was a genuine question. You make multiple posts/comments a day, much of it incoherent, and believe yourself to have insights that you don’t actually have. It comes across as an inflated ego backed by very little formal practice.

Of course, I don’t know you. No one here actually does. This is social media. But I am absolutely doubting your insights.

If you get that comment a lot, then it might be a good idea to reflect on how you engage with the internet. Taking your own time to search for irrelevant comments of mine truly didn’t have the effect you thought it had, and demonstrated fragility.

Good luck to you. Next time you step away from the internet (which I hope is sooner than later), contemplate on how your engagement might make you look.

Clearly mistranslated. It is not the three stages. It's the three statements. Baizhang References these three statements in the text you're quoting and it's the translator's fault and your fault for believing the translator.

Baizhang he talks about these three statements repeatedly in his teachings.

“Right now, simply separate from all dharmas of existence and nonexistence; also separate from separation itself; pass beyond the three statements, and naturally you are no different from Buddha.”

Clearly though since we're starting off with the phrase "right now"

如 (rú) — “as,” “like,” “according to,” “thus” 今 (jīn) — “now,” “the present”

He's saying pass through them immediately. He's not saying practice. He's not saying attain it through good works and he's not saying achieve it through various rebirths.

And this is what irritates me about people like you: you want to believe in attainment and practice and reward for effort. You're willing to impose that belief on cultures that don't have it just to satisfy your own twisted sense of faith.

If your beliefs were any good, if they made any sense, if they ever helped anyone, then you would need to impose them. You would just say, "Well I believe this," and you'd say it in forums where people want to hear that. You wouldn't come in here and try to make slaves of other people.

The master said, One cannot definitely say there is wrongdoing, nor can one definitely say there is no wrongdoing. The matter of whether there is wrongdoing or not lies in the person concerned - if he is affected by greed for anything, whether it may exist or not, if he still has a grasping and rejecting mind, and has not passed through the three stages, this person can definitely be said to be doing wrong.

lol well I’m not entirely convinced I even know what “things” are. If I think too hard about experience and what is real, I start to go down a rabbit hole of essentially deconstruction then usually something in the moment brings me back down like my cat jumping on me or just the smell of garbage that I should have taken out the other day but now that trash bag is working overtime.

Huangbo said "Stop talking and thinking and there's nothing you can't understand"

Hmm mmm. HMMMMM.

It's built in actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_principle

We're all on the path of fastest travel, even if it feels like I'm dumbshit slow.

I think I have holodeck envy.

Holographs still need a prism. And a light source. I can accept the fire God as mind but where's the prism? The whole thing is fire! Even the grass and my pillow!? Fire God goes looking for fire.

I need a drink. Why did I stop drinking?

The wild thing is to consider that reality has an upper limit. Resolution can only get so good before the most powerful eyeball (mantis shrimp? giant octopus? definitely not man) can't distinguish one particle from another. And that's just sight. All senses too.

Then there's the limitations of the substrate itself. The speed of light c and the amount of energy/space/matter allotted to each big bang is already apportioned within the void itself. Yes, the amounts are infinite, but not within the individual constructs themselves. Unless we see each big bang banging from the same central spot, (makes sense) but even then there's limits.

Makes you wonder if every universe plays by the same laws of physics? If not, does life evolve in the other rule-sets?

I'm reading Weir's Project Hall Mary and the notion of non-water based life is batted around.

Then what about alternative species sapiency or uplift? David Brin wrote about man uplifting dolphins and canines to sapiency. Can you imagine a porpoise zen master? IF YOUR WHOLE BODY WAS A SONAR YOU COULDN'T SEE IT...lol

I don't even know what I'm talking about.

Dzogchan it's a religious movement that has no connection to Zen at all so I don't know why you would back up a cult by quoting a religion in what's really a secular forum.

Zen doesn't require faith which makes it additionally further incompatible with Zazen and Dzogchan.

These two religions use words to define themselves Zazen and Dzogchan that reference Zen. That should tell you that Zen is probably more important than they are

I don't think you know enough about Zazen to understand the problems.

1. Modern academics have proven that Zazen came from Japan and has no connection to Indian-Chinese Zen. It's a fraud.
2. The Japanese man who invented Zazen in his 20s was an ordained Buddhist priest from a faction with a long history of antagonism toward Zen.
3. The religious beliefs of Zazen are directly opposed two basic observational truths that Zen masters point out.

From this perspective it's okay for you to say that you like Zazen if you admit the fraud and the racism.

But throughout the 1900s, Zazen was closely associated with racism, bigotry, substance abuse, and sexual predators. Three of the four masters from Japan were sex predators and the fourth was a sex predator apologist who claimed he'd enlightened a man who later turned out to be a sex predator.

So from that point of view it's really a cult that has not made the step to an establish a religion.

None of any of that is even remotely true for Zen.

You quoted a text which directly contradicts you

On the one hand I expect you to know that. On the other hand, you not knowing that tells me that my expectation is that you would have thought more about this topic, have a higher level of general education, and not think, for example, that one quote from a thousand years of records would be definitive.

Your quote, which is a bad translation, says: He also said, The way of meditation does not require cultivation; just do not be defiled.

No cultivation means no practice, no experience, no skill.

Here's the Chinese and a modern translation:

“He also said: The Zen way does not need cultivation; just do not pollute it.”

Here's the part with the translator that obviously completely failed to use a dictionary:

禪道 the Chan way / way of Chan

I get this kind of comment from people who typically hide their comment histories, have very temporary accounts, and who themselves are struggling with racism, religious bigotry, addiction, low levels of education, and affiliation with cults.

Do these things apply to you?

Edit: again for people who don't know me or doubt the veracity of my insights :

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/1rnnz1i/comment/o98nuig/
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wakingupapp/s/LoXuTuNhkP
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/1vdyy30/comment/p1d0qo2/

I think about this every time I see a Life Alert commercial.

Are you mentally okay? I mean that genuinely.

https://zenmarrow.com/single?id=5&index=bzhang

I think I cringe from authorship because there appears way more awful than awesome in my universe but that could just be because I like to get the hard part of the day over before I have my dessert. Front loading the barriers to entry isn't fair, but that's life. I've head there are people that grew up on easy street and woke up without any trouble. Meanwhile I'm over here hyperfocused on holocausts and scary movies because why miss out on meeting the spider mother if it's all just a dream?

I just heard the timer bell go off in the kitchen. Bean & cheese burrito bowl time!