Friday 10th April
The Japanese are pretty blasé about the cherry blossom season. On the one hand they think it’s delightful, and on the other they don’t really seem to pay it too much attention, in terms of going out sightseeing. Sure, there are lots of strollers and picnickers sitting under the trees - but nothing compared to the population as a whole. It’s taken for granted I guess.
The Japanese language apparently has several words to describe the varying shades of colour of the blossoms - pinkish white, whitish pink, etc.
Today was another beautiful, cloudless, warm day. Everywhere there’s an atmosphere of calm and peace, even in the middle of the city, in the middle of the working day. There are no screaming sirens or noisy vehicles. The level of courtesy on the streets and elsewhere is staggeringly high. Wherever there’s road works or pavement excavations there’s always at least one guy in uniform waving a red baton whose job it is to direct pedestrians around them safely.
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Yesterday a youngish American guy came down from the upstairs flat to let me know that I could access his broadband wireless link to the internet if I needed to use it. Brilliant! Except that my bloody wireless card has crashed.
The flat’s starting to look nicely lived in. I now have three guitars - one of each. A steel-stringed acoustic, a Yamaha gut-stringed classical, and an Ibanez electric, together with a mini-amp and effects box, and headphones! That’s all thanks to Yoko putting the word round in the uni that I’d like to borrow a guitar. Pity I can’t play any of them properly, though I keep on trying.
I had another major learning experience yesterday. I discovered how easy it is to download digital video from camcorder tape to computer hard-drive, via firewire. And I had a first proper look at Windows Movie Maker, which seems to be a great little gadget in the ‘accessories’ menu. I can’t wait to get started on editing my first DVD, using the video I’ve shot these past two weeks.
The problem with working with digital video is that it needs masses of memory, and the hard drive on my laptop is pretty much full. No problem! says Yoko, as she whips out a 32 gigabyte memory stick. Bloody hell - that’s bigger than the actual hard drive on my ancient machine! How do they do that?
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Today we were making plans to go to Takayama, up in the central mountains on the fringes of the North Japan Alps, for the weekend, to see the preparations for the famous Takayama Matsuri festival. One of Yoko’s friends is coming to collect us at 1.30 at the uni.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_festivals
http://www.hidanet.ne.jp/e02/ematsuri/ekigen.htm
http://www.hidanet.ne.jp/e02/ematsuri/eharu.htm
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e5909.html
http://photoguide.jp/pix/thumbnails.php?album=528
We were also looking at the guidebooks to Tokyo, to decide which bits of it I’d like to see when I go there the following weekend as a guest of Professor Yutaka. He’s a very cosmopolitan, well-travelled guy, Department of Health and Sport Sciences and Director & Chief of International Affairs of the Japan Basketball Association. He seems to be heavily involved in Tokyo’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.
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I’ve been spending some more time translating into contemporary English from 1920’s English four more chapters from Percy Nunn’s book on Education. It’s quite a challenge. God help any poor Japanese academics who choose to summarise it for themselves, especially the bits about hormes, hormic processes, conative processes and mnemes. All of that was in a chapter called The Will To Live, and by the end of it I’d just about lost mine.
Yoko reckons my lecture for the post-grad students on the aims of education ought to include the relevant bits from Nunn, who, in spite of his weirdo psycho-babble, was clearly an academic (Institute of Education, London) who was ahead of his time, in terms of his ‘progressive’ ideas about the chief aim of education being to produce autonomous beings who are equipped to find and become their true individual selves.
According to Nunn, “Freedom for each to conduct life’s adventure in his own way and to make the best of it is the one universal ideal sanctioned by nature and by reason. It offers the one possible foundation for a brotherhood of nations, the only basis on which men can join together . . . Hunger for it is the secret source of much of the restless fever of the age.”
Then as now. And not a word about bloody SATs.
To be fair to Nunn, leaving aside his hormes and mnemes, his ideas about the aims of education and how to develop thinking, well-motivated, creative and imaginative individuals is way more enlightened than any of the ‘standards’ bullshit that comes out of our government and its lackeys nowadays.
Those bastards have no idea how the very spirit and lifeblood of children and teachers alike are crushed by the government’s ‘standards agenda’ and its evil didactic methodology, with all of its ridiculous ‘wow words’ and ‘connectives’. They wouldn’t have a clue how to go about developing creative autonomous beings. Then again, they’ve no interest in doing so.
I’m determined to make the focal point of my lecture the 3DI model and explain the six intelligences and their relevance to self-actualised creative individuals who are well equipped to follow their individual pathways towards enlightened living.
I’m also going to put in a huge plug for the New Learning Revolution by Dryden & Vos, and point out that countries who continue to ignore what’s happening in truly progressive education systems will live to regret it. I feel so bloody sorry for the kids who are missing out on all the truly exciting innovative learning that’s available now - thanks to technological miracles and thoughtful teachers who have already plugged into the learning revolution.
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Yoko told me today that her family have traditionally followed Rinzai Zen, and she’s proposing that we go to visit the Tenryu-ji temple, located in the Sagano district in the western outskirts of Kyoto, since it’s the head temple of the Tenryu-ji branch of Rinzai Zen Buddhism. This is excellent news. I feel a strong sense of mission to get Zen on to the school curriculum in Japan!
http://zen.rinnou.net/head_temples/10tenryu.html
Here’s a good page of background reading for anyone interested in Zen:
http://zen.rinnou.net/whats_zen/index.html
And on that note I’m going to blog off and get ready for the trip to Takayama. Sayonara.
Showing posts with label Rinzai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rinzai. Show all posts
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Monday, April 21, 2008
Layer 14 Zen Buddhism - Breaking The Chain
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More quotations from Christmas Humphries.
Zen is the apotheosis of Buddhism. This direct assault upon the citadel of Truth, without reliance upon concepts (of God or soul or salvation), or the use of scripture, ritual or vow, is unique.
So fierce, indeed, is the Zen technique, and so scornful of the usual apparatus of religion, that it has been doubted whether Zen is a Buddhist School at all. The task in hand is the breaking down of the bars of the intellect that the mind may be freed for the light of Enlightenment.
In Zen the familiar props of religion are cast away. The purpose of Zen is to pass beyond the intellect. The intellect has its uses and it is an essential faculty of the human mind. But just as the emotions have their use and abuse, their range of usefulness and a limit to that range, so the intellect, by which men reach to the stars in science and philosophy, must pause and fail at the gates of spiritual knowledge. For the intellect can learn about it but can never, as the finest intellects discover, KNOW.
What KNOWS? The answer is Buddhi, the faculty of direct awareness [intuition, metaphysical or spiritual intelligence]. The intellect is itself a device or means, and Zen is the way of direct enlightenment. All must be freely abandoned before the seeker finds. Even the fact of seeking, and the will to find.
Bodhidharma, known as Daruma in Japan, expressed his teaching in four lines of verse:
A special transmission outside the Scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s own nature.
First the intellect must be transcended - for it is where the intellect pauses, baffled and at bay, that Zen begins. The intellect is a developed instrument for the use of knowledge, but only the senses and the intuition acquire knowledge at first hand. The thought-machine, therefore, too easily becomes a cage, a workshop for the handling of second-hand material.
Just as the senses acquire direct experience by touch and taste and the like [what I would call feelings], so Buddhi, intuition, acquires direct experience [often through those ‘feelings’ - often through feeling awe and wonder in response to sensory stimulus] and KNOWS.
In the ideal process of development, this higher faculty [Buddhi] increasingly illumines the thinking mind; in usual practice the intellect claims a final validity and closes its doors to direct experience. Hence Zen is largely a breaking into the closed doors of the human mind to let the light without flood in, and any and every process that will shock the mind into such an opening is useful and may be used.
Zen has produced its own techniques for the sudden path to Satori, the Zen name for Enlightenment. The two most famous devices of Rinzai Zen (less used in the Soto branch) are the MONDO, a form of rapid question and answer between Master and pupil, and the KOAN, a compressed form of mondo - a question, word or phrase that is insoluble by or unintelligible to the intellect. [e.g. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Most of the questions we ask ourselves are pretty stupid. ‘Why am I here?’ Duh! ‘What is God?’]
‘How shall I escape from the wheel of birth and death?’ asked a pupil? The Master asked in reply, ‘Who puts you under restraint?’ A laugh, an oath, a shout, a shaking, even a blow may do what years of ‘meditation’ have failed to achieve.
Asked why he meditated all day long, a pupil replied that he desired to become a Buddha. The Master picked up a brick and began to rub it. Asked what he was doing he explained that he wished to make a mirror. ‘But no amount of polishing will make a mirror!’ ‘If so, no amount of sitting cross-legged will make thee a Buddha’, was the deep reply.
[Mondos and Koans tend to produce dialogue or interactions that appear to be basically nonsense - that is non-sense - which is the essence of Zen. Intuition and direct experience - metaphysical intelligence - are ways of directly KNOWING that don’t require mediation by ‘sense’ - meaning intellectual or verbal or conceptual or analytical means.]
Sense is the product of reasoning and logic, of the laws of thought; Zen roars with laughter at all of them. Zen is the joke in a joke, and cannot, like a joke, be ‘explained’. It is the life within the form; it is that which reasoning tries to enshrine and frequently strangles. It is the river of life that cares not for the palaces of thought, the dictionaries and definitions, the understanding or the decisions of those upon its banks.
Zen technique, therefore, is like an explosive, designed to break the log-jam in the river, to let the waters flow freely, and all who flow with them ride free.
Theravada Buddhist philosophy is all arranged in three of this and four of that with a twelve-fold Chain of Causation. Very neat, says the Zen practitioner, but as Dr Suzuki says, ‘The Buddha was not the mere discoverer of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation: he took the chain in his hands and broke it into pieces, so that it would never again bind him to slavery’. In Zen the emphasis is on the breaking and not on the chain.
All objects, of thought or emotion, whether things we touch or the things that stand in our mental way, must sooner or later be smashed and removed. As the Master Rinzai himself proclaimed, ‘Do not get yourself entangled with any object, but stand above, pass on, and be free’. All phrases, dogmas, formulas; all schools and codes; all systems of thought and philosophy, all ‘isms’ including Buddhism, all these are means to the end of KNOWING, and easily become [though are not easily perceived as] obstacles in the way.
Zen technique is designed to develop the mind to the limits of thought and then to drive it to the verge of the precipice, where thought can go no further. Why not go over? For only then can WE go on, and progress is a walking on and on to the Goal.
It is true that at a later stage one learns that there is no walking and no Goal, but that is Zen . . . . Meanwhile, until we achieve the goal of purposelessness, let us have this purpose: Said the Master Ummon to his monks, ‘If you walk, just walk; if you sit, just sit. But don’t wobble!’
[The Zen attitude is that we need to focus in the Now, and give our full attention to whatever we are doing, so as to do it, whatever it is, properly. The assumption is that we only choose to do the things in life that are important and necessary to us at a given time, and we should cease to endlessly worry about things we’ve done in the past, or may do in the future. ‘By our actions you shall know us’, and we should ensure that our actions are proper and good, even if they are only walking or sitting. We can’t change the past, we can’t control the future, but we can be mindful of ourselves from moment to moment, and ensure that our lives are well lived in the present.]
More quotations from Christmas Humphries.
Zen is the apotheosis of Buddhism. This direct assault upon the citadel of Truth, without reliance upon concepts (of God or soul or salvation), or the use of scripture, ritual or vow, is unique.
So fierce, indeed, is the Zen technique, and so scornful of the usual apparatus of religion, that it has been doubted whether Zen is a Buddhist School at all. The task in hand is the breaking down of the bars of the intellect that the mind may be freed for the light of Enlightenment.
In Zen the familiar props of religion are cast away. The purpose of Zen is to pass beyond the intellect. The intellect has its uses and it is an essential faculty of the human mind. But just as the emotions have their use and abuse, their range of usefulness and a limit to that range, so the intellect, by which men reach to the stars in science and philosophy, must pause and fail at the gates of spiritual knowledge. For the intellect can learn about it but can never, as the finest intellects discover, KNOW.
What KNOWS? The answer is Buddhi, the faculty of direct awareness [intuition, metaphysical or spiritual intelligence]. The intellect is itself a device or means, and Zen is the way of direct enlightenment. All must be freely abandoned before the seeker finds. Even the fact of seeking, and the will to find.
Bodhidharma, known as Daruma in Japan, expressed his teaching in four lines of verse:
A special transmission outside the Scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s own nature.
First the intellect must be transcended - for it is where the intellect pauses, baffled and at bay, that Zen begins. The intellect is a developed instrument for the use of knowledge, but only the senses and the intuition acquire knowledge at first hand. The thought-machine, therefore, too easily becomes a cage, a workshop for the handling of second-hand material.
Just as the senses acquire direct experience by touch and taste and the like [what I would call feelings], so Buddhi, intuition, acquires direct experience [often through those ‘feelings’ - often through feeling awe and wonder in response to sensory stimulus] and KNOWS.
In the ideal process of development, this higher faculty [Buddhi] increasingly illumines the thinking mind; in usual practice the intellect claims a final validity and closes its doors to direct experience. Hence Zen is largely a breaking into the closed doors of the human mind to let the light without flood in, and any and every process that will shock the mind into such an opening is useful and may be used.
Zen has produced its own techniques for the sudden path to Satori, the Zen name for Enlightenment. The two most famous devices of Rinzai Zen (less used in the Soto branch) are the MONDO, a form of rapid question and answer between Master and pupil, and the KOAN, a compressed form of mondo - a question, word or phrase that is insoluble by or unintelligible to the intellect. [e.g. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Most of the questions we ask ourselves are pretty stupid. ‘Why am I here?’ Duh! ‘What is God?’]
‘How shall I escape from the wheel of birth and death?’ asked a pupil? The Master asked in reply, ‘Who puts you under restraint?’ A laugh, an oath, a shout, a shaking, even a blow may do what years of ‘meditation’ have failed to achieve.
Asked why he meditated all day long, a pupil replied that he desired to become a Buddha. The Master picked up a brick and began to rub it. Asked what he was doing he explained that he wished to make a mirror. ‘But no amount of polishing will make a mirror!’ ‘If so, no amount of sitting cross-legged will make thee a Buddha’, was the deep reply.
[Mondos and Koans tend to produce dialogue or interactions that appear to be basically nonsense - that is non-sense - which is the essence of Zen. Intuition and direct experience - metaphysical intelligence - are ways of directly KNOWING that don’t require mediation by ‘sense’ - meaning intellectual or verbal or conceptual or analytical means.]
Sense is the product of reasoning and logic, of the laws of thought; Zen roars with laughter at all of them. Zen is the joke in a joke, and cannot, like a joke, be ‘explained’. It is the life within the form; it is that which reasoning tries to enshrine and frequently strangles. It is the river of life that cares not for the palaces of thought, the dictionaries and definitions, the understanding or the decisions of those upon its banks.
Zen technique, therefore, is like an explosive, designed to break the log-jam in the river, to let the waters flow freely, and all who flow with them ride free.
Theravada Buddhist philosophy is all arranged in three of this and four of that with a twelve-fold Chain of Causation. Very neat, says the Zen practitioner, but as Dr Suzuki says, ‘The Buddha was not the mere discoverer of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation: he took the chain in his hands and broke it into pieces, so that it would never again bind him to slavery’. In Zen the emphasis is on the breaking and not on the chain.
All objects, of thought or emotion, whether things we touch or the things that stand in our mental way, must sooner or later be smashed and removed. As the Master Rinzai himself proclaimed, ‘Do not get yourself entangled with any object, but stand above, pass on, and be free’. All phrases, dogmas, formulas; all schools and codes; all systems of thought and philosophy, all ‘isms’ including Buddhism, all these are means to the end of KNOWING, and easily become [though are not easily perceived as] obstacles in the way.
Zen technique is designed to develop the mind to the limits of thought and then to drive it to the verge of the precipice, where thought can go no further. Why not go over? For only then can WE go on, and progress is a walking on and on to the Goal.
It is true that at a later stage one learns that there is no walking and no Goal, but that is Zen . . . . Meanwhile, until we achieve the goal of purposelessness, let us have this purpose: Said the Master Ummon to his monks, ‘If you walk, just walk; if you sit, just sit. But don’t wobble!’
[The Zen attitude is that we need to focus in the Now, and give our full attention to whatever we are doing, so as to do it, whatever it is, properly. The assumption is that we only choose to do the things in life that are important and necessary to us at a given time, and we should cease to endlessly worry about things we’ve done in the past, or may do in the future. ‘By our actions you shall know us’, and we should ensure that our actions are proper and good, even if they are only walking or sitting. We can’t change the past, we can’t control the future, but we can be mindful of ourselves from moment to moment, and ensure that our lives are well lived in the present.]
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