RE: Meaningful ideas and quotes
July 23, 2020 at 2:37 am
(This post was last modified: July 23, 2020 at 2:39 am by Porcupine.)
(July 22, 2020 at 7:32 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Right, that's a paradox. And yet people like Alan Watts keep talking about it.
But Alan addresses this and explains this in a lecture that I can't post here.
Quote:My experience led me to think that either I had to commit to it full time, or it would just be cosplay. And among the cosplayers there was just as much cliquishness and holier-than-thou feeling as in any other religion.
Alan Watts instead teaches that it can take you 30 years or 3 seconds. Insight can happen suddenly.
One key thing is that Zen was originally Chinese and most Zen Buddhism today is Japanese. Alan Watts teaches the original Chinese kind but he still explains why Japanese Zen Buddhists behave so bizarrely and refuse to teach. There is a method in the madness. They teach by not teaching.
Quote:Plus, people here in Japan tend to associate Zen with the military class. It played a significant role in the militarism that led up to WWII, and all the evil that went with that. Apparently non-attachment to the world and an emphasis on impermanence come in handy when you're sending people off to kill and die. All of that got filtered out when Zen became popular in the US.
But we mustn't confuse Zen Buddhism with Zen Buddhists. Anybody can be violent.
Quote:In William James' The Variety of Religious Experience, he describes a minority Christian tradition in the US that made an impression on me, because it is very similar to what Americans think of as Zen. Not the Japanese version, but the American version. It appears to me that a lot of Zen's popularity in the US is that it allowed Americans to continue an existing tradition that was appealing to them but to dissociate it from Christianity, which isn't cool any more, among that kind of person. By re-stating the existing concepts with imported vocabulary, it appears exotic and fresh.
There is nothing wrong with explaining Eastern teachings in a Western way. And although people will disagree about the right way to teach Zen ... there is no right or wrong way to practice it. And it's the practice that is important.
And the reason why there's not a right or wrong way to practice it is because it's not a matter of doing the right thing or the wrong thing ... or doing anything at all. It's a state of mind rather than a set of rules to follow. And what can often seem like rules are more like clues to the insight.
Quote:So I think I did my work on Alan Watts already, and won't look into it again. Thank you anyway. It makes sense for you to go through it, if it's new to you.
Okey-dokey, then.
Quote:Currently I'm listening to these podcasts.
https://shwep.net
This guy is fantastically knowledgable -- better than a college class. It's further helped me to get past the narrow image of Christianity which people like to condemn on forums like this one.
Well, I don't even like the core of Christianity no matter how much of the supernatural baggage is removed from it. I will probably check this out anyway out of curiosity but I don't expect to be impressed by it. Thanks anyway.
"Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." - Alan Watts