Rinzai School

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How?

[Fujikoma]

A wizard did it.

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let me know how that works for you 

[Placid Dingo]

A wizard did it.

The one that made the grass green?

[Golden Applesauce]

[Cramulus]

Rinzai, from what a superficial reading of this thread may allow, seems to focus on "immediate" enlightenment.  I think this means it works for people for whom the idea of gradual enlightenment does not make sense.  Its funny how the focus is on "striking", either physically or mentally, to reflect the extemporaneous act.  Having submitted myself to this, and demanding an explanation for the "tough-love" thing, the best I could gather is that the perceived hypocrisy of acting on a causal-deterministic model to effect something "immediately" is only part of the problem.

(pretend for a second you've never seen this illusion before...)



Is this a picture of two faces, or a goblet?


whatever your answer,

was it something that you came to gradually, or was it a sudden flash of understanding?

I think the types of truths contained in zen are not things that you learn gradually, chapter by chapter.

They're things you think about and focus on until something shifts and it suddenly makes sense -- sort of like discovering the hidden picture in a magic eye. It's not like understanding something like human psychology, which is a gradual ongoing lifelong process.

Check out this clip from the movie I Heart Huckabees, in which two students flirt with enlightenment by hitting themselves in the face -  "Pure Being".

[Elder Iptuous]

i was actually looking for a picture of the pure being ball thing to post, but google failed me...    (except for one tiny crappy image)

that movie was fantestic.

[Fujikoma]

This makes sense, Cramulus. I remember spending weeks staring at this grainy picture in this book called "Buddhism Now", trying to figure out what it was. I got so frustrated that I called the friend who lent it to me and said "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS THING SUPPOSED TO BE?!? I CAN'T FREAKING SEE IT!" to which he replied "I could tell you, but you still wouldn't see it, so there's no reason for me to tell you, just keep looking at it.", so I went a few more days and called him again. He told me it was a cow, I still didn't see it, I thought he was messing with my head...

Finally, one day, out of the blue, FREAKING COW, or, more accurately, a steer. I spent so much time looking at it wrong that I just couldn't get it, and then when I did I was kind of underwhelmed, but also quite happy that I'd finally seen it. The magic eye posters, a little trick, if you cross your eyes and allow them to slowly uncross, they will fix on the image in the poster. If you can't cross your eyes on your own, place your fingertip on the bridge of your nose and watch it as you pull it away slowly. The finger may block the picture, though.

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Members of the Japanese Embassy, photographed on their trip to America in 1860.





In 1853, U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry steered his smoke-belching steamship into the Bay of Edo (today's Tokyo), terrorizing the Japanese citizenry and forcing the Tokugawa government to end 200 years of almost complete isolation. In the process, Adm. Perry and the U.S. consul he left behind further weakened a government battling famine and growing political opposition. As the U.S. established more formal relations, criticism of the shoguns grew. "Shogun" means "barbarian-subduing generalissimo," yet those very barbarians were now calling the shots.



Amid this turmoil, a Japanese delegation sailed to America to present the recently signed U.S.-Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce to President Buchanan. They arrived in San Francisco on March 29, 1860, for a three-month tour that ended with two weeks in New York. That visit is the focus of "Samurai in New York," a new show at the Museum of the City of New York that uses photographs, newspaper clippings, personal belongings and a handful of artworks to commemorate its 150th anniversary.

Samurai in New York

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Ave., (212) 534-1672
Through Oct. 11

Two thick lines—one red, the other black—slash across the white wall of the introductory display at irregular angles, imbuing this otherwise airy space with a subtle tension. There, in a central display case, is the curving blade of a beautiful but lethally sharp Japanese sword, a gift to the U.S. Navy.



Foreshadowing aside, the effect is not as dramatic as it might seem: The show's presentation is unassuming and its content requires careful reading for the tensions to emerge.

The sword forms part of an introduction that includes reproductions from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, an excerpt from Walt Whitman's poem "The Errand Bearers," and a bronze medal given as a commemorative gift. The message is clear: The growing tensions that were driving the U.S. toward the Civil War may have quickly superseded the Japanese visit in New Yorkers' consciousness, but at the time it was a big deal.



Big enough, as the next section shows, that famous photographers like Mathew Brady courted the Japanese delegates. Big enough, as the display of cartes de visites and stereoscopic photographs demonstrates, that New Yorkers flocked to buy images of men in kimonos against painted backdrops of palm trees.



While the three principals claim center stage in the official photographs, other images feature members of the delegation whose identities have been lost. Contrary to American expectations, these were not high-ranking members of the shogunate. In fact, most were in their 20s and 30s and under strict orders not to take any initiative. Reluctant to leave the Metropolitan Hotel, they visited such places as a naval shipyard, a rubber factory, schools and hospitals only at the Americans' insistence.



As a result, the envoys often chronicled life inside the hotel—one photogravure shows them clustered around laundresses using a sewing machine or ironing, the former something new and strange to them. Some, however, displayed increasing curiosity. In his diary, displayed here, Somo Kato recorded sketches of steamboats and cannons—a reminder that Japan was keen to catch up to a more technologically advanced West. Tateishi Onojiro, nicknamed "Tommy," collected female admiration. A darling of the U.S. press, he was only 18 and, says curator Kathleen Benson, alone among the envoys to wave and blow kisses to the crowds.



Each side harbored different aims and experienced different frustrations. For the Japanese, the visit was primarily ceremonial: A photogravure of a ball given in their honor shows the Japanese standing at the back of the room as though waiting for their hosts to stop partying and engage in a proper, sober ritual.



For the Americans, the celebrations were tied to commerce. A silver service presented to Adm. Perry by New York merchants grateful for the opening of Japan is displayed next to a facsimile of the treaty and just ahead of some photogravures and photographs recording the lavish horse-drawn cart that paraded the treaty up Broadway. One reads in the Japanese flags shown in the windows excitement at the prospect of profitable trade.



As the show progresses, ambivalent attitudes, particularly on the American side, become more apparent. A song sheet's lyrics mock the visitors with racial epithets, while a case with Japanese artifacts and Japanese-inspired Tiffany objects expresses a deep and lasting appreciation of their art. Similarly, while some questioned the wisdom of entertaining the Japanese so lavishly, others pointed to their "munificence" and "superb presents."



A New York Times quote stenciled on the wall, meanwhile, expressed the cynicism of many. Yes, the Japanese were buying "dry goods, hardware, firearms, jewelry, glassware, optical instruments and innumerable other evidences of our ingenuity and art—doubtless when our commerce with Japan is fully open, to be returned to us in the shape of duplicate imitations and improvements."

[Doktor Howl]

For once, Doktor Howl isn't jumping MY ass (I know, exaggeration, and I deserved it)...

Yeah, the Japanese were a bit brutal... Thomas Cleary spoke in an interview about how people need to always beware Japanese militarism, and read up on things in order to know their potential enemy... Or at least, that's the gist of it I remember, I'm not going to read it for a third time for a bit yet.

http://www.sonshi.com/cleary.html

Whoops!  Caught you right before the thread split.

Difference is, Fuji, you usually post intelligent shit that I may disagree with (more for the sake of threadjacking than of content).

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

i was enjoying reading this thread.. the cat is cute, but its not necessary

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this may not work

[Fujikoma]

Whoops!  Caught you right before the thread split.

Difference is, Fuji, you usually post intelligent shit that I may disagree with (more for the sake of threadjacking than of content).

LMAO

Well, thanks for the compliment, and sorry for thread jacking, it's a bit of a bad habit. I noticed the thread split and reposted my comment there.

[Telarus]

http://books.google.com/books?id=VIYREaBbOUYC&lpg=PA117&ots=LBsQbo6w6B&dq=rinzai%20koan&pg=PA119#v=onepage&q=rinzai%20koan&f=false


The Nature of the Rinzai (LINJI) Koan Practice - Victor Sogen Hori

[I'm only typing out this selection. -Tel]

p118
  The koan practice is first and foremost a religious practice, undertaken primarily not in order to solve a riddle, not to perfect the spontaneous performance of some skill, not to learn a new form of linguistic expression, not to play cultural politics, and not to carry on scholarship. Such ingredients may certainly be involved, but they are always subservient to the traditional Buddhist goals of awakened wisdom and selfless compassion.
  In saying this, I am making a normative statement, not a description of fact. The fact is, in most Rinzai monasteries today, many of the monks engage in meditation and koan practice for a mere two or three years in order to qualify for the status of Jushoku (resident priest). For many of them, engagement with the koan may indeed consist in a little more than the practice of solving riddles and learning a ritualized language, a fraction of the full practice. In the full practice the Zen practitioner must bring to the engagement the three necessities of the Great Root of Faith, the Great Ball of Doubt, and the Great Overpowering Will (daishinkon, daigidan, daifunshi). The koan is an artificial problem given by a teacher toa student with the aim of precipitating a genuine religious crisis that involves all the human faculties -- intellect, emotion, and will.
  At first, one's efforts and attention are focused on the koan. When it cannot be solved (one soon learns that there is no simple "right answer"), doubt sets in. Ordinary doubt is directed at some external object such as the koan itself or the teacher, but when it has been directed back to one-self, it is transformed into Great Doubt. To carry on relentlessly this act of self-doubt, one needs the Great Root of Faith. Ordinarily, faith and doubt are related to one another in inverse proportion: where faith is strong, doubt is weak, and vice versa. But in Zen practic, the greater the doubt, the greater the faith. Great Faith and Great Doubt are two aspects of the same mind of awakening (bodaishin). The Great Overpowering Will is needed to surmount all obstacles along the way. Since doubt is focused on oneself, no matter how strong, wily, and resourceful one is in facing the opponent, that opponent (oneself) is always just as strong, wily, and resourceful in resisting. When self doubt has grown to the point that one is totally consumed by it, the usual operations of mind cease. The mind of total self-doubt no longer classifies intellectually, no longer arises in anger or sorrow, no longer exerts itself as will and ego. This is the state that Hakuin described as akin to being frozen in a great crystal:

Suddenly a great doubt manifested itself before me. It was as though I were frozen solid in the midst of an ice sheet extending tens of thousands of miles. A purity filled my breast and I could neither go forward or retreat. To all intents and purposes I was out of my mind and the Mu alone remained. Although I sat in the Lecture Hall and listened to the Master's lecture, it was as though I were hearing from a distance outside the hall. At times, I felt as thought I were floating through the air. (Orategama III, Yampolsky 1971, 118)

In this state, Hakuin happened one day to hear the temple bell ring. At that moment the ice shattered and he was thrust back into the world. In this experience, called the Great Death (daishi ichiban), the self-doubt is finally extinguished and the Great Doubt is transformed into Great Awakening. As Ta-hui says, "Beneath the Great Doubt, always there is a great awakening."
  Kensho, the experience of awakening, is more than merely the state of concentrated Samadhi [Which I have flirted with -Tel]. When the Great Doubt has totally taken over the self, there is no more distinction between self and other, subject and object. There is no more differentiation, no more attachment. This is merely samadhi and not kensho. Kensho is not the self's withdrawal from the conventional world, but rather the 'selfless self' breaking back into the conventional world. It is only when this samadhi has been shattered that a new self arises. This self returns and again sees the things of the world as objects, now as empty objects; it again thinks in differentiated categories and feels attachment, but now with insight into their emptiness.
  Again, I am speaking in normative terms. The particular aspects of Zen kian practice on which scholars have concentrated their attentions -- it's nondual epistemology, its ritual and performance, its language, its politics -- are aspects. There are facets of a practice whose fundamental core is a religious practice.

Koan: Instrument or Realization

  Most commentators take the approach that the koan is an upaya, an instrument, that deliberately poses a problem unsolvable by the rational mind in order to drive the mind beyond the limits of rationality and intellectual cognition. This approach views the koan as a psychological technique cunningly designed to cause the rational and intellectual functions of mind to self-destruct, thus liberating the mind to the vast realm of the nonrational and the intuitive. Powerful personal accounts of spiritual quest make it seem that the koan is not a text to be studied for it's meaning as one would study an essay or a poem, but rather an existential explosive device with language merely serving as the fuse [MEMEBOMBS! -Tel]
  Part of the problem with many such instrumentalist approaches is that it deprives the koan itself of meaning. The koan, it is said, cannot be understood intellectually; it gives the appearance of being meaningful only to seduce the meaning-seeking mind to engage with it (Rosemont 1970). This interpretation ignores the mass of evidence contradicting the idea that the koan is no more than a meaningless, blunt psychological instrument. It is hard to think that the shelves of heavy volumes of koan commentary produced through the centuries and the lectures in which Zen teachers expound at length on the koan are all occupied with a technique that is in itself nonsense. It is much more sensible to begin from the assumption that the koan disclose their own meaning (though not necessarily an intellectual one), once they have been properly understood.
  A second difficulty is that in trying to demonstrate how the koan overcomes the dualisms and false dichotomies created by the conventional  mind, the instrumental approach introduces dualism and dichotomy back into the picture again. The awakened mind, it is said, has transcended the dualistic dichotomizing of conventional mind and resided in a state of nonduality. The awakened person is thus freer than the average person in being able to choose to act either in the conventional dualistic way or in the awakened nondual way. But the dichotomy between duality and nonduality, conventional thinking and awakened mind, is itself a duality. [Based on this assumption... - Tel]Rather than being free from dualistic thinking, the 'awakened mind' ends up more tightly locked into dualistic thinking, incessantly forced to choose between being conventional or being awakened.
  A much better way of approaching the koan is by way of the "realization" model, a term I have borrowed from Hee-jin Kim (1985). The practitioner does not solve the koan by grasping intellectually the meaning of "the sound of one hand" or "original face before father and mother were born." Rather, in the crisis of self-doubt referred to above, one experiences the koan not as an object standing before the mind that investigates it, but as the seeking mind itself. As long as consciousness and koan oppose each other as subject and object, there are still two hands clapping, mother and father have already been born. But when the koan has overwhelmed the mind so that it[the koan -Tel] is no longer the object but the seeking subject itself, subject and object are no longer two. This is "one hand clapping", the point "before father and mother have been born." This entails a "realization" in two senses of the term. By making real, i.e., by actually becoming an example of the nonduality of subject and object, the practitioner also realizes, i.e., cognitively understands, the koan. The realization of 'understanding' depends on the realization of 'making actual'.
  This realizational account of the koan solves several problems. On the one hand, it helps explain how the solution to a koan requires the personal experience of "the sound of one hand" or of "one's origional face." On the other, it allows us to see the koan as not merely a blunt or meaningless instrument, useful only as a means to some further end, but as possessed of a meaningful content of its own which can be apprehended intellectually.
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[Triple Zero]

Thanks for your answer. Yes, I see how they seem to dislike people stopping to think, even for a second...

If that's part of Zen, how does that correspond to Discordianism being called "Zen for roundeyes"?

Cause we dislike people never stopping to think, even for a second...