UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

Who said it was yours?What if they are all liars?Who you gonna call?* * *The Hsinhsinming, the longest of the three Ch’an chants in the Zen liturgy, occupies three pages in the layout of the service manual, while Sandokai fills only one page, and Hokyo Zammai requires two. This gives you a rough idea of the variability of these three ancestors’ differing manners of expression, and their relative loquaciousness, in communicating The Great Matter to their contemporaries, over spans of almost exactly

A novel idea!What if it’s untrustworthy?Then what will you do?* * *In this next series of four UnMind podcasts, we will take a look at certain selected Chinese ancestors of Zen. In Japanese pronunciation, their names are Kanchi Sosan, Sekito Kisen, and Tozan Ryokai. One reason for focusing on these three is that written teachings attributed to them are featured as chants in the liturgy of Soto Zen. They lived about 100 years apart from each other, covering periods roughly in the 600s, 700s, and

What a Zen monster!Walking back to India —Dead, with one sandal!* * *Whatever you may think of the legends surrounding the 28th Ancestor in the Indian transmission, first in the Chinese lineage, it does not take away from the effect, that whoever that person was, or those persons were, had, upon the propagation of the direct practice of Zen to its second country of origin. India occupies the central mass of the vast subcontinent, and China stretches all the way to the Pacific coast, where the

Warning, practicers:Spawn of the Five Aggregates —Don’t be fooled again!* * *The original plan for this podcast series comprised a condensed commentary in six segments. This turned out to be impossible, given the scope and importance of the teachings therein. I decided to add a coda, as is often done in musical composition, to include the appendix on Buddha’s warnings to practitioners, or “practicers.” I find them compelling and affirming, in terms of my own experience in zazen. The last section

Further instructionIs apparently called for —Don’t eat those onions!* * *Immediately on the heels of the last sections we explored, “Instructions for Practice,” and the testimony of Buddha’s posse, the “Twenty-Five Sages,” comes an excruciatingly long and detailed examination of what seems to be the entire litany of Buddha’s teachings, some directly relevant to the focus of the Surangama, others seemingly thrown in just for good measure, or simply because they were available. This discursive