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#4371 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The Huffington
Post continues to bring nonduality to the mainstream. Here is
another article.
Before There Was
Stress Reduction, There Was No-Thought
by Wendi L.
Adamek (Author, "The Teachings of Master Wuzhu: Zen
and Religion of No-Religion")
Master Wuzhu is your
typical Zen Master: he reads minds, hides himself away in
inaccessible mountains and tells earthy stories. Most
importantly, he jettisons all conventional religious practices,
and he did this about twelve hundred years before Alan Watts,
Esalen or MBSR. What makes him unique in the annals of Chan/Zen
is that his followers compiled a book about his antecedents,
anecdotes and aphorisms at a time (roughly 780 C.E.) when Zen was
not yet a powerful religious network evolving its way into the
heart of the cultures of
Chan/Zen formed itself
around a contentious issue: how do you teach Buddhist practice if
you reject all forms of practice as misleading? Forms of practice
are misleading because they make something concrete out of
something that is not even abstract. As Master Wuzhu puts it:
"When there is true no-thought, no-thought itself is
not." This "formless practice" immediately makes
the everyday challenge of making distinctions and choices even
more challenging. Or does it?
If non-dual enlightenment
is neither good nor evil, is this a dangerous thing to teach? How
do you encourage people to get a move on in their practice while
telling them there's nowhere to go? Should you be paid for doing
this? Did Wuzhu's female disciple Liaojianxing compile the Lidai
fabao ji? And, finally, what kind of sound does a paddy-crab
make?
In the Lidai fabao ji
these issues -- antinomianism, formless practice, support of
monastics, the role of women and out-of-the-box teaching -- are
presented through accessible dialogues and stories. Yet they have
roots in complex Buddhist philosophical scriptures and treatises.
Many of Wuzhu's teachings echo a style used in the
Prajña-pa-ramita (Perfection of Wisdom) literature, which often
links antithetical characteristics to express what is meant by
"emptiness." Thus, one line of the Heart Su-tra reads:
"no old age and death, and also no extinction of them."
This in turn generated the Ma-dhaymaka (
So, when I find myself
wondering whether it would have mattered to Wuzhu that we are
still interested in reading about him, I suspect he would have
not-cared -- and he would have cared, very much.
Order The
Teachings of Master Wuzhu: Zen and Religion of No-Religion
(Translations from the Asian Classics), by Wendi Adamek from
Amazon.com: