r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/15sjq0w/weekly_dose_of_serenity_case_63/

Post Summary: Zhaozhou asked Touzi, "When someone who has undergone the great death then returns to life, how is it?"

Touzi said, "He can't go by night--he should arrive in daylight."

Zen Teaching: Yuanwu’s book of Zen instruction Book of Serenity, Cleary translator

Post Cast Overview: What should we talk about? Why are those masters flowers, but those other masters are jewels/gold? What is a boat with no bottom?

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/15qfes6/snatched_away_by_sense_objects/

Zen Teaching: Often people of sharp faculties and superior intellect get it without expending a lot of effort. They subsequently produce easy-going thoughts and do not engage in practice. In any case, they are snatched away by sense objects right in front of them and cannot act as a master subject. Days and months pass, and they wander about without coming back. Their Dao power cannot win out over the power of karma, and the Evil One gets his opportunity... - Dahu

Post Cast Overview: practice (daily or otherwise), archery, mindfulness,

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/14kisif/foyan_the_presence_of_the_body_and_mind

Post Summary:

Your body is not there, yet not nothing. It's presence is the presence of the body in the mind; so it has never been there. Its nothingness is the absence of the body in the mind; so it has never been nothing.

Do you understand? If you go on to talk of mind, it too is neither something nor nothing; ultimately it is not you. The idea of something originally there now being absent, and the idea of something originally not there now being present, are views of nihilism and and eternalism.

Zen Teaching:

Post Cast Overview: (under construction)

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/14ffn30/what_you_see_and_i_dont/

Post Summary: 

The monk asks: 'When the master meditates does he see or not?' The master whacks the monk on the head three times and asks: 'When I hit you just then, did it hurt or not?' The monk replied 'It hurt and it didn't' The master then said 'Well then, I see and don't see'

Zen Teaching: Platform Sutra of Huineng

Post Cast Overview: Fault vs Errors, Translation of 4SZ, Finger pointing, Nothing Seen, Fear?

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/13tph3w/baiyun_duan_81_the_boy_who_attends_to_the_lamps/

Post Summary:

Master Baoen Xuanze asked Qingfeng, “What is this student’s self?”

Qingfeng said, “The boy who attends to the lamps has come seeking fire,” after which Baoen announced he had seen the Dharma.

Zen Teaching:https://terebess.hu/zen/baiyun.html I think.

Post Cast Overview: Who is the boy? Seeking fire. Responsibility. Then I forgot to take notes.

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/15cvsvu/tossing_a_snake_into_the_fire/

Post Summary: In the process of burning a clearing in the mountains, Master Dasui saw a snake; tossing it into the fire with his staff, he clucked his tongue and said, "You still won't give up this physical body on your own; for you to die here will be like finding a lamp in the dark."

Zen Teaching: Dahui’s Shobogenzo, published under the title Treasury of the Eye of the True Teaching.

Post Cast Overview: Audience is who? Literal vs metaphorical levels. Snakes don’t speak English. Not buying it. Stone lions and wood buddhas. Why does it seem so hard to understand Zen Masters?

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/149gpdt/self_and_things/

Post Summary:

Time and again I see longtime Zen students who have been freezing their spirits and letting their perception settle out and clarify for a long time. Though they have entered the Way, they immediately accepted a single device or a single state, and now they rigidly hold to it and won’t allow it to be stripped away. This is truly a serious disease.

Zen Teaching: Questionably authentic letters of Yuanwu.

Post Cast Overview: What is great rest. What people get confused about. Enlightenment revolving door. Backgrounds of Masters.

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/147yhqd/what_if_im_not_good_enough/

Post Summary: Foyan:

 

There is another type of Zen teacher who tells people not to make logical assessments, that they lose contact the minute they speak, and should recognize the primordial.

This kind of “teacher” has no explanation at all. This is like sitting on a balloon— where is there any comfort in it? It is also like the croaking of a bullfrog. If you entertain such a view, it is like being trapped in a black fog.

I am exhorting you in utter seriousness; I am not lying, I am not making up rationalizations to trap people, I will not allow people to oppress the free.

Zen Teaching: Foyan’s Instant Zen

Post Cast Overview: Intelligence, IQ, Charm, lost records, devotion and will power, bunch of Zen Cases and devotion. Kinds of satisfaction. What’s good enough? The Secret Ingredient. It’s like… not a real thing. Magic.

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/13rnwho/observing_without_making_a_nest

Post Summary:

Just being the way you naturally are – whether you’re talking or keeping quiet, moving around or sitting still – and not ornamenting it with lots of branches and leaves: this is the great gate to freedom. But to ford that river your idealist philosophies must be dead, your familiarities forgotten, your dispositions vanished, your opinions withered away. Somebody with half a speck of an idea of his own mind can’t get there. -Mingben

Then there's these two passages from Huangbo:

It is better to make offerings to a spiritual man who is free from mind-attachment' than to make offerings to all the Buddhas in the ten quarters. Why? Because to be free from mind-attachment means to be free from all forms of imagination.

Zen Teaching: Amazon has Illlusory Man and Huang-Po

Post Cast Overview: The itch to attain. What about people who experience life differently. What sort of difference. How do people bridge the differences gap. Itch after enlightenment. Satisfaction vs itch to interview.

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted

r/zen is a reddit forum about Zen scholarship, study, and practice.

Reddit Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/13wpglm/joshu_and_intellect/

Post Summary:

A monk asked, “Usually when there are questions and answers, the intellect is involved. Without being involved with intellect, how will you respond?”

The master said, “Ask a question.

”The monk said, “Please say something.

”The master said, “Don’t bring good and bad here.”

Zen Teaching: Green trans. Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu

Post Cast Overview: What is happening in this Case? Is “good-and-bad” a reference to Huineng’s Mountain Pass teaching. Where can you insert yourself into the Case. What if you can’t think. Are Zen Masters satisfied with their own answers. Why doesn’t the monk ask another question? What is intellect?

Zen Lineage: www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted