Heirloom Zen

I confess, I hang around some of the top chefs in Atlanta.  They teach me a lot about cooking and food quality.  For example, they don't buy their flour from the same place the unwashed masses do, and that goes for everything else.  Suffice it to say that what you get at a fine restaurant is not stuff you can purchase from your local supermarket.

Right now I am cooking up some 18th century oatmeal.  (No kidding.)  What I really want to say is that the oats I am using were probably used by folks like George Washington.  These are heirloom oats, in other words.  As for the taste, there is no comparison.  These oats (from Anson Mills) are far more tasty and rich than, say, what Quaker Oats has to offer.  It is unbelievable.

So what is the connection with Zen?  Well, I am betting that 'heirloom Zen', going back to Tang China, is altogether different from modern Zen.   The difference is almost like night and day.  Not even Dogen's Zen counts as heirloom Zen.  To get a sense of heirloom Zen we have to study the works of Zen masters like Tsung-mi (Zongmi).  Here is an example.

"[W]hen there is nothing in a jar, the jar is said to be empty—it does not mean that there is no jar."  In the same way, "when there are no discriminating thoughts such as desire or anger in the mind, the mind is said to be empty—it does not mean that there is no mind.  'No mind' (wu-hsin) only means that the defilements (fan-nao; klesha) have been eliminated from the mind" (Peter N. Gregory, Tsung-Mi and the Sinification of Buddhism, p. 236).

After reading a lot of classical Zen literature, its spirituality and richness cannot be denied—it is still unmatched.  Much of it, too, had little or nothing to do with sitting on a zafu (Dogen's Zen).  

To begin to learn real Zen is first to have studied many of the Buddha's discourses in addition to studying the Zen of Hui-neng.  This doesn't mean read Joko Beck's books like Everday Zen which is not about Zen at all or what the Buddha taught.  It is like eating instant oatmeal made from oats that are bland and almost tasteless.

I know some of you will try to defend the modern version of Zen.  It is not a worthwhile endeavor.  Modern Zen can be and often is, nutritionless, bland slop.  

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