It is difficult to comprehend fully how yin and yang pervade Heaven and Earth because the forces themselves are invisible. That images may manifest the minute is a fact that does not perplex even the foolish, whereas forms hidden in what is invisible are what confuses even the learned.
How much more difficult it is, therefore, to understand the way of Buddhism, which exalts the void, uses the dark, and exploits the silent in order to succor the myriad grades of living things and exercise control over the entire world. Its spiritual authority is the highest, and its divine potency has no equal. Its magnitude impregnates the entire cosmos; there is no space so tiny that it does not permeate it. Birthless and deathless, it does not age after a thousand kalpas; half-hidden and half-manifest, it brings a hundred blessings even now. A wondrous way most mysterious, those who follow it cannot know its limit. A law flowing silent and deep, those who draw on it cannot fathom its source. How, therefore, could those benighted ordinary mortals not be perplexed if they tried to plumb its depths?
What I like is the acknowledgement that it's not easy to understand....
2 comments:
Zen is the only religion I have any respect for. The rest suck. Buddhism broadly also sucks. Zen is a melding of Buddhism and Daoism, stripped away all the metaphysical woo woo of Buddhism and Hinduism, and is more like a psychology than a religion.
Yet even Zen masters engaged in the most pathetic rationalizations to justify the Japanese horrors in China.
The text is not easy to understand because because it is nonsense. Like that stupid koan crap. The lesson is obvious: language is poor at explaining the world and us.
I haven't really looked into Zen in that much detail - it intuitively doesn't have much appeal to me.
I did read just this morning what looks like an old post by someone with a list of books on Zen that he thought "don't suck". Amusingly, he says this about Alan Watts:
"It took me a long time to finally read anything by Alan Watts. When I started studying Zen it seemed like the only books on the subject I could find were by DT Suzuki and Alan Watts. DT Suzuki was way too scholarly for me and Watts just seemed like a druggy hippie. I finally read the title essay from this collection around 2009 and was amazed. Watts was really good. I’m still not so sure about DT Suzuki."
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