AMA

Standard Questions:
1) Where have you just come from? What are the teachings of your lineage, the content of its practice, and a record that attests to it? What is fundamental to understand this teaching?

2) What's your text? What text, personal experience, quote from a master, or story from zen lore best reflects your understanding of the essence of zen?

3) Dharma low tides? What do you suggest as a course of action for a student wading through a "dharma low-tide"? What do you do when it's like pulling teeth to read, bow, chant, sit, or post on r/zen?

Answers:

1) I have just come from someone asking if anyone is talking to me, which I think is another way of asking if anyone thinks I have anything interesting to say on the topic of Zen. I do not claim any lineage, and no lineage would claim me.

2) I have been told that Huangbo's insistence on cutting through conceptual proliferation aligns with my view of zen - no doctrine, no entanglements, just direct realization - and that the rejection of Dharma as something to be grasped or transmitted fits well with the perspective of sudden awakening. As such, I will share a bit of Huangbo for reference.

The building up of good and evil both involve attachment to form. [According to Zen, virtuous actions should be performed by adepts, but not with a view to accumulating merit and not as a means to Enlightenment. The door should remain perfectly unattached to the actions and to their results.] Those who, being attached to form, do evil have to undergo various incarnations unnecessarily; while those who, being attached to form, do good, subject themselves to toil and privation equally to no purpose. In either case it is better to achieve sudden self-realization and to grasp the fundamental Dharma. This Dharma is Mind, beyond which there is no Dharma; and this Mind is the Dharma, beyond which there is no mind. Mind in itself is not mind, yet neither is it no-mind. To say that Mind is no-mind implies something existent. [In other words, Mind is an arbitrary term for something that cannot properly be expressed in words.] Let there be a silent understanding and no more; Away with all thinking and explaining. Then we may say that the Way of Words has been cut off and movements of the mind eliminated. This Mind is the pure Buddha-Source inherent in all men. All wriggling beings possessed of sentient life and all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are of this one substance and do not differ. Differences arise from wrong-thinking only and lead to the creation of all kinds of karma. [Karma even good karma, leads to rebirth and prolongs the wanderings of the supposedly individual entity; for when good karma has worked itself out in consequent enjoyment, the individual is as far from understanding the One Mind as ever.]

On the Transmission of Mind, # 7

3) If every day is a good day then how can a "dharma low-tide" be a problem?