This piece accusing Watts of laziness is just as guilty.
`It’s true that Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism, teaches that we are perfect just as we are, we have merely forgotten our true nature.`
As someone who has studied Zen Buddhism for a few decades, you will be very hard pressed to find anyone practiced in it refer to the words 'true' and 'perfect' so casually.
True is only meaningful with respect to an abstract system of rules, and this extends likewise to perfection. You need an external metric to determine what is, and by the same token, is not, perfect.
Zen Buddhism teaches people how to experience the world independent of that part of your mind that is actively categorizing the world into true, false, imperfect, perfect, etc. To experience your own experience of life as directly as possible, without mediation through your linguistic centers or moral philosophies. Since we're programmers, one analogy would be to reduce all those needless abstractions in the call stack down to the essential turing-complete read/write add/sub and jump instructions.
So Alan is forcing an important point on the Yogi. You can only know or define enlightenment with respect to an abstract system of thought. Remove the abstraction, and there is a complete liberation. No meaningful way to form distinctions. "Doesn’t he see the Brahman everywhere, and in all people, all beings". All becomes one. There is no difference between the enlightened and the non-enlightened in the non-conceptual world. Which is the world that Zen teaches how to experience, if for no other reason than to reveal that it is possible, and provide a renewed perspective on the seemingly ordinary miracle of conscious life.
`It’s true that Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism, teaches that we are perfect just as we are, we have merely forgotten our true nature.`
As someone who has studied Zen Buddhism for a few decades, you will be very hard pressed to find anyone practiced in it refer to the words 'true' and 'perfect' so casually.
True is only meaningful with respect to an abstract system of rules, and this extends likewise to perfection. You need an external metric to determine what is, and by the same token, is not, perfect.
Zen Buddhism teaches people how to experience the world independent of that part of your mind that is actively categorizing the world into true, false, imperfect, perfect, etc. To experience your own experience of life as directly as possible, without mediation through your linguistic centers or moral philosophies. Since we're programmers, one analogy would be to reduce all those needless abstractions in the call stack down to the essential turing-complete read/write add/sub and jump instructions.
So Alan is forcing an important point on the Yogi. You can only know or define enlightenment with respect to an abstract system of thought. Remove the abstraction, and there is a complete liberation. No meaningful way to form distinctions. "Doesn’t he see the Brahman everywhere, and in all people, all beings". All becomes one. There is no difference between the enlightened and the non-enlightened in the non-conceptual world. Which is the world that Zen teaches how to experience, if for no other reason than to reveal that it is possible, and provide a renewed perspective on the seemingly ordinary miracle of conscious life.