Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!eos!data.nas.nasa.gov!news
From: simmonds@demon.siemens.com (Tom Simmonds)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Lin-Chi on reality and his function as a teacher
Message-ID: <1991Jun27.193459.28732@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 27 Jun 91 19:34:59 GMT
Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov
Organization: Siemens Corp.Res. Inc.,Princeton, NJ
Lines: 43
Approved: prabhu@amelia.nas.nasa.gov



Lin-chi (Rinzai in Japanese) lived in the ninth century AD and is considered
to be the founder of one school of Zen Buddhism.  His approach was primarily
non-rational.  He preferred to expose limited thinking by confronting his
students with direct experience.  I get the impression that he was very 
skillful in perceiving that kind of thinking and at choosing just the right
action to reveal its inadequacy.  He was famous for his shouts of "kaa!", which
he would frequently use when somebody was expecting some rational response, and
for doing something else whenever somebody was expecting him to say "kaa!".
It seems that he did whatever he could to yank people out of their thoughts
and into direct, here-and-now experience.

His teachings were recorded by his students in a collection called the Lin-Chi
Lu.  In it, there is an interesting discourse that is relevant to the
discussion about the purpose of a guru.  It's quite lengthy, and I'm not
inclined to post such a lengthy quote; but I'll try to summarize it as best
I can.

Lin-Chi criticized his students for looking to him for enlightenment.  He told
them that reality was already there in their own experience and that there was
nothing he could add to it.  He said that their only problem was a lack of
confidence in the reality of their own nature, and that his function was to
try to help them to overcome that lack of confidence.  He urged them not to
look outside of themselves for Buddha-nature, as if it were something missing
that they could acquire from some outside source.  He said that they would not
find it in the scriptures and that all the Buddhas of the past could not give
it to them.  Instead, he told them that the six senses [seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting, feeling and thinking (ie. mental experiences)] are no other
than the Buddha-mind itself, and that they need look no further.  He said that
all he could do for them was to point them back to their own experience.

Just one final point of clarification: the reference to the six senses refers
not to the organs of sense, nor to their objects, nor to some subjective
medium, but to the vividly present experiences themselves as conscious
events, without the conceptual assumption of some underlying substance or
external cause.

--
 ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
((    (( . (((  (  ((((((  (((( (((  (  (((  (  ((( . (((  ( ((( , (((  ((((((
 ))) ))))   ))) ) ) )))))))  ))) ))) ) ) ))) ) ) )))   ))) )  )))   ))))  )))))
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((