The Zen Manifesto ~ 02

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event type discourse & meditation
date & time 21 Feb 1989 pm
location Gautam the Buddha Auditorium, Pune
language English
audio Available, duration 3h 10min. Quality: good.
Osho leading meditation from 2:49:07.
Live music after the discourse.
online audio
video Available, duration 3h 12min. Quality: good, but a slight constant audio-noise.
online video
see also
online text find the PDF of this discourse
shorttitle ZENMAN02
notes
synopsis
Reader of the sutras: Ma Prem Maneesha. Questions are being read by Osho himself.
After discourse Osho leads No-Mind Meditation.
The sutras
One day, on his way to see Ma Tzu, Tanka Tennen met an old man with a boy, and asked them where they lived. The old man answered, "Above is the sky; below is the earth!"
Tanka said, "How about if the sky crumbled away and the earth fell to pieces?"
The old man said, "Ah! Ah!"
The boy drew a deep breath, and Tanka said, "If there were no father, no child would be born."
The old man and the child entered the mountains and were seen no more.
Once, Tanka Tennen was lying on the Tenshin bridge. Lord Teiko, who was in charge of the bridge, came out and warned Tanka that he had better move, but Tanka didn't get up.
Teiko asked why he didn't listen to him. After a few moments, Tanka said, "I am a monk of nothing."
Teiko was taken aback by Tanka Tennen's response, and from then on provided him with clothing and a daily meal.
After the incident, Tanka Tennen was venerated by the whole city.


Question 1
In Thomas Merton's view:
"Zen is not a systematic explanation of life, it is not an ideology, it is not a world view, it is not a theology of revelation and salvation, it is not a mystique, it is not a way of ascetic perfection, it is not mysticism as it is understood in the West; in fact it fits no convenient category of ours. Hence all our attempts to tag it and dispose of it with labels like pantheism, quietism, illuminism, pelagianism, must be completely incongruous.
But the chief characteristic of Zen is that it rejects all systematic elaborations in order to get back as far as possible to the pure, unarticulated and unexplained ground of direct experience. The direct experience of what? Life itself."
Beloved master, has Thomas Merton got it?
Question 2
Thomas Merton wrote: "Zen is one of the most mysterious of all spiritualities, being so full of impudent paradox that it is at first a real scandal to the rational spirit of the West."
Beloved master, but, in fact, is not Zen more rational in its irrationality -- being the acknowledgement that rationality has limits and we are after the unlimited -- than Christianity with its miracles, immaculate conception and resurrection?
Question 3
Beloved Osho, Thomas Merton wrote: "If a Christian mystic has an experience which can be phenomenologically compared with a Zen experience, does it matter that the Christian in fact believes he is personally united with God, and the Zen man interprets his experience as 'shunyata', nothingness, or the void being aware of itself? In what sense can these two experiences be called mystical?"
Beloved master, why do so many Christians and admirers of Zen try to make the two fit together?


(source:CD-ROM)


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