Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First seriesSuzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Religion
Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First series
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Zen Buddhism
The Buddha himself gave utterance to the feeling of return when his
eye first opened to the Dharma unheard of before at the realisation
of Enlightenment. He said: “I am like a wanderer who, after going
astray in a desolate wilderness, finally discovers an old highway,
an old track beaten by his predecessors, and who finds, as he goes
along the road, the villages, palaces, gardens, woods, lotus-ponds,
walls, and many other things where his predecessors used to have
their dwellings.”[f73] Superficially, this feeling of returning to an
old familiar abode seems to contradict the statement made concerning
“an insight to things never before presented to one’s mind”; but the
contradiction is logical and not spiritual. As long as the Buddha was
going over the Chain of Origination from the epistemological point
of view, that is, as long as he attempted to get back to his
native will through the channel of empirical consciousness, he could
not accomplish his end. It was only when he broke through the wall
of Ignorance by the sheer force of his will that he could tread the
ancient path. The path was altogether unrecognisable by his intelligent
eye which was one of the best of the kind; even the Buddha could not
ignore the law governing its usage; the Chain was not to be cut asunder
by merely reckoning its links of cause and effect backward and forward.
Knowledge, that is, Ignorance drove Adam from the Garden of Eden to the
world of pain and patience (_sahaloka_), but it was not knowledge that
would reconcile him to his Father, it was the Will dispelling Ignorance
and ushering Enlightenment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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