Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First seriesSuzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Religion
Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First series
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Zen Buddhism
[f94] According to this, there must have been a special volume of
sermons and letters by Hui-k‘ê, which were compiled evidently by
his disciples and admirers before they were put down in writing and
thoroughly revised by the author himself. In the case of Bodhi-Dharma
too, according to Tao-hsüan, his sayings were apparently in circulation
in the day of Tao-hsüan, that is, early in the T‘ang dynasty.
[f95] Understood by some to be leprosy.
[f96] In the _Vimalakīrti_, Chapter III., “The Disciples,” we have the
following: “Do not worry about the sins you have committed, O monks,”
said Vimalakīrti, “Why? Because sins are in their essence neither
within nor without nor in the middle. As the Buddha taught us, all
things are defiled when Mind is defiled; all things are pure when Mind
is pure: and Mind is neither within nor without nor in the middle. As
is Mind, so are sins and defilements, so are all things—they never
transcend the suchness of truth.”
[f97] _Hsin_, is one of those Chinese words which defy translation.
When the Indian scholars were trying to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit
works into Chinese, they discovered that there were five classes of
Sanskrit terms which could not be satisfactorily rendered into Chinese.
We thus find in the Chinese Tripitaka such words as _prajñā_, _bodhi_,
_buddha_, _nirvāṇa_, _dhyāna_, _bodhisattva_, etc., almost always
untranslated; and they now appear in their original form among the
technical Buddhist terminology. If we could leave _hsin_ with all its
nuance of meaning in this translation, it would save us from the many
difficulties that face us in its English rendering. For _hsin_ means
mind, heart, soul, spirit—each singly as well as all inclusively. In
the present composition by the third patriarch of Zen, it has sometimes
an intellectual connotation but at other times it can properly be
done by “heart.” But as the predominant note of Zen Buddhism is more
intellectual than anything else, though not in the sense of being
logical or philosophical, I decided here to translate _hsin_ by “mind”
rather than by “heart.”
[f98] This means: When the absolute oneness of things is not properly
understood, negation as well as affirmation will tend to be one-sided
view of reality. When Buddhists deny the reality of an objective
world, they do not mean that they believe in the unconditioned
emptiness of things; they know that there is something real which
cannot be done away with. When they uphold the doctrine of void this
does not mean that all is nothing but an empty hollow, which leads
to a self-contradiction. The philosophy of Zen avoids the error of
one-sidedness involved in realism as well as in idealism.
[f99] I.e., Tat tvam asi.
[f100] There is however a variation from five years to fifteen years
according to different authorities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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