CxD 📚'23 #12: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ China Root: Taoism, Ch'an and Original Zen
Who this book is for: anyone interested in cosmological wild freedom.
What is Ch’an/Zen Practice? Ch’an operates on the edge of our human universe, where the human mingles away into the broader Cosmos. It takes a wild and fearless mind to inhabit that terrain, but only there is it possible to engage Ch’an at the deep levels necessary to awakening. For the adventure of Ch’an means dismantling all of the explanations and assumptions that structure our human universe, all of the answers that orient us and define us as centers of human identity… In their deconstruction of conceptual structures through meditation and sangha-case (koan) training, Ch’an’s wrecking-crew masters raze most essentially self, the center of identity that seems self-enclosed and outside natural process.
The lone lost star ⭐️ is because so so many of the terms used herein end up pointing to the same thing, which at some point begins to feel disorienting and not a little redundant — X means Y but really, truly, means exactly what all the other terms we’ve talked about so far mean; why exactly are we coming up with such an abundance of terms that point in the same exact direction? There are obviously reasons and effects of having multiple words for love and snow, etc. but it can feel disorienting before they’ve all been integrated in their subtle distinctions.
David Hinton addresses this issue directly:
“But in the end, Ch’an liberation resides outside words and ideas, answers and certainties and stories. As we will see, that is exactly what meditation and sangha-case (koan) training do: cultivate understanding outside of words and ideas and stories.
… Tao, Absence and Presence, tzu-jan (occurrence appearing of itself), ch’i (breath-force), rivers-and-mountains landscape, empty-mind, no-mind, Absence-mind, mirror-mind, original source-tissue face, Buddha, dharma, inner-pattern, ch’i-thought/mind, existence-tissue, Buddha-nature, Buddha-mind, prajna-wisdom: these are the terms that describe the contours of Taoist/Ch’an ontology/cosmology. Each term emphasizes a different aspect of that ontology/cosmology, but by now it is becoming clear that in the end they all blur into a single concept, a single linguistic darkness, and this darkness is itself the cosmological/ontological ground: that undifferentiated and generative tissue of the Cosmos seen as a single organic whole.
The four stars are earned because this book displays a depth of understanding both in historical terms, in poetic terms, in terms of translation, and in terms of practice regarding what Ch’an/Zen/Meditation practice is about and how to think-non-think about it.
What is meditation? Clearing away the machinery of the self.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the art of meditation and its authentic roots— not merely transpositions of ideas from one thought system onto another.
Superb Bonus: the 20-page appendix points out all the ways Zen teachers and translators fail to comprehend the original Taoist meanings and historical context and introduce wrongheaded metaphysics where they don’t belong. Some of these mistranslations — commonly accepted — are really quite egregious, so serious practitioners will benefit immensely from just the appendix itself.
An example of the mistranslation of The Heart Sutra, according to Hinton:
Reading Absence as “not,” the passage reads as a series of negations, which is how translators have always rendered it and which gives the following in Aitken’s [A Western Zen Teacher] translation:
Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, thought, impulse, consciousness;
no eye, ear nose, tongue, body, mind;
no color, sound, smell taste, touch object of thought;
no realm of sight to no realm of thought;
no ignorance and also no ending of ignorance
to no age and death and also no ending of old age and death
But read only this way, it again describes some kind of imagined metaphysical realm that is perhaps known through awakening and is more true than the physical world. The empirically minded Chinese would have had no patience for such claims.
Without dwelling there: that is the crucial thing. It means accepting the movement of thought or life as part of Tao’s great transformation, rather than clinging to a permanent self, a stable and enduring center of identity that sustains itself in turn by clinging to a constellation of assumptions and ideas.