“Square Zen is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall.

For beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is.

But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master.”

It’s basically very simple, isn’t it, even within most people’s experience, perhaps especially those ‘working on themselves’, via meditation or whatever?

So how come all the ‘mystery’, all the holier-than-thou pussyfooting around it, all the reluctance to say anything?

I will meditate on that. I can see where you are going with it.

Zen is a training in seeing how things (pragmata) ‘appear’, rather than how we ‘think’ they are. It is a re-evaluation of the phenomenal world and an adjustment of our relationship to it. Most race past the phenomenal and get caught-up by the minutiae of abstraction when presented as thoughts.

It is a way of looking at the objects (and subjects) themselves rather than our brain’s interpretation of them.

So we’re stuck with your previous response: “As to what Zen might be… Zen is whatever Fresch says it is… I didn’t realise we were running an information service”.
And your ” Anything that can be “said” about zen will be wrong. So basically pick the kind of wrong you like.”

This is the sort of pretentious mystification that I was getting at, which sounds so very ‘mysterious’, ‘full of Eastern promise’, yet, one suspects, hides little else other than sheer ignorance.

Unless you at least try to explain explain at least some of your claimed 2000 pages’ worth of insight into the nature of Zen and thus shed some practically useful light onto the matter then all this merely amounts to a sort of academic smokescreen, a sort of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ syndrome. Which is all too common when glamour-struck, intellectual-type westerners approach eastern mysticism.

There is a broad brush game plan.
The micromanagement is for us. (To make sure we never run out of things to squabble about, to ensure we don’t form mass alliances.)

The Buddhism (and Zen Buddhism) “you know” was a Greek ‘construct’ devised to be the enslaving ‘religion’ of the Eastern part of the Greek empire… and even though it was first spread by the Greeks (as the Greeks dissipated and disappeared) the construct was so-good it spread like wildfire right across the East and on into China and Japan.

In the link below you will find some of the few references of the current Japanese archaeological involvement into the birth of their religion and in this video you will see some of the first Japanese tourists arriving to see the relics.

The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.

http://centralasiandragons.weebly.com/bactria.html

I bet that surprises you. Most of this material is so recent that there isn’t much on the web about it.

As I said, pick your wrongness. Do you still want to argue? Bring it on.