A teacher can help you get ready if you are not, then they can point out what you cannot see.master of puppets wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 6:21 am If your mind is not ready no teacher can help you.
My understanding: In a practice like Zen part of the function of the teacher is to show you your own face, you have been avoiding looking at your own face since beginningless time, so much that you don't even remember how to see it. The chance of you figuring it out on your own is not good, likely to be nearly impossible. One traditional analogy is the taste of sugar, you can read about it and try to figure out what it tastes like as much you want, but it is never the same as tasting it.teacher for me can only be give dicipline to stay on the right track until your mind become ready.
Once we see it maybe, until then such events are nice, but not the same animal as getting that glimpse, which generally only a teacher can point out, and at least get us on the path to abide there. We can become more independent following this, but in the practice of Zen the teacher serves a very important role.Then everything could easily become a teacher; like a stone hitting a bamboo as to most ordinary events that we read from the story of past masters; and you can hear the teacher,
btw, here's a quote for you about The Disease of Emptiness:
See these are the kind of distinctions that need a teacher and lineage, it is very easy to think we are doing one thing, and be doing another entirely, we need someone to point out to us exactly what we are doing, because we just cannot see it by ourselves initially. In other words, it's hard to "be on track" without their help.Boshan wrote:The Disease of Emptiness
If you're unable to rouse doubt when practicing Zen, you may come to regard the physical and mental worlds as utterly emptied, with nothing at all to cling to and nothing to hold on to. Unable to discern your own body and mind or the world around you, denying inner and outer, you make everything into one emptiness.
Then you believe this emptying to be Zen, and the one who emptied it all to be a buddha. You imagine that the four postures of going, staying, sitting, and reclining are done within emptiness. This too is simply your wavering mind; it is not Zen.
Continuing in this way you end up in false emptiness, sunk in dark ignorance. Attached to it, you become as if demon-possessed and proclaim that you've attained enlightenment. All because you fail to realize that what you're doing has nothing to do with true Zen inquiry.
If you genuinely inquire, with one koan you'd rouse this doubt and wield it as a razor sharp sword—whoever comes in contact with its blade will be annihilated. Otherwise, even though you may reach a state of emptiness where no thoughts arise, it is still ignorance and far from final.
Anyway, it is not hard to take teachings in this day and age.