Zen and Japanese Culture
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- Опубліковано 12 лип 2023
- Planet Tokyo video - • PLANET TOKYO
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I read your books for the first time probably like ten years ago in prison. And I've been watching your videos following your work for some years. I've recently decided that the right action for me right now is to be a Christian. That's not the point tho. Just know man that you've helped me allot. Yours is the genuine dharma i love you God bless you
a "right action" can't be proved in advance, rather it has to be shown as a result in the long term. i don't get the right vibe from the way you express yourself, too full of your own certainty when in fact you are very uncertain
@@osip7315 uh huh how certain are you about my uncertainty
@@errornomessage5229 certain
@@osip7315 to clear up your confusion with the way I express myself, I was trying to express gratitude
@@osip7315 arrogance plagues the American Buddhist community
Beautiful intro!
Korean-based Zen is like this too. For example, in long retreats we do chanting for more than an hour each day, half in the morning, half in the evening. Chanting is done in semi-musical fashion, unlike Japanese-style monotone. Every day starts with 108 full prostrations, and some people do 1000 or more bows each day. I think that's pretty weird, but that's just my opinion and stuff, man.
Watched the video the day you posted. I liked the music and the video. Good fun. During a teacher’s talk and subsequent discussion, I disagreed with the teacher and the crowd over a similar translation issue. It raised one of the problems with the development of American Zen. People read Dogen, or some famous teacher, from one translator’s work and assume that’s what Dogen, Bodhidharma, whomever meant. Very frustrating. I learned to translate French and Spanish. My German is a bit rusty now. However, my skills were not at an acceptable level until I spent time in some corresponding countries. Japanese is on the list, but not until I’m done moving a household. Viva Ziggy! Anyway, all the best! Rockin’ video
Thanks. I think you’re right. Good luck with Japanese. After all the time I’ve spent studying it I still feel like my skills are less than stellar.
" It raised one of the problems with the development of American Zen. People read Dogen, or some famous teacher, from one translator’s work and assume that’s what Dogen, Bodhidharma, whomever meant. Very frustrating."
for sure, people do not understand that translations are 'interpretations", especially with religious texts so you get a lot of blatant idiocy lapped up apparently, by blatant idiots
For me, it’s more a question of separating the weeaboo from the spiritual practitioner. If there’s anything of worth in Zen, it has little to do with Japan. Japan is a necessary, but not sufficient condition as the philosophers say.
Nice.
To me, Dogen was about getting this to the layman. I have a hard time believing he would draw hard lines, as long as one wasnt rejecting without understanding it first.
If we could all talk and see each other with flint stones, I think he would have a different narrative about them 😅
I'd love to come to the Hebden Bridge one but getting married that week. Hope you'll be back in the UK soon
What you say about "hi" and "fu" is right on. As someone who has lived in Japan for 20 years and translates haiku for a living, I am very aware of this issue. I didn't know the bowing came from Buddhism. Very interesting! I agree that Japanese culture and Buddhism are so tightly intertwined it's impossible to separate them. Your analogy of eggs and the cake was perfect.
Thanks! I was initially surprised to hear someone who translates Japanese a lot saying "hi" and "fu" mean the same thing. But if you just go by what you see in Japanese-English dictionaries, it would be easy to think they're the same.
Absolutely right
Nothing can take the place of on-the-ground experience with a language.
I studied at a university in Berlin years ago and learned to speak German quite well. I'm constantly seeing translation errors from German into English in the media. There's no substitute for actually "living the language" day in and day out.
This made me think of a talk that Alan Watts gave back in the late 60s. He said that Hinduism was as much a lifestyle and a culture as it was a religion, and that it couldn’t be wholesale brought from India to the West with any real degree of success for that exact reason. But, he said - and here’s the kicker - Buddhism was in many ways, Hinduism stripped down for export. Clearly he wasn’t talking about Zen, but I can see that other forms of Buddhism might fit that bill.
Good point. Buddhism tends to blend with the culture that it is exported to. For example, Buddhism entered China and we have Chan. While Chan came to Japan and became Zen it also took on Japanese elements as well. Buddhism went to Tibetan and merged with Bon and so on. Then Buddhism came to America and became this weird politically driven version of Buddhism we have in the United States now.. (kidding but also not kidding)
Yes Hinduism though the truth was in the vedas and Advaita Vedanta, people made it so complex with their man made hierarchies and social structures so the esoteric core got lost. Buddha had to come to extract that and direct the spiritual aspirant towards practice. So it was “Hinduism for export.” I think the same about Christianity and how it came out of Judaism and got exported to the rest of the world was open to it while the home religion rejected it (same with Hinduism and Buddhism, where Buddhism was largely driven out of India and into the far east)
Well... in the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, Buddhism was not Hinduism. But Hinduism was heavily influenced by Buddhism for 1000 years.
不思慮➡️不思量、 です。Mr.Warner, please. 🙏
思慮 = prudence; discretion; thought; consideration. 思量 = 思料 = careful consideration; thought. I did check this. I thought something looked off, but I figured I just remembered the characters wrong. Anyway, I can't change it now and the difference between the two words seems trivial.
I personally wondn't want to remove the Japanese culture from Zen, just like I wouldn't take the Chinese out of Chan or the whole mass of Indian culture out of Buddhism as a whole. As it has moved eastward, it has kept its essential traits and acquired new character with every place it has been taken up, and I think (with discretion) that's a good thing
noh theater is very "zen"
we are in the second incarnation of western zen and its built on the first which was hume via jesuit missionaries
zen and buddhism as imports from japan and asia have been part of the western philosophical tradition for 250 years, so in the second incarnation post ww2 it just slotted naturally into a religious-philosphical hybrid which basically has all the japanese folk beliefs stripped out and this also fitted in quite well to christianity which has been missing its mystical arms for centuries meeting a need there
interestingly i have read that shinto was originally part of buddhism and the separation today was the result of meiji and imperial era governments attempting to create a more "nationalistic" and aggressive religion than buddhism
reading yoshida kenko's "essays in idleness" which is set in 14th century kyoto gives a wonderful picture of medieval japanese culture
asian cultures have a highly intertwined mix of superstition and beliefs in daily and ceremonial life, imo, a order of magnitude greater than the west
Dear Lord.
If you follow any author long enough, you will find instances when they seem to contradict themselves. Be aware that language is imperfect, and limited, as are people. I grapple with this from time to time.
I couldn't get what is the difference between FU-shiriyo and HI-shiriyo. Did Dogen mean that we have to totally elimenate any kind of thinking i.e. sit like a log?
No. It's just that what we are to think about is absolutely not thought.
As humans, fortunately/unfortunately, we have considerably more going on than logs do. And so we just sit like humans.
@@ianinjapan2 like humans with an idle mind?
@@wladddkn1517 or humans who are allowing their thinking mind a little R&R? ^_^
But -- to get a little less playful and a little more personal -- I suppose my favorite feeling in Zazen is the freedom from the Three Poisons: "Wow, I like that", "Get that outta my environment", or "I don't give a f*ck".
That we only pay attention to things that appeal to, or bother, us, and everything else just gets Papered Over with this kind of Soft Focus Haze, as we Drift Off into Thought about something else we want or hate...?
And so that feeling of just being able to bring a clarity and attention to things as they are, independently of how I happen to feel about them (or don't feel about them): that's what Zazen has given me. 🌞
Play the theme to Barney Miller on your bass!
I did! A few months ago.
Zen so-called Masters often have affected spiritual behavior ...it is more or less Japanese Culture theater. I have seen many America Zen folks engaged in Japanese martial arts, Diet, and Zendo culture. Walk, talk, think, like a Japanese cultured person...BUT, It is affected with unreal -make believe culture, plus there are innovations and western exceptions that the Pali canons say to totally avoid.
There's nothing like the Pali Canon to make western Buddhism seem to be missing the boat.
This is a subject I've been considering lately. How do you reverse engineer Zen? Well, what made Bodhidharma special? Wall-staring, a dour attitude, exercising, living in a cave, not giving a fuck about you.
Another telling thing is how the word Zen evolved from Jhana, which is a state of deep meditative concentration. Im guessing it developed because the way Gautama eventually got his ding! was he basically gave up and sat under a tree meditating until he got there.
So, where do you go from throwing away all parts except the meditation?
Side question: What happens to a person if they don't know anything about Buddhism and have them stare at a wall until their brains leak out?
Another side note: these things of cultural transmission and assimilation aren't simple. Like everything else it's a rats nest of factors, with at times people (like Dogen) 'going back' to the keepers of the sacred flame and returning with the 'true way' and at other times people consciously rejecting the old school and making their own developments, which in turn either become the new main stream or influence it somehow (eg, Medieval Japanese Pure Land Buddhism as a reaction against fastidious and insulated Zen ivory tower, which in turn influenced Zen to develop in more populist directions).
The only answer is to just do the thing.
The christmas nights out with the zen centre Im a member off are.......non existant.
I don’t believe much Dogen said; “THINK the thought of not thinking”. There must be an error in translation because as soon as one THINKS the intellectual mind starts to take place.
He wrote 箇の不思量底を思量せよ which would be pronounced "ko no fushiryou tei wo shiryou se yo." Word by word you get something like: "Concretely on the basis of non-contemplation contemplate I say emphatically." This is a jumble, so in something more like standard English word order we get: "I say emphatically: concretely contemplate on the basis of non-contemplation." It's a very difficult sentence even if you understand Japanese. It is a koan.
"Think the thought of non-thinking" is a reasonable translation. The only quibble I have with that translation is that the English word "think" may be a somewhat different meaning from the Japanese word "shiryou." Shiryou is composed of two characters which individually mean "think" and "measure/weigh." So it implies a state of active deliberate thinking about something rather than the state wherein the mind is sort of wandering around. So it's closer in meaning to "contemplate."
@@HardcoreZen ; Comtemplating on the basis of non-contemplation is free of THOUGHT. It is like a lively dynamic sequence in contact with reality in which any concept dilutes.
The word “Think” may need to be replaced in English translation with something else. The thought of non thought is still a thought. But the INSIGHT coming out when thought has not been taking place is what approaches one closest to our buddha nature.
@@HardcoreZen ; Penetrating beyond the thought might be a more clear y direct guide to express “Think the thought of not thinking”.
What is Zen? How does it relate to Buddha's original teaching? The truth is that any version of dhyana (Zen in Japanese) that strays from what Buddha taught is not going to produce the wanted results. Zen has nothing to do with the culture of the Japanese. That is something that has been added on. Buddhism has been adapted to other Eastern cultures as well. If you want to know what the practice will look like in the future you have to isolate the essence of the practice and then add the cultural environment it will be taught in. If you prefer the Japanese version that is fine. But we certainly don't need it.
I guess in the long term Buddhism in the West is destined either to be diluted and disappear or (which I hope for) take the form of Western schools. I think now it's far too soon for it so I stick with Soto, and I see my fate as a practictioner consisting in doing my insignificantly small part in extracting what has to be carried
You said the TV people would hang with you but none of the Zen people would, but you did hang with the German Zen monk, Muho, right?
Yes. But I never knew or practiced with Muho when I lived in Japan. People I knew and practiced with didn’t respond to me.
I am going to part with all of your comments. I am an American who’s lived in Japan for 30 years. I am a ZEN Monk. I went to the seminary for two years, went through all the ceremonies and everything to get to where I am today. And I will unequivocally tell you this one thing. ZEN is not about how many books he read. In other words, it doesn’t manage how much knowledge you accumulate. It means nothing! You talk about dog and his words to think about thinking about nothing. Nobody can understand that, so why even say it? The secret is in silent practice!
Is that the secret?
First
Boring, who cares what culture zen or Japanese is. Does it help zazen?
Yes.
A GEEK TO CRY ABOUT...LOL...GEEK...LO;L EGG-LESS OMELETTE