Rational Zen

Intro

• The more you seek enlightenment, the more you lose it.
• The aim of Zen is to become immune to being conditioned into altered states, away from original mind.
• If you try to avoid something, it’s still affecting you.
• Don’t cling to sense data, let them be, without hindrance.
• Emphasis on emptiness aline tends to produce nihilism and decadence.
• Emphasis on phenomena alone tends to not produce liberation.
• Discipline, meditation, and knowledge are all necessary to cultivate virtue and to get rid of craving.
• Zen aims to strip students of sentimental attachments.
• Neither mechanical performance nor mere theory will foster enlightenment.
• Enlightenment is inherent in everyone, but it needs to be practiced to manifest and be directly experienced.

Universal Book of Eternal Peace

• Three exercises: contemplating impermanence of the subject; contemplating impermanence of the object; alterness in the immediate present.
• Remove obstructing fixations.
• Realisation of the absolute does not extinguish experience of the relative.
• As long as the idea of something to be transcended remains, this obscures our inherent Buddha-nature.
• The integration of the absolute and relative doesn’t obliterate their distinctness.
• When “someone” understands, the understanding is already secondhand.
• Tranquilising yourself deprives you of useful stimuli for conscious development.
• By not grasping or rejecting we can be undisturbed in the midst of the world without shutting anything out.
• The ominpresence of reality does not obstruct the ubiquitousness of the illusion.
• Hover above the duality of the absolute and the relative.
• Only suchness and knowledge of suchness.
• Jar the mind out of its self-limiting, routine outlook, and thinking patterns.

Treasury of Eyes of True Teaching

• Good and evil are products of relations, not pre-existing inherent qualities.
• First there is effort, then spontaneity.
• No longer a slave to compulsion or coercion, internal or external.
• Don’t notch the side of a boat to mark where something went overboard.
• Be free in the midst of it all.
• Be able to use or not use whatever’s available to you as an individual.
• Act without attachment. Act spontaneously, without contrivance.
• Don’t grasp the world and oneself, don’t reject the world and oneself.
• All things being interdependent means that each individual implies the whole, and the whole implies each individual.
• The essence of mind, bypassing the feelings and thoughts produced by the function of mind.
• Charity and service are manifestations of the attitude of enlightenment.
• Be fluid and free, not pinned down by mental fixations.
• The practice may have played a role in opening the mind, but what’s important is the effect of the opening.
• ‘“The Land of Eternally Silent Light” - Tendai Buddhist name for the absolute.’
• If mind and things were separate, there would be no possiblity of awareness of things.
• Ultimate reality is innocent of the descriptions projected upon it by conceptual and linguistic habits.
• Knowledge without action is useless. Action with knowledge is dangerous.
• Free up energy by letting go perceptual and cognitive boundaries produced by fixation on limited views.
• The middle way is the simultaneous awareness of both perspectives.
• As soon as you think “this is it,” it’s not it anymore.
• Using brings up potential, being used throws it away.
• The answering is in the questioning.
• Anticipation of enlightenment keeps the mind entangled in subjectivity.
• The unity of the absolute and the relative is the consummation of Zen practice.
• Service without expectation of reward is one of the keynotes of the boddhisattva path.

Added 2024-01-14.