Diana St. Ruth - Zen Buddhism--Simple Guides

Published in Great Britain by
Simple Guides, an imprint of Bravo Ltd
59 Hutton Grove, London N12 8DS
www.kuperard.co.uk
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First published 1998 by Global Books Ltd.
This edition published 2009

Copyright 2008 Bravo Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the publishers

eISBN: 978-1-85733-637-5

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cover image: Daibutsu or Giant Buddha, Kamakura, Japan.
istockphoto
Photograph on Ivanoff
Drawings by Irene Sanderson

v3.1

Daruma

We would like to express grateful thanks to the Rev. Jiku (Patricio Goycoolea) for his commentary on the monk ordination, James R. Fowler for his help with the Christian quotation and Don E. Whitbread for his helpful comments on the manuscript.

Zen garden at the Daisen-in sub-temple, Daitokuji Temple, Kyoto

The Great Buddha of Kamakura

Bodhidharma by Keishoki

Monks on alms round

Monks practising zazen

Daruma

Songgwang Sa monastery complex, Korea

Master Chinul reading the compact of the Concentration and Wisdom Society

Tea room within a temple, Kyoto

Monks leaving temple to go on alms round

The encouraging stick

The Heart Sutra in Chinese

Seated Buddha at Chogenji, Japan

Todaiji Temple, Nara, Japan

The Great Buddha at Todaiji Temple, Nara, Japan

Oxherding pictures by Shubun, a Zen priest

The face of the Buddha in contemplation, Kamakura, Japan.
Photo: Michael Cooper

One day, while teaching his followers in India, the Buddha held up a flower. A disciple smiled in response. This was a heart-to-heart transmission a teaching beyond words and letters. Later, this kind of approach was used extensively in China, Korea and Japan, and became known as Zen.

Vast numbers of Buddhist texts have accumulated over the centuries. Everything that can be explained about the Buddhas teaching has been defined in innumerable ways. Yet from the Zen perspective, nothing at all has been explained, the true teaching being a personal experience beyond words. To a person who has never tasted chocolate, the description is meaningless. Just one piece of it, however, will instantly reveal its flavour. That is how Zen is. The Zen teachings and all the descriptions are mere fingers pointing to the moon. It is important to look at the moon and not the finger, the spirit of Zen and not the form.

Bodhidharma, the great Indian monk, defined Zen as follows:

Zen monks greeting each other

A special transmission outside the scriptures;

No dependence upon words and letters;

Direct pointing at the mind;

Seeing into ones nature and the attainment of Buddhahood [awakening].

It is hoped that these few pages will introduce the spirit of Zen, edify, and put into perspective the terms and ideas which have begun to enter into the Western world in recent years.

DIANA & RICHARD ST RUTH
Sandwell, Devon

Siddhartha Gautama , the man who became the Buddha, is thought to have lived from 563 to 483 BCE. He was born in a grove in Lumbini, northern India, the family residence being at Kapilavastu, an area which today lies just inside the Nepalese border.

The family were kshatriyas, members of the warrior caste, and Siddharthas father, Suddhodana, was one of the heads of the Shakya clan. Therefore Siddhartha was born into wealthy and privileged circumstances; he was a sort of prince. Suddhodana was ambitious for his son, wanting him to inherit his wealth and follow in his footsteps by becoming a great ruler, but it was never to be. Even as a boy Siddhartha had wondered about the nature of existence, but by the time he reached adulthood he was overwhelmed by a need to know the purpose of life why beings are born, why did they suffer so much, and why they have to die at the end of it. It all seemed so pointless, empty, meaningless, and his own life of extravagance and self-indulgence in particular felt futile and banal.

Buddha means the awakened or enlightened one

When he was twenty-nine, things came to a head. Despite the pull of his family, which by that time included wife and child, Siddhartha left the security of wealth and home, and entered upon a spiritual quest. He cut off his hair (a symbol of renouncing the world), exchanged his fine clothes for rags, and sought out the holy men of the day for instruction.

Penniless now, Siddhartha lived in forests and quiet places, relying totally on the goodwill of the local people to put food into his begging bowl, as has always been the custom in India, and passed from place to place searching for the wisest teachers. He sat first with one great master and then another, learning what they knew, meditating and fasting. However, despite his single-minded determination, he did not reach his goal. It gradually became clear to him that none of the great and holy figures he encountered had access to the ultimate truth he was looking for. Eventually, he decided to go his own way.

Siddhartha then became an ascetic, a very diligent one, and quickly acquired a reputation for being resolute. He even attracted five companions who were so impressed by his endeavours that they became his disciples. But he went too far with his fasting and almost starved to death. No nearer to finding the answer to life, he recognized the uselessness of what he was doing. Punishing the body, he discovered, led nowhere. It was then that he turned away from all extreme practices and began to tread the middle way only the narrow path which runs between asceticism and over-indulgence.

It took six years from the time he left home, but finally Siddhartha found what he was looking for -not from anyone else, not from ancient rites, not from the old scriptures, and not from particular practices, but from deep within himself. There, in the silence of his own mind he exploded the myth of self and suffering, became awakened to truth, and became Buddha.

The Four Noble Truths

For the rest of his life, a period of about forty-five years, the Buddha expounded the truths he had discovered for himself. The essence of those teachings are very often given simply as the Four Noble Truths: