Chapter 5 in O'Brien: Song Dynasty

I like it that neo-confucianism was against supernaturalism.

The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp includes Budai, the fat laughing Buddha, and women and the important people with interesting exchanges, "encounter dialogues".

O'Brien writes mostly about The Gateless Barrier, The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Equanimity. These are the beginning of the koans.

I tried reading some of the book of Equanimity because I like the Brahma Viharas, but it's Zen stuff trying to confound your conceptual thinking. There are 100 short paragraphs, and I think I'll read it. Perhaps Yelu Chucai, who advised Genghis Khan after he invaded his lands is the author. He was very tall and had a deep voice, and composed the book at the request of the regional governor. The title literally means encouragement (hermitage) record = Congrong lu.

But it turns out later the systemization of koans leads in the original order I put forward. So I should start with the Gateless Barrier.

There are also longer puzzles and slogans that are called hautou. When Stephen Batchelor left the Tibetans over his skepticism about reincarnation, he went to a Korean Zen monastery and kept asking, "what is this?" That is an example of a hautou.

She also writes about the Ten Bulls. Pretty funky Zen version of the wheel of life almost. Lots of good commentaries on the Wikipedia site. I even found a manga version.

It was at the end of the Song dynasty that Nalanda, the first university, was burned, Odantapuri and Vikramashila, Somapura and Jagaddala were burned by Muslims. (P.154-5 The Circle of the Way)

chapter 5

Alan Watts' book Psychotherapy East and West, treats Buddhist liberation as another boondoggle by civilization to tame humans. So you can imagine his last chapter is going to be a bit of a letdown. His suggestion is to dance with life, a full eroticism with all of life and not just the genitals.

He is as usual eminently quotable: "The type of human being who submits to this culture is, almost literally, a zombie." He is talking about the human who submits to technology. At times like these he doesn't nail down his insight cleanly, he is more like a continental philosopher who uses philosophy more like an art, than a logic inquiry. His statements are suggestively artistic.

In another place he quotes a 6000 year old Egyptian he quote from a Fromm book: "Our earth is degenerate...Children no longer obey their parents." Boy, wish everyone heard this. I hear this kind of statement all the time. It comes from nostalgia for a past that didn't exist, like the mother who tells her children she would never do this or that as a child, but really she did.

In the end this book is impressionistic. I can't help but think how Watts ended his life divorced from his wife, fired from his job, living like a total genital hedonist. What he actually did with his ideas does not seem to be where I want to end. His rhetoric can have a liberative feel to it, but it's target is vague and unclear, and does disentangle the bewilderment and confusion, the fog we all walk through in the world we find ourselves in. It does encourage one to believe in themselves and be bold, which might be useful to the insecure. In the end it is an interesting meditation on psychotherapy and the guru relationship, even if it fizzles out, after it gains some momentum.