Buddhist View of Attachment

Taking this phrase as my kung-an in the process of k'an hua meditation, I would begin with the doubt that I would be anything but lost without the Buddha as my guide. I would doubt that I should or could do something as violent as killing the Buddha, even if only in my mind, or in any sense of the term. Who am I to kill the Buddha? I am to revere the Buddha, so how can I kill him?

These doubts would lead me to the perception that as long as there is a division between my self and the Buddha, then there is a division between my self and enlightenment, for the Buddha is in my mind the epitome of enlightenment. As long as I see the Buddha as something separate from myself, as something above myself, I will never be enlightened, and therefore I will never be, truly be, at all. As long as I imagine that I need the Buddha to reach enlightenment, I will be deluded into believing that my enlightenment must come from without rather than from within. I will doubt that I can be e

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n be a gradual experience is to say that it is possible to have an electric shock take place only in one's hand or one's foot. When an electric shock enters the individual, it enters the individual's entire body and mind suddenly and thoroughly. The individual is electricity at that moment. Enlightenment unifies the individual as completely as a shock, erasing all distinctions: It is beyond all intermutabilities or polarities, such as host and guest, the noumenal and the phenomenal, silence and speech, the via positiva and the via negativa, action and nonaction, subitism and gradualism, motion and rest, the inner and the outer (Wu 141). 3. Mysticism in regard to meditation practice within the Zen tradition is inevitably formed by the conceptual, practical, discursive, and institutional contexts prevalent in the individual's life. In fact, the mystical experience which occurs in Zen meditation is the individual's life, is the individual. The koan in effective meditation becomes the meditator, or the meditator becomes the koan. The meditator's entire life is experienced in the intuitional or mystical experience which is generated by meditation on the koan. This includes those aspects of the individual's life which appear to eithe
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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