Meditation, 3

As I wrote yesterday's post, I remembered the story about Nanyue and Mazu (check it out, if you didn't read the post).

Put yourself on Mazu's cushion. You're alone in the meditation hall. You're really into it, deep in samadhi or whatever, everything quiet and calm. (And, of course, your peers aren't around. Ego satisfaction is sweet, isn't it?)

Then the Zen master walks in and says, "What the fuck are you doing in here on such a nice day?"* To make matters worse, he gets a clay tile and starts scraping it with a rock. Imagine the noise! Imagine your anger.

To complete your humiliation, the old fellow tells you that you're wasting your time. Unless you're a roof tile yourself, you're gonna get pissy.

Judy Roitman, a fine teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen, has been scraping this blog with a stone for the last couple of days (here and on Facebook), trying to get my attention.

Yesterday she wrote (for the second time), "I said it before and I'll say it again: The questions isn't why [or what], but for whom?"

I'm pretty confident that once his initial irritation passed, Mazu understood Nanyue's inner meaning. I'm grateful to Judy for her persistence but less confident that I really understand her meaning.

For whom do we practice?

Good question, eh?

*Nanyue was originally from Philadelphia.

Comments

[Joseph]

The little I've learned leaves me asking, what's the difference between this whom or that whom?

[Gabriel]

I have been directed to you by a man on yahoo answers. There I asked this question: In the vajradhatu mandala, the list of sixteen great bodhisattvas is not comprised of the astamahabodhisattvas?
Manjusri, Maitreya, Avalokiteshvara and so on are missing. The sixteen great bodhisattvas that are included all have their names begining with "vajra". Could it be that they are in fact the list of popular bodhisattvas but in vajra form? I am a soto zen practitioner from Romania and I relly am interested about this stuff.
I got a pretty good answer from somebody you know but he told me to come to you for an answer. Thank you.

[David Ashton]

For the one asking the question.