Quest of Zen: Awakening the Wisdom Heart

By Sam Nak P.J. Concepcion

Religion/Psychology/Philosophy/New Age

Quest of Zen
Awakening the Wisdom Heart


Quest of Zen calls us to the fearless heros journey that will set the mind free from the dark clouds of delusion.

Quest of Zen presents a glimpse of the Zen training for monks and lay persons as well as offers practical guidelines on mind cultivation. The book introduces the Buddhist worldview and retells also the Buddhas and the Zen masterss awakening accounts that provide a sense of direction to the fearless hero in realizing the bliss of the enlightenment and rousing the wisdom heart.

All rejoice! The fearless hero reveals the bliss of the enlightenment - - the ultimate emptiness. He conveys the perfect wisdom heart that unveils its sublime excellence. Like the waters of the Ganges that flow constantly toward the ocean, the perfect wisdom heart enters quietly into the meandering stream of the one suchness of all living beings. Through self giving, the perfect wisdom heart spurs them into a rebirth and a newness of life within the mystical sanctuary of the Buddhas. The perfect wisdom heart flows on with unlimited loving kindness, unlimited compassion, unlimited joy and unlimited peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453563694

Sam Nak P.J. Concepcion

Sam Nak P.J. Concepcion serves as a teacher at the Buddhist Way Place of Hope in Toronto, Ontario.

Book preview

Copyright © 2004, 2010 by Sam Nak P.J. Concepcion.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010912530

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-6368-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-6367-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4535-6369-4

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Contents

Preface

Part One

Reflection

The Vital Truth

Meaning

Great Awakening

The Buddha

The Teaching

Buddha Mind Transmission

Beyond Words

Part Two

Introduction

Taming the Bull

Zen Master

For Monks and Nuns

Summary

Postscript

Part Three

Selected Mahayana Scriptures

Glossary

Bibliography

Endnotes

Illustrations

The Taming the Bull pictures are on pages 43, 54, 59, 83, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, and 98. On page 46, the drawing represents the levels of consciousness. On page 52, the laws of karma within a circle show their relationship. The basic sitting positions are found on page 61 and 62.

Preface

Quest of Zen asks the meaning of life and death and shows the Buddha’s Way for an answer.

The Buddha’s Way stands as one of mankind’s great and universal wisdom traditions because the Buddha’s Way—the truth of the enlightenment—sustains and upholds all life in the universe. Self giving reveals the truth of the enlightenment. The self-giving wisdom heart proclaims the glory of the enlightenment by conveying loving kindness and compassion to all living beings for them to flourish with happiness, peace, and joy.

Quest of Zen introduces the Mahayana Buddhist outlook and explains simply the Zen practices that lead into the insight of the mind’s innate enlightenment. The Zen practices include the method of questioning that involves a quest. Questioning concedes ignorance of an unknown something as well as yearns to face it and to figure it out. Questioning creates an opening through which the wisdom light can penetrate and can shine for the practitioner that seeks freedom from the darkness of ignorance. Continuing with the Zen practices turns his penetrating vision of the enlightenment into action. He awakens the wisdom heart that will make him the fearless hero who wills to uplift universal life.

The book redefines samadhi and dhyana, which are non-volitional acts and the penetrative awakening stages in the Zen training, at the time the scholarship on Buddhism has entered the corrective phase in the West. Moreover, the book mentions the Zen practices that have combined the five Asian civilizations’s rich legacy of spiritual insights. Over the past twenty-five centuries, Zen has spread to China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam from India. The western Zen followers can learn much from those nations’s Zen practices, their spiritual experiences and their traditional values. While the western Zen practitioners filter the essential teaching from them, they can develop the teaching’s new forms that will respond to their needs and their cultural milieu.

The book does not claim originality because it can only restate the mystical teaching of both Buddhas and great Zen masters. I am the only person to blame for all the errors of interpretation. I have retained the old masters’s Chinese names that are transcribed in the Wade-Giles system. I can not avoid the use of some foreign terms, which stick out like intruding elements in the book, because there are no exact and no identical words for them in English. The terms are translated into English and they are italicized where they appear for the first time in each part of the book. I have included a list of scriptures and a glossary that will explain the Buddhist worldview to the practitioners and the readers.

I am much indebted to Venerable Sunim Hwasun Yangil, the Zen master of the Korean Chogye Order’s Nine Mountains Zen Centre in Toronto, Ontario, and Venerable Sunim Samu, my first master and the founder of the Buddhist Society of Compassionate Wisdom in North America, for showing me it. I am grateful to them and my parents also for their benevolence that has made me able to seek the Buddha’s Way and to write this book. "My thoughts return to them when I behold the sacred grass, liao wo. I would repay the bounty they have given me, but it is as the sky that can never be approached."

I convey special thanks to Venerable Sunim Eesam and the Bong Eun Sa Temple in Seoul, both Nine Mountains Zen Centre and Dae Kak Sa Temple in Toronto, Purie R. Jesuitas, and Efigenia J. Concepcion for all their help in the book’s production as well as Brian Garcia for rendering the drawings with local colour. And I thank Venerable Sunim Bup Kwan and the Bul Kuk Sa Philippines Branch Temple also for their unfailing moral support for my Dharma work.

Thinking the book has come through whenever little Shanine has cuddled up for a nap on my chest. Over the next three years, her hugs and her kisses have made me work at a snail’s pace. I will not have the chances, however, of pausing from work and of resuming it with fresh eyes that have noticed the errors of the drafts without her interruptions. I dedicate this book to Shanine and the other children like her everywhere. May the Buddhas fill their hearts with love and joy.

Sam Nak P.J. Concepcion

Laguna, Philippines

March 2010

Part One

THE ZEN WAY

Reflection

Nature displays an awesome view of the maple leaves that have turned into varied colours of yellow, red and brown in Seaton Park when the student has felt the numbness in his body. As he seeks to find the cause of the unusual sensation out, the thoughts of all conditioned things’s impermanent nature and of their inevitable dissolution dawn in his mind. He can not evade now the question, What does life mean? and gropes for an answer.

Meanwhile, he seems to head toward a serious illness because he fails in achieving his goals and overloads his mind continuously with knowledge within a short period of time. He chomps through the books in the library to search for ideas for an original theory of revolution that reflects the pronouncement, from each according to ability, to each according to need, in an envisioned utopian society. The research outcome will form his purpose for living and will fill the need for it in. When the summer session has come close to its end at York University, a professor raps his knuckles for his research paper that calls for radical means for attaining change in society. Another professor opens his eyes, however, to alternative means, such as the hegemonic struggle that does not result in the loss of human lives and which can create a just and egalitarian society by transforming human consciousness.

The nervous wreck shows up one autumn morning in the Zen Buddhist Temple where its kindly master conveys compassion to him. The Zen master shows him how to sit quietly in the meditation hall and he tells him, Let go of anger. Offer yourself to the Buddha. Either psychotherapy or the Buddhist practice of keeping a steady and calm mind can help him out of his predicament. He quits university studies and anticipating the onset of the workers’s revolution in the world. He visits often the temple and offers to wash its floors as a way of soothing the gloomy emptiness of despair and releasing the excess load in his mind. He begins unknowingly the lay person’s Zen training that transforms the consciousness and which launches the odyssey of discovering both meaning and joy of life.

The student’s affinity with Buddhism goes back to childhood, although his family cherishes the Christian values. As a child, he wonders at a weekly magazine’s features on Buddhism with the pictures of the boy monks that show calm and innocent miens and of the unusual art and architecture in the Angkor Wat and in East Asia. The small boy plays while he tickles the smiling Buddha statue, which has a fixed setting in the centre of his family’s home. And he discovers Fu Ta Shih as he leafs through the books in the study. The child imitates the ancient enlightenment master’s pose of holding a stick in one hand and in asking, Do you understand the truth?

The question echoes in the student’s mind during his visits to the temple. Over the next five years, it has provided him a peaceful and quiet atmosphere that fosters a calm mind. He joins the temple’s program that involves happily living every moment through mindfulness, precepts practice and manual work. He has been lucky to hear the Buddhist world’s great masters when they have come to teach the temple’s members and to encourage them also in their practices.

The Zen Buddhist Temple’s master has decided to spread the Buddha’s teaching further by moving to Chicago where he will start another temple in 1991. The student remains grateful for having attained the happiness of a steady and calm mind and having felt the intimations of the clear light through the master’s directions, but he decides on knocking at the door of another Zen master in Toronto. The student has been in a hurry to attain the sudden and direct insight into the truth of being.

The Nine Mountains Zen Centre’s master offers tea and he explains the Zen practices’s ultimate goal of awakening the wisdom heart to the student in their first meeting. The master teaches the Ganhwa Zen method of repeatedly asking What is it? or What’s this? to a few students in a relaxed manner.

Once, the maverick Zen master cancels the students’ sitting practice and he takes them to a cultural show. They ask, What kind of Zen is this? throughout the show. In another practice session, the master hums a tune while he prunes the long and thick ferns that spruce the hall up, while the students sit and try to concentrate on their questioning practice. No one can focus on the great problem of life and death because of the noise, although the master expects everyone to carry the questioning on despite all obstacles.

The mental images of the York U professor and of Fu Ta Shih with a stick reappear when the Nine Mountains Zen master probes the student’s mind. What does Zen mean? Do you understand the truth? The master shakes his head at the student’s book knowledge of the transcendental truth. But the master leaves no stone unturned, and he extends always a helping hand to anyone in awakening the wisdom heart.

The Vital Truth

The compassionate Zen master speaks accordingly the living truth, It calls for anyone to speak it, but it lacks a name. ‘What is it?’ Saying it looks like something misses the point. Words fail. They stick in the throat and stay glued at the tip of the tongue.

They say that a thousand holy men have become silent upon reaching it. Only silence can describe it . . . like the deep and golden silence of the mystic that sees the whole universe and which enjoys now everything in it more fully than before and of an artist that becomes enthralled with great beauty.

The Zen master continues, However inadequate the human language works in describing it, words can give some hints about it. They serve as a skillful means for the common people for them to see and to understand it.

Meaning

What does Zen mean? The sage Bodhidharma says, Not even the wise persons can understand it. Zen means that a person must behold the mind’s nature.[1] Put another way, Zen means awakening the mind’s innate enlightenment[2] and the enlightenment itself. Therefore, Zen refers to an action that shows the mind’s absolute nature.

Great Awakening

The Splendour of Asia’s great awakening and his teaching ministry shed clear light on the sage’s depiction of Zen. They stand as epoch-making events in mankind’s spiritual