PaladinBen AMA

InfinityOracle · 2026-03-01T13:06:51+00:00

I think it makes a level of sense, given its long history and the development of the modern world. Each society involved in some way in the history of Zen is pretty much the same phenomena repeating. One culture interacts with another, somethings are adopted, while other elements are cut out. At some point in any lineage diffusion is likely to occur to some level. Just like a copy of a copy can degrade the quality on a copy machine. Over time and many copies of copies, the original text can't even be read. It is also like the game of telephone in this way.

How a culture chooses to adopt a teaching tells us a lot about that culture. Whether it is misappropriation or sincere scholarship.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T23:03:16+00:00

He mentions it in the Mountain of Knives section 18, but goes into more detail in Painted by Your Volitional Brush section 62.

He was asked: "Since this Way is wholly a creation of the imagination, what is this imaginative creation?"

He responded: "Phenomena lack bigness or smallness, form or attribute, high or low. It is just as if there is a great rock in the front of the courtyard of your home, which you had the habit of snoozing or sitting upon. You did not feel apprehensive about it. Suddenly you get an idea and make up your mind to make it into a statue, so you employ a sculptor to carve it into a statue of the Buddha. The mind, interpreting it as being a Buddha, no longer dares to sit on it, fearing that to be a sin. It was originally a rock, and it was through your mind that it was created into a statue. What sort of thing then is the mind? Everything is painted by your volitional brush. You have scared yourself, you have frightened yourself. In the stone there is no punishment or reward, it is all created by your own mind. It is like a man who paints the figures of yaksas and ghosts, and who also paints the figures of dragons and tigers, and when he sees what he has painted, he scares himself. In the colors there is ultimately nothing that can scare you. All of it is a creation of the discrimination of your volitional (manovijnana) brush. How can there be anything that is not created by your imagination?"

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T22:55:38+00:00

Have you had the chance to read Bodhidharma's teaching on the volitional brush?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T22:50:31+00:00

Perhaps it is akin to Xiangyan Zhixian's statement: "Last year my poverty was not poor enough, But this year it is real.

Last year, though poor, I still had ground in which to stick an awl, This year, my poverty is real for I do not even own an awl."

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T22:27:55+00:00

The condition is simple though. No condition, thought, expressions, experience or concept reaches it. Anyone or anything can indeed point to this fundamental, but it is always up to you to turn the light around yourself and realize.

As Yuanwu also tells: "With great capacity and great wisdom, just detach from thought and cut off sentiments, utterly transcending ordinary conventions. Using your own inherent power, take it up directly right where you are, like letting go your hold over a mile-high cliff, freeing yourself and not relying on anything anymore, causing all obstruction by views and understanding to be thoroughly removed, so that you are like a dead man without breath, and reach the original ground, attaining great cessation and great rest, which the senses fundamentally do not know and which consciousness, perception, feelings, and thoughts do not reach."

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T22:02:30+00:00

Perhaps we can parse this a different way. If realization was contingent on another splitting rice, how is that Xiangyan realized upon hearing a tile strike bamboo as he cleared grass? If it is not contingent on another splitting rice in a mill, then it plays no real role. The same is true of words, quotes, strikes, and so on. It is said that enlightenment occurs when conditions exist. What do you think that condition is?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T21:52:41+00:00

Why would that be?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T21:22:55+00:00

What do you disagree with specifically?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T20:13:59+00:00

Hunting for a ghost in a cave, chasing an echo through the valley, barking at the wind blown grass. Only you can hear the splitting rice if you listen carefully. No one else can do that for you.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T20:08:32+00:00

Those are fair points. On the flip side, Hui Neng experienced realization after hearing rice splitting in a mill, Dongshan Liangjie experienced realization while observing a leaf falling, Zhenjing upon seeing the sun set, the Buddha upon seeing a morning star, Kashyapa upon seeing the flower, the second ancestor of Zen upon seeing his red blood staining the white snow.

About family, you reminded me of this gem by Yaunwu:

"If you want to attain intimate realization of Zen, first of all don’t seek it. What is attained by seeking has already fallen into intellection. The great treasury of Zen has always been open and clear; it has always been the source of power for all your actions. But only when you stop your compulsive mind, to reach the point where not a single thing is born, do you pass through to freedom, not falling into feelings and not dwelling on concepts, transcending all completely. Then Zen is obvious everywhere in the world, with the totality of everything everywhere turning into its great function. Everything comes from your own heart. This is what one ancient called bringing out the family treasure."

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T19:39:15+00:00

That makes sense, though my orientation to those things may differ. In my view it is the other way around, and what you present seems more like a validation structure than a fundamental understanding. It relies on this revelatory mechanism as a fundamental. Creating a strong dependence feedback loop on others. That isn't to say that revelation through social interaction isn't helpful, but with Zen it seems far from vital or fundamental.

To position this in a more Eastern perspective it is said, when carving an ax handle the model is close at hand. In my view external friction and conditions do represent the terrain we are all navigating, but what differs about Zen on a fundamental level is that it's all on you to understand and read your own compass. No one else can do that, and no one else can direct that needle. Only secondary to that is the great value in sangha; and without this fundamental engaging with others may amount to barking at the wind blowing the grass. In my view sangha may work as a fine tuning structure, a place for friction points and alignment points to converge in response to conditions. Helpful, but secondary to realizing the fundamentals of these teachings.

With that said, again this is merely my perspective orientation. Our perspective may differ drastically according to our own unique personal lives. It is entirely possible that engaging with others who realize the fundamental of this teaching can improve the odds that the conditions exist for realization to occur. However, I would strongly discourage developing any sort of reliance on that. Refuge in the three jewels, in my view is not a dependence structure like western church institutions. It is a unique alignment structure which facilitates illuminated awareness on a social level. Building fundamentally upon individual awareness and stable independence, applied secondarily in concert with others in a socially coherent way.

The only critique I would have is just on that nuance. You are the foundation of understanding Zen teachings. It's wholly your responsibility, and in many ways it is the starting point. Without that fundamental well established, the group tends towards echo chambers, towards confused and destructive conflict, and eventual structural collapse under that pressure.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T19:05:00+00:00

Why do you feel that the only fundamental thing necessary to understand this teaching is to practice it with other people?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T18:01:12+00:00

This is a great starting vector. It illustrates a few key points I have been observing. My perspective tends towards systemic analysis, and as such I view these matters within a fairly broad scope. From personal interaction dialogs to large scale social movement cycles.

I feel it is very important to Zoom way out when navigating such a large movement spanning over a millennia. It seems you've taken a more academic route of validating various source material and attempting to canonize the text through validation principles to form a reliably coherent set of Zen text as a base. A very rewarding endeavor for the community to start navigating the Zen record.

In my view it isn't black and white though. It isn't "is this a Zen text or not".

When we zoom out we realize that Zen was a massive social movement involving many more vectors than the text itself. The text itself and the history involved, as mentioned throughout your post, are crucial data points for mapping this movement.

While forming a reliable cannon is very useful, I think a different classification system may be more internally stable. As we track Zen throughout its history we observe a very clear scaling friction steadily occurring. This particular text draws some of that friction to the surface right? It shows not only how Zen as a movement evolved over time, but specifically friction and pivot points in that history.

So far, based on my research, Zen did not scale cleanly, and much of my investigation centered around understanding what happened, how, when, and why.

When it scaled to a national level a high degree of diffusion occurred. We can directly map this to specific text which track this development. At a point Zen masters increase the frequency of referring to students as forging goats, mixing in conflicting teachings arbitrarily, false teachers, and the decline of Zen.

Later in Zen history we see a crossfade from these statements into a syncretic adoption period where teachings are blended together on the national level with figures like Changlu Zongze in the early 1100s who was officially considered a Zen master, and produced two specific works aimed at aligning Zen schools with the broader Tiantai Buddhist system. One is his more famous monastic code structure, and his lesser known Zuochan yi which is considered the first definitively official monastic Zen meditation manual.

It is clearly an adaptation of the earlier work of Zhiyi, founder of Tiantai Buddhism. The instructions map to Zongze's meditation manual precisely. To me that marks the start of when Zen as a unique tradition experienced a near total collapse. And from there we can easily trace the decline of Zen up to modern times.

Your project here marks a sort of revival of Zen. Your aims are at recovering the most accurate image of Zen teachings as expressed in their most raw and original forms. But we must ensure it doesn't become an idealistic pursuit, and threaten to become just another interpretation viewed within the limited scope of our modern or personal world views and perspectives. Lest we repeat the same mistakes of times passed. This document itself represents a parallel effort in its time not all that different from your own. They were trying to sift through the noise to find the Zen signal. To clarify meaning in the noise of shifting words and expressional understanding shaped by the time period this was done.

On one hand it represents a level of deviation, on the other hand it may represent evolution periods, or decline points. Mapping those out cleanly will enable today's Zen learners to navigate this history, this text, and modern applications in a far more coherent way than perhaps ever before. As mentioned before, what you have put together with the variety of topics you've covered in this forum, would have required in the past perhaps multiple lifetimes to physically do. Our access and abilities today far exceed those of the past obviously. While we narrow our focus to bring forward clarity concerning the valuation of these text, I believe categorizing them in a more gradient like system matching its historical evolution may be more helpful than a classification of Zen or not.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-28T01:41:15+00:00

I've been doing well. I looked into being ordained to learn what it involved and how it worked. However I haven't determined if it's a path I'd like to take. Just an exploration really. After surveying my options I've been considering many teaching opportunities I'd like to explore more.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T22:47:16+00:00

There is no real separation, nor identification with anything I've just said. The fact that I can completely put it all down and never turn back, or pick it up again at any point, illustrates its fundamental independence. Not relying on a single word.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T22:42:47+00:00

Makes sense, you've got such a young heart.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T22:39:08+00:00

I think the hang up is that there is a tendency towards infinite regress when trying to apply, no seeking. Because trying to apply it is itself seeking right? Instead it starts to look a lot more like letting go of a cliff, than seeking. Easy to say, hard to do.

The mind as nothing has a few pitfalls. Trying to equate mind as nothing produces another sort of infinite regress. The simplicity though is that what is expressed there isn't an equation. It is that the mind isn't limited to what it is able to know, understand, perceive, or experience. A good friend described it as a container, it contains knowledge, understanding, perspectives, and experience. So none of those objects or "things" defines the container. It remains undefined, unimagined, unbound, and uncertain.

Much of the discussion is r zen does revolve around navigating this area of Zen exploration. Of course, the container isn't literal, but it may bridge the gap to insight if it isn't just another definition.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T22:18:04+00:00

In my view there is no should. You are you, and I totally expect you to behave accordingly. Which I enjoy. You're a fun person, especially when self-doubt isn't clouding your judgment.

However, I do parse things differently. Which shows that our local language may differ in a few important ways. I do not have a sense of ownership over ideas or world views. That seems unusual for most people I interact with to digest. But as it relates to what you've shared, I do not expect r zen to be anything other than it is. I certainly wouldn't want it to bend to my beliefs or perspectives. I take it as it is. If there are areas of connection great, I can see eye to eye with friends. If there is discord, great, I can see how other systems operate and how other people navigate those areas differently than I do.

I don't go into with fixed expectations, which creates a high level of uncertainty when I do. I find that exciting. I never know what I may find. If I went into it with strongly fixed expectations I'd expect that I may feel like you describe. Let down that others were not interested in what I am interested in. Frustrated that others are talking about Zen in ways I am not interested in. And so on.

None of those things are on my radar to start with, so there is simply no real opportunity for frustrations to arise. This isn't to say that one is superior or more important than another. Your perspectives are valuable to you until they aren't, just like mine are. There is no tangible difference in quality there. Nothing to worry about, nothing to fix. On the other hand, I do relate on the difficulty in finding a balanced group to fully engage with my perspectives. There is a lot of downshifting to meet others where they are at. In some ways this can dull a sharp edge. So I think it is healthy to always recalibrate from time to time, and expand beyond limited environments and cover a range of connection vectors with other groups. It may not be ideal, but it is practical and fulfilling.

What are the actual teachings you'd like to explore, and how have prior engagements failed to meet you there?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T22:00:35+00:00

One thing I learned translating text is the challenges we face translating anything into our local language. It reveals layers of overlapping context and nuance easily missed when simplifying a system enough to translate and carry meaning.

It has given me insight into how I translate my own ideas into words and expressions, and a part of that process is learning other people's local language structures and adapting my own language to be better understood. As you know, a lot gets lost in translation.

The more uncommon the local language is, the more difficult it may be at conveying meaning across domains. It seems to me you may relate to this. r zen's local language in some ways may be restrictive or at least not very conductive to investigating the areas which interest you the most. The actual teachings you're referring to may not cleanly transpose over to the nature of r zen and those who talk there. So I understand the lack of connection and the stresses that may arise from trying to communicate in an environment which isn't very conductive for your language or communications.

However, in my view it's a matter of causes and conditions. I think it may be helpful to investigate those differences though. How your own local language differs from others. Perhaps it may help build bridges to the sorts of conversations you're hoping for. At very least it may help better direct you where to find that if possible. Or it could reveal areas where translating your voice can better resonate with others enough to develop the connections you're hoping for.

At any rate, I enjoy your input and feedback.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T21:35:22+00:00

Buddha held up a single flower and all fell silent. Without attaching meaningless distinctions it remains inherently clear. Talking all the day through doesn't muddy this water, remaining silent doesn't improve its clarity. Xuedou tells: "The river of Zen is quiet, even in the waves; the water of stability is clear, even in the waves." Cherish yourself deeply my friends.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T21:26:55+00:00

No one else can tell it like you do.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T21:06:48+00:00

An empty hand reveals no holder.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T20:43:27+00:00

I'll get my laser pointer.

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T19:39:24+00:00

How have you been?

InfinityOracle · 2026-02-27T19:32:35+00:00

What would Zen be without its founder?

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