Publish Date:2024-08-22
(42) Shaolin Buddhist Monastery is the place of origination of the Buddhist Chan Order. In a rocky cave in a crag at a short distance away from the rear of Shaolin Monastery, Bodhidharma stayed for nine long years, doing sitting meditation in front of and facing the steep side of a boulder for thinking out the scheme for creating the Chan Order. According to the Chan tenets, one of the inceptive measures to take to facilitate the initiation of a practitioner into the basics of the Chan doctrine is doing seated meditation. What the Chan tenets emphasize is the existence of Buddha-nature in the psyche of every human being. Buddha-nature is a source of wisdom. Possession of wisdom means attainment of enlightenment. Therefore to seek enlightenment is to reclaim one’s obscured wisdom which is hidden by various delusions and attachments. One needs to purge one’s mind of delusions and attachments to reclaim the Buddha-nature which is inherent in him. Gautama Buddha teaches that Buddhism consists of the three branches of learning: <1> sila and vinaya, <2> Samadhi achieved through meditation, and <3> prajna. By fully mastering the knowledge of how to become loyal to sila and vinaya, a practitioner can be led to secure Samadhi for himself. Once he has Samadhi at his disposal, prajna will spontaneously arise in him. This is the road map of Chan self-cultivation. It is evident that sila and vinaya is the foundation of Chan self-cultivation. Without sila, the Buddhist Chan Order is to disband soon, and without vinaya the Chan Order would become a strange religious anomaly. So without both, Buddhism in China would be not only crippled but ridiculously deformed. Therefore all the Shaolin monastic population and all the Chan followers across China have been setting great store by sila and vinaya and are excellent in observing them.(From My Heart My Buddha)
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