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Japan is not my favorite source for Zen. Dōgen is the only one of them I know for sure wasn't a faker, but I can tell you that whenever you have to pick between DT Suzuki and Shunryū Suzuki, go with DT. These two quotes are why. Thing is, I have no idea if he said them on his own account or just plucked them from his prodigious translating. I guess it doesn't really matter because, if it was him quoting ancients, he had the sense to pluck the good stuff out.
I tried to nail this down, again, this morning, and came away as frustrated as ever, wading through scholarship to see if something would leap out to indicate the true source, but became so aggravated by the total crap that passes for scholarship, again, that I slammed the browser windows shut, and came here to declare outright, it matters not if he was quoting someone who really knew, or pointing at his own enlightenment.
The only reason you need to know there were too many Suzukis is so you don't confuse these with utterances from old Beginner Brain Shunryū, whose contribution to American Zen was pure revenge on the gaijin.
There are three mystical schools I can say for sure are not, and never were, religion, no matter what skinbags have made of them. Zen, Sufism and Taoism. None are friendly to scholarship, because the only way scholarship could be more than insulting them is if only masters were allowed to produce it.
Of course, then it wouldn't look like scholarship, which would be upsetting to university drones, and even if they could be persuaded to be respectful enough to leave it intact, the professors would fuck it up for the kids anyway.
Zen is beyond recall, and your only hope is to find one of the vanishingly few who have the real thing and help turn it into its next incarnation before you're too dead to pull this off.
So many of the mystics or proponents of mysticism online are into Western Mysticism, which, while more easily translatable to the Western human, has had not just clueless schlubs adulterating it for centuries, but also hostile psychopaths purposely turning it into trash all that time. Still, I've spotted a few places where the original intent is not obliterated.
Big deal. The Zen stuff, the original stuff from the masters themselves, was left intact in enough places that it serves anyone, even gaijin, much better than Hermeticism. You read that word "Hermeticism" and your mind's eye conjures a Merlin type in a library slash laboratory and maybe amulets and pouches of arcane powders. What it is in reality is just the same thing said over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over... all of it amounting to Joseph's bit about the "topological metaphor".
He's got an Oxford doctorate in Patristics, so I'd hope to spit he'd know about this... but... honestly... nowadays and in almost always lesser places than Oxford... you don't stand a chance.
You. Do. Not. Stand. A. Chance.
So I'm thinking to myself I need to find a scholar who is not a prig and a Taoist and a Sufi who aren't into costumes... and John Trudell... and some people I haven't thought of yet... to lock away in a room with me somewhere so we can come up with a brand new mystical school. One that isn't full of lethal charlatans and centuries of obscuration, one that will not be a bunch of deluded fucks slapping together slogans to lure you into their deathless self-aggrandizement.
A type of globalization that disempowers psychopaths.
always and any time....
