Dharma Combat

mickmacdublin

Inspired by the Hacker koans thread I'd like to recount a story (probably apochryphal) about a Dharma combat between the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn Roshi and the revered Tibetan Lama the late Kalu Rinpoche.

Dharma combat is, as you may know, a term sometimes used in Zen to describe a type of debate in which Zen masters will test one another's realisation.

Apparently once on a visit to a Korean Zen center by Kalu Rinpoche the resident teacher Seung Sahn decided to test the realisation of his guest by holding up an orange and asking "What is this?"

Kalu Rinpoche - completely ignorant of the Zen tradition - stared blankly.

Seung Sahn asked again loudly "What is this?!"

At this point the story relates the Lama Kalu bent over to his interpreter and asked "Don't they have oranges in Korea?"

It's almost a little koan in itself.

Mick

Yoda

Sums up my feelings for zen well enough. I've never understood it.

Yeah, there's probably a point there....

SkepticOne

A bit rude, putting the Tibetan fella on the spot like that.

If you ask me.

ColinM

That's great! I love metaphysical humour.

mickmacdublin

I don't think the Zen master was being intentionally rude - the tradition of debate exists in Tibetan Buddhist also but the format is a bit different.

I don't know if this story even has a meaning but if it does it shows how, despite having no knowledge of Zen tradition the Tibetan lama is able to cut through the traditional forms and answer the koan - whether he know it was a koan or not.

Unforntunately the story does not record the Seung Sahn's reation but I think he would have been satisfied.

Mick

albertw

So what do you learn from the orange story?...

There is an unusual source for similar stories that my late Father used to read. Strangely enough they are in books by a Jesuit priest, the late Anthony de Mello SJ. Thay are not specifically boddhist (nor taoist, nor christian nor anything else for that matter!) so apologies if this is off topic.

Cheers,
|Al

ColinM

Originally posted by albertw
There is an unusual source for similar stories

Such as?
Linky-poohs please?

albertw

Originally posted by ColinM
Such as?
Linky-poohs please?

I thought "they are in books by ... Anthony de Mello SJ" was reference enough.
eg: The Song of the Bird, ISBN 0385196156

Cheers,
~Al

ColinM

Well you thought wrong, there Al!
You mentioned stories, you should have provided a link to the ones you were referring to. Don't quote me ISB numbers when I'm on the inner-net! Did you actually think someone like me would get off my fat ass and pop down to Easons with that number scribbled on a piece of paper?
Googling for Anthony de Mello SJ was even far too much work for me, especially considering that the first result generated did not lead to any stories. Now I am tired and cranky after having had to do some work that I didn't have to do, and I still can't be certain that the exact stories to which you were referring are to be found here: http://x.opf.slu.cz/~radek/demello/
Tsk.

Trojan

W[hat] are you complaining about? tut tut...

Seems people want everything on a plate these days.

http://www.google.com/search?q=0385196156&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

It's Buddhism, not rocket science...

ColinM

Originally posted by Trojan
It's Buddhism, not rocket science...

A friend of mine is an astro-physicist, and naturally alot of what he does is rocket science. When he's having a bad cranium-day he often consoles himself by saying that at least it isn't meta-physics.

Trojan

Well, I guess it's not using an assembler level debugger on your C cos there's no source level available on that platform...

Doesn't really roll off the tongue though...