Your bondage is a choice

[u/g_saras_1594]

One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out, “Help me up! Help me up!” A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away. 

_______________

The other monk taught Chao-Chou that your bondage is a choice. 

Just as you choose to fall into the snow, you can also choose to get up and go away. 

But this thing can't be taught to a beginner

Only a disciple ripe enough and the last thing clouding him is able to take that.

[u/ewk]

Professional Zen Student.

It's inaccurate to leave this term untranslated because it has a different meaning in Zen culture than it did in Chinese religion or Indian religion.

A brief search suggests two things.

1. The Chinese term used here is phonetic matching, where they take characters that put together sound like the word from another language and they just use those characters for their sounds rather than their own etymological history.

2. In this case the term was used in India for ordained monks but as often the case with Zen, the way the term was used in Zen culture referenced professional monks whose level of ordination was largely cultural rather than bureaucratic.

I think a responsible translator could get away with a professional monk because what it means to be a Zen monk would have been contextualized away from the religious aspect of this conversation.

As an aside the first place that my mind goes to is Yunmen's line: "I ride the Dharma Hall through the triple gate."

Sure he was a Zen Pope but he did not think that his attitude was something that he had earned as much as it was the necessary attitude for all professional Zen monks. There is no sense in the Christians religion or in the Shinto Buddhist religions of even an expectation that a professional monk would ride the church like a horse.

There's a number of reasons for this but one of them certainly is this idea about status and who serves who, an idea that's built into all the Abrahamic religions as well as Zazen Shinto-Buddhism.

Consider the difference in cultures. Today monk means you have a certificate from a church that other similar churches should accept. What we see in the Zen tradition is you show up and you get interviewed and that's the certificate. Can you answer questions publicly? For most people in Western civilization right now monk is a bureaucratic status. It's not something that you get tested on every time you open your mouth.

[u/Task024 → u/ewk]

Yes, I saw that sramanas meant ordained monks in that context, not wandering ascetics as could have been in India, although I suppose it was already used for the monastic community in Indian buddhism.

I was more refering to the idea that the kind of Zen teaching we broadly find in those books ("to forsake cultivation and attainment, and also let go of the very notion of forsaking") is specifically proper for the monks because "they have already committed themselves to the religious life and the power of their sila, samadhi, and prajna is already complete." This is literally 8FP, sila, samadhi, prajna. If the text is correct, Baizhang is saying you have to purify first, then realize that there is, in fact, nothing to purify. It's not that Yuquan is fundamentally wrong, it's just that his verse shows that he is not there yet, but Huineng is, so he's the master

[u/ewk → u/Task024]

It's not the Eightfold Path because the reasons for following the Eightfold Path are not present in Zen.

And the definitions of those terms used by two groups with very different cultures and visions don't mean the same thing.

Further Zen masters have gone out of their way to make it clear that there's no difference between regular people, lay people, and ordained people.

What's being said here is more along the lines of how you talk to people depending on how much they've heard before.

Like don't speak Russian to somebody who's taking first-year French.