Less than a week until my monk ordination. I'm almost done with my sewing.
@idlematts will you still be posting after ordination? How does that align with Right Speech?
@destroy Can I ask where you feel the discrepancy lies between right speech and posting?
Posting is usually very frivolous. Gossip and such. I know there’s Bhikkhu on social media but it seems very… regulated?
@destroy Hmm, if I had to explain it, I'd say that in Zen (or at least Soto Japanese Zen), we think of the eightfold path more as directions towards what works rather than as explicit commandments or even guidelines for life. We tend to be more concerned with our 16 precepts. And even then, we see them as goals than hard and fast demands of us. For example, "do not speak of others' errors and faults". We might strive to observe this precept but in reality, we're obviously going to slip sometimes.
There are also times where we need to violate precepts in order to uphold other precepts.
I guess you could say we're quite as strict as other sects of Buddhism.
Yeah coming from a Theravada experience, with the novice handbook having literally hundreds of rules, it’s definitely different.
@destroy
Wow! We really don't have many rules. We have a lot of traditions. But we have zen masters who smoke cigarettes, who drink, etc. The deepest part of zen is an understanding that we are human and we strive to be human, with all of the struggles, emotions, etc that come with it. Including anger.
Zen is a Mahayana sect that was deeply mixed with daoism when it developed in China so we tend to be pretty different even from other Mahayana sects.
@idlematts yeah that’s… very different from Theravada monastics. Even lay people who take the Five Precepts aren’t supposed to drink!
@destroy
Well, we have the precept "do not intoxicate the mind", which warns against it. But again, drinking doesn't disqualify you! Most seem to refrain from drinking in general, though.
My lineage is full of recovering alcoholics, too. The White Plum Asanga was started by Maezumi Roshi who was a recovering alcoholic. My teacher and his teacher are both recovering alcoholics and so am I. There was a teacher - Maezumi's brother - who would start every morning with a glass of beer. One time he got so drunk that he fell into a fire pit and burned his fingers off! But he was still considered to be extraordinarily wise and accomplished in the Buddha way.