Teachings of Zen Master Man Gong (Part 1)

Zen Practice: The Way to Find Your True Nature

1. In our world, there is no place to find your true self, nor a teacher to show you how. Only in a Zen Buddhist practice place can you find your true nature.

2. Zen practice means that everyone should clear their own mind. This is most urgent.

3. The study of worldly knowledge only serves this life and the delusions of the body. Zen practice leads to a wisdom which is beyond time and space, beyond our body, and even beyond this life.

4. The Zen hall is not the only Zen hall. For those who practice Zen, their own body is also a Zen hall. You can practice Zen nonstop when you are standing, walking, sitting or lying down – even when you are silent or speaking. This means that one can always stay in the Zen hall.

5. You can never practice Zen alone. You shouldn’t leave your teacher because only they can teach you, without hindrance, about life’s concerns.
 

Zen Practice: The Way to Find Your True Nature

6. If I shout someone’s name and they immediately answer, “Yes!” – that is true nature. True nature has no birth or death. It can’t catch fire, get wet, or be cut with a knife. It is completely free and without hindrance.

7. Just like the prisoner screaming as he is dragged, twisting behind a horse, the chains of karma drag us down the road of suffering. Repeatedly, we follow the cycles of life, sickness, old age and death. Only your wisdom sword can cut these chains.

8. No matter how well educated or respected you are, if you haven’t resolved the great question of life and death, you are like a person who has lost their mind.

9. When Sakyamuni Buddha was born, he pointed with one hand to the sky and the other to the ground and said, “Between the heavens above and the earth below, only ‘I’ am holy.” This ‘I’ means the true nature.

10. Everyone already has Buddha nature (true nature) but they cannot become Buddha because they do not understand themselves.


From the book, The Teachings of Zen Master Man Gong