Make no mistake about it, Chan Dharma transmitted for the last one thousand four hundred years is tainted and stained by mind folly. The problem is that the stains are difficult to see, for they are covered by a curtain of pretty words and phrases generated by a host of teachers who do not know true emptiness from the hole in a donut (or that of their foolish backside). We could say the same for all almost all present-day Dharma teachings that flood the Dharma marketplace and the New Age minds.
If you suspect this, or can actually see this, then the important question is, "what are the possible antidotes?"
The answer is quite simple. Encounter the true union with the Life Force that Nature provides.
How many Dharma followers really understand that within Nature, apart from the virus generated by the human creature, there is Dharma Perfection? The base of all Chan is to return to that root, called the Uncarved Wood.
Now I have to make clear that sitting outside on a clear night in natural surroundings and viewing the splendour of the moon is not what I am talking about. Nor is watching a fox racing through the brush or a brood of wild pigs racing after their mother. That is all mind.
Also of little value (although it is better than all modern associations with nature) is the clear comprehension that man is destroying nature and that something must be done. That too is nothing more than mind.
Only when you can embrace a tree and feel its Life Force, its growth and its survival spirit, are you touching nature. Only when you experience "tree" do you begin to understand.
When you admire that moon, that is all ego unless you are fully integrated into "moon." If that does not occur you are clinging to the moon. You are declaring, "look how wonderful that I am seeing the moon."
That is all egoistic manure.
So you have a great deal to do within the Dharma to engender a different vision of nature as an antidote to that poisoning mind.
However here, for the moment, we can look at what our folly is doing to this planet. If your mind can see this then that at least is something, but if with every glance you experience a violation within yourself then you are beginning to touch the Life Force of all living things.
THE CHAN FOREST DEFENSE OF NATURE
噍类净土