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Reading group: Jinul’s Secrets on Cultivating the Mind, on sudden awakening and gradual practice, in two sittings

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Mysticism & spiritualityBuddhistJapanese & KoreanChan & Zen#jinul#practice#seon-buddhism#sudden-awakening
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Its coordinates: 6.1.1 Religious Experience

This reading group turns to Korea, and to one of the most influential short texts of East Asian Buddhism: Secrets on Cultivating the Mind, by the Seon master Jinul (1158–1210).

Jinul's question is one that anyone who has practised anything will recognise. If the mind is already Buddha, as the Chan tradition says, why practise? And if practice is needed, was the awakening real? His answer is the formula sudden awakening, gradual cultivation: one sees one's own nature all at once, and then spends a lifetime letting habit catch up with what was seen. His best-known image is a frozen pond. You can know in an instant that the ice is water; it still takes the warmth of the sun to melt it.

Not everyone accepted this. In the twentieth century the Korean master Seongcheol argued that an awakening which still needs cultivating is not yet complete awakening at all.

Plan
– First sitting: the opening sections, up to Jinul's defence of putting awakening first.
– Second sitting: the remaining sections, on cultivating meditation and wisdom together.

To start us off: is "I understand it, but I can't yet live it" a coherent thing to say? Bring examples from music, sport, learning a language or giving up a habit.

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2 replies

  1. Moon Ha-eun

    Fellow

    I teach cello, and Jinul's pond is my students' whole life. A pupil hears a phrase played well once and suddenly knows how it should go. Then it takes six months for the hands to agree.

    But I would push a little on Seongcheol's side. Sometimes what the student "knew" turns out, after six months, to have been wrong. The work doesn't only melt the ice; it also corrects the seeing. If that happens with awakening too, then the first insight was not complete, and Seongcheol has a point.

  2. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    The Theravāda path has a structure close to Jinul's, though nobody there would call it sudden. At stream-entry the practitioner sees the Dhamma directly and three fetters are cut for good, doubt among them. Yet sensual desire and ill will are only weakened at the next stage, and removed only at the one after.

    So the tradition I practise in already says that seeing and being transformed come apart. The difference is that we count several seeings, not one. I would like to know whether Jinul allows more than one awakening, or whether the first is the whole of it.