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Gerlach is German and rhymes with bear-lock. I was born and raised in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco, moved to Berkeley for college and grad school, with an MA in History of Religion from the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley, and now teach Philosophy and the history of human thought at Berkeley City College. I have taught Intro Philosophy, Ethics, Logic, Asian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Modern European Philosophy and Social & Political Philosophy there for the past several years, and it has been a joy.
Thought Itself
May 14, 2021 at 5:57 am
Well, I have a lot of catching up to do.
Dogen gets a lot of hate from my peer group interested in Zen. I have read a book by him, and a few about him by Brad Warner. Occasionally there is some neat stuff in there, but when compared to the original Chan Patriarchs, for the most part, it’s uninteresting…
While Zazen may make me a buddha this inherently makes practice a necessity – even the defense of being (for lack of a better word) mindful during my everyday activity (which is ‘zazen off the cushion’) seems to miss the point by more than a hair’s breadth…. this comes from someone who does Zazen everyday too. I’m fine with meditation.
Anyway, you expressed similar, though milder, sentiments in this lecture. I will admit, part of me gets pretty upset at all the sitting stuff. As you noticed, Dogen works as a weird bottle neck for the history of Zen. Most don’t even know that Zen masters like Joshu existed, and even less are reading the Blue Cliff Record or the Gateless Gate… And if they do, most of the time they are reading Dogen’s or Sekida’s commentary instead of Yuan wu’s or Wumen’s… That’s.. uh.. too bad…
One of my peers remarked the problem of treating the Blue Cliff Record and such as koan collections, like Dahuis Shobogenzo. If it’s a collection of Koans you can freely comment on them as you like – but things like the Blue Cliff Record were organized by a Zen master, and then commentated by another Zen master. They are full on literary classics…. And random modern day ‘Zen’ Masters ignore all of this and do what they want with it… Yeah you can call that the Zen spirit but I haven’t been impressed by a lot of it. The best I’ve seen is by Blythe and his translation of the Mumonkan.
Phew, got that out. Anyway-Anyway, I’ll try to catch up as much as I can. School ended up being very intellectually draining (who knew!) so I lost the will!
I will probably pick and choose as I want, but I will be around.
Great lecture !
May 18, 2021 at 11:20 pm
Thanks for that, and following my talks! I think we should all share and discuss these masters as we wish, and I don’t see what harm comes of that. One of the things I do respectfully think is that studying all the texts as open-ended philosophy is much different from many practicing traditions, and I do my own work and hope it helps others. I also like the early texts and masters most, and wish that they seemed more widespread.