- He is an Israeli Teacher. Not a Buddhist teacher or a “Zen” teacher. - Though clearly an enlightened one. If you doubt the fact this whole post might generally lose its meaning. - Though again, - I do not intend to argue for it, nor do I much know how to had I wanted to.
He is said to have seen the light in December of ’69. - I could just mention that I have never heard anyone doubting him. (though if you do say he is not enlightened this would clearly mean he’s just a fraud)
He’s translated several texts, mainly through the ’70s. - One of which is a collection of 128 “Zen”-talks (as he calls them) entitled “‘Zen’ and ‘Zen’-Sages”. (- Among other thing he’s translated the Patanjali [Yoga] Sutra, the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, Shankara’s Viveka-Chudamani, - and more recently the Gospel of Thomas. - All to Hebrew, - of course; - and most-at-least not from the original language.)
- “The truth, eventually, is none but one for ever and each who dwells in it knows it. The words only – which are ever incapable of describing this truth – are the source of the distortions and the deformations. Indeed, the measure of distortion is minimal as the speech serves great teachers. On the other hand, the measure of distortion related anyway to all use of words, might arrive at enormous and hindering measures none the like. And what these things are about are those men [and women] who innocently occupy themselves with ‘Zen’, analyzing and interpreting its ways and purpose and sometimes – but translate a ‘Zen’ story from one language to another – without having attained (- lit. ‘received’, - or - more literally, - ‘won’, - as the expression in Hebrew is) Enlightenment. These men are like pseudo bakers unable to tell flour from waste and in spite of that – they dare and knead a bread of gravel and serve it to the hungry audience. The result – severe damage to the servers and the recipients as one.”.
I will just leave these words as they are. I don’t wish to interpret and it doesn’t seem necessary.
- Though here is the text as it appears in the original book:
There is a quote from Master Dogen I might want to relate to in another post. - Though it won’t be that soon. - It will be at least a few posts before that. - A quote which might be related to the above matter. - I intend to call that post “The Master’s Intention”, but time will tell.
Either way, - so far that’s it for this time.
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I wrote this some time ago. - I didn't link it anywhere else on the blog.
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