If you actually practiced meditation as taught in Ch'an and Zen for over a thousand years, you'd be aware it has nothing to do with attainment or chasing states.
Chan
Austin Turner
Nolan Davis
>meditating to become enlightened
>not chasing a state
Michael Thompson
so how do you reach enlightenment op?
Eli James
Bodhidharma has one spoken record, the bloodstream sermon. It's very brief and the content is known to pretty much every Ch'an and Zen practicioner I've met.
Linji's teaching is esoteric in that he's exhorting students who are engaged in rigorous meditation practice to let go of preconcieved notions regarding meditation and enlightenment. It's true that ch'an discipline involved more monestary work than sitting meditation at the time, but they still did the latter to a great degree. He's not telling the average layperson to forget about spiritual practice and do whatever they want. That interpretation arose with Alan Watts in the mid-1900's, but it's not the doctrines of Ch'an and Zen lineages past and present.
Matthew Myers
In Ch'an and Zen meditation is not practiced in order to reach a goal such as enlightenment. Meditation is itself the expression of enlightenment. Very important distinction.
Jaxon Bailey
What does it mean to be a Ch'an master?
Sebastian Harris
>what Ch'an was in the beginning
A system that rebelled against the established MUH TEXTS and I WILL "OBTAIN" ENLIGHTENMENT AND "GO" TO THE "PLACE" WITHOUT SUFFERING views of the era and employed b8 tactics to shock people back into the middle way
>what Ch'an is today
DUDE JUST CHOP WOOD LMAO NOTHING IS REAL EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED :^)
Evan Murphy
>DUDE JUST CHOP WOOD LMAO NOTHING IS REAL EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED :^)
Modern Chinese "Buddhism" is CCP-controlled propaganda-action designed to glorify manual labor.
Jason Fisher
Judging from the OP it means you read a bunch of stuff on Wikipedia, watched some Alan Watts videos, then declared yourself to be one on Veeky Forums.
Connor Reed
No, not really. It's more complicated than that.
Also this attitude is more prevalent outside China than inside, AFAIK. It's largely due to "modernized" and butchered Japanese Zen further butchered by certain ebin Japanese and Westerners.