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That Is Not Your Mind!: Zen Reflections on the Surangama Sutra - Paperback | Diverse Reads

That Is Not Your Mind!: Zen Reflections on the Surangama Sutra

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Viewed through the lens of psychology and neuroscience, a classic Zen sutra becomes a springboard for exploring sensory experiences and realizing freedom.

What does it mean to be liberated through one’s sensory life? In That Is Not Your Mind! Zen teacher Robert Rosenbaum explores this question by taking readers on a step-by-step journey through the Surangama Sutra. This Chinese Mahayana sutra is known for its emphasis on practicing with the senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and the Buddhist “sixth sense” of mind or cognition), as well as its teachings on the necessity of basic ethical commitments, like not killing or stealing, to support the development of one’s meditation practice and insight.

Rosenbaum interweaves passages from the sutra with contemporary insights from neuroscience and psychology, illustrating the usefulness of the text with anecdotes from his life and his forty years of teaching experience. In addition to learning about a sutra that played an important role in the creation of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhism, readers are guided through meditations and other practices derived from the sutra’s teachings, such as hearing meditations (awareness of sound, awareness of silence, turning hearing inwards) and centering meditations (basic centering as well as centering on compassion).

"One of the most difficult aspects of Buddhist practice is wrapping our minds around how every moment is both a deceptive seeming and also a true gateway to awakening," writes Rosenbaum. "Nothing is hidden, but there is an infinite field we cannot see."

ISBN-13: 9781645470793

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Shambhala

Publication Date: 08-09-2022

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.44(h) x 0.68(d)

ROBERT (BOB) MEIKYO ROSENBAUM, PhD, is an American Zen teacher with lay entrustment in Soto Zen from Sojo Mel Weitsman and denkai in Ordinary Mind Zen from Karen Terzano. A founding member of the Lay Zen Teachers Association, Bob started the Meadowmind Sangha in Arnold and Vallecito, California, and is currently starting an Ordinary Mind Zen center in Sacramento. He is a senior teacher of Dayan (Wild Goose) Qigong in the lineage of Yang Meijun, authorized by Master Hui Liu of the Wen Wu School. He worked for thirty years as a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and behavioral medicine specialist until retiring ten years ago to devote all his time to Zen and qigong. Bob has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as the books Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy, Walking the Way: 83 Zen Encounters with the Tao Te Ching, and What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (and what isn’t)—Zen Perspectives.

Table of Contents

Foreword Norman Fischer xi

Introduction 1

Part 1 Mind 15

1 The Request for Dharma: Practice-What and Why 17

2 Temptation and Intention: The Context for the Teaching 30

3 The Nature and Location of the Mind: Unreal 43

4 The Nature of Visual Awareness: Seeing and Believing 59

5 The Matrix of the Thus-Come-One: The Matrix 73

6 The Coming into Being of the World of Illusion (I): Let's Pretend 91

7 The Coming into Being of the World of Illusion (II): Beyond Is and Is Not 104

Part 2 Heart 119

8 Instructions for Practice: Musics of the Mind 121

9 Twenty-Five Sages Speak of Enlightenment: Untying the Knots 131

10 The Bodhisattva Who Hears the Cries of the World: Hearing the Cries of the World 147

11 Four Clear and Definitive Instructions on Purity: Sex! Murder! Theft! Lies! 163

12 Establishing a Place for Awakening: Space in Mind 183

13 The Surangama Mantra: Communing with the Source 199

14 Levels of Being: Truth of Consequences 210

15 Fifty Demonic States of Mind: Accumulating Nothing 224

16 The Merit of Teaching the Surangama Dharma: Reverence and Joy 241

Acknowledgments 257

Appendix I Hearing Meditation 260

Appendix II Meditation with the Center 264

Appendix III Twenty-Five Sages and Their Practice Methods 271

Notes 273

About the Author 297