Repentance – The Desire to escape life and death through Enlightenment – Zen Meditation

Repentance Ceremony is also the time for the zen monks to shave the head. The junior monks offered the small bathroom to the senior zen monks for the winter meditation retreat. They walked down to the brook instead where they broke the surface ice to wash their clothes and only bathe themselves where they must because it was freezing.

Repentance Ceremony

Zen in principle, is teaching outside the scriptures. It proclaims, "Directly pointing to the mind and attain Sagehood" or "Attain Enlightenment without depending on words and letters," emphasizing the importance of seeing your Original Nature. Zen monks exclusively focus on their original question. They reject any unnecessary rituals or other religion practices. They dispense  with the scriptures. As a consequence, zen monks often look strange and obsessed.

Although, the head monk sensed that it would be pointless to discourse on precepts and holy actions to such monks, he did so anyway and the practitioners simply listened.

Some monks did not pay the slightest attention and just concentrated on their innermost deep questions. Others left at the beginning of the ceremony and walked around outside. No one objected to this ritual. Everyone seemed to accept that everything in the world had a purpose, necessity and historical nexus. As long as you are not enlightened, you do not know what is right and wrong or what is real or phony.

In other words, an extremely conservative 'wait and see' attitude pervades the zen tradition. It is because of: "all phenomena from the very first have themselves constantly borne the marks of tranquil extinction."

Or because things exist for the sake of existence itself as existentialism asserts?

Practicality

In the world of sentient beings, if you emphasize practicality too much, it is a way of justifying anything, and if you emphasize a principle too much you create dogma. Therefore, zen monks who desire to escape the world of sentient beings through Enlightenment simply try to see and feel the world as it is like witnesses. As long as you are in the world of sentient beings, all judgement is up to the mind of sentient beings. Accordingly, the zen family considers it taboo to judge what is right and wrong. But in fact they never stop judging because they are sentient beings too.