There are several classic records of Zen histories such as Ching Te Ch'uan Teng Lu (Record of the Transmission of the Lamp); Tsu T'ang Chi (Collection from the Halls of Ancestors); Wu Teng Hui Yan (Five Lamps Merged in the Source); and Ku Tsun Su Yu Lu (Records of Sayings of Ancient Venerable Adepts) that together compile information on well over 600 Zen masters. Among the masters cited within the texts, for example, are Kuei Shan (771-853) whose community numbered 1500 and produced 43 Enlightened disciples (2.8%). Hsueh Feng (822-908) 1500 community followers, 56 Enlightened disciples (3.7%). Fa Yen Wen I (885-958) never less than 1000 followers and 63 Enlightened disciples (6.3%). Yun Chu (d. 908) led a community of 1500 and produced 28 Enlightened disciples (1.8%).

Poor old Zen masters, if only they had known the secret of the internet. A major league coach or manager with such poor percentage ratings wouldn't even be relegated to the fields to help Tung Shan weigh three chins of flax. It should be noted however, that before the days of the internet, back in the old days of exclusively snail mail, there was a man, a higly Attained yet throughly anonymous American Zen master by the name of Alfred Pulyan, that maintained what could only be called a mail order following. It is reported that he had a 70% success rate.

From the days of snail mail to the days of the internet things seemed to have speeded up. But have they? There seems to be very few successful Enlightenment outcomes cited or noted via the internet, although it does not mean it doesn't happen. A CHILD OF THE CYBER-SANGHA: Enlightenment From the Internet?, listed as number nine in The Awakening Experience in the Modern Era being one example. Another example is found in:

Like Reddit and Quora YAHOO: Answers is an online internet question answer forum. Sometime back the following question was asked on YAHOO: Answers:

Are there any online Buddhist teachers?

Not long after the question was posted on the Yahoo site, one Arjuna Ranatunga replied. Arjuna, who goes by the screen name Goodfella, and who holds an earned Master's Degree in Buddhist Studies with Merit from the University of Sunderland, North-east England (2011) as well as a YAHOO: Answers respondent for over 15 years offered the following:

The most famous site with perhaps the most integrity is "Awakening 101", authored by "the Wanderling". I met an Enlightened person who'd used it in His approach / initial studies / on His journey.

It has facilities to ask questions of the Wanderling, too.

• http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/index.html

• http://sped2work.tripod.com/web_ring_list.html

  http://the-wanderling.com/zen_enlightenment5.html

  https://wanderling.tripod.com/zenlinks.html

Best Wishes in your Quest, Friend,

Arjuna

Please note the second of the two links above has been sub-planted from the original post with two additional albeit equivalent links. The site initially
so cited by Arjuna had not been kept current within it's own links.by the site originator, although a recent check has shown otherwise, hence it's return.

CRITICAL CONCERNS WITH AWAKENING 101

MORE CRITICAL CONCERNS WITH AWAKENING 101

Back in the old days Enlightenment was a rare and difficult endeavor. Even for the Buddha it wasn't easy. After following several teachers initially, he turned to a path of individual asceticism, experiencing various tortures and austerities along the way including a prolonged period of fasting and battling the evils of Mara. Eventually a young girl variously called Sujata or Nandabala in the sutras offered him a rice-milk gruel, and from his emaciated state slowly regained his strength. He then began meditating. With a total of six or seven years invested, on the morning of December 8th sitting under the Bodhi Tree, he glanced up and saw what some say was the planet Venus and others say was a star, and experienced what is called Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi, the Consummation of Incomparable Enlightenment.

Nowdays however, it seems everywhere you go all over the whole internet in Zen or Buddhist related areas EVERYONE is Enlightened. If you go to various newsgroups such as alt.zen, alt.philosophy.zen, etc.; to the hundreds of web pages that come up when you type in Zen, Zen Enlightenment, Enlightenment, Buddhism, etc.; or to the message boards such as Excite, Lycos, or Yahoo under such headings as Religion, Buddhism, Zen, etc.; everyone is Enlightened. And, if for some untold reason YOU happen to be one of the few people left in the world that is NOT Enlightened, then the internet offers a million easy ways for YOU or any other poor soul to attain the ultimate Enlightenment experience. In so saying, the following six examples have been culled from the net, some very good, some offered in jest, some offered to consider seriously --- all with the same result in mind, ENLIGHTENMENT:

• ACHIEVE ENLIGHTENMENT. Just continue to click the ideaographs and you become Enlightened.
  

• JUST THROW IN THE TAO. Click the moving eyes and follow your way to Enlightenment.
  

• CARDBOARD ZEN. Cut out your own "Sound of One Hand Clapping." Get Enlightened.
  

• THIRTY MINUTES TO ENLIGHTENMENT. By Harry Balmer. In just thirty minutes you can become Enlightened. Very, very , good. Results vary.
  

Laskshmana Swamy, the last known person to have been fully Enlightened under the grace and light of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, lives within shouting distance of the Ramana Ashram he seldom takes visitors and, except on his birthday, does he do darshan --- and even that is sporadic lately. He will not even entertain seeing anyone who already has a guru or is an itinerant guru hopper, so forget it.

His adopted daughter, Mathru Sri Sarada, born in 1959 and now a woman of age 50-plus, lives at the same gated compound near the Ramana ashram. She realized the Self permanently under the grace and light of Laskshmana on December 18, 1978. She pretty much abides by the same rules as Laskshmana as to the coming and going of visitors, etc. The trials and tribulations of her Enlightenment was fully documented and found in the following and is not for the light hearted:

MATHRU SRI SARADA

How about nothing less than a well placed gaze from a truly Enlightened guru? It was no more than simple eye contact for the young boy below, who within an hour of his face-to-face meeting with a venerated Indian holy man, that his mental barriers were reduced to nothingness:

SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI

So, is there anything really the matter with any or all of the above? Isn't it written that when the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, Hui-neng (638-713), was a very young boy and in town selling firewood for his mother oneday he experienced a level of Realization when he overheard a portion of The Diamond Cutter Sutra? Also too, didn't Sri Ramana Maharshi awaken to the Absolute basically out of nowhere at age 17 or so. Hui-neng himself in his The Sutra of Hui Neng" (Chapter II, On Prajna) said:

The wisdom of Enlightenment is inherent in every one of us. It is because of the delusion under which our mind works that we fail to realize it ourselves, and that we have to seek the advice and the guidance of Enlightened ones before we can know our own Essence of Mind. You should know that so far as Buddha-nature is concerned there is no difference in an Enlightened person and an ingnorant one. What makes the difference is one realizes it, while the other is ignorant of it.

"The wisdom of Enlightenment is inherent in every one of us." From that it is taken that everyone is Enlightened. Upon meeting Hui-neng for the first time, Hung Jen, the Fifth Patriarch, immediately recognized (although did not announce) Hui-neng's Attainment, thereby setting the scene for the transfer of the patriarchship and the bowl and robe signifying same.

At the time it is said Hung Jen had some 700 followers including his potential replacement Shen-hsiu (605-706). Of course, since the oft heard 'all are Enlightened' statement is law, Hung Jen could have just set the robe and bowl on the floor of the meditation hall or out on the grounds and let the first stumbling dolt to trip over them become the Sixth Patriarch. He didn't. Instead he staged the now classical Stanza Competition wherein the lowly rice pounder Hui-neng composed a stanza and obtained the efforts of an accomplice to write it, overshadowing the stanza presented previously by the venerated head monk and heir apparent Shen-hsiu.

Dogen Zenji (1200-53) credited with founding the Soto School of Zen and the author of the Shobogenzo, struggled with the problem of Original Awakening, that is, an awakening fundamental or innate in everyone, and Acquired Awakening, an awakening attained or acquired through practice. Dogen rejected both, breaking through the relativity of original and acquired, opening up a deeper ground. He wrote: "The principle of the Buddha-nature is that it is not endowed prior to Enlightenment...the Buddha-nature is unquestionably realized simultaneously with Enlightenment." The Shobogenzo eloaborates quite lucidly his concerns with the matter, written by him in an Enlightened state following his own Realization under the guidance of Chinese Zen Master Ju-ching (1163-1228).

Dogen does not maintain there is any ultimate difference between cultivation and authentication, or between Original and Acquired Enlightenment. Hence, Dogen would not want to say that he is describing "Zen consciousness" or "Enlightened consciousness" to the exclusion of "ordinary consciousness."

Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where we differ is that we place a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience and then proceed to make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself rather than to be an "expression" of the "occasion" in which we think or talk about the given experience. In a sense, we have a double layered description:

• First, there is the prereflective, not yet conceptualized, experience--what we all share, Zen master and the rest of us alike.

• Second, there is the expression or characterization of any experience within a particular situation or occasion.

If the speaker brings no personal, egotistic delusions into this expression, the occasion speaks for itself, the total situation alone determines what is said or done. Thus, in the case of the Zen master, what-is-said is simply what-is. In the case of the deluded person, however, the "what-is" includes his excess conceptual baggage with its affective components, the deluded ideas about the nature of "self," "thing," "time," and so on that constitute the person's own particular distortion of what actually is. (source)

Traditions reveal that Mahakashypa was the Buddha's successor. He smiled when Shakyamuni raised the flower on Vulture Peak and was recognized as such. Shakyamuni's brother, some say his cousin, Ananda followed as Mahakashypa's successor. It is written Ananda, born on the day Shakyamuni Awakened beneath the Bodhi Tree, served the Buddha twenty years and twenty more, Mahakashypa. Forty years of discipleship, twenty under the direct radiance of the Buddha himself, twenty under the Buddha's handpicked Enlightened successor before recognization of Awakeness. Poor thick-headed Ananda, not at all like nearly every doofus that comes down the cyber-pike nowdays oozing with Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi.

Aziz Kristof, a non-traditional Advaita Zen master writes:

Many seekers seem to be unaware of a very simple fact that there are actually many levels of Self-realization as exemplified in the Eight Jhana States, the Five Degrees of Tozan (Wu Keng Chuan), and the Five Varieties of Zen. There is an enormous difference between initial Awakening such as say Kensho and the actual State of Enlightenment.

Not to mention the Three Phases of Zen or the Ten Fetters of Buddhism.

For those so interested there is an absolutely fabulous article written by Alex Bunardzic that, following a heated debate amongst alt.zen particpants about Enlightenment, originally appearing in three parts, that can be read in it's entirety by going to:

(PLEASE CLICK)

HOW TO ACHIEVE ENLIGHTENMENT

ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT IN A NUTSHELL

30 MINUTES TO ENLIGHTENMENT

(please click image)