The Zennist

A book, The Secret Of Zen

Back in the early 60s, if I went into a bookstore in Berkeley or San Francisco and bought a D.T. Suzuki book about Zen I might pay close to $3 for the paperback book.  In today's money the same book would be $26!  For all that money whether in the 60s or 2021 Zen still remains incomprehensible for the vast majority of people who buy books about Zen.  Even the translations, no matter how accurate they are and close to the original, most remain incomprehensible for the majority of the curious.

Since 2007 I have endeavored to write about Zen in The Zennist blog from my own awakening back in 1969.  Notice, that I used the word “about” which means for me an approach through language to the exactness of my intuition.  My endeavor has not be an educated guess or a probe into the unknown to find Zen’s truth.  Far from it.  My word-arrows always hit the target.  It is just that the target remains invisible and incomprehensible for the many!  Yes, my arrows are clearly visible for all to see except for the target.

For the last three years or so I've been working on a book.  I had amassed a considerable amount of quotes from the Buddha’s discourses including  quotes from Zen masters.  But these quotes were not intended so much for a book as they were proof that what I was saying about Buddhism and Zen from my own awakening were in fact true. 

When I wrote the book I found it unnecessary to do much quoting.  I already understood where Zen and for that matter Buddhism was coming from.  The book in a way expresses what I would want to be told by a great teacher where the second part of the book is about my personal journey into the mysterious land of Zen where lies its secret.

With the help of Otomo, an old student of some 17 years, the book, The Secret of Zen was recently put on the Amazon's Kindle and Books.  There might be a few errors here and there but the bulk of the book stands ready to read and enjoy.   I really hope that the reader will one day be able to see the target that I look at every day and find no problem hitting the bullseye.

A kind of bottomless negativity

The central message of modern atheism is not so much that God is dead as if to say there is nothing divine or sacred in the world that transcends birth and death, but rather it goes further.  We are to believe in nothing (not even ourselves) so as to become perfect nihilists.  But then, where does this take us if not to overlooking an abyss, a kind of bottomless negativity.

Maybe this condition begins with doubt then moves from there into skepticism in which truth does not seem to exist.  This is reflected in the notion of prasajyapratisedha, that is, absolute negation without positive implication.  In other words, I have searched for truth nothing can be found.  Bt there is an obvious contradiction to this which forbids any nihilist from asserting the truth that there is no truth!

The bigger matter to consider is that by using our imagination we are really saying there is no truth other than what is imaginable.  And if I can't imagine it then there is no truth.  The error to consider here is that since truth (tathatā) cannot be imagined it must not exist.  But for Buddhism truth cannot be imagined since it is beyond the ken of the imaginable.  It is supramundane knowledge.  Gnosis or intuition is the only way to reach it.

Atheism is a cop-out just as much as imagining the divine or ultimate reality.  Nihilism in this regard is only gazing into the abyss limiting oneself to prasajyapratisedha.  It is really a form of insanity in so far as one is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.

The transition from the exoteric to the esoteric

It may be true that Zen Buddhism is something that we can teach ourself but that doesn't mean it is easy to learn.  It's like teaching oneself mountain climbing.  The transition from reading about mountain climbing to actually climbing a mountain can be very dangerous.  In fact, the odds are that our big climb will only be a foothill.

The greatest risk that a person encounters in Zen Buddhism is their innate capacity to delude themselves about its meaning.  This can be accomplished in a number of different ways from going to a bad teacher, to listening to bad advice or misreading Zen literature recontextualizing it to meet with our expectations.  But with any learning curve there is difficulty, this means failure is always more likely than less likely.

Add to this the fact that many of us don't have the ability to rise up from our failures.  Instead, we hunker down and try to make the best of our failures.  But at the back of our mind we know that we haven't got what it takes to overcome our setback.  We want sympathy from others knowing full well that we cannot sympathize even with our own reasons for the setback. 

Most of us hope that with a minimum of effort we can accomplish the goal of Zen being satisfied that we have completed its path.  But this is little more than wishful thinking — enlightenment on the cheap.  Zen requires much more of us if we are going to overcome the barriers which keep us from enlightenment.  The real problem then becomes not so much from the outside (exoteric) but our own ability to take a profound look at the inside (esoteric).  It is really on the inside that the path of Zen begins.  This is not to say that the path is only subjective but rather it is to say to the Zen student, Zen is intuitive.      

Zen is a kind of revolutionary path?

In my old age I think I have met enough people to see that they harbor the not-so-apparen-belief that when they were born they were supposed to be born into a near perfect world which had no problems and no one would ever become poor, get sick or die. 

While they have physically grown into adulthood they've also grown in the amount of resentment they have as a result of their expectations not being true.  They are eager to do something about it while they are still young.

Some have decided to wage war against the more fortunate (the bourgeoisie?) on behalf of the world’s downtrodden. At the same time, they have failed to see that the only way to live in a world which is not of one’s dreams or fantasies, is to live open-eyed by compassion, which they can't do.

Affected by the same youthful egoism I decided to become a student of Zen Buddhism in 1965 rather than participate in the great leap forward, becoming a revolutionary on behalf of the downtrodden.  By that time I figured out that the human heart has both good and evil within it.  This means we can either choose to feed our heart the food of goodness or evil.  But we can also at the same time delude ourselves, eating at the trough of evil getting full on pleasures in the belief that all that feels good, is good.

The difficult thing for any youthful person to accept, wholeheartedly, is Buddhism’s noble truth of suffering.  And what exactly is suffering?  In practical terms it is our psycho-physical body that is suffering and will suffer greatly as we grow older.  The degree to which we cling to our psycho-physical body is the amount of suffering we will have to bear when it comes time to let go of it.  To refuse to let go is to fall back into the avidya of the womb. 

On the other hand, to have stopped clinging to our psycho-physical body, having transcended it by awakening to absolute spirit, is the end of suffering.  But this is almost impossible for any youthful person to realize.  Nevertheless, I took it upon myself to realize absolute spirit which is beyond the world of suffering.  But like most in my generation they chose to become, in someway, revolutionaries going so far has to rebel against everything (nihilism?).  Some, even believed that Zen was a kind of revolutionary path.  It is not.  It is a path of intuition that leads to where suffering no longer exists. 

Not a dualistic realization

Without consciousness (vijñāna) appearance (māyā, nāmarūpa) cannot exist.  In other words, the price of admission into our world of appearances or fantasyland is consciousness.  Without consciousness our universe and the earth on which we live and die cannot exist.  Consciousness preexists all appearance and yet it is bound down to it, unable to escape. 

In previous blogs I have gone over the fact that consciousness is always dual; it is not a universal essence or something like spirit, far from it.  If anything, it can roughly be described as the one divided within itself—a non-intrinsic illusory division.  Said again, this division is never other than unreal—an imaginary opposition.  Still it cannot be bridged even though it is illusory.  Even thinker and thought are opposed.  So here we get a taste of what Zen Buddhism is really about.

The barrier we face which prevents us from seeing what is beyond appearance is the duality inherent within consciousness.  Even the duality of realizer and realized must be transcended.  In most profound words there is only the transcendence of realizer and realized when the seeming duality contained within consciousness disappears into the original one.  The one, it turns out, has only realized itself as absolute.  But this is not a dualistic realization.  This is awakening (buddhatā).

Those who desire to awaken but cannot awaken are constantly caught within the trickery of consciousness.  This might explain why it is so difficult to explain the awakening of Siddhartha because he attained nothing determinant from it.  Nevertheless, Siddhartha transcended the illusion of non-enlightenment that consciousness produced.

The making of a diabolical world

In order to establish a diabolical world of samsara one must first change the perception of people.  In this direction, one need only make it impossible to make the right decision in the face of an impending interpersonal crisis. 

Nor does it matter how much good information people have in front of them, they are still unable to make the right decision about what to do.  In other words, all the information a person has access to they still don't know if it's true or false.  But this leads to a worse state of affairs, that is, the likely manipulation of good and evil.

Key in the manipulation of good and evil, is the ability to invent one crisis after another to keep the people from coming to any kind of rational way of overcoming the crisis which could, in reality, be only a made-up crisis.  Let’s call it for now a product of social engineering the source of which is carefully hidden from the public.

On this rather somber note our world is not the happy place we imagine it to be or could ever be in light of the fact that our way of life and our values could very well be manipulated by powers that we cannot see.  I am even more convinced that Zen is really no longer Zen.  It has been taken over by a certain kind of political ideology that controls certain groups of our society.

By the same token I am even more convinced that Zen or Chan as it was known in China acted as a means for harmonizing the two sides of the human brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.   Naturally, both hemispheres can become, overtime, antagonistic towards each other which may account for why civilizations weaken then fall.  This phenomenon is behind the thesis of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World .  I see a certain irony in the subtitle which is the unmaking of the western world by over-focusing on the left hemisphere of the brain helped along by made-up crises. 

Returning to the original one

The price we pay for our dualistic perception (vijñāna) is living in an infinite unreality (samsara), a life which never returns to the original one.  In other words, observer and observed, subject and object never converge back into the original one.  Also, this duality is never in harmony; there is always a tension between the two.  Their difference from each other remains unresolved.

It is only the sages or the Buddhas who close the gap; who return to the original one and transcend the unreal.  They realize that the phenomenal world which is duality based constantly emerges from the one and returns to the one.  The becoming apparent (the created )and the return (the fleeting) are the stuff of duality.  Yet, intrinsically, nothing fundamentally arises and nothing fundamentally terminates.

During the intuition of our true nature, this being kenshō, the so-called realizer and the realized disappear.  You could even say that they've returned, suddenly, to the original one.  This mystical intuition cannot be put into the framework of an object or a subject.  In the sage’s return to the ordinary dual world for the purpose of teaching, nothing about true reality can be said without situating it in the dual which is inherent in all information conveying systems.

Going a little deeper, we could be looking at reality through our imagination (the sixth sense for Buddhism) which rests upon duality.  This means that our reality is not entirely real but a figment of our collective imagination which we have concretized/reified and emotionally loaded.  From this, philosophy and religion could be about how to live and survive in an imaginary world.  On the other hand, true religion could be how to realize the absolute one that is not imaginary, thus freeing oneself.

An illusory difference

In Buddhism, our English word consciousness is used to translate vijñāna.  It misses the mark completely.  Vijñāna means lit. in two parts knowing.  In Buddhism, it is a kind of antinomy which is more like a difference in the One from itself which is an illusory difference. 

In order to create and live in a virtual world vijñāna is necessary.  It is, so to speak, the price of admission.  It is responsible for our rebirth into a virtual world.  We would not be here today if it were not for this consciousness.

To keep us in this virtual world what is diabolically important to believe, we have one life and after we die that's it.  And here we come to Zen Buddhism in which intuition plays a prominent role in leaping beyond the confines of consciousness—a return to the One which is hidden from those deeply attached to consciousness. 

In perfect kenshō or gnosis realizer and realized disappear (so do the experiencer and experience) into the One or absolute Spirit.  This means that the illusory difference within the One which creates a virtual world has disappeared.  One learns how the magical trick is accomplished thereby breaking the magical spell.

From immaturity to maturity

Youth almost always with few exceptions eventually betrays its own causes and aspirations.  Such youth is not so much about being in a young, still developing body, as it is being immature where practical experience is lacking. 

Such immaturity suffers from the Dunning-Kruger Effect in which one is so incompetent that they don't know they're incompetent.  There are even shields youth puts up which prevents them from looking at their own likely incompetence thereby overcoming it to some degree.

This effect is not lost upon those who come to study Zen.  For the most part they are young adults who are making a transition from youth to maturity.  A lack of awareness governs their conduct as does a lack of conscientiousness.  It is not surprising that they often fail in the first stages of Zen which I would characterize as learning what Zen’s path is about.

As expected, learning about Zen Buddhism, at first, has to do with reading a lot of Zen literature and thinking about it.  But this is not the same as mastering Zen having walked its mysterious path finally overcoming one's spiritual ignorance; having met and passed through Mumon’s barrier (無門関) which is closed off to human thought. 

While it is true that human ingenuity can pass beyond the barrier of thought few are able to do this.  It is a feat like no other.  For a Buddhist it is like seeing the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta), directly, where spirit has not been formed into thought, that is, Mumon’s barrier. 

In other words, our own imagination and thoughts cannot pass through imagination and thought!  Whatever faces the barrier of imagination—it cannot pass through.  And whatever we think, nevertheless, is still a thought that cannot pass through.  The human mind produces thought while the mind of a Buddha transcends thought.  The youth and immaturity that come to Zen have to be forged into maturity and that is a difficult task. 

Ordinary person Zen

The transcendent is beyond the road of thought and the road of words.  Such roads eventually run out of road.  This is where the road of Zen or the same, the road of intuition begins, but it's not an ordinary dirt road.  In fact, it is not a road of at all in the usual sense.  It begins when all of the roads have come to their end.

Upon reading these words, the average Zen student will still take the road of thought and the road of words.  But the end of these roads leads to a dead end with no more signs or directions.  Wandering around aimlessly is no way either.  On such a trek one can say they are exploring.  But what does that mean?  The Zen student is really lost with no sense of fulfillment.  He or she is running out of ideas:  There are no real options left. 

This is what comes from the practice of ordinary person Zen 凡夫禪 (bompu Zen).  These are people who have very little spiritual depth; who lack intuition (dhyāna).  Such people have no idea what it means to arrive at direct knowledge without reasoning or inferring, which in the case of Zen is direct knowledge of Buddha-nature.

Still, it must be said that there are different types of Zen because there are different kinds of people with differing abilities.  In fact, this is a typical beginner’s mistake:  to think that Zen is Zen and that when you visit a temple you're talking to enlightened people.  Nevertheless, it could be a situation in which you are a fool amongst educated fools.  One should never underestimate one's stupidity or overestimate one's abilities. 

When the student of Zen knows he or she has run out of road, or comes to a dead end, that is the time when Zen really begins (because they are engaging with themselves intrapersonally).  In their heart of hearts they still love Zen Buddhism but they realize that they are getting no place in this particular tradition.