The Zennist

A limit to the power of magic

Magic’s power lies in dominating the five senses so as to control the person.  It can influence the sixth sense, too, which in Buddhism is manas which I translate as mentation.  But there is a limit to the power of magic. 

Magic itself has no effect on what transcends the six senses.  While our life can be a life of delusion dominated and controlled through magic, when we study Buddhism we understand that there is something beyond the senses, something even beyond mankind.

In this brief treatment of magic, it is easy to see that it has a tremendous influence over people.  A person can hardly ignore its power.  Even the magician falls prey to magic. 

Magic is an integral part of our modern world.  It makes things charming and alluring, even bewitching, attractive and desirable.  Love affairs are born of magic but so are evil leaders who doom their people to misery. 

In modern culture another name for magic is advertising, education, propaganda, ideology, mass culture, drugs, the placebo and nocebo effect, sexual attractiveness, etc.  Madness is born from magic.  Sooner or later everyone is caught by magic.  Few escape its power.

Religion is the nemesis of magic or should be in so far as it enshrines the comprehension that transcends creation.  In Buddhism the goal is the full realization of the transcendent which is beyond the senses.

“There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned” (Tatiyanibbānapaṭisaṃyutta-sutta).

Only in the created world is magic possible.  But from magic we also have to understand that there is a magic associated with evil which endeavors to keep people attached to the senses especially the sixth sense.  We should not forget that Siddhartha battled with the evil demon Mara and that the five aggregates which comprise the psychophysical being belong to Mara!

Still too burdened by consciousness

Materialism requires the splitting of the transcendent one into perceiver and perceiving, which we understand in the West to be consciousness or what Buddhists call vijñāna.(lit. in two parts Knowing).  Such materialist cognition cannot take place without a split in the original nature of reality which is indivisible.  The resultant split is an illusion, however.

The pluralization (including appearance) which results from the illusory split is not real relative to the indivisible one.  As fundamentally unsplit, nevertheless, we are immersed and enclosed in illusion to live as materialists.  The path and the goals we have chosen are strictly within the confines of illusion.

Put into Zen, with Mind-only (unsplit spirit) there is no real spacetime world.  Thus, the adept is released.  What hid the illusion making the world seem all too real is gone. 

Those who are new to the world of Buddhism will use their imagination to help them believe that the world they're in is illusory, but it doesn't work that way.  They have not actually gone beyond the vijñāna-split to see true reality.  It's like telling a mentally ill person just to imagine they're normal (trans-normal?).

Such people are incapable of gnosis, or the same, direct intuition of the unsplit absolute.  They are still too burdened by vijñāna.  This is where Zen’s way comes in.  Overtime it destroys the perceiver and perceiving dichotomy until the Zen adept has lost even perceiver and perceiving to rely on.  Suddenly and unexpectedly the adept beholds the original one.  Ox herding pictures illustrate this in VII, VIII, IX.

The great human illusion

In these blogs I have mentioned before that we are in a trap, a very subtle trap, one conceived within the human mind itself.  It is not surprising therefore in Buddhism to find that we are enclosed in the five grasping aggregates which the Buddha speaks about which are owned and operated by Mara the evil one! 

Furthermore, these same aggregates are without a self or anātman (P., anattā) which is supposedly the doctrine of the Buddha! Put the Buddha taught no such doctrine. However, he did teach that we are deceived by these grasping aggregates into believing that they are our self.  Thus the human problem is one of misidentification: mistaking the self for what is not the self. 

The highest truths of Indian religions including Buddhism is that the world and the human beings within it are an illusion.  Spacetime is an illusion including this human body in which we are immersed.  But perhaps even more deceptive, the imagination of beings contains within it both birth and death.  Liberation then as a matter of intuiting directly what transcends the great human illusion. 

 

Mumon’s clever Mu trap

Our saviors, gods and lofty utopias will not save us from what we do not know, or from our own innate power to deceive ourselves.  We have the choice (P., sankhārā) to stay where we are, about which we know nothing, or go forward into something of which we know nothing (but imagine we do). 

Either choice brings us to the final trap which says it all about Zen koans, that they are unanswerable through human convention try as we might to force an answer from them.  No matter how much we ponder them we will always end up in Mumon’s Mu trap only to be reborn again and again in a samsaric cycle.

You must take my words seriously.  I am trying to help you escape from Mumon’s clever Mu trap.  That is all my book The Secret of Zen is trying to do.  Including Siddhartha, only a few Zen masters figured it out and even I figured it out. And I am on my last leg!

Seekers on this inscrutable path, what you seek will never match with the enlightenment which you seek!  It ever lies beyond the scope of perceiver and perceiving.  Think about Mu and you are at once lost. 

You must go to your wits’ end.  In a split second you’ll forget your dualistic consciousness and converge instantly with the Buddha-nature.  The released drop of water has become a boundless ocean of bliss.

The most difficult of all to let go of

There is a kind of original sin in Buddhism.  It is called avidya (destitute of knowledge).  Human beings come into the world under the dominion of avidya.  It's like waking up in a virtual reality game but have no idea how you got there or how you might escape when the going gets tough.  We are only a blank. 

Now you are feeling hunger and fright and all those things that go along with being an infant.  You begin your life being totally dependent on things outside of your control.  You desperately cry for help like an abandoned kitten.  You depend upon the love and care of those who brought you into this world — this not so kind world as you will one day find out.

Admittedly, life is always giving you hope but in the end you have to give up your carnal body.  You have no idea where you're going to be after it passes away.  Your imagination works overtime to create some kind of utopian world whether it's a heaven or a materialist utopia in which you will live forever in a temporal body.

Obviously, no great creator God is going to come down and help you (here your imagination is working overtime).  You are on your own.  But there, according to Buddhism, lies the escape route.  It is where we transcend all appearances and conditions, even the perceiver and the perceiving which got us into this mess (avidya).  

Letting go

Letting go, by following the way of the wild monkey, is really about letting go of one branch only to grab on to another; living in a jungle full of branches. 

Under these circumstances it is easy to let go.  We just grab onto something else.  We leave one tough life-event behind then get involved in a new one.  Offhand, the late Mickey Rooney comes to mind.  He was married eight times.

Do we ever kick the monkey habit of letting go and grabbing onto another branch?  Probably not. 

In Zen and Buddhism (really the same thing) it's all about letting go of our attachment to the big VR game we call life, that is, conditioned existence.  In fact suffering only comes from living in a condition world in condition bodies unable to see what exactly transcends the world and the corporeal body.

Unfortunately, biology has hard wired us to the belief that our human bodies and the world we perceive through them is absolutely real and final.  We will not be convinced otherwise even though science today suspects that our universe is really a kind of fractal based illusion (māyā).

Today we believe this is the real world.  We’re not going to change our belief.  If we continue swinging from one branch to another like the wild monkey one day we will arrive at the right branch or so we hope.  At least it seems better than the previous one.

Not anything empirical but real nevertheless

Without being truly integrated into the big picture of Buddhism we dare not try to come up with an assumption of what Buddhism is.  We will most likely be wrong. 

The bulk of Buddhist books these days are wrong if they teach that the Buddha denied Ātman.  According to these people the Buddha was supposedly teaching a kind of benevolent nihilism as in, there is only emptiness!

The ātman problem goes much deeper in Buddhism.  Ordinary beings assume the temporal body that they were born with and will one day perish is their ātman.  Others assume that there is no self whatsoever (they are something from nothing). 

But this is what makes Buddhism so unique.  It teaches ordinary beings that what they cling to as who they are is not ātman.  It is only a simulacrum of ātman.  The real self or nature is only attained by transcending all phenomena including even consciousness which is always dual as in perceiver and perceiving.

This debate in Buddhism which has been going on for well over 1000 years is really a battle between the materialist/nihilists and the gnostics/ intuitionists.  The materialists, however, have little in the way of evidence from the Buddhist canon to rest their argument on.  Siddhartha realized under the bodhi tree something transcendent and unthinkable.  It was not anything empirical but real nevertheless.  

The very nature of the three refugees (Buddha, Dharma, Saṃgha) is the true self or ātman.

At the core of the Heart Sutra 心經

Basically, the Heart Sutra/心經 is saying the world as viewed through the five aggregates is an illusion.  Do not cling to any of it but transcend it. Thus will bodhi be attained.  But what is this mystery of transcendence?

The Sutra is not telling us to cling to this mortal, conditioned world nor run away from it.  The solution to the problem is transcendence:  to go through all illusions and come out the other side!

But then we have to admit that all of mankind is worshiping at the shrine of samsara where we are always making sacrifices to this illusory corporeal body with its sensuous needs and extravagances. 

Maybe you believe that old pains can be washed away by new pleasures.  But this is not true. 

Illusion binds us to the same old patterns although each existence seems new and different.  We are always caught in the net of samsara because we are unable to transcend it completely.  Some of us get right to the edge of liberation then fall back.  Falling back is what we humans do best.  Always asking for forgiveness.  We even invent saviors to save us from ourselves and our own misdeeds.

We don't need your stinkin’ utopia

The religious life is a struggle that is interior.  It is an adventure nevertheless, but fraught with great danger.  In the Buddhist sense, struggle is specifically oriented toward achieving direct intuition of the absolute or the same, Buddha-nature.  But also it is about giving up false assumptions and beliefs.  That is difficult to do. 

In any religion or ideology (politics in the form of religion) the lie is propagated along with the truth.  But the unawakened are usually deceived by the lie while fervently denying the truth.

The practice of Buddhism amounts to valuing enlightenment rather than striving one-sidedly and blindly for a new utopian world.  In the Buddhist form, however, we don’t have to pay the collective price (often in blood and terror) for the mistakes of a few mentally deranged ideologues.

While these ideologies are often youthfully enchanting in the beginning this enchantment is often lost very early by an ideologically possessed bureaucracy that demands obedience and conformity.  Those with the most wealth are still in power who still control the government while the government makes it possible for them to hide their presence and iniquities.  At the same time people eventually become disenchanted with the religious life.

 

The great mystery revealed

Buddhism (bauddham) soon loses its appeal when it goes beyond the six senses and especially the last sense which has to do with mentation (manas).  In this sense Buddhism is all about complete transcendence.

The ordinary person does not realize that the world they put together, including their body of birth and the environment it lives and dies in is a mental representation albeit very real looking. 

Key to locking on to this representation is consciousness (vijñāna) which is always dichotomous or the same, perceiver and perceiving.  Such consciousness is never absolute, most primordial or first.  This is reserved for spirit or ātman which excludes anātman (not spiritual, corporeal, empty of spirit).

Buddhism has changed significantly from what Siddhartha Gautama realized after he transcended consciousness.  Having merged with spirit, he could distinguish ātman from anātman.

He said that an anātman refers to the five aggregates, namely, material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness.  They are always suffering and conditioned.  The most troubling aggregate is consciousness which I have said earlier is always dichotomous:  we are always stuck in the perceiver and perceiving mode.

It would safe to say that modern Buddhism is a distortion of what Siddhartha Gautama taught.  It nowhere approaches the problem of consciousness, especially, the transcending of consciousness which leads to the elimination of rebirth since consciousness is the transmigrant from one life to the next.

Consciousness is always an unresolved tension.  As mentioned earlier, it is the difference between perceiver and perceiving. There is a seeming unity between the two, even a harmony, but no transcendence of this duality.  As with the example of an asymptote, the line that continually approaches a given curve can never meet it.  When consciousness is transcended then is the great mystery revealed.