The Zennist

The farther shore

Few among humans are those who reach the farther shore: the other people here run along this shore.

— Dhammapada 85

Crossing to the other shore is a transcendent accomplishment which reaches the unconditioned, namely, nirvana. There is no real body of water that anyone crosses. This seems obvious. The ocean that we view from this shore which is conditioned reality, is the ocean of samsara in which beings are continually reborn and die again. If we wish to cross it, we cannot do so by means of a horizontal route which would lead us to still more cycles of birth and death. The crossing has to be vertical crossing. But the vertical method is always the mystical path. Our ordinary mind, however, contains both a horizontal and a vertical path. There is both the conventional, that veils the mystical, and the mystical that is paramartha which is of a transcendent character.

Those who hear no inner calling from the beyond summoning them to cross to the other shore; who are content to run along this shore, are repeatedly doomed to undergo samsara, passing from one conditioned from of existence to another without any break. This can only be called the sin of ignorance; that while suffering, one does not care to escape the very conditions which make samsara possible. Such a mind is thirsting for the material. It believes that, some how, it will find fulfillment by feeding the senses. It doesn’t care that this is a delusion; that at no time in the history of mankind has anyone become fulfilled by the acquisition of sensory materials.

The wiser among mankind are fewer. When they look within, they see another side of mind the appetitive person doesn’t see. They can see the ocean they must cross where the ocean ends and the shore of nirvana begins. The also have the courage to leave the common quay. They have a heaven soaring spirit which is not content to stay here, in this barren shore of birth and death.

Sex and precepts

Edict number 133 issued by the Meiji government in 1872 decreed that all Buddhist monks in Japan should be free to “eat meat, take wives, and shave their heads” as they chose.

American Zen is primarily modified Japanese Zen. The bulk of American Zen’s founders were Japanese who presented Zen through a Japanese ethos. Many beginners are unaware of this. Many assume that all American Zen priests take monastic precepts, one of which is celibacy. This is not true with regard to a Zen tradition from Japan. A Zen priest can do just about anything, in other words, including having sex and getting drunk. In fact, one of the closely guarded secrets in American Zen circles is the frequency of sex between Zen priests and their students.

So what kinds of precepts or rules do these American Zen priests generally take? It is the Bodhisattva precepts rather than the traditional Hinayana precepts, the latter of which have definite prohibitions against sex; the violation of which can lead to expulsion from the Sangha.

By comparison, the Bodhisattva precepts almost amount to lay persons precepts but, more importantly, Bodhisattva precepts are for Bodhisattvas—a fact overlooked by almost everyone. Zen priests are not, as a rule, Bodhisattvas. It is even safe to say that they are not first stage Bodhisattvas who have not even attained Bodhicitta which is a rather rare accomplishment. To appreciate the sense of this, Bodhicitta is the initial awaking of Mind in which one stands for the first time, so to speak, directly in the presence of pure Mind.

The most important aspect of the Bodhisattva precept is the commitment to magnify the initial awakening (bodhi) of Mind (citta), i.e., Bodhicitta. Such precepts, therefore, are for the subsequent unfolding of pure Mind; leading eventually to Buddhahood. This idea is embraced, for example, in the vow to bring all of the spirit (sattva) to maturity by skillful means. Such a vow, it needs to be stressed, has nothing to do with the rescue of humanity—it has everything to do with completely spiritualizing oneself and becoming a Buddha. Indeed, “no one who is himself in bondage can release the bonds of others” according to the Vimalakirti-nirdesha Sutra.

The only serious transgression for a Bodhisattva lies in doing things out of hatred and ignorance whereby they are in jeopardy of losing the Bodhicitta. In this light, desire is not a serious transgression. Even if one his having sexual intercourse, as long as Bodhicitta is maintained during coitus, and the spirit of the other is sensed during intercourse, there is fundamentally no wrong being committed. Indeed, there is no harming of the other during sex. Harm, however, is always the case when ignorance and hatred dominate us.

On the other hand, not to having sex because of hatred towards it or hatred towards those who strongly arouse it in us, breaks the Bodhisattva’s vow if we have Bodhicitta. This is to say that from the angle of Mahayana Buddhism it is a grave offense. But even worse than hatred towards sex is to have sex out of ignorance since it binds us directly to the flesh blaspheming any chance of coming into communion with spirit or sattva.

Another point worth mentioning about the Bodhisattva’s precepts, the true Pratimoksa has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s obedience to certain rules or regulations. This term actually pertains to the spirit as having (pra) the highest (ati) deliverance or moksha. In the commentaries to the Pali canon it says:

It is the Patimokkha since it is the fallen that it frees (mokkheti) from the suffering of samsara. For it is due to the release (vimokkhena) of the mind (cittassa) that a being is spoken of as ‘liberated’” (UdA 223—224).

Taken altogether, there is no great spiritual crime in Edict number 133. The great spiritual crime is to hate spirit (sattva) or willingly remain ignorant of it, even confusing sexual passion with spirit, which is often the case these days.

Without sitting

Sitting a long time and not lying down is not logically beneficial. —Hui-neng (tr., Yi Wu)

The Sixth Ancestor Hui-neng was against formal sitting for the sake of just sitting. Unfortunately, this seems to be the practice in modern Zen centers which has led to the questionable practice of marathon sitting otherwise called in Japanese, sesshin, literally meaning, “collecting the mind”.

Hui-neng believed that attachment to the form of sitting missed the whole essence of Zen. He was also against the practice of trying to still the mind in order to make it empty and dark. For Hui-neng, in the midst of ordinary thought, one must try to discover the pristine animative self-nature which continually gives birth to such thoughts. What Hui-neng mainly objected to was equivocating sitting meditation with seeing one’s true nature.

We can carry this one step further by saying that true meditation is to apperceive the pure Mind which is the fountainhead of our mundane thoughts. This Mind is naturally transcendent for the one who discovers it. One is truly awakened when there is not a thought or a phenomenon which is not realized to be dependent upon this creative Mind. Thus, this Mind does not depend on thoughts or phenomena. Nor does it depend on sitting, standing, walking or laying down. Such physical practices will not awaken a common person nor will such practices add to a Buddha’s awakening.

The Zen of rebirth

The conditioned world is all about samsara in which we are bound inside of a a temporal body to experience its birth and its death, and still further rebirth into still other temporal bodies. Whatever sad experiences we may of had in the last life we have forgotten them all in this life. So here we go again, reinventing the vicious wheel of samsara.

Some of us, of course, remember a little of our past life. We instinctively know that people can’t be trusted; that even the greatest love turns into mutual assured destruction; and gods can’t answer prayers any better than blind chance. We also instinctively know that it probably wasn’t a good idea to be reborn this time around because at the end of our rainbow is a rebirth blackhole. Who knows, maybe in our next birth we will be conscious of a new body with a set of wings, or reborn with four legs and an insatiable appetite for mice and other kinds of small creatures.

So how do we get out of samsara? The answer is not an easy one to give. We need the right analogy by which to see the problem which will then give us some clues for the right solution.

Well, to explain it using a modern analogy, we are all like a radio wave. This means we have the capacity to resonate with an antenna; then get amplified by the radio (the job of a radio is to amplify etheric waves). In fact, this is how we became reborn. Mom and dad were having sex; mom and dad got lucky and hit the biological jackpot. When their DNA antennas combined to make a new DNA antenna, guess what? We tuned in and got embodied in a biological radio in which everything got—all of a sudden—terribly amplified and downright painful.

Well, to make a long story short, we are presently trapped inside the equivalent of a biological radio-body and really don’t know how to detune our radio-wave-being from this bodily radio! Try as we might, nothing seems to work because everything we identify with as being our primordial wave is part of the bodily radio (the radio in Buddhism is the Five Aggregates). This is not to say that detuning is impossible. People who have had an OBEs (Out of Body Experiences) can testify to this strange detuning phenomenon. Here, in fact, is the Buddha describing such an experience:

I have shown my disciples the way whereby they call into being out of this [material] body [yet] another body of the mind’s creation, complete in all its limbs and members and with transcendental faculties” (M.ii.17).

To recapitulate, the Buddha said that there is another body within our physical body which is immaterial. He said it is like a sword which can be drawn out from the scabbard. This immaterial body, however, can only decouple from the material body when we tune into something higher than this finite carcass of ours.

Short of fully realizing this immaterial, wave body, we can apply our consciousness to apperceiving purer states of temporal being by thinking higher thoughts, as it were, trying to avoid concerning ourselves with ignorance, anger, and raw desire. By such pure states of being, the Buddha meant the world of the gods or devas. Even the world of the gods is not, however, exactly perfect. But as far as bodily radios go, to be reborn into a divine radio is much better. However, if you love your human condition, then you have to take your chances after your death, that you are unlikely going to comeback to a happy life. In fact, the chances are slim you will even make it back to the human realm at all according to the Buddha.

As long as we persist in tuning into low states of being our prognosis for a decent rebirth appears to be dismal. Religions, these days, can’t help unless such religions teach detachment from the temporal and communion with the unconditioned. Instead, most religions these days teach almost the opposite, viz., over concern with the temporal and communion with human emotions and desires.

Addressing those who think this is all rubbish, science is pushing the envelop much faster and farther than we can imagine—and certainly faster than our prejudices. The work of P.P. Gariaev, et al., have made significant advances in what is called wave-genetics. The key to this remarkable advance is that the 98% of the DNA believed to be junk, may well be a communication apparatus which acts as a bridge between non-local, unconditioned reality (nirvana), and local, conditioned reality (samsara). People like the Buddha and his advanced students probably could go back and forth between the unconditioned and the conditioned. Being detuned from his body, the Buddha was neither in this temporal body, nor was he apart from it. He realized he was tuning into it; activating it; causing it to move. Moreover, he was no longer dependent on the body. The body depended upon the Buddha.