Beings from Gamma Quadrant

To use a Star Trek term, some modern Buddhists (and I include Zennists), I dare say, seem to have lived in the Gamma Quadrant in a past life or two.  I find it difficult to read—let alone follow their ideas about Buddhism which includes a number of books about Zen.  Just when I think I have understood them—wham!—they shape-shift and I lose their whereabouts.

Books like Collins’ Selfless Persons, Peter Harvey’s The Selfless Mind, and What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula readily come to mind.  Such works generally come from the Theravada camp of Buddhism in which the self or attâ is rejected; being, I would guess, right up there with the bad guy, Mara the Evil One. (Keep in mind there is no mention that Mara is a champion of the self or attâ.  However he is the champion of the illusory Five Aggregates.)

For the beginner this becomes especially confusing when they follow the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism of which Zen is a part, and one day come across the Mahaparinirvana Sutra in which the self or atman is pretty much its main theme.

Kasyapa said to the Buddha: “O World-Honoured One! Is there Self in the 25 existences or not?” The Buddha said: “O good man! “Self” means “Tathagatagarbha” [Buddha-Womb, Buddha-Embryo, Buddha-Nature]. Every being has Buddha-Nature. This is the Self. Such Self has, from the very beginning, been under cover of innumerable defilements. That is why man cannot see it.

In the same large Sutra we also learn that the Tathagata subdues “the Mara of illusion, the Mara of the Five Aggregates” so that it becomes clear, if we are wise (and I  hope we are), that the atman is not the Five Aggregates and is really our Buddha-nature.  This means, of course, that the nasty aggregates or skandhas really belong to the evil guy Mara.  In light of this, the main problem that we face is to stop identifying with what we are not in the belief that it is what we are.

None of this is particularly difficult to contemplate, I hasten to add.  We are to reject all of the Five Aggregates because they are not our true self (and they belong to the Evil One).  On the other hand, it would be wrong to reject the self (i.e., who we are as pure Mind) and by doing so, affirm the Five Aggregates as the default position.  

Moving to Zen, it becomes all too fuzzy if we read Dainin Katagiri’s Returning To Silence, or Joko Beck’s, Everyday Zen, or even Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind which, ironically, is not for beginner’s since a good Zen teacher would tell a beginner in a few minutes that the animative side of your being is what you are trying to apperceive—and it’s hard to do this because you are wallowing in the mire of the sensual Five Aggregates!  Enough said.

Still, there are a lot of good books of Zen that deal with traditional Zen or are translated Zen texts, that anyone can read such as D.T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, translated by John Blofeld, and The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, translated by Red Pine.  There is nothing fuzzy about these works if we approach them with the understanding that we are supposed to have an intuition into Mind with a capital “M” from which our everyday thoughts are composed, including our emotions and all that we call “phenomena”.  In other words, Mind is the substratum of all things (sarvadharmâ) which we have to take from our theoretic understanding to “Wow, so this is Mind—holy Buddha this is wild!”

Meanwhile, those reborn into this world from the Gamma Quadrant will continue to publish muddled works of Buddhism and Zen so as to transmit their muddled state of mind to ours.  But we need to keep in mind that there are many other good books about Buddhism and Zen in print that we can use to help us on the path.  To this I would even include Tibetan books like Luminous Mind by the late Kalu Rinpoche which contains a lot of nice thoughts on Mind.  In many respects he reminds me of the old T’ang Zen masters who had a marvelous comprehension of Mind and its seminal importance.

Comments

[TGL]

I agree with much of what the author writes on this excellent blog yet sometimes, on the behest of my own teachers advice to always be aware of the errors in the "born" mind, I do not agree with the authors advice of Kalu Rimpoche being a read worthy lama on the subject of Mind. We speak of someone whom in the years after his death has been revealed as an abuser of women and in my view no more noteworthy then your average horny abbot in a western church. No bodhisattva has carte blanche to abuse a student with the excuse of tantric necessities. Having read some of this so called "Master" I do not consider him more spiritually awake then a can of sardines. The smell may be similar in both but the latter is more nourishing in order get through another day towards freedom from the corporeal influence on ones spirit.

There are many testimonies on the sexual scandals cloaked demons in robes has caused Buddhism and other religions and this particular link on Kalu Rimpoche is but one of many sad stories of what really goes on behind the scenes of so called "holy men":

http://www.anandainfo.com/tantric_robes.html

TGL