The Zennist

The absurd lightness of being

The title,The Absurd Lightness of Being is a tribute to Milan Kundera and his philosophic novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) which is a play on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of “eternal return” that all events in the universe have already occurred an infinite number of times and shall do so again, and again.  Kundera writes:  

“If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. This is why Nietzsche called the eternal return the heaviest of burdens” (1984, 3).

By turning Nietzsche’s weighty notion of eternal return upside down as a “lightness of being” Kundera is able to expose all that is superficial in our world today, especially, our reluctance to engage adequately with the heaviness of being symbolized through Nietzsche's eternal return and, I would add, the Buddhist idea of rebirth and all that it entails.  

For inexplicable reasons many of us only want the lightness of being even though history warns us of life’s almost unbearable heaviness of being.  But this wish—and trying to ignore future heaviness—will only lead to future man-made hells in my opinion.

So what are the consequences of desiring the lightness of being in which many wish to avoid the heavy side of life?  Let’s take the current belief that we live only one life; that after we die, that's it—there is no karma or rebirth.  Incidentally, this view is also shared by some modern Buddhists who reject the Buddha’s notion of rebirth/reincarnation.

By believing that this life is our only life we are giving ourselves a green light to live with reckless abandon, are we not?  The only thing that is stopping some of us is we’re not quite sure that this is, in fact, the only life we have.  After all, being born once does not come with any guarantee that it will not happen again, or that we won't end up in Nietzsche's eternal return. 

Another consequence suggests that if we have but one life, then all life is entirely superficial if not actually meaningless and insignificant.  Even suffering and the ending of suffering count for nothing.  Indeed, it will all end one day—perhaps even violently—but it will end with all is for naught. 

From what I can gather, according to Kundera, from where such lightness views arise, for example, that this is the only life we have, owe pretty much to the totalizing effect that kitsch has on our psyche.  It is so pervasive that we even refuse to engage with profound anti-kitsch ideas thus ennobling the opposite:  a kind of agnostic stupidity which doesn’t want to know. On this track, kitsch is aptly described by Frank Burch Brow taken from his book, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste:

For Kundera, kitsch is a beautiful lie; it prettifies and falsifies the world, often by embracing, implicitly, a cause or an ideology that requires cheap emotions and an unqualified (but blinkered) acceptance of reality, a categorical “agreement with being” (129).

The way I see it, what kitsch works to achieve is to hide the heaviness of our being that can only be overcome spiritually through a great deal of effort.  This may explain why kitsch abhors the Buddha’s notion of rebirth and Nietzsche’s kind and institutes the one life plan!  Kitsch is also behind every work of propaganda.  It shows the multitude that everything is okay in River City, so to speak.  It pumps out slick, colorful ads of smiling little blond children running to greet dad who just came home from work driving his big chromed Buick.  Above all, kitsch implicitly wants us to believe that whatever I believe in—and we all agree—is the truth.

Not only does kitsch create a fake, gaudy world for its inhabitants, but it also is capable of creating a fake religious attitude.  

In the main, the kitsch religious attitude fails to understand that true reality is something profoundly deep; that it lies beyond the emotions and sentiments.  In fact, true reality can only be accessed by introspection, an introspection capable of penetrating through the hard rind of phenomenality, including this corporeal body and its entire existence.  This is something a modern kitschified religion doesn't want to think about or engage with.  It is off-limits, in other words.  Kundera likens this attitude with how we treat “shit.”  He says, “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.”  Nevertheless, shit is a fact of everyone’s life, just as introspection is or karma, or our rebirth, according to Buddhism.  

For a Buddhist to dismiss rebirth saying, “I don't believe in it” is a symptom of kitschness—and shit avoidance.  These same Buddhists have only lived on the surface of Buddhism because their very being seeks only the lightness of being and will not settle for anything less.  In other words, they are not ready for prime time gravitas (i.e., guru, meaning heavy, great, large, violent, serious, important, weighty, of much account, etc.).  They will also be the ones who will eventually destroy Buddhism with their kitsch.

Ways of investigating Buddhism

What Buddhists come to know about Buddhism generally depends on the way they come to know it.  In other words, how they investigate Buddhism will determine what they know about it.  This also means that different ways of investigating Buddhism will likely lead to different conclusions about it and even conflict. 

If, for example, I decide to join a Zen center in my home town I am really choosing a way of investigating Buddhism.  This is a much different way of investigating Buddhism than taking a course in Buddhism offered at a university.  It is certainly different than going on a three year retreat with a Lama, or going to South Korea or Taiwan to become a monk or nun.

Turning to popular forms of Buddhism, if I decide to follow the teachings of Jack Kornfield, doing insight meditation (vipassana), I will naturally form different conclusions about Buddhism than say those who have attended a Genpo Roshi Rohatsu Big Mind Zen retreat.  I think we can see where this is heading.

We might also say that what we learn about Buddhism is not so much Buddhism, per se, but what we believe Buddhism to be.  Practicing many years at a particular can, In fact, fill us with needless prejudices.  We can also grow to become smug and arrogant so that we do not spend much time investigating the Buddha’s discourses both in the Pali and Mahayana canon.

Perhaps a question we should ask ourselves is there a right way to investigate Buddhism so that the conclusions we come to about it are more in line with the words of the Buddha?  The answer of course is yes, there is.  What hinders us is a narrow (hina) path of investigation that tends to exclude more than include; one that, in fact, ignores the Four Reliances, namely, rely on the Dharma, not the person (pudgala), rely on the spirit not the letter, rely on Sutras of ultimate meaning not relative meaning, rely on gnosis (jñâna) not discursive thinking (vijñâna). 

1900 vegetarian Thanksgiving

Since recorded history, vegetarians have been around for a long time, going back to the ancient Greeks.  Even we Americans, despite our love of cooked meat hastily put between two buns, have a fondness for the vegetable—or did at one time in the not too distant past.  

I was just looking at a Thanksgiving menu in a Good Housekeeping magazine, 1900.  It was suggested by Mary Foster Snider.  The bill of fare showed the following:

Celery soup          Nut butter sandwiches

          Olives       Salted almonds

     Lentil cutlets with tomato sauce

  Rice croquettes with red currant jelly

Vegetable turkey     Brown gravy     Cranberry jelly

Italian chestnuts (boiled)   Creamed onions

Grape sherbet

Nuttose timbales     Mushroom sauce

Apple and nut salad

Granose biscuit     Almond butter

Pumpkin pudding     Lemon pie

White fruit cake

Pears     Apples     Oranges     Nuts

Coffee

This all looks quite appetizing to me.  And not a speck of meat (well, there might have been milk and an egg or two but that would be no problem today with our substitutes).

For the temperate carnivores among us some foods served at the earliest Thanksgiving were oysters and eels and other kinds of sea foods.  Incidentally, it was Native Americans who introduced the white settlers to their first taste of oysters, not to mention it was the American turkey that won the hearts (I mean stomach) of the European.  Even Charles IX (27 June 1550—30 May 1574) of France served turkey at his wedding banquet!

The Light of Mahayana

If any of you have tried to read Suzuki’s translation of the Lankavatara Sutra it is not easy to get a firm hold of this Sutra’s real meaning.  It is not because Suzuki was a terrible translator—he was not.  Yet, there is something there that reading this Sutra a thousand times will not shed any light on.

 

Beneath its exterior, the Lankavatara is trying to tell us that the very content or substance of our thoughts is Mind.  This also means that we should understand Mind to be the substance of everything from raindrops to the milky way.  Yet, we must be forewarned that we cannot intuit this Mind by means of thought.

 

Holding this idea before us, the difference between our thoughts and Mind, as we attempt to plumb the Lankavatara Sutra’s position, owes to the duality thinking creates which attempts to paint a picture of Mind, which is not Mind, the substance of all.

 

Since the activity of thinking can never ‘think’ Mind, directly coming into contact with it, we will always remain at a distance from Mind.  As far as the Lankavatara Sutra is concerned we will never get to first base with Mind by trying to think our way to it.  More to the point, we will never experience what the Lanakavatara describes as the “Light of Mahayana” (mahâyana-prabhâsa) described here.

 

“Then, Mahamati, sustained by the power of the Buddhas, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas at their first stage will attain the Bodhisattva-Samadhi, known as the Light of Mahayana, which belongs to the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas. They will immediately see the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones appearing before them personally, who come from all the different abodes in the ten quarters of the world and who now facing the Bodhisattvas will impart to them their sustaining power displayed with the body, mouth, and words.”

 

As unbelievable as this reads, the Light of Mahayana amounts to a spiritual baptism when the seeker, for the first time, dips his or her toe, so to speak, into the holy waters of pure Mind.  To the seeker’s utter amazement they directly witness the entire world which stretches out before them to be Mind-only, although it is shaped into trees, rocks, buildings, people, and even the sun above.  

 

How the Light of Mahayana came about, that the “Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones” appear before the seeker, probably owes more to the seeker’s love of trying to penetrate the mystery of Buddhism, than anything else.  

 

While this state doesn’t last for long—maybe a week or two—it soon dawns on this new Bodhisattva who experienced it, that this extraordinary experience, according to the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones, will have to be back-engineered!  

 

What, therefore, lies before the fledgling Bodhisattva who just underwent the Light of Mahayana is the daunting task of figuring out what really happened; then being able to generate this very same experience, at will, and even to a limited degree to share it with others.  

 

What this means, in a practical way, is that one has to plow through the Sutras for many years—but the good part, they will also be mysteriously aided by a “sustaining power” which helps to bring about the proper insight which reveals the world to be Mind-only.  

 

If all of this sounds unbelievable, it is until it happens to you, personally.  For anyone to doubt the Light of Mahayana requires the same biased mental disposition as one would expect of those who are skeptical of such events as a close encounter of the fourth kind when, according to Jacques Vallee of UFO fame, “witnesses experienced a transformation of their sense of reality.”  

 

For the sincere seeker, they can’t be daunted by the narrow limits of their culture which will try to scout such an experience.  In a word, they spiritually have to leave their presuppositions behind about the nature of reality.  Recalling the example of Siddhartha, he left the limitations and expectations of his own culture behind in order to achieve enlightenment.  

 

 

 

Zen master T'aego

Korean Zen master T'aego (1301–1382) proved to be an outstanding Korean Zennist who became the National Teacher of Korea.  J.C. Cleary, in his book, A Buddha From Korea, writes about T'aego that he

"committeed [sic] himself to the Buddhist life, and over the years he lived to the full many of its characteristic roles:  youthful seeker, practicing discipline and traveling to Buddhist centers to seek wisdom; dedicated mystic, approaching wisdom with the cool intensity of the practical path; mature teacher, staying a while here and there to guide people and aid their development.  In his fifties T'aego became a national figure: he was invited to the capital, pursued by high society and a fickle king, honored and exiled and honored again" (64).

Looking at T'aego the “dedicated mystic” throughout his early life as a young man he wrestled with the koan:  The ten thousand things return to the one; to what does the one return?"  Finally at age 33 he had a profound awakening.  He came to realize the true medium of all which could, indeed, become plural or singular and still not be either.

The following excerpt is from Cleary's book, A Buddha From Korea.  T'aego provides a brief outline to the King about the fundamental principles of Zen (K., Son).  I will present a portion of it here, for the reader. (I would like to present it all but my typing skills are pretty bad—I struggle!)  The reader should pay strict attention to the first part.  T'aego is describing the absolute medium of existence or the same, the Dharma the Buddha discovered when he said that it was, "profound, of deep splendor, difficult to see, etc.."  Keep in mind this is not a phenomenon of any sort.  Nor is it thinkable.  Nor is it pure awareness as some latter day Zennists are wont to believe.  

"There is something bright and clear, without falsity, without biases, tranquil and unmoving, possessed of vast consciousness, fundamentally without birth and death and discrimination, without names and forms and words.  It engulfs space and covers all of heaven and earth, all of form and sound, and is equipped to function.

If we speak of its essence, it is so vast it embraces everything, so that nothing is outside of it.  If we speak about its function, then it goes beyond the abilities of the samadhi of the spiritual powers of the wisdoms numerous as the dusts in the buddha-lands:  it is at once hidden and manifest, sovereign and free in all directions, with great spiritual powers.  Even great sages cannot get to the end of it.

This one thing is always with each and every person.  Whether you move or not, whenever you encounter circumstances and objects, it is always very obvious and clear, clear everywhere, revealed in everything.  It is quietly shining in all activities.  As an expedient, it is called Mind.  It is also called the Path, and the king of the myriad dharmas, and Buddha.  Buddha said that whether walking, sitting, or lying down, we are always within it.  Even Yao and Shun said:  'Holding faithfully to the mean, without contrived activity, everything under heaven is well ordered.'  Weren't Yao and Shun sages?  Weren't the buddha and enlightened teachers special people?  They simply managed to illuminate This Mind" (101–102).

Zen master T'aego had a good grasp of pure Mind.  He goes on further to say, "If there is some other teaching outside of This Mind, this is a deluded theory, not the words of Buddha."  When I read that, you can imagine I smiled as would any Zennist who daily struggles to preserve true Dharma in the face of counterfeit Dharma.

As with all authentic Zen teachers, it is easy to sense that T'aego had his eye on the true Dharma, the same Dharma the Buddha saw.  This is not the case with some modern teachers, especially in the West.   They avoid teaching This Mind because they've never actually realized it (and it shows!).  I can only guess as to why they never pursue it.  That's another subject.

The truth of our beliefs

The truth of our religious beliefs does not necessarily rest on whether or not those beliefs come from the actual founder or not.  What is important is whether or not the experiences those beliefs predict can actually be realized.  

I say this to those who are of the opinion that if you can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Buddha actually spoke his discourses, then Buddhism is of no value.  Much of it can be dismissed, in other words, as an obvious work of fiction.

This leads me to say that the real test of any religion is its actual ability to guide a follower to the absolute, which the follower can verify, directly.  Accordingly, it is not a true religion that tells its followers to believe in a set of dogmas then go no further waiting, instead, for the promised savior to return who is supposed to deliver his patient followers from their misery.  This is not religion—not in a Buddhist sense.

Religion for Buddhism only requires of us that we internally try to put into practice the Buddha’s words in order to see what he saw when he attained enlightenment.  It makes no difference who spoke a particular discourse, some of which were spoken by Shariputra, if they get us to the other shore of nirvana.

For those who have a great deal of faith in the Buddha’s discourses; and if there is a sincere effort on their part to investigate the Buddha’s teachings in order to lay bare their truth, then the proper experiences will naturally follow which will verify that Buddhism is a true religion.

Devaluing the canon

A modern Buddha would not have required an attendant like Ananda to set his teachings to memory.  Modern technology would have provided a modern day Buddha with plenty of ways to preserve his teachings, from books, digital recordings, to DVDs.  

 

Let us imagine for a moment that this modern Buddha left all of his discourses on a set of DVDs and also in a set of books before he died.

 

Wouldn’t it be extremely odd if his followers, after is death, did not avail themselves to the bulk of his discourses but, instead, preferred their own teachings, or turned to psychology, or tried to blend Buddhism with skepticism and the physical sciences?  Of course it would!  But this is exactly what is going on presently.  Given all that Gautama left us twenty-five hundred years ago, little of it is being utilized.  Most of it, I dare say, is ignored by the modern Buddhist public.

 

Given the enormous bulk of the Buddhist canon we possess, I find it troubling that what seems to be the two most popular Sutras consist mainly of the Heart Sutra, which is not an actual Sutra, and the Kalama Sutta, a discourse given to non-Buddhists.  Of course, one may only guess as to why these two Sutras are popular.  My own guess is they reveal the disposition of the modern psyche.  It is nihilistic and has a strong aversion towards the idea of karma and rebirth.  Thus, the modern psyche likes its Sutras to be about emptiness and skepticism.

 

In light of the above, to understand the sense in which Buddhism is currently being presented to the public, it is not farfetched to consider that it is being revised on almost a daily basis to make it chime with modernity’s own view of reality which is hardly Buddhist.  There is also little question that the average modern Buddhist shows little or no great interest in diving into the canon, in a fair minded way, to study what the Buddha may have actually said.  

 

Where this may all lead us if we are not careful, is to full-blown nihilism when, to use  Nietzsche’s words, “The highest values devaluate themselves” which boils down to a belief in valuelessness which when it enters into the halls of Buddhism attempts to de-transcendentalize it.

 

 

No practice without Sutras

Continuing from the previous blog, i.e., What practice entails, let me first quote Zen master Tsung-mi on the importance of using the Sutras correctly.

“If one just depends on the sayings of the Buddha and does not infer for himself, his realization will be no more than a matter of baseless faith.  If one just holds on to direct perception, taking what he perceives for himself to be authoritative without comparing it to the sayings of the Buddha, then how can he know whether it is true or false.”

First, in a nutshell, what is Tsung-mi saying as regards the Sutras in the context of authentic practice?  He is saying that our intuition[s]—shallow or profound—must align with the Sutras.  If during our practice we find that a particular intuition of ours and the Buddha’s words, found in the Sutras, are miles apart then our intuition is probably incorrect.  If we refuse to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, with our intuition, in spite of it being at odds with what the Buddha said, then we are guilty to some degree of hubris.

Making no apologies for what I am about to say, a sizable chunk of pop Buddhist literature doesn’t tally with what actually the Buddha says in the Sutras.  Not wishing to name names, but when a Zen master suggests, in so many words, that their dog has achieved some kind of Zenic epiphany since the dog doesn’t worry about the meaning of life nor appears to care about being liberated, you almost automatically sense something isn’t right.

Again, when a modern day Zen master says that the aim of sitting in zazen is not to think you begin to wonder.  If thinking is so contrary to Zen then maybe what Zen practitioners require is a frontal lobotomy!  Where exactly in what Sutra does the Buddha tell his followers not to think?

If one is really practicing Buddhism, they have to spend a lot of time studying the Sutras, otherwise they are not authentic practitioners.  As I have tried to point out a number of times, Sutras are more like navigation maps.  It is exceedingly difficult to get from point A to B without them.  They are not by any comparison like the literature found in the Bible or other related works.  The Buddha was neither a prophet nor a messiah.  

We have to think of the Buddha to be more like an explorer of the inner man who finds his other shore which is beyond birth and death.  After finding this other shore, out of compassion, the Buddha, we could say, also leaves to posterity a lot of really great maps.  This means, of course, that we too have to become spiritual navigators.  We will have to weather many storms in our own small vessel—but at least the Buddha has given us all that we need to cross this vast ocean of suffering if we avail ourselves to his discourses and really ponder them night and day.

If we should chance one day to meet an authentic Zen practitioner let us imagine no other than some bespectacled rustic living in a small house or cabin reading Sutras; who then spends the rest of the day pondering over what he had just previously read trying to see what the Sutra is pointing to in is own mind.

Amongst White Clouds: What practice entails

 

 While we in the West are hesitant to admit it, the recordings of the heart of Buddhism still lie hidden within its texts.  These texts are essentially thousands of different maps and fingers pointing to the Buddha's recondite Dharma that he realized under the Bodhi-tree.  If we truly intend to practice Buddhism we will need these maps and fingers because the territory where the Bodhi-tree grows is not in our all-too-human world.  It lies quite beyond it.

 

 

I just finished watching Edward A. Burger’s documentary film, Amongst White Clouds, who, by the way, is himself a serious Buddhist practitioner.  In the film, the last Buddhist hermit monk Burger meets and interviews provides us with the essence of what real Buddhist practice entails.

 

“The text [Sutras] contain the true path to buddhahood.  With a little ability ... wherever your mind arrives ... you say, hey! this text talks about that place.  Your mind is there, and the text talks about it, so you have arrived there, right?  Now if you don't have this ability ... even if you read something in a text ... if your mind isn’t there, then you won’t understand, so you practice more.  It’s easy to read a text, difficult to understand it.”

 

The hermit monk who said this, along with the other Buddhist hermits in the film, including a hermit nun, live in China's Zhongnan Mountain range where supposedly Lao-tzu/Laozi composed the Tao Te Ching/Daodejing.  All the hermits who dwell here live in small, rustic stone dwellings scattered throughout this verdant mountain range.  

 

Not in any showy or pretentious manner, these hermits keep the tradition of Buddhism alive through their practice.  From what I could see, their practice seems not to have succumbed to any of the modern tendencies which seem, regrettably, to have made inroads into Western Buddhist practice.  One regrettable example is the enthronement of zazen or seated meditation over the text, not to mention the psychologization of Buddhism, in general, changing its focus to self-help.

 

What is evident from Burger’s documentary is the daily life of tending a sizable garden, cooking, building and repairing hermitages, fetching water and firewood, are integral elements of practice, not just sitting.  But of more importance was the place of the Buddhist text.  It was like the Buddha was still teaching; who was alive and well in these mountains.

 

To some extent, the flim reminded me of what I used to do at my ranch many years ago.  I would rise early in the morning; light the kerosene lamp; stir the coals in the old iron stove; add an oak log; then crack the Lankavatara Sutra which I can assure you, at the time, I didn't understand!  For the rest of the day I hoped that I might understand just a tiny portion of it.  Maybe when cutting firewood I might even understand one word of it!

 

Burger’s film conveys the impression that the life of the Buddhist hermit monk and nun is not by any means easy nor is it brutally painful or sad.  It is exactly made to order for a seeking mind—a mind fully given to comprehending itself which when it happens, hurls one beyond the sphere of birth and death.  In a way, there is a very positive and uplifting side to the life of the Buddhist hermit if they have faith that all of the Buddhist texts do, in fact, point to liberation as a real and attainable goal.

 

By the way, I would highly recommend this movie to be included in the reader's list of great Buddhist flicks.  It is not going to enlighten you nor does it romanticize the Buddhist path, but it will show you a great deal of ‘practice’ in its proper context.

 

 

Finding itself

The immediacy of being we call the 'now' or self or sensory consciousness, is an immediacy that is nascent and undeveloped.  We have not awakened (bodhi), in other words.  Moreover, unbeknownst to us this same immediacy is the absolute, but one that has no knowledge of itself; which still abides in a state of avidya.  As paradoxical as this seems, this absolute as Mind is, but it is not yet an object of itself.  What still stands before it is the dissimilarity between its immediate being and its full awakening which has not been completed.

Thus there remains a goal to be reached which is Mind’s gnosis of itself.

For the average person, what they perceive as the phenomenal world, including their thoughts, is always inadequate for them.  Nothing matches up with them, in other words.  They are never satisfied.  In such a condition, in which the subject is the undeveloped primordial Mind, it simply doesn't know what it is or how to see itself, directly.  While everything is potentially okay, the average person feels off-kilter; attending only to phenomena.

Turning now to the sage, the sage’s attention, like a pure beam of light, penetrates through the phenomenal fog to such a degree that he objectively meets up with the source of the attending (i.e., Mind).  Mind has found itself, in other words.  This, I should add, is the exact meaning of samâdhi; especially of right or samyak samâhdi found in the Eightfold Aryan Path.

For the spiritual adept, reaching sagehood is a path of mediation and practice.  As I am able to penetrate through the veiling fog of phenomena, attending to ever finer and finer states of focus, I eventually reach the limit of phenomena which is no phenomena.  Here is utter emptiness—except for pure Mind, the primordial substance of all things.  I am now directly attending to Mind as an object, which is empty of all fluctuations.  But this is not a subjective state.  It is gnosis.  But it is also the overcoming of the physical abode of being reducing it to an illusion.  Mind is the only reality, fullest attained Mind that is.