If I were a Zen Buddhist monk in the Sung Dynasty I would have already attended a number of lectures on key Sutras like the Surangama, Mahaparinirvana, or the Avatamsaka. As a result of this education, I would hopefully know in what general direction the great finger of Zen is pointing! It would be pointing to intuition of pure or luminous Mind. (When I use the term pure or luminous Mind it actually refers to the absolute which has many different names in Buddhism.)
Knowing what I must intuit, meditation will therefore serve to make me familiar with my own vast mental landscape as if to shed a light upon it. And remembering what the Sutras are really pointing to, I also have a good idea that various psychological states I encounter have to be superseded if I am to get close to pure Mind which I hasten to add, is not a psychological state—far from it.
In the West we don’t do Zen the old fashioned way. Not like the Zen monk in the Sung. We first begin with the practice of zazen (lit. sit down meditation). There is no extensive study of the Sutras beforehand, in other words. Some monk or nun teaches us zazen, for example, how to position our body on the zafu (sitting pillow). We never actually learn what zazen is about except maybe that mindlessly sitting makes you a Buddha. In fact, according to the Japanese Zen master Eihei Dôgen (1200–1253) it seems that sitting mindlessly is the Way.
“If you spend your time sitting straight [zazen] without attaining anything or understanding anything, then it would be the Way of Buddhas” (Shobogenzo Zuimonki).
Eihei Dôgen, of course, is wrong from a scriptural standpoint. Neither the Pali canon nor the Mahayana canon say that just sitting straight is the Way of the Buddha. But this is beside the point, the point being that we have to study certain important Sutras before we know in what direction, so to speak, to drive our meditation automobile. Parking our Zen auto beside the road as Dôgen appears to advocate is not the real Way of Buddhas. It is just being lost.
Simply sitting in zazen is inadequate. However, in all fairness, it might be an advantageous posture for calming down the monkey mind or the same, settling down our general level of anxiety. But can the posture, itself, blow away the obstructing clouds that make the sun of the luminous Mind seem nonexistent? Well, of course not.
The process of penetrating through the cloud-like veil of phenomenal being (in this case psychological phenomena) so as to reach its limit and to behold thus a luminosity that engulfs our finite carnal body, ain’t easy. Sitting or standing doesn’t make the process any easier. What is required is a kind of intuitive leaping ability! As regards this ability the literature of Mahayana Buddhism is not without lots of examples or hints for us intuitively to leap at. For example.
“Likewise this clear seeing as well as the objects (seen) and the void are fundamentally the perfect, pure, true Mind of the Wonderful, Bright, Supreme Bodhi wrongly perceived as form and voidness as well as hearing and seeing, just as a second moon is perceived with the accompanying misconception of real and unreal moons” (Surangama Sutra).
And,
“Said the Blessed One: It is not, Mahamati, that all things are Maya because they are both alike in being imagined and clung to as having multitudinousness of individual signs, but that all things are like Maya because they are unreal and like a lightning-flash which is seen as quickly disappearing” (Lankavatara Sutra).
Since we are intrinsically absolute Mind, which is most primordial, but as yet can’t distinguish itself from its transitory phenomena, passages like the previous two examples serve to jog our spiritual memory (smriti). With enough jogging we break the moorings which bind us to this temporal realm of clouds and illusions. We at once see the luminous Mind so that everything less than it appears illusory and empty. Sitting alone (zazen) cannot accomplish this. It is a fool’s errand which leads not to nirvana, but to the abyss.
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