The Zennist

Was the Buddha the first enlightened dude?

Was the Buddha a dude somewhat like the character “The Dude” played by Jeff Bridges in the film, The Big Lebowski (1998)?  I ask this question because I remember something Bodhidharma had said about the Buddha that sounded dudistic. 

“A buddha is an idle person.  He doesn’t run around after fortune and fame.  What good are such things in the end?" (Red Pine, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, p. 35).

While it is speculative on my part to take up the subject of dudism as regards the Buddha, the life of the Buddha is certainly not far from the contemporary ‘dude profile’.  As I have observed throughout my life, every true dude is always trying to go with the flow, avoiding needless hassles.  This is what the Buddha did which eventually led him to the babe Sujata, her magical elixir, and then the Bodhi-tree where he sat and took on Mara the Evil One finally to win full enlightenment.

Backing up a little, the ‘dude path’ opened up for the Buddha after he found out that doing painful ascetic practices to achieve enlightenment were not going with the flow.  The true means to enlightenment—and the dude flow—is more akin to Gertrude Stein’s wonderful insight who said:  “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”  The really doing nothing part, I hasten to add, is not even caring to agitate one’s mind so that the unagitated, clear-light Buddha Mind is instantly seen.

When the Buddha rejected the path of painful ascetic practices, which we can guess went against the way of the dude, his colleagues were not too happy.  They said:

“By the achievements of this path, the Sramana Gautama [the Buddha-to-be] will never be able to manifest the saintly wisdom which is above the highest human knowledge.  As he is now eating food in abundance, and as he is begging food, he is clearly an ignorant and a stupid fellow” (Lalitavistara Sutra).  

Yes!—Gautama the Buddha, at this point, became a full-fledged dude.  But even before the Buddha came to reject such asceticism to go with the flow, he showed dude tendencies.  According to the Lalitavistara Sutra, he always practiced asceticism with ten young village girls by the names of Bala, Balagupta, Supriya, Vajayasena, Atimuktakamala, Sundari, and Kumbhakari, Uluvillika, Jatilika, and of course Sujata.  This prompts me to say that no one can be a true dude and neglect women—and least of all a young woman like Sujata bearing her magical drink that would insure the Buddha’s enlightenment.

No doubt the foremost and the greatest of all religious dudes, was the Buddha.

 

Why can't we have better Buddhist writers?

Writing a book or a blog for beginners can easily fall into the bad habit of dumbing down Buddhism.  As a consequence, what the beginner learns is not Buddhism.  Here is an example of what I mean. 

In the book Buddhism for Beginners, Thubten Chodron answers the question, "What is the essence of the Buddha's teachings" with this: "Simply speaking, it is to avoid harming others and to help them as much as possible."  Sorry, but that ain't the essence of the Buddha's teaching, especially, not when the canon can say what the essence is, and do it clearly.  The following passage is the Patimokkha (S., prâtimoksa), which can be found in  the Dhammapada and the Mahapadana Sutta of the Digha-Niakaya.  Patimokkha, by the way, has to do with release/mokkha from bondage.

Forbearance and forgiveness is the highest kind of penance (tapas).
Nirvana is declared to be the highest (object) by the Buddhas.
A mendicant (samano) does not harm others.
One who harms others is not a mendicant.
Abstinence from all evils, accumulation of all that is good,
Purification of one's mind (sa-citta),
That is the teaching (sasana) of the Buddhas.

Beginners need to read the Buddha’s teaching, or works that contain a great deal of his teachings.  Comments can then follow his words which might explore, in depth, some of the terms used by the Buddha serving thus to educate the beginner, opening up a path for them.  After all, Buddhism is about the Buddha’s teaching.  This may also help to prevent a Buddhist ‘cult of personality’ from taking root of which there are several, presently.

 

Alan Watts on the big Self

First written when he was only nineteen, Alan Watts' book, The Spirit of Zen (1935), is a much different book when compared with most books written by contemporary Western Zen writers.  At nineteen, Watts apparently did his homework and had enough insight into Buddhism to at least see the scope of Mahayana Buddhism, and on the same track, but more importantly, realize that Mahayana did not deny the Self as did Hinayana Buddhism.  He wrote: 

"The Mahayana, on the other hand, considers that a true Self is found when the false one is renounced.  When man neither identifies himself with his person nor uses it as a means of resisting life, he finds that the Self is more than his own being; it includes the whole universe.  The Hinayana, realizing that no single thing as such is the Self, is content with that realization; hence it is a denial of life, conceiving Enlightenment only as the negative attainment of understanding that all separate entities are anatta—without self, and anicca—without permanence.  But the Mahayana completes this denial with an affirmation; while denying the existence of self in any particular thing, it finds it in the total interrelatedness of all things" (The Spirit of Zen (1958), p. 27).

Watts is making sense here.  There is much to back this up in a number of Mahayana Sutras such as the Mahaparinirvana and Lankavatara Sutras.  Although this book by the young Watts is not perfect, nevertheless for its spirit, it is a much better book than some of the stuff pumped out today which falls under the general category of self-help Zen which a serious  student of Zen should avoid.  Self-help Zen is not interested in words like these which are from Watts.

“In Mahayana philosophy this divinity, the Self, was known as the Buddha-nature—the ultimate, eternal and universal principle of which all things are manifestations.  In Sanskrit it is called Tathata or ‘Suchness’, a term which has a close affinity with the Chinese Tao or the ‘Way of things’.  This principle is described as the Buddha-nature because to be a Buddha means that one has realized one's identity with Tathata, with the one true Self which is not conditioned by distinctions between ‘I’ and ‘You’, ‘Me’ and ‘Mine’, ‘This’ and ‘That’” (p. 29).

In a word, to study the big Self is to forget the little self that self-help Zennists seem to be wallowing in.

Keeping real Zen alive

I thought that I had mentioned this book, Zen Dawn, in earlier blogs.  Oops—guess I didn’t.  Anyway, J.C. Cleary’s translation of early Zen texts discovered at Tun Huang is a good buy.  So break your piggy bank and get a copy.

 In Cleary’s book, fairly often, one comes across nice stuff like this:

 The Lankavatara Sutra says:  “Inherent Mind manifests objects appearing everywhere amid the five phenomena accord to kind.”  What are the five phenomena?  Names, forms, false thinking, true wisdom, and thusness.  For this reason, all things are nameless:  they are named by mind.  Just be mindless oneself, and there are no names and forms.  Then it is called true wisdom and thusness.  The Dharmapada Sutra says:  “The dense array of myraid images is the impression of One Reality” (p. 21).

 Cleary’s translations spill a lot of ink on Mind, Buddha-nature, and other terms for the transcendent, of which we really are, but don’t yet fully realize it.  Personally, I have to bow to Cleary for his steadfast dedication to keeping Zen and true Buddhism alive which, I dare say, is slowly being snuffed out by people like Stephen Batchelor who just don’t get Buddhism or Zen.

 I should mention that when Batchelor was a Zen monk studying under the Korean Zen master Kusan Sunim.  Sunim, like all good traditional Zen teachers, especially in China and Korea, put all of his efforts into getting his students to obtain a glimpse into pure Mind because realizing Buddha or the awakened Mind is pivotal to Zen.  Without this awakening—no Zen, no Buddhism.  Period.  

 Astonishingly, among the many things we learn about Mr. Batchelor from his new book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, is that he essentially said Zen is stupid and quit.  In a nutshell, he refused to have anything to do with gaining an insight into Mind.  He writes:

 “I had difficulties with much of the underlying philosophy of Kusan Sunim’s teaching.  I struggled with his view that the “this” of “What is this?” denoted a transcendent Mind, which he also called the “Master of the body.”  When I consulted the Chinese text where the question “What is this?” first appears, it made no mention of Mind or a Master of the body, but simply said:  “What is this thing, and how did it get here?”  I liked the blunt earthiness of “thing,” since it offered little scope for metaphysical elaboration.  But this is how Kusan Sunim explained what we were doing:  “The purpose of Zen meditation is to awaken to the Mind....There is a Master who rules this body who is neither the label ‘mind,’ the Buddha, a material thing, nor empty space.  Having negated these four possibilities, a question will arise as to what this Master really is.  If you continue inquiring in this way, the question will become more intense.  Finally, when the mass of questioning enlarges to a critical point, it will suddenly burst.  The entire universe will be shattered and only you original nature will appear before you.  In this way you will awaken” (pp. 67–68).

 Despite all the Buddhist literature on Mind (and believe me there is a lot of it), Batchelor refused to accept Sunim’s teaching about Mind.  He said of it—in particular about Mind—, “Once again, I found myself confronted by the specter of a disembodied spirit” (p. 68).  

 In light of Batchelor’s complete rejection of Buddha Mind (i.e., his term “disembodied spirit”), I suspect, that he would be the last person to read Cleary’s book, Zen Dawn, since the transcendent is discussed on virtually every page.  

 Back to the beginning of this blog.  Please buy Cleary’s book Zen Dawn before the Batchelors of secular Buddhism start a bonfire and toss Zen Dawn and other books into the flames which speak of Mind. 

 

The mysterious awakening

In 1932 Max Planck, the father of Quantum theory, said that “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature” insofar as we “are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”  

This mystery, to be sure, is quite profound and hyper-subtle.  If science is arrogant enough to believe that it is getting closer to solving the mystery of nature, it is severely deluded.  Science which depends on sensory consciousness and instruments designed to increase the power of the senses is only increasing the scope and depth of nature’s mystery—not solving it.  As a result, only more questions will arise; certainly not answers which remove the mystery.

Solving the mystery of nature is not a job for science.  Its job is to create useful and practical fictions which extends to technology and its development.  Where science errs is in not realizing that the scaffolding it creates is not the same as what it is placed against.  In other words we cannot, through the senses, know the transcendent thing-in-itself (Kant) as something determinate except to become (or awaken to) the transcendent thing-in-itself which always lies beyond the plane of our sensory experience including pure reason and thought.  But in the main, science cannot except this.  Instead, science chooses to cheat.  It changes the transcendent thing-in-itself to an empirical thing-in-itself then sets about to create its fictions with fictional answers.

Buddhism, unlike modern science, takes the path of least resistance and presuppositionlessness.  By doing so, the mystery can better awaken to itself.  In other words, enlightenment consists in mystically seeing the mystery in all of its glory including the fact that the sensory world is composed of this mystery.  This, I hasten to add is inscrutable nirvana, Suchness (tathata) or absolute Mind which are labels for this awakened-to-mystery. 

“The dharma obtained by me is profound, of deep splendor, difficult to see, difficult to understand, incomprehensible, having the incomprehensible as its scope, fine, subtle, the sense of which can only be understood by the wise” (Catusparisat Sûtra).

 

Meditational hypocrisy

When I first sat in meditation at my local Soto Zen center long ago (I think it was in 1965), for me, it was like practicing being still.  I had never sat this still before.  But this was not the case with my ordinary human mind which included lots of internal dialogue, and picture thinking.  Sitting still for long periods of time I didn’t find that difficult.  It was trying to control my human mind that was difficult.  Let me put it this way.  My body was still but not my mind.  I had achieved a state of meditational hypocrisy!

In an attempt to calm down my noisy mind, I would follow my breath until images of some of the girls I dated in high school came dancing through my brain.  It was sort of like in the first scene in the movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) when the character Frank Chambers first sees Cora Smith played by Lana Turner.  Discipline immediately breaks down.  I couldn’t follow my breath, but I could follow my mental image of Shirley, the A cheerleader, who I had dated several times.  Still, on the outside I appeared to be a seated Buddha.  I hardly moved a muscle.

Trying to control my thoughts was difficult.  I have to admit, I was never successful.  The only benefit I could see from seated meditation was that I gained the ability to stand in a long line better than most people or sit longer without fidgeting.

Only many years later did I come to understand the more profound fundamentals of meditation.  It wasn’t about trying to control my thoughts or follow my breathing.  To put it briefly, meditation was about gaining the laser-like ability to focus directly on the very substance of my thoughts and mental images (this substance being pure Mind or tathata).  It was also the ability to be more and more antecedent to my breathing—neither following the in breath nor the out breath.  Naturally, the physical body became less of a burden but also it became apparent that my ability to connect with the very substance of thought (i.e., pure Mind) brought me, in a manner of speaking, to a place or universal medium that was utterly transcendent.

I gradually came to understand that the phenomenal world with all of its variety was fundamentally the substance of pure Mind—nothing more.  This Mind only seemed to be pluralized owning to ignorance.  Moreover, not knowing the medium of pure Mind it seemed the only path I could take, as far as meditation was concerned, was being a meditational hypocrite: calm looking on the outside but with a monkey mind (kapicitta) on the inside. 

 

The real practice of Zen

The real practice of Zen is all about trying to remember the Buddha Mind (or Buddha-nature) that we've forgotten and by remembering it awaken (sambodhi).  In this respect, remembering our Buddha Mind is more like a search.  In addition, this search for the Buddha Mind is not so much like a search for a material object in the example of looking for our car keys, rather it is more like a search for the most intrinsic part of us which, believe it or not, is immaterial, undying and certainly not dependent upon this frail body we inhabit.

For such a search the mind of the searcher has to be an ‘open mind’, open to new possibilities and, equally, different ways of perceiving both their mental world and the external world around them.  With such an open mind the search for Buddha Mind is much like the first oxherding picture of the Ten Oxherding Pictures.  This picture is meant to represent our wild, all-too-human mind that, like a dense forest, hides or conceals the Buddha Mind, symbolized by an ox.  At this point, we must say that short of the actual gnosis or acceptance with Mind, i.e., the ox, the Mahayana path is unapproachable.  

To reiterate, the real practice of Zen is about remembering the Buddha Mind that is hidden in us.  Because we have forgotten it we believe in and adhere to an external world and discrimination.  We don’t realize that what appears before us does not exist in reality.  According to the Lankavatara Sutra, “it is indeed Mind that is seen as multiplicity” which means that everything we perceive is an illusion; merely the warp and woof of Mind.  In order to know Mind concretely, in all of its depth and profundity, we have to remember Buddha Mind, if only for a second or two which begins the process of transformation into a Bodhisattva.  In those few moments the phenomenal world will become mysteriously illuminated; what we will see before us is a  phantasmagoria of Mind which is dream-like.  It has no reality whatsoever apart from Mind.

 

We shouldn't ignore what the Buddha said

Alan Watts in his book, The Spirit of Zen, reminds us that one may study great spiritual literature such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Dialogues of Plato or Buddhist Scriptures “without being any the wiser” which is also like expecting “the sight of a menu-card to reach and satisfy the inner processes of a hungry man” (p. 21).  This is certainly true.  A menu has a particular but limited purpose when we go to a restaurant.  So does a recipe book which is not like Watts’ “menu-card” which has a different purpose; which requires some culinary skills on our part if we are to make a special dish to serve our friends.

The discourses of the Buddha are not quite like a menu or a recipe book.  The basis of the Buddha’s teachings, which are to be found in his discourses or Suttas/Sutras, is what he is trying to get us to awaken to.  However, his teachings cannot be fully put into words sufficient to awaken us.  This is the problem with language.  Meeting this hurdle, however, we should not ignore the discourses or avoid their study.  It is by reading and studying the discourses of the Buddha’s that we come to acquire a clearer picture of where the path lies which stretches beyond the boundaries of our flesh and bones, and certainly beyond phenomena.

While it is true that the fruition of the path certainly surpasses all the discourses that we might ever read, acquiring this supreme insight, as the Buddha did, requires a compass of sorts, even though a compass, like a map, has nothing to do with the terrain.  This is why the discourses of the Buddha are so very important.  Indeed, they are like a compass, always pointing us in the proper direction even when, sometimes, we find ourselves lost, that is, spiritually lost.

Not giving much weight or importance to the discourses of the Buddha is what modern Buddhism (I really mean to say ‘pop Buddhism’), especially Zen, does too much of.  The one Sutra Zennists appear to read, if not the only one, is The Heart Sutra.  Believe it or not, they even get that Sutra wrong along with the Diamond Cutter Sutra (Vajracchedika Sutra).  On the same score, they believe that doing lots of zazen makes up for their lack of Sutra study.  This is like believing that if I just walk a lot, without a sense of direction (and without a compass), I will find my way out of a forest in which I managed to become lost.

Incidentally, much of the wrangling and heated arguments that can occur in Dharma centers and on Internet Buddhist forums, for the most part, comes from an incomplete study of the Buddha’s discourses.  I have especially found this to be true when people argue with me on the subject of the ‘self’ or ‘atman’ who it seems have never read much of the Pali canon or the Mahayana canon but nevertheless believe that their opinions about self are essentially correct. 

 

On Buddhist bullshit

The Age of Enlightenment was not about a rejection of religion or just about reason.  For example, Hume distrusted reason while others tried to find loopholes in it or find its limit.  If anything, the Age of Enlightenment unbridled the power of thought and imagination, letting both freely roam wherever they might—not always in a good direction either.  If this sounds anything like the opening of Pandora's jar—yes, it did that.  But with this opening also came the Procrustean couch which stretches or cuts off pertinent facts in order to evade a particular conclusion or present another conclusion made up of stretched facts with a conspicuous absence of others.

With the unbridling of thought and imagination, which the Enlightenment offered, came also hum-bug, mumbo-jumbo and bullshit, all of which are not easily detected despite a somewhat persistent belief to the contrary.  (A timely book on mumbo-jumbo is Francis Wheen’s book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions.)  Much of this comes hidden in the form of ideology, scientism, psychology, mathematics, nationalism, historicism, etc., all of them capable of creating fictional accounts of reality—and bullshit.

Turning now to the subject of 'Buddhist bullshit'; setting forth the essence of bullshit has been already done for us.  Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay, On Bullshit, puts the essence this way:  “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit” (pp. 33–34).  But there are other pertinent elements in the makeup of bullshit I hasten to add.  Importantly, the bullshitter “misrepresents what he is up to” (p. 54) and “he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false” (p. 56).  Frankfurt even goes so far as to say that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” (p. 61) and its source springs from “various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are” (p. 64).

Carrying the aforementioned forward into Buddhism so that we might see how much bullshit there really is in Buddhism, it starts to become apparent when an authentic concern for what Gautama taught is demonstrably lacking in popular books about Buddhism, including Zen Buddhism.  Let me give the reader some comparisons.

 Johannes Bronkhorst's book, Buddhist Teaching in India is not bullshit—far from it.  First of all, we know what the author is up to; moreover, he is on the side of truth in regard to Gautama’s teachings.  By comparison, Stephen Batcherlor’s book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, is bullshit.  When Frankfurt describes bullshit or excrement as “matter from which everything nutritive has been removed” (p. 43) we can't help but read Batchelor’s book as Buddhism With Gautama's Teachings Removed.  Along side of this, what Batchelor is up to is not clear at all because the book is not really about Buddhism since there is no commitment on the part of the author to be true to the facts of the Buddha’s teachings as they exist in the canon.  Incidentally, Batchelor’s book only mentions nirvana twice with no attempt to unpack it.  What is clear about Batchelor is his sincerity but then as Frankfurt informs the reader, “sincerity itself is bullshit” (p. 67) for the likely reason that sincerity is only as good as knowledge of oneself which must be  substantial and unchanging; further implying a deep commitment to the acquisition of truth.  Short of this, sincerity is more than likely bogus.

Examples of Zen Buddhist bullshit include Shunryu Suzuki's, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Joko Beck's book, Everyday Zen, and Genpo's Merzel's book, Big Mind, Big Heart.  Compare any of these books with Blofeld's or Red Pine's translations such as The Zen Teaching of Huang Po or The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma.  The divergence between bullshit Zen and the non-bullshit Zen of Huang-Po and Bodhidharma is obvious.  Let me also add that wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk or a Zen teacher is no guarantee of no bullshit Buddhism—in fact it almost guarantees it.

 

From simplicity to oversimplification

In recent memory, the only person who, in my estimation excavated much of the essence of  the Buddha’s teaching as found in Pali Buddhism (i.e., Buddhism from the Pali canon); systematically putting it together for the general public, was George Grimm.  His main work, The Doctrine of the Buddha  which is rife with references from the Nikayas, is quite an astonishing work but mainly for its simplicity.  Grimm reminds us in the preface to The Doctrine of the Buddha that the Buddha could cast the highest truth in a form “that even a robber chief along with his band, even a leper” and “even a seven-year old boy” could comprehend “without more being added.”  Well, this is certainly not the case today nor was it the case with Buddhism after the Buddha’s passing over into parinirvana.  

As many will agree, much of Buddhism has gone beyond the message of its founder.  In Grimm’s opinion, Abhidhamma (the scholastic analysis of the Buddha’s teachings which was compiled successively between 250 and 50 B.C.) has contributed much to making unnecessary problems for original Buddhism; making Buddhism almost incomprehensible for the average person.

What we have today which is called “Buddhism” according to George Grimm “is as little the old Buddha-teaching as that any one of the present-day Christian sects represent the Christianity of Christ.”  I would go so far as to say that most Buddhist teachers (particularly in the West) are as far from the Buddha as Pat Robertson is from Jesus.  Among other things completely altered, the Buddha’s notion of the Sangha is not the same as today’s; nor did the Buddha demand that one needed to go to a certified master in order to confirm their awakening.  Grimm writes, “The Buddha, in fact, calls his teaching the dhamma anitiha, the truth that carries its confirmation within itself, stands in no need of external authorization.”  

Where this leads us is back to simplicity; but certainly not oversimplification believing, for example, that living in the secular here and the now is enlightenment, or in the words of Zen master Joko Beck, “If you live with a difficult person, that’s nirvana”!  I hasten to add that the original simplicity of Buddhism has nothing to do with secular Buddhism which, among other things, supports a kind of smorgasbord approach to Buddhism:  take what you like from the Buddhist canon (one or two Suttas or Sutras) and forget the rest.