The Zennist

Those who live according to the world

After the Buddha’s enlightenment, absorbed in deep, profound introspection “he thought upon those who live according to the world” (Lalitavistra Sutra, hereafter LS).  What I want to do is reflect on the problem of what it means to “live according to the world,” effectively cutting oneself off from the Buddha’s true Dharma.

It should be a given that when we live according to the world we cannot understand what is beyond it which is the Buddha’s Dharma.  Given this problem, the Buddha’s Dharma runs against the worldly current.  In this respect, it is of no worldly benefit.  Who, with passion and bound up with the world, can understand such a Dharma as the Buddha’s?

“It has not been communicated, and it cannot be communicated; it has completely surpassed the six objects of the senses;  it is not subject to rules, not particularized, inexpressible; it is ineffable and beyond sound and speech; it cannot be articulated or demonstrated; it cannot be penetrated; it has completely surpassed all imagining” (LS).

Faced with the impossible task of teaching the transcendent to the worldly who have no ear for it what could the newly awakened Buddha say except:

“If I were to teach this Dharma to others, and they did not understand it, how useless and wearisome it would be; having no reason to teach, I will therefore remain silent, and keep it to my heart” (LS).

Notwithstanding the huge difficulty of teaching Dharma, the newly awakened Buddha finally had a change of heart after Brahmâ pleaded with him to teach his sublime doctrine (dharma).  And why the change of heart deciding instead to teach “gods, men, and asuras” (LS)?  It is because the Buddha’s “compassion for the world is boundless” (LS).

We can draw from this the Buddha was somewhat on a “mission impossible” having finally elected to teach the impossible after Brahmâ pleaded with him.  For how can that which transcends the worldly mind be taught to people who cling tenaciously to the world; who hold it to be real and solid; who refuse to accept the fact that it is an illusion?

If there is any good news in this for the worldly who are incorrigible blockheads they might try to construct a counterfeit Dharma and mass market it as Buddhism.  It would be one that any worldling (prithagjana) could grasp in a heartbeat like, “just be” or “live in the now” or Zen master Joko Beck’s, “Buddhahood is how you deal with your boss or your child, your lover or your partner, whoever.  Our life is always absolute: that's all there is.”  

 

Teaching poison

Teaching the marks of conditioned or phenomenal existence, namely, impermanence, suffering and no self can be thought of as medicine which is intended to cure those who, by their self-inflicted ignorance, tenaciously cling to the illusory, conditioned world as being truly real. Applying this medicine is not meant to deny eternal (nitya), blissful nirvana or the true self but is, instead, meant to wean deluded beings off of samsara, sufficiently, so they might eventually be healthy enough to begin to understand the true teaching (saddharma).

Little did the Buddha realize that, later on, modern Buddhists (mainly Westerners) would turn his medicine into poison.  They  teach that the Buddha taught only impermanence, suffering and there is no self!  Furthermore, as proof that there is no self these same misguided Buddhists regard the five skandhas as the standard for determining whether or not the self is real.  For example, they teach that when the Buddha says of the first skandha, form (rupa), it is not the self or anâtman, this means there is fundamentally no self!  But this is what the Buddha really said in the Culasaccaka Sutta:

"Now, Aggivessana, a disciple of mine in regard to whatever is material shape, past, future, present, subjective or objective, gross or subtle, low or excellent, distant or near, sees all material shape as it really is by means of perfect intuitive wisdom as: This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self" (M. i. 234). 

This passage proves that true Buddhism doesn’t hinge on a denial of ‘self’ but  points in the opposite direction, that our true self is not what our material condition is.

The entire older Pali canon is simply showing sincere Buddhists that the psychophysical body (the five skandhas of form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, consciousness) and the world they sense through it is for abandoning, not holding on to.  This means the true self, deliverance, nirvana, and Buddhahood transcend the psychophysical body and the world.  And because they are transcendent, a true Buddhist must directly realize the transcendent if they are to escape rebirth in the conditioned, phenomenal world of suffering. 

 

Life is but a dream

According to the highest teachings of Zen which still flow down from the Lankavatara Sutra there is no external world apart from absolute Mind itself, although we would like to believe otherwise.  This same Mind, when it fully recognizes itself (samadhi) realizes, at the same time, the triple world of existence is no more than a configuration of itself being in this regard an illusion.  In other words, there is really nothing other than Mind; all else is empty.  Just like gold which can be made into countless shapes there is nothing real except gold—the shapes are illusory.

Avidya (ignorance) and delusion rule us when we mistake what is unreal for the real, tenaciously clinging to the unreal because we imagine it to be real.  This leads to samsara which we are bound to as long as we chase after and desire the unreal.  The Lankavatara Sutra warns us that the world we elect to cling to is "the same as a dream" a subject the Buddha in the Lankavatara Sutra seems to never get tired of teaching.  

Mahamati, it is like a man, who, dreaming in his sleep of a country variously filled with women, men, elephants, horses, cars, pedestrians, villages, towns, hamlets, cows, buffalos, mansions, woods, mountains, rivers, and lakes enters into its inner appartments and is awakened. While awakened thus, he recollects the city and its inner apartments. What do you think, Mahamati? Is this person to be regarded as wise, who is recollecting the various unrealities he has seen in his dream?

Said Mahamati: Indeed, he is not, Blessed One.

The Zen that comes to us today doesn't chime with the older, more advanced Zen that is found in the Lankavatara Sutra.  Few modern teacher teach from the Lankavatara Sutra emphasizing that we stop clinging to the triple world which is dream-like.  Instead, modern Zen seems to teach its flock how to cope with the modern world.  It seems less like a dream in that respect while what is real is all but ignored.  One gets the impression from modern Zen that we can make the dream a better, happier dream!  There is even the belief that the dream state and the waking state are equally ultimate reality (Dogen)!

  Such a position, however, is going in the wrong direction.  It isn’t Buddhism.  It offers to the serious student no refuge except a false one.  Awakening to Mind (buddha) is the only true refuge.

"The world is the same as a dream, and so are the multiplicities of things in it; [the wise] see property, touch, death, a world-teacher, and work as of the same nature" (Lankavatarasutra).

 

Zen's barrier that has no door

As one might expect, Zen for the beginner is overwhelmingly an experience with the language of Zen, not the object which the words of Zen point to; which goes beyond language, including everything mental and physical.  Putting this in a slightly different way, what the words of Zen point to cannot be put into words or some kind of physical practice or structure.  

The words of Zen are about Zen—not Zen, itself.  They can only surround Zen’s mystery.  Even if one comes face to face with the profound mystery of Zen, what they've intuited cannot be transmitted to another as if it were something determinate. 

Bad  habits don’t give way easily.

Try as they might, beginners and even seasoned veterans can’t put down the crowbar of language.  They use it unconsciously to get to the heart of Zen.  This includes physical practices such as sitting on a meditation pillow.  This also includes following ‘external Zen’:  the religious structure that the culture has placed around the deep mystery of Zen.

This leads us to Zen’s barrier that has no door.  We can think of this strange barrier as our psychophysical totality.  Zen leads us to this barrier and invites us to enter.  But we are unable to pass through it because we see nothing else besides our psychophysical totality through which the external, humanized world appears.  Furthermore, we imagine that if we do pass through this barrier we will fall into some kind of deadly abyss!

Whether we are studying a Sutta from the Pali canon or a Sutra from the Mahayana canon, sooner or later we come to realize  the clear message of the Buddha:  that enlightenment or bodhi consists in transcending our present psychophysical totality which is Zen’s doorless barrier.  It is a powerful illusory barrier—a prison if you like—that keeps our Buddha-nature from recognizing itself in the welter of phenomenal experiences.  Every thought and experience that arises is the barrier.  Even the most subtle thoughts are the barrier.  To pass through Zen’s barrier requires extraordinary commitment, skill, and creativity.  What this all adds up to is this:  if we wish to pass through Zen’s doorless barrier we must have a first hand intuition of pure Mind which is the substance from which the barrier is composed.  Then we will meet our true self, that is the Buddha. 

 

Community: the fall of true religion

I think most would agree that we cannot directly experience another person’s experience amounting to a kind of super telepathy.  This is not to say that it is completely impossible.  If we claim to have had the experience of awakening (sambodhi), it would be  difficult to share with others except indirectly through words.  Others might even suspect that we're deluded.

It almost goes without saying that there are many sharable things but gnosis, sambodhi, or jñâna are not.  We can even share ideas and fellow-feeling but sharing the first hand experience of awakening to true reality is unsharable.

For Buddhism, its soteriological path, which is open to all, is supposed to lead to awakening.  However, the task of communicating this path to others by which they might save themselves through gnosis proves extremely difficult, even for a Buddha.  To fully awaken, one must transcend the allure of the temporal world and the psychophysical body (skandhas).  This is extremely difficult.  Few wish to do it.  

Faced with such a difficulty, religion as we know it begins to take shape and grow as a consequence.  If the direct experience of awakening to the absolute is at the heart of mysticism then religion, by contrast, can only teach an ungrounded mysticism which never gets past sensory consciousness; which relies, instead, on symbols, robes, rules, certification, religious buildings, music, art, etc., in which piety leads the way.  With all this, religion ends in devotion to the community which is opposed to the life of the muni or anchorite.  This community interest, which can only minister to worldly concerns, is really the fall of true religion (sad-dharma) where mysticism or gnosis should dominate but has been shut out.  This has already happened to Judaism and Christianity but not entirely to Buddhism.

 

Abandon what is not the tathagatagarbha

If the Tathagata-garbha (garbha can mean womb, embryo, fetus, conception, interior)  in the Sri-Mala Sutra is defined as the ground of samsaric existence which is beyond birth and death; which is also permanent (nitya) and eternal (sasvata), then the Five Aggregates are the exact opposite.  They are described by the Buddha as being impermanent (anitya) and suffering and are not our self (anatman).  In addition, these same aggregates (khandha/skandha) are synonymous with Mara the Evil One who the Buddha defeated while sitting under the Bodhi-tree.  

The message in the Nikayas or Pali canon is the adept must not take the Five Aggregates to be their self since they are always impermanent.  The Buddha exhorts his monks (bhikkhus) to abandon what is not their self which is all of the Five Aggregates which make up the psychophysical body!  This is made explicit in the Samyutta-Nikaya of the Pali canon at iii. 33–34.

It needs underscoring that these ‘bad boy’ aggregates are nothing like the description of the Tathagata-garbha found in the Sri-Mala Sutra.  

“But Lord, the Tathagatagarbha is not born, does not die, does not pass away to become reborn.  The Tathagatagarbha excludes the realms with the characteristic of the constructed.  The Tathagatagarbha is permanent, steadfast, eternal.  Therefore, the Tathagatagarbha is the support, the holder, the base of constructed (Buddha natures) that are nondiscrete, not dissociated, and knowing as liberated from the stores (of defilement); and furthermore is the support, the hold, the base of external constructed natures that are discrete, dissociated and knowing as not liberated."

This is why the Buddha never fails to exhort his followers to not identify their self with the aggregates because the true self or atman is the Tathagata-garbha which transcends the aggregates; which is beyond suffering.  This is according to the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra which says, “The atman (self) is the Tathagatagarbha.”

 

The Zennist, certainly no Dr. Strangelove

The Zennist, not intentionally, stands in sharp contrast to popular Buddhism and Zen.  This doesn’t mean that it lacks credibility.  For anyone who has bothered to read and think about what the Buddha taught in both the Nikayas and the Mahayana canon The Zennist doesn’t come as a shock.  Mainly, it helps to unpack much of what the Buddha really taught.  For this reason, the author of the blog is certainly no Dr. Strangelove.

There is a lot wrong with religion these days—Buddhism included.  Those who follow a particular religion, for the most part, don’t like to read what the founder of their religion actually taught and then have to think about it for any extended period of time.  They much prefer to attend a religious service or sit in zazen at their local Zen center, then call it a day.  This whole process is quite superficial.  It also finds the clergy often catering to some religious fantasy the pop religionists have conjured up about their religion which can’t be found in the canon.  

Eventually, the authentic notion of religion gets lost and buried in the glitz and glitter of being externalized to satisfy the common people (prithagjana).  Perish the thought that anyone dare tell these people that their religious practices and ideas are a dead-end.  In fact, they run counter to real religion if by religion we mean “an awareness of something outside and beyond nature” (Schleiermacher).  This awareness or better still, gnosis/jñâna, is not just a belief—say, a belief in God.  It is a direct, intuitive acquaintance with the absolute.  Certainly, it goes beyond even words and ideas, including feelings.

For now, let’s say The Zennist is on a mission to show the general Buddhist public that the Buddhism they practice isn’t really Buddhism at all, for example, secular Buddhism.  It is just a westernized adaptation of Buddhism leaving out its most essential elements, like nirvana because nirvana is about transcendence—an odious term for any secular materialist.

The Zennist will continue to show no mercy to pop Buddhism lest such mercy allow a wrong view of Buddhism to settle in where it does not rightfully belong.  And from what I can see, most of the commentators to The Zennist have a low tolerance for views which are not in the canon which is a good sign that a truly authentic Western Buddhism is emerging that fully understands in what direction real Buddhism is pointing as opposed to the wrong direction which pop Buddhism has elected to take.

 

Something that might piss off Buddhists

I am going to say something that might piss off a lot of Buddhists.  Okay, here goes.  If you are extremely attached to your psychophysical body (i.e., the Five Aggregates of form, feeling, perception, volitional formation and consciousness) you either believe the self to be your psychophysical body or you believe there is fundamentally no self.  Oh, one more thing I  forgot to mention.  The psychophysical body belongs to Mara the Evil One (S. iii. 189)—the self doesn’t.

The psychophysical body is also incapable of acquiring intuitive knowledge (jñâna).  This same body is also incapable of dhyâna, samadhi, sambodhi, etc.  Nor does the psychophysical body win nirvana.  (If the psychophysical body attained nirvana this is like saying Mara attained nirvana.  But Mara the Evil One is the adversary of Siddhartha.)

As long as one remains extremely attached to the Five Aggregates allowing even for the possibility of a transcendent state or ultimate reality is out of the question.  The reason for this lack of openness is that by being attached to the aggregates as instruments of cognition they are incapable of recognizing ultimate reality.  It is like a fishnet trying to catch space.

The only means acceptable we have for attaining nirvana or awakening (bodhi) is to transcend the psychophysical body.  This is what the Buddha teaches throughout the Pali canon.  In short, the Five aggregates are not our self (anattâ); our self is beyond their range.  Being free of their power constitutes awakening and our deliverance from samsara.   

From the viewpoint of the Lankavatara Sutra the Five Aggregates have no real existence.  They are illusory.

“The Skandhas, of which the Vijnana is the fifth, resemble the reflections of the trees in water; they are to be regarded as Maya and a dream, they are so by thought-construction; make no discriminations!” (trans. Suzuki)

From this it stands to reason that anyone who is deeply attached to the Five Aggregates or skandhas is using a measure that is either going to find no self or absolute or worse, assume the self to be one or more of the skandhas.  As for the present state of modern Buddhism, too many Buddhists are deeply attached to the Five Aggregates, so much so they’ve ended up denying the self!

 

The not so bright people

Who runs and controls popular Buddhism that is fed to the public? Believe it or not it is the ambitious-not-so-spiritually-bright-people. They might even be a Zen master or a nun or a psychologist.  They look for subjects of interest they believe the average person will easily understand requiring very little if any reflection. Mainly, the subject has to be compatible within the context of modern, secular life.  

As we might expect, there will be hardly any unpacking of fundamental Buddhist tenets and notions.  Nirvana, for example, will be glossed over receiving none of the attention it  deserves.

At this point I need to say that “popularization” of any deep and profound subject such as Buddhism leads to oversimplification.  What can come of this, in the example of Buddhism, is a Buddhism which has been severely distorted and inverted.

Such a a distortion and inversion works to undermine the spiritual content of Buddhism.  Buddhism stops being spiritual and soon embraces secularism and materialism, a humane materialism I hasten to add.  Secularism, it is important to remember, purposely excludes religious considerations.  Although some would argue that secularism is a development of religion which allows the recognition of all religions and their right to exist, secularism becomes injurious when it insidiously tries to reform a  religion like Buddhism.

In my opinion Buddhism’s popularization by ambitious-not-so-spiritually-bright-people has led us to almost a full-blown paradigm war.  It seems fairly obvious when the following question finds no acceptable answerer: By whom is the message of the Buddha to be articulated and defined including the categories of the secular?  An indication of this war (more at logomachy) is the ongoing  battle between Stephen Batchelor, the existentialist, agnostic, atheist, and B. Alan Wallace, the open minded scientist/religionist.

The only calm island away from this war seems to lie in the canon, itself.   To read the DhammapadaDhammapa by the light of a kerosene lamp in a cabin with no electricity or telephone, the nearest neighbor being seven miles away, is quite an experience.  The force of the Buddha’s words seem to go deeper, much deeper, than reading the same text with the din of modern everyday life going on in the background.

My own impression of the ambitious-not-so-spiritually-bright-people is they don’t like to read the words of the Buddha, especially alone—really alone.  They much prefer the bustle of modern life which helps them to come up with ‘pop’ explanations of what the Buddha taught which, incidentally, make the Buddha seem like a dull, mediocre fellow.  In short, a secular materialist. 

It is important to mention also that the Buddha found in the canon is not a guy who particularly liked the average person and their goals which he said constituted a “dung-like happiness” (M. i. 454 = iii 236).  Nor did the Buddha show a fondness for the lay and monastic community leaving the community at one time to live in the forest staying under a Sal tree with an elephant (cp. Udana, IV, v).

 

Throwing out the baby

The proverb which warns us that we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some of our undertakings is an old one but always timely.  When Zen came to the West with the baby and the bathwater, understanding what is the essential meaning of Zen became important.  For example, is zazen the baby, that is, the meaning of Zen, or the bathwater?  Are Zen’s various rituals and observances which, by the way have never been unique to Zen, the baby or the bathwater?

Certainly, it is a fact that there have been periods in Zen’s history when Zen has undergone a reformation:  something getting tossed out, in other words.  As we might expect, the reformers have always maintained that their intentions were of the noblest kind.  Still, inadvertently, they may have tossed out the baby with the bathwater in their zeal.

Modern Zen has not escaped the problem of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  If you check in at your local Zen center, you may not be aware that your modern Western Zen center may have thrown out something resembling the baby with the bathwater insofar as seated meditation or zazen appears to be the centerpiece.  But real Zen, according to contemporary Zen master Joshu Sasaki, is not about sitting (cp. Zen Notes XX, No. 8).

Looking back to the early history of Zen it was not regarded as a school based on seated meditation.  During the Sung period, a number of Zennists argued that Zen or Ch’an was a synonym for the Buddha Mind (fo-hsin).  Zen has nothing to do with sitting and everything to do with realizing Buddha Mind.  In fact, dhyana from which the words “ch’an” and “zen” are derived is not about sitting.  Sitting is not contained the the accepted Buddhist Sanskrit definition of dhyana. 

An example of the Zen baby that has been tossed out along with the cultural bathwater is evinced in the words of Zen master Szu-hsin Wu-shin of Huang-lung (1044–1115):

“While still alive, be therefore assiduous in practising Dhyana.  The practice consists in abandonments.  ‘The abandonment of what?’ you may ask. Abandon your four elements (bhuta), abandon your five aggregates (skandha), abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness (karmavijnana), which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see into the reason of it.  As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.  The experience is incommunicable, though you yourselves know perfectly well what it is” (Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (1933), p. 8).

As the reader can see, true dhyana (the baby), to a large extent, has been tossed out of modern Zen (read, for example, the books of late Zen master Joko Beck).  Furthermore, dhyana has nothing whatsoever to do with sitting.  It has everything to do with abandoning our psychophysical body and the material world to which we cling so that we might behold pure Mind thus realizing that all things are illusory and unreal.  There is only Mind, in other words.