The Zennist

The external pursuit of truth is a waste of time

Returning from the Steady Hand Pour House (my local coffee shop) I kept hearing faint, hardly audible music—choir music to be exact.  I couldn’t locate its source.  I even went up into my attic.  I checked my portable radio.  It was off.  The computer was silent.  I kept searching for the source of the music.  Then I realized my iPhone that was in my right pocket was playing the music!

I said to myself, there has to be a blog here.  Yep, there was.  It is all about looking within after you’ve spent a long time in the external pursuit of truth, obviously not getting anywhere.  

So what does  looking within actually mean?  It is not about just listening to one’s internal dialogue or dealing with one’s emotions, let’s say trying to calm them down.  In a way, this is still external.  Even sitting in zazen is external.  Real looking within is more about seeing or beholding the very substance of our thoughts.

As I keep stressing in these blogs, we are intrinsically the absolute substance (i.e. Buddha-nature).  But here’s the problem: we don’t recognize ourselves in a phenomenal mode or the same, in antithesis, which includes this human body together with its psychical life which also includes thoughts, internal dialogue, mental images, and emotions.  

Yes, we’re clueless unwakened Buddhas wandering (samsarana), going from one illusion to the next without seeming end. 

The way out of this mess is by looking within, that is, by deep introspection.  This means that all phenomena has a limit.  While we may think that there is only birth and death, what is really happening is there is an ongoing rise of phenomena followed by its cessation and then a return-to-self or as a physicist might put it, we enter zero-phase for a split second.  Then the cycle begins anew.  As you, the reader, might guess at this point the properly trained Buddhist adept doesn’t miss the zero-phase.  The adept yokes with it.  His whole being suddenly becomes illuminated as a result.  The adept just hit the spiritual jackpot!  This is Zen’s transmission of Mind to Mind or the awakening of pure Mind to itself (bodhicittotpada). From here the adept then enters the path to Buddhahood, which constitutes a huge magnification of this initial awakening (bodhi).

 

Those who go beyond illusion

A universal reality or medium is Mind.  This is what Mind-only means in the Lankavatara Sutra.  What we see as the phenomenal world with all its differences from quarks to galaxies is Mind oscillating, moving itself creating, as a result, a contrast.  This contrast, as we mortal humans face it, which includes our psychophysical bodies, seems altogether impenetrable and bewitching. 

As we might expect, the prithagjana (worldling) stops at illusion’s edge.  He lacks the ability to penetrate through Mind’s oscillations—certainly his own vexing imagination including desires for the illusory.  

Those who find the Buddha’s teaching alluring; who seem to sense that the great voyage across the sea of samsara consists in penetrating the veil of phenomena, are not content to stay in the home of illusion.  They understand the voyage to be internal: internal in the sense that what is most primordial in them, which is pure Mind or tathata, must be able to recognize itself, in its phenomenalizations.  It is not enough just to be.  Mind can only recognize itself by penetrating through its oscillations.  Only then does it re-member and awaken to its absoluteness which contains all.  

This is no course in philosophy, either, which is thought based.  Far from it.  One must, as implicit Mind, completely pass though all of its  oscillations and disturbances, this includes thought.  Not a single oscillation can remain.  Only then does it recognize and remember itself.  One then becomes a Bodhisattva; who then embarks upon the mystery of becoming a Buddha.

It is not too difficult to see from the aforesaid that Buddhism is not Buddhism which bends down to the will of the prithagjana allowing itself to be turned into some religious cult the purpose of which is to serve those drowning in their desire for the phenomenal.  Buddhism is foremost an aryan path.  The aryan is one who stands having arrived at the door of the immortal.

 

Buddhist heretics?

While the Buddha was alive he had heretics.  One was Yamaka who strongly believed that one whose taints are destroyed is annihilated and perishes with the breakup of the body and does not exist beyond death (param marana). Then there was the heresy of Sati.  Sati believed that consciousness is autonomous and thus transmigrates unchanged (anañña).  

I am sure there were other less known heresies mainly put forth by those who didn’t fully understand the Buddha’s teaching.  

Today, we don’t like to use the word heresy.  It brings up extremely negative mental images.  Some of us might recall the horrible deeds of the Catholic Church that when they executed a heretic, such as a witch, for example, they might first strangle her then tie her body to a stake and set it afire.

Buddhist heresy is quite different.  The Buddhist heretic was one who harbors and spreads an evil wrong view (ditthi pâpika/pâpakam ditthigatam) which had the power to mislead one on the noble path. Because of being misled, the adept cannot attain nirvana.  It would be, in fact, impossible.  From the Buddha's perspective there is no wiggle room.  The noble path is straight and narrow.  Being nice and cheerful or working for world peace do not get one to yonder shore of nirvana.  But these are not heresies.  They only become such when someone believes that taking in stray cats, for example, is nirvana or more apt, “If you live with a difficult person, that’s nirvana” (this was said by the late Zen master Joko Beck). 

Today we still have Buddhist heretics although we aren’t supposed to call them that.  What they put forth as Buddhism ain’t real Buddhism.  If one were to follow the path these heretics have laid out they wouldn’t reach nirvana. To provide one popular example of a modern heresy, besides Joko Beck’s nirvana, it has to be the view that “just sitting” (J., shikantaza) is synonymous with Buddhahood.