The Zennist

The world of light and the world of darkness

Our true nature never, automatically, reveals itself to us because it is thoroughly incorporeal.  Still, it is never non-present.  Accordingly, this incorporeality is ungraspable by the corporeal senses including even our consciousness which we cling to, tenaciously. 

When we learn, for the first time, of our true nature from the teachings of the Buddha it seems dark and hidden from us since we are trying to see it as something corporeal which is all that we know. The corporeal, we don't realize, is continually obscuring our true nature, as it were, hiding it from us almost completely.  It seems for us that a dark veil covers our true nature which we can't rend.

Naturally, when our true nature is revealed, which is luminous and compassionate, only then is the darkness dispelled.  When it is not taken away we seem doomed to suffering and death; we see no means of escape.  In fact, the idea of the luminous seems alien to us.  In this regard, there seems to be two opposed worlds, the world of light and the world of darkness, or the same, the world of unconditionality (nirvana) and the world of conditionality (samsara).  But from the awakened standpoint it is one substance that expresses itself as an arising and a return, this really being the arising of infinite power/compassion and a return to self-knowingness.  

The unawakened, on the other hand, are only aware of birth and death because of their strong attraction to the corporeal.  In this condition, will or desire can dangerously exalt itself which then becomes entrapped in the cycle of birth and death with no way out.  This is really regression led by a will to more and more corporeal states.  Such a person who exalts their will is an icchantika.

"Also, next, O good man! For example, a burnt seed will not call forth buds, even if the rain falls on it for a period of 100 thousand million kalpas. There can never be a situation in which this seed will bring forth buds. The same with the icchantika. No bud of Enlightenment springs forth, even if the icchantika gives ear to this all-wonderful Great Nirvana Sutra. Such can never happen. Why not? Because such a person has totally annihilated the root of good. As with the burnt seed, no root or bud of Bodhichitta will shoot forth" (Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra).

Awareness/empowerment

For the dedicated Zen beginner, it is only a matter of time before they come to the conclusion that some kind of spiritual leap has to be made.  There is no bridge.  Even after sitting in zazen for a couple of years one has to conclude that it is missing something.  Sitting for its own sake is like going around in a circle—nor is it practice since it is not getting us anywhere.  Practice has to be right practice.  It has to clear away whatever is blocking us from seeing our true nature.

One practice that I did for many years, what seemed like 24/7, was being aware of what I did.  If I was getting out of bed in the morning, I was aware of getting out of my bed, making the bed, going into the living room and making a fire.  From putting my hand on a cold doorknob to making buckwheat pancakes, I was aware.  So what was really happening?

We like to think that  our world around us is lifeless if not entirely dead, but from an awakened standpoint it is not.  In a word, we are always empowering ourselves and the world around us—but only if our awareness is precisely focused.  If I am turning the doorknob, my focus is there; at the same time (something the beginner cannot yet see) the doorknob is being empowered.  Several hours later when I turn this doorknob again it will impart to me what I put into it.  In other words, I am affecting things around me.  At the same time when I touch the doorknob, I can do it with a calm mind.  In fact, I can sweep my floor with such a mind and empower it thusly.  From taking care of my chainsaws, to hiking in the woods, to making tea, and brushing my teeth, I can spiritually affect the world around me.  The same goes with reading a Sutra or the words of a Zen master like Bassui.

We might call this ritualistic behavior but let me say there is a deeper purpose to such practices.  For one with a spiritual eye, it is meditation; or I could say, I am blessing and empowering everything around me from mantras to lifting my feet.  Hence, I am imparting to all things and beings a mind that is tamed (not all the time, of course).  Such actions, it needs to be stressed, also reflect back into us.  

As for the leap I brought up at the beginning of this blog, our cumulative awareness/empowerment will one day meet itself.  This is the mysterious leap.  It is also the straightforward Mind (riju-citta) of which Hui-neng speaks.

 

The ultimate criterion

The genius, in my estimation, of teaching Buddha-nature, is that it postulates in each being (sattva) this nature to be the ultimate criterion, although this criterion is completely obscured by avidya/nescience (even a kind of amnesia).  

Despite its concealment, this criterion carries with it, in addition, a via negativa drive of sorts.  A search for truth is more of a setting aside of what does not tally with the hidden criterion, this being Buddha-nature.  The sense of tallying, we could also say, is more pronounced in some beings and less in others.  Some sense a ‘calling’ whereas others do not.

If Buddha-nature were not the criterion that is active but buried within in us a search for our ‘true nature’ would prove impossible.  We would be committed to a hopeless trial and error search.  But with the criterion deep within us it is possible to develop more and more resonation with this nature with an ever growing sense of being on the right track.

Just how the search and the remembrance of Buddha-nature is to be conducted is of critical importance which involves Sutra and Sastra study, the study of commentaries, reflection on the ideas contained in this literature, not to mention deep musing (dhyâna/zen).  In addition, having trust that we have this Buddha-nature, except that we are not connected with it, directly, is also important.

 

The more encompassing definition of Zen

 The history of Zen Buddhism doesn’t begin with the crystalized image of Zen that we recognize today.  History tells us that there were teachers of Zen in China before Bodhidharma.  They taught traditional Buddhist meditation, the kind reflected in the Nikayas (C., Agamas).  This Zen is the four stages of dhyâna (Zen and Ch’an are transliterations of the the word dhyâna).  It was through the fourth stage of dhyâna that the Bodhisattva (the Buddha-to-be) attained nirvana.  We can see that all dhyânas pertain to the higher mind (abhicetasika).  

Zen as such was never, originally, a particular sect of Buddhism.  There was no actual Zen sect in China as if to suggest that meditation, itself, is a sect.  If we are looking for particular sects they appear to be formed around particular Sutras such as the Avatamsaka Sutra (J., Kegon), the Lotus Sutra (J., Tendai) and the Lankavatara Sutra (Lanka School). 

To be sure, the Zen that we know of today grew out of the Lankavatara Sutra and began with the Lanka School.  It is recorded that Bodhidharma, one of the founders of this school, gave a copy of the  four-volume Chinese translation of the Lankavatara Sutra to his disciple Hui-k’ou saying:

As I observe, there are no other sutra in China but this; you take it for your guidance, and you will naturally save the world. 

This particular Sutra points to the transcendental state of Mind which we understand to be the fundamental essence of reality from which all mental processes, no matter how subtle and fine, are composed.  According to the Lankavatara Sutra: “When Mind-only is understood, external objects are abandoned and discrimination no more takes place; here the Middle Path is reached.”

Getting to this level is not so much about a physical sitting practice, as if this is what Zen is mainly about.  Dhyâna as was mentioned, previously, pertains to the higher mind of which we can say is somewhere hidden from us as we use our everyday mind.  Our search for this higher mind, therefore, constitutes the wider and more encompassing definition of Zen that includes various means to gain access to it.  This broader definition was the groundwork for Zen as we know it today that began in China.  By it, we are to  understand that the realization of the essence of Mind, which is also the realization of our true nature, is more than sitting meditation, or more than any single practice.

 

A subtle grammar

Saying, for example, “that all things are just constructs created by the mind out of Suchness” is not the same as saying “there is only Suchness; fundamentally things do not exist.”  The first statement carries with it a tacit division between mind and Suchness.  Mind, we could envision, is making things out of raw Suchness. The second statement carries no such division, tacit or otherwise.  Things, or all things (sarvadharmâ), are just configurations of Suchness, Suchness being synonymous with the One Mind.

The first statement expresses a mechanical viewpoint (a separation between mind and Suchness) whereas the second statement expresses an organic totality.  In this totality, the absolute can be, seemingly, both itself and other; having no awareness of how the two are connected; this connection being concealed, as it were, by dark unknowability (avidya). Or it can also realize otherness, and the subject of otherness, to be mere configurations of itself.  In so doing it has converged with itself amounting to perfect and full self-realization which somewhat paradoxically allows for the play of illusion. 

A deeper grammar appears, more or less, in most all of the discourses of the Buddha, especially, in Sutras like the Lankavatara Sutra.  This is in contrast with conventional grammar which works on a horizontal surface of little or no depth; which we could even say is anti-illuminative.

The difficulty of reading and understanding a grammar of depth is that our conventional education has not prepared us to read such a subtle grammar, especially, Zen Buddhist koans.  There is nothing in the West that even comes close to the subtle, unconventional grammar of koans and Sutras like the Lankavatara Sutra.

 

Overcoming duality

I am not sure the average person understands duality from the Buddhist point of view.  Examples of duality are being and non-being, light and darkness, subject and object, experiencer and experience, etc. It could be also birth and death, nirvana and samsara, or student and teacher.  Almost any situation can be dualized into a dyad of opposition or contrast.  

Duality, itself, is unreal.  According to the Lankavatara Sutra, “There is nothing but that which is seen of the Mind itself, the duality too is of the Mind.”  Relative to absolute Mind, duality is a fiction, yet certainly a useful fiction for living in the conditioned world.  Moreover, duality does not conflict with non-duality, non-duality being the One Mind or substance (tathatâ).  We might even say that duality is just a differentiation of ultimate reality.

If I draw a line in the sand on the beech, the line may seem to divide but there is no actual division. I have just made a groove in the sand, that’s all.  If I carve a block of wood into an elephant, there is no real duality such as elephant and the wood.  It is the same with water and wave.  To dualize, for example, water and wave is to abstract away the ‘one’ which is water.  This is why Dionysius Areopagita said: "Duality is never a principle (arche).  A unity (monas) is always the principle of every duality."  Also, according to the Buddha, “all that is of duality has its rise from the Mind” (Lankavatara Sutra).

When we have gnosis of the Mind that is Bodhi (Bodhicitta), for the first time we see how the fiction of duality arises.  It arises because we lack the gnosis of absolute Mind.  We do not actually behold the substance of reality.  It is like we see waves but no water. Hence, each wave exists in contrast with the others; all can be dualized.  In the example of our world, we see it but not its unific substance—dualities are infinite it seems.  We are aware of our thoughts, but we don’t see the substance from which they are composed.  Each thought seems unique from the rest.  

Just to deny duality is not enough.  One is already caught in a very real duality called life and death not to mention sensory consciousness and many others dualities.  What is demanded is seeing the One Mind or Suchness (tathatâ).  Only then can we escape from the cycle of birth and death, because from the aspect of the One Mind nothing is being born and nothing is actually dying. 

No apparent absolute or escape

I am always careful to read the works of Western Buddhist scholars with some degree of skepticism.  I have generally found that, in one way or another, they are trying to eliminate any trace of absolutism from Buddhism.  Hence, Buddhism denies the possibility  of an underlying and unchanging substratum in contrast with an ever changing empirical world.  I take this to mean, rather humorously, there are ocean waves but no water. 

Given that absolutism means there is an unconditioned, and universal reality that underlies things (cp. O.E.D.) it seems hardly tenable that the Buddha’s great awakening was the discovery of the impossibility of an absolute.  If it is such an impossibility why did the Buddha say this?

“Monks, there is a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded.  Monks, if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be apparent no escape from this here that is born, become, made, compounded.  But since, monks, there is an unborn ... therefore the escape from this here is born, become ... is apparent” (Udâna 80-81 ).

In scientific terms the absolute is orthogonal to the conditioned world, i.e., phenomena.  It is longitudinal; not transverse.  In terms of meditation in it one pointedness of mind (ekâgratâ-citta).  From the perspective of the conditioned Five Aggregates, it is the âtman.  In terms of birth and death, it is undying spirit or Tathagata.

Back to my earlier comment about the ocean that has waves but no water, I meant this to illustrate the absurdity of those who vehemently deny an intuition of pure Mind in Zen Buddhism which is absolute.  Without this intuition of pure Mind or Buddha-nature, what is the alternative?  According to the Buddha in the Udâna passage above, there would be apparent no escape from this here that is born, etc.

From the mystical stream

Modern Zen is murky in the sense of being difficult to understand, especially, for the average beginner.  Making matters worse is trying to make Zen something that lives outside of the Buddha’s teachings in which doing seated meditation is all that is necessary.  Some Zennists even go so far as to believe Zen is more psychological than spiritual or religious.  (Perhaps they’ve left their previous religion for a number of reasons.)  

From a historical understanding of Zen, according to Heinrich Dumoulin, “Zen is the school of enlightenment born from the mystical stream of Buddhism” (A History of Zen Buddhism, p. 52).  Of course, we should not regard mysticism as a simple term.  There are varieties of mysticism just as there are different religions.  Sufi mysticism, for example, is different than Jewish mysticism.  What, perhaps, ties all mysticisms together is direct communion with the absolute which leaps over concepts and words, thus giving one a new way of looking at the world as it really is.  

Judging from the Western interpretation of nirvana it is not a subject empty of speculation which seems, at times, to baffle some who see no mystical stream in Buddhism.  However, for those who acknowledge the mystical stream, nirvana is decisively transcendent.  It is beyond the empirical condition of man, that is, the samsaric man who is subject to rebirth; not just dying once but many times.  The Buddha’s diagnosis of why we suffer and the cure for suffering is certainly a mystical one.  

Looking at Zen, itself, which is born from Buddhism’s mystical stream; which according to Bodhidharma is about seeing our true nature, this seeing is a profoundly intuitive and mystical one which has nothing to do with the eyes of flesh.  In addition, the apprehender and the apprehended vanish in the moment of intuitive seeing.  

This, as we might guess, should make Zen less murkier, but oddly it doesn’t.  This seems to me to be partially due to the fact that Mahayana Sutras are not studied as much as they should be but more, I don’t get the impression that Western Zen teachers are all that interested in looking at Zen, mystically.  Their orientation is largely psychological which is a serious mistake.

Admitting our ignorance is important

I believe that in the beginning of our spiritual journey, we first have to admit that we don’t understand anything close to pure Mind or the same, Buddha Mind.  Because of this, we must conclude we are ignorant.  But there is still more.  We have to experience this, thus acquainting ourselves with our predicament of ignorance.  This requires that we have to be personally familiar with the features of our ignorance.  It also means that we are completely lost. 

That we can admit that we are lost is accepting the verdict that we must leave our present place—it is not the right place (i.e., the right state of mind).  This admission must be thorough.  It is like this line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “East Coker”, And what you do not know is the only thing you know.  It is only in our thoroughly lost condition and aloneness, still seeking awakening, that the Buddhas, so to speak, come to us, so to speak.

Many years ago, I can remember being in this exact situation.  Facing my profound ignorance, I chose to make my ignorance an ally becoming harshly skeptical of my spiritual realizations.  I was also willing to follow many trails and watch for omens along the way.  While others around me were searching through the Buddha’s discourses to find passages that supported their beliefs, I had the keen sense to know that I really didn’t know what the Buddha was talking about—but deeply wanted to know.  It wasn’t until I mastered one pointedness of mind meditation, after a time of utter hopelessness, that I began to understand what the Buddha was really saying.

 

An intelligent rendering

Is this an intelligent rendering of the Buddha’s words?

"Therefore, Ananda, you should live as islands unto yourselves, being your own refuge, with no one else as your refuge, with the Dhamma as an island, with the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other refuge" (D.16.2.26, trans. by Maurice Walshe).

Or is this the most intelligent rendering?

 "Therefore, Ananda, you should live as those who have the âtman as island, as those who have the âtman as refuge, as those who have no other refuge; as those who have the dharma as island, as those who have the dharma as refuge, as those who have no other refuge."

Looking at the Pali original, the important term in this passage is attâ (originally a Prakrit word) which I have substituted with âtman which is its equivalent.  Âtman is perhaps one of the most important words in Indian philosophy.  It was certainly important in the Buddha's time.  Going back before the time of the Buddha, âtman did not refer, strictly, to the idea of a self, that is, an individual person which is a Western notion, all of which seems closer to the Sanskrit word jîva, which stands for an individuated being. 

It sounds nice to the Western ear to hear “live as islands unto yourselves” but the notion of self expressed by this plural possessive pronoun should not be understood as an individuated being like the jîva.  It is not even a self or ego as we moderns would like to think.  

Of the three definitions Yâska (6th-c B.C.) gives in his famous etymological work, Nirukta, âtman is the ultimate sentient principle (cetana-tattva) which I translate as animative principle.  There is nothing remotely empirical here; certainly no biological I-form.  From this, it stands to reason that the psychophysical body cannot be the âtman.  We could easily imagine such, but the Buddha in his discourses continually drives home the point that the âtman is not connected with the psychophysical body, which consists of five aggregates, namely, material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness.  He says, for example:

“There is the case, monks, where a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones—who has regard for nobles ones, is well-versed & disciplined in their Dharma; who has regard for men of integrity, is well-versed & disciplined in their Dharma—does not assume material shape to be âtman, or the âtman as possessing material shape, or material shape as in the âtman, or âtman as in material shape. He does not assume feeling to be âtman... does not assume perception to be âtman... does not assume volitional formations to be âtman... He does not assume consciousness to be âtman, or âtman as possessing consciousness, or consciousness as in the âtman, or âtman as in consciousness” (M. iii. 18).

This âtman is a very important term in Buddhism.  By comparison, the psychophysical body consisting of five aggregates or skandhas is to be thoroughly rejected.  According to the Buddha it is murderous and belongs to the demon Mara.  In fact, never once the the Buddha say anything kind about the skandhas.  This is why the Buddha wanted us to regard the âtman as an island which is a place of ultimate safety (island is also another name for nirvana).  He says elsewhere that he wants us to “make an island of the âtman” (Dhammapada, 236).

As long as translators and Buddhist scholars continue to treat attâ/âtman as an ego, a self, a person, or an individuated being, they only add to the confusion of trying to understand the Buddha’s message.  What the Buddha is trying to teach is that which animates us, namely, the âtman which is unconditioned, is not to be confused with the animated psychophysical body which is conditioned.  The skandhas are not the âtman and we are not these skandhas.