The Zennist

Being a devil’s advocate

I recently read somewhere that behavioral scientists recommend that small groups appoint a devil’s advocate to challenge the worthiness of various claims and logic.  Incidentally, this is something President Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. The decisions that the group usually agree  upon tend to be more accurate and more grounded in reality with a devil’s advocate.  This also works with individuals.

I remember doing this to some degree when I was still searching for pure Mind.  I questioned my assumptions and forced myself to look deeper and to stop playing games with myself thereby deceiving myself.  I didn’t allow myself to claim any satori—on what grounds?  Some intellectual insight?  I also had a gut feeling that pure Mind would give me the key to understand the koans (I turned out to be right).

By being my own devil’s advocate I became skeptical of some of the major assumptions of Buddhism, one being that the Buddha denied the self or âtman.  I was looking for any passage from the Buddha’s discourses that might undermine the view that the Buddha denied the self.  I wasn’t willing to let Buddhists get by with what looked like to me to be a doctrine of crypto-nihilism.  I hit pay dirt when I could read the discourses about the five aggregates, not as a rejection of self, but that we shouldn’t identify as our self that which is not our self, namely, the five aggregates!

I think being a devil’s advocate with myself helped me to connect the dots of Buddhism.  It became more systematic, but foremost it was based on awakening to the absolute which is supramundane and unconditioned.  With our seeing of ultimate reality, certain implications stem from it which eventually grow into a beautiful system.  To get here, I had to be a devil! 

 

Beginner's mind is not Zen mind

I never had high regards for the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.  Although it proved to be a very popular book for those who want to learn about Zen but haven't the time to study what Zen is really about, I saw it as a very bad book.  For one thing, it preyed on the great weakness of beginners: their tendency to be overconfident in addition to their spiritual ignorance of the fact that the tradition of Zen Buddhism is about reaching a mystic awakening beyond the confines of the temporal world.  

Beginner’s overconfidence, which they take for wisdom, tends to be very strong and difficult to change.  It takes an enormous amount of effort on the part of a good teacher to wean the beginner off of their overconfidence; to teach beginners that they should have great doubt which can generate great seeking.  The only thing a beginner should know is they don’t know.  

No beginner should assume that the beginning mind (初心) or in Japanese shoshin is the same as the pure Mind which is effulgent and supramundane.  They are world’s apart.  No amount of zazen, holding the beginner’s mind, can change this difference.  What is really being done as far as the beginner’s mind is concerned is trying to calm the monkey mind down.  A bad teacher might even go so far as to suggest that the monkey mind is part of the big mind like waves are part of water.  The two can’t be separated.  Thus, big mind and monkey mind are one!

Another problem that is overlooked as regards beginning mind is that it is in constant non-knowledge (avidya) of the pristine substance of mind, this substance being pure or unconditioned.  Because of this non-knowledge  beginners more than often take the wrong path and go to the wrong teachers.  Even their thinking is offtrack.  Back to the wave & water analogy, beginners don’t understand that waves are not fundamental or equal with water.  Only the water is truly real.  Likewise, when deluded thoughts or the monkey mind suddenly stops, only then is the pure Mind seen, as it is, without distortion.

Setting our will

Bodhidharma didn’t travel west so that some Zen master later on might say, as for his reason of coming to the west, “Cypress tree in the front of the hall.”  Bodhidharma came to the west to point out the true nature that all beings inherently possess so they might awaken to it and put an end to their beginningless suffering. He was a Buddhist ascetic (t'ou-t'o, dhûta in Sanskrit) who saw what the Buddha saw and elected to teach it to people whose minds were stained and defiled by their erroneous knowledge—hopefully, not too much!

Bodhidharma for some Zennists remains an inspiration, even to this day.  He was a member of the Lanka School that was named after the Lankavatara Sutra, a most recondite Mahayana discourse of the Buddha which according to one scholar may have hugely influenced Nagarjuna.  Bodhidharma told his followers to regard this discourse as "the only translated Sutra which, if followed in conduct, may lead to salvation."

While all this sounds nice it doesn’t erase the mind that is stained and defiled by erroneous knowledge.  Such a mind can even read and practice Zen, and still be deluded.  We can only verbalize and think about this so much thus leading ourself astray in the process.  Eventually, we have to penetrate through the stained and defiled mind to reach its unperturbed, supramundane substance.  Reading “Cypress tree in the front of the hall” a thousand times will not help us one jot.

Setting our will to seeing the true nature that Bodhidharma saw is a deadly serious business.  Once we decide to start we shouldn’t stop.  There are no halfway measures to awakening because such an awakening, in a flash, has to be thorough and complete, encompassing the universe.  When the finger points, we see the moon.  When the word “Buddha Mind” is spoken, the Zen adept has to see it, directly.  Otherwise, it is like looking at the finger unable to see the moon overhead.  

Having lost the old way

While the myths and legends of Zen remain in print, not to mention its many recondite sermons, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that those who teach Zen these days have the True Eye, or are capable of teaching the mysterious Source.  Zen master Yuanwu (1063–1135) who is best known as the author of The Blue Cliff Record, seems to lament over the fact that many teachers have lost the old way.  He writes (Cleary, Zen Letters, 15):

"Nowadays many  have lost the old way, and many try to usurp the style of Zen, setting up their own sects, keeping to cliches, and concocting standardized formulas and slogans.  Since they themselves are not out of the rut, when they try to help other people, it is like a rat going into a hollow horn that grows narrower and narrower until the rat is trapped in a total impasse.  Under such circumstances, how can the universal teaching not decline?"

Here one’s discriminating intellect reaches an impasse.  The rat’s nose is pressed up against the limit of the hollow ox horn, but still pushing.  This also is our individuality which is unable to make heads or tails of what the finger of Zen is pointing to.  If we speak with a Zen teacher, what can he or she really say to help us who may also be a trapped rat wearing the robes of a teacher?

At some point in our study of Zen, we have to start to rely on something other than externals and this individual person (or rat) who believes he is the true criterion.  But this habit is hard to give up.  Yuanwu continues:

"In the old days, when I first met my teacher Wuzu, I blurted out my realization and presented it to him.  It was all words and phrases and intellectual points, all empty talk of 'buddhadharma' and 'essence of mind' and 'mystic marvels'" (15–16).

Looking back on his youthful mistakes, Yuanwu came to realize that he still hadn’t deeply penetrated the profound dharma.  He was just engaging in verbal cleverness, in other words, he was babbling.  This is easy to do.  I can remember doing it in my twenties.  But something always told me that coming to realize pure Mind had nothing to do with perfecting my intellectual and verbal skills.  It had everything to do with putting an end to my deluded thinking—just letting it drop out like the bottom of a bucket.  Pure Mind could only be seen on its own terms—not mine.  Giving up all of our own ideas and what we believe the path to be is difficult.  This is why Zen is still in a mess insofar as many teachers have lost the old way.  Still, it is also capable of getting us out of this mess provided our rope is long enough (a Chinese proverb says: “If the rope is too short, it will not reach far enough to draw water from the deep well”).

Putting a stop to desire

The notion of desire in Buddhism is not an easy subject to think about.  We can think of the problem of desire as I am almost continually subject to desires such that I also have some capacity to resist desire, especially desires that may, in the long run, prove harmful to me and certain goals that I have set for myself.  Desires may include desires of the human species, in general, such as reproduction, all the way to idiosyncratic desires.

Being unable to resist desires that may prove painful (duhkha) to both my mental and physical life is not where we want to be.  By the same token, not getting what we desire may also prove painful.  As it soon becomes apparent over time, we are continually subject to desires that originate from our biological body and our psychical life.  

Desire, although extremely important, is not as important as the apparatus we interface with, trying to manage the flow of desires.  The apparatus is the psychophysical biological organism consisting of material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.  Desire or craving the apparatus appears to deepen our entanglement or grasping (upâdâna) of the apparatus.  This further leads to an intensity of biological desire or becoming (bhava).  This leads to jâti or regeneration and with it, once more, old age and death. Intense desire, certainly has its disadvantages, both short term and long term.  Less intensity would be better.

The stopping or nirodha of desire for the painful, namely, the psychophysical apparatus, is called for.  But how is this feat accomplished?  As long as we over-desire the psychophysical apparatus, which we believe we are, hence, turning it into our self, we can’t stop desire for it.  This is where the Buddha’s great  insight comes into the picture.  The Buddha said that the psychophysical apparatus is not our true self.  The serious adept must dis-identify with the biological apparatus, that is, stop desiring material shape or feeling up to consciousness.  

To accomplish such a dis-identification requires of us a radical shift.  We have to see the unconditioned.  By doing so, we disengage from the biological apparatus which is never other than conditioned.  This is also a return to our true nature or self, but instead of not recognizing it, we now fully recognize it.  What we once believed to be our self turned out not to be our self.

Turtle wisdom

There is a small group of diehard Buddhists who believe there is no absolute beyond this world—no refuge. In my many years on the Internet, even before the advent of the Netscape browser, they would challenge my view of a real absolute which transcends our conditioned world.  They would ask really dumb questions like, "What is this transcendent reality, of which you speak, made of?" Other such questions went something like this: Does this absolute have a location?  Does it have dimensions? How about size? Does it have density?  Is is a kind of matter?  Is it plural or just one?"  To all these questions I answered, no.  This brings me to the Buddhist story of the turtle and the fish. Bhikkhu Bodhi tells the story.

There was once a turtle who lived in a lake with a group of fish. One day the turtle went for a walk on dry land. He was away from the lake for a few weeks. When he returned he met some of the fish. The fish asked him, "Mister turtle, hello! How are you? We have not seen you for a few weeks. Where have you been? The turtle said, "I was up on the land, I have been spending some time on dry land." The fish were a little puzzled and they said, "Up on dry land? What are you talking about? What is this dry land? Is it wet?" The turtle said "No, it is not," "Is it cool and refreshing?" "No, it is not", "Does it have waves and ripples?" "No, it does not have waves and ripples." "Can you swim in it?" "No you can't" So the fish said, "it is not wet, it is not cool, there are no waves, you can’t swim in it. So this dry land of yours must be completely non-existent, just an imaginary thing, nothing real at all." The turtle said that "Well, may be so" and he left the fish and went for another walk on dry land.

As we might guess, the turtle was a metaphor for the Buddha who realized supremundane reality which is unconditioned and transcends the all-too-human world which sentient beings live in and thirst for.  The fish represents such worldly people (prithagjana) who only wish to know of the finite world; who can’t see beyond this limitation.

Sounds nice but what is really being said?

Some Buddhists I encounter seem to be on the right track (notice, I said ‘seem’).  They will say something like:

Through ignorance, sentient beings perceive originated things, when in fact nothing has actually originated at all. The view of dependent origination is a means to reveal that origination of conditioned phenomena has never occurred in the first place.

Such words, however, may need some unpacking—terms are still too indefinite.  We might first of all ask, “What is avidya?”  I am sorry to say this but a Sanskrit dictionary is not going to be of much help.  It would be better to understand avidya as the confusion between the born and the unborn, or the same, the conditioned and the unconditioned—or even the dependently originated and the unoriginated (we could even say the ‘increate’). Simple enough?

Okay, go outside and take a look at the forest.  Can you distinguish between the dependently originated and the unoriginated?  Be honest.  I bet you can’t.  Someone awakened—believe it or not—can.  We could call this prajñâ, but this is beside the point.  

The important thing is that we can actually discern between conditioned things and unconditioned reality.  Being able to do such, we are no longer caught in avidya.  We can distinguish spiritual light from the material darkness; essence from mode.  In fact, if we really think about it there is only the unconditioned.  The conditioned world is just the torsion waves of the unconditioned.  They have merely an illusory existence.

What the Buddha is teaching us about dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada) is that phenomena (samutpada) are relative to what they are based upon (pratitya).  In an absolute sense, phenomena are configurations of absolute Mind.  Mind is the substance.  It alone is self-generating (svayambhu) like the lotus.  Its phenomenalizations are not.

Awakening is, you might say, a rebooting of the entire system.  We go from being entrapped in conditionality, blindly following it, eventually, to seeing the unconditioned which is unchanging and most real.  After seeing the unconditioned, the world we once took to be real becomes gradually more and more illusory.  Over time, we pass away, fearlessly, stepping from the dream into absolute reality.

Some metaphysics

At least going back to the time of Kant, metaphysics is at the core of philosophy and still remains so. It is an inquiry into what reality, fundamentally, is; or what the basic structure of reality is in the highest sense.  The bookends of metaphysics might be summed up as the rationalists at one end and the empiricists at the other.  The rationalists believe that we can reach substantive conclusions about reality through reason, that is, ideas independent of all empirical experience.  The empiricists, at the other end, don't think so.  Reason, the empiricists believe, is limited.  The only way to reach substantive conclusions about reality is by sensory experience, that is, by way of the natural sciences.

The problem as it stands before us is we are looking at this present reality before us through special spectacles which act as a kind of perceptual apparatus that alters the truly real.  These spectacles even include Kant's space and time not to mention our senses and the empirical world.  What we imagine to be the world or reality, really amounts to an image that has been altered by these spectacles.  This leads to the conclusion that reality, as it is, with the spectacles removed, is not accessible to us.  Thus, we only have access to how things appear through the spectacles.  It is almost like we are trapped in Plato's cave which is described by Socrates in The Republic (531d).

We may speculate on what ultimate reality is by way of various concepts.  But according to Kant we can't get beyond the limitation of reason and empiricism, or the same, remove the spectacles to see the noumenon.  But if, according to Buddhism, the one who looks through the spectacles (the five skandhas) is not the spectacles, we can begin to dis-identify with the illusory world the spectacles create.

Our psychophysical body is the perceptual apparatus by which we see phenomena (objects of possible sensory experience) which act to conceal the noumenon, i.e., the thing-in-itself, including our very self (S., pratyâtma), which is enclosed by phenomena.  This leads me to say that on the rationalist side of metaphysics we haven't gone far enough.  Reason doesn't end with mathematics and logic or abstract thought.  It possesses its own power to penetrate through the veils of the most subtle phenomena and setting all aside, come to self-realization.

 

The feeling of great doubt

 

The fuel that drives the Zen adept on to realize the subtle essence of Mind is the feeling of great doubt (大疑情).  But there is more to it than these simple words can express.  Yes, doubt (疑) or an honest search for the right answer is integral.  Adding to this, in my case, it was somewhat like realizing you’ve been poisoned, and have to find the proper antidote.  What I am suggesting, there is a great sense of urgency that takes possession of a person.  No more sitting in the rocking chair—it’s do or die.  This kind of urgency is hard to imagine.

Those who have a cursory interest in Zen can easily intellectualize the feeling of the great doubt without entering into it; keeping it at arm’s length.  But it is not the same experience.  A cursory interest in Zen never goes any deeper and further than, for example, zazen practice.  It hasn’t yet dawned on such people that Zen is aimed at acquiring kensho which is seeing one’s true nature, directly.  Short of this, one is going no place.  Zen is not a special lifestyle.

Having a Buddha statue on your home shrine, some meditation cushions, some candles and incense, is not the feeling of great doubt.  One may also be assuming (and wrongly) that Zen means “fundamentally there isn't the slightest bit of anything, but when we have tea we drink tea, and when we have rice we eat rice."  This is the Zen of awakened teachers—not the Zen of students seeking awakening.  Before this Zen master realized his or her true nature, they didn’t just drink tea or eat rice.  Their mind was focused on passing through the Mu barrier or some other barrier of Zen which guards the gateless gate so that nothing conditioned may pass through.

Without being energized by the feeling of great doubt; putting it all on the line to realize, in my example, pure Mind, one will get nowhere in Zen.  This, I need to add, it not the same as following a teacher.  Great doubt, pertains to our present inability to comprehend the absolute.  Following a teacher around like a little calf ; calling this an example of the feeling of great doubt is being deluded.  Great doubt begins only in us.  It sets the pace, so to speak.  It determines who we seek out.  It might even create the conditions for our awakening.

 

Why can't we have smarter Zennists?

In contemporary Zen there seems to be a problem with what Zen teachers say as regards pre-awakening work (C., gongfu) and what they say with regard to post-awakening.  In my own little ad hoc survey, beginners (the worst of the lot) take post-awakening words to be the path.  If they read of a Zennist burning the commentary to the Diamond Sutra after his awakening, these Zennists could take this act to mean a kind of practice: Don't read the discourses of the Buddha or the commentarial literature.

When an awakened Zennist like Layman P'ang says: "My supernatural power and marvelous activity [is] drawing water and chopping wood," these words come after his awakening; not before.  For someone engaged in seeking to awaken to their true nature, which they can't remember because it is hidden by countless obstructions, it is not advisable to just draw water and chop firewood.  One must engage in actively seeking their true nature which they have lost; which is a remembering or a waking-up process.  Any student who believes that drawing water from a well and cutting firewood is the practice of Zen, needs a beating by a good teacher!

Jeffrey Broughton is not without a rather important view on this matter which I, personally, have taken to heart in this blog finding it quite profound (brackets are mine).

“This is the pattern sense throughout the Chan Whip: the adept closes his door (metaphorically) for a lengthy period of time, measured in years, and zealously devotes himself to the hard work (gongfu [kung-fu]) of cross-legged sitting and keeping an eye on the cue [huatou/hua-t'ou].  In the Chan Whip continual stress is placed squarely on this pre-awakening gongfu.  The context is always unceasing diligence and unlimited zeal in the practice of sitting and raising the cue to awareness.  This was the source of the Chan Whip's enormous appeal for Hakuin

But in this uncompromising vision of day-and-night practice, what is the place of Linji's famous nothing-to-do?  The answer is: nothing-to-do is a post-awakening matter.  Linji in the Record of Linji famously instructs his assembly that the Buddhist teaching is "just a matter of the usual nothing-to-do—shitting, pissing, putting on clothes, eating meals; and when tired, lying down.  In the Chan Whip (section 17), after Gaofeng at twenty-four achieves a breakthrough by amassing a cue, his teacher Xueyan enjoins him in the following manner: "From now on it is not necessary for you to study the buddhadharma and to investigate to the limit the ancient and modern [cases].  It's just a matter of eating when hungry and sleeping when tired."  Shuhong's appended comment sternly warns the reader not to misunderstand this slogan "eating when hungry and sleeping when tired."  Eating when hungry and sleeping when tired is for after you have produced awakening.  Not before.  Until then the Chan Whip will keep the practitioner company” (Broughton, The Chan Whip Anthology, p. 59).