The Zennist

To realize that one has to realize

I think the biggest hurdle for anyone reading The Zennist is understanding how much emphasis I put on achieving a gnosis of pure Mind or if you like, the unborn Mind.  Stepping back a little, it is a watershed moment in one’s spiritual life (as strange as it sounds) to realize that one has to realize some kind of unconditioned substance such as pure Mind.  All else—all practices up to that point go to the back burner in our spiritual career.  Our new practice is to facilitate this quest to find one’s pure Mind in the jungle of the everyday mind of birth and death. 

Realizing the need to realize was an eye-opener for me.  It is also a moment when we can distinguish between, intellectually, sitting on our arses imagining we have gold, so to speak, then waking up to the fact that we have to do the hard work of looking for gold because we don't have any gold.  Part of seated meditation is doing practices for the sake of practice which can easily become soporific.  It's not about having gnosis of pure Mind.

This realization is not a call to a superior kind of moral behavior so much as it is a do or die matter.  On the one hand, we know we don’t know pure Mind, and on the other, we can’t afford to sit in our easy chair patting ourself on the back for having a great intellect imagining we’ve seen it.  We simply haven’t.  And now we know it which is, actually, a good thing (we’re being honest).

Whatever we’ve done in the past no longer counts if it does not help to facilitate realizing pure Mind.  If we’ve done a lot of seated meditation in the past, then we have to find a more profound way to do it, one that might help us to see pure Mind.  Just sitting is ineffective.  We are just sitting a living corpse on a pillow—that’s all.  How does this physical action work to help us to see pure Mind which is beyond the physical?  Hopefully, our quest makes us focus on our everyday mind of birth and death because that is where we are going to find pure Mind.  It’s there just like the blue sky above us.  But if we’ve been looking at the ground or simply what is in front of us, we’ve missed looking in a different way—seeing the open, clear sky.

There is no emptiness

How today’s Buddhists view emptiness is not too difficult to guess.  Maybe it is something like dark matter, or space.  It might even be something like a super back hole.  This would imply that emptiness is categorematic in the example of “man” or something that can stand on its own.  Or we might use the example of the moon, or a tractor as an example of what is categorematic.  But emptiness is not like this.  It is nothing in itself.  There is no intrinsic emptiness essence.

When we say the house is empty or the lot is vacant, the categorematic terms are house and lot.  Empty and vacant tell us something about the condition of the house and the lot.  But they are nothing in themselves like our house or the lot around the corner.  If we learn from Buddhism that nirvana is the supreme void or the highest void (P., aggasuñña) this can only mean that nirvana is void or empty of conditioned phenomena this includes being empty of anâtman (non-self) which are the Five Aggregates and the defilements.  

When we empty out all that is conditioned, which includes impermanence, suffering and non-self (the Five Aggregates), what remains is the element (dhatu) of nirvana.  It is the ultimate essence, eternal, blissful, the highest benefit, undying, and so on.  We get this same sense when Chandrakirti says the following about emptiness:

"Emptiness is not a property, or universal mark, of entities, because then its substratum would be nonempty, and one would have a fixed conviction (dristi) about it. In fact, it is a mere medicine, a means of escape from all fixed conviction. It is taught so that we may overcome attachment, and it would be a pity if we were to become attached to it. It is not a positive standpoint, but a mere turning away from all views and thought-constructions. To treat it as an object, and to oppose it to non-emptiness, is to miss the point" ( Trans., in Conze, Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom (Berkeley, 1975), p. 144, n. 4).

Chandrakiriti is really saying that if we wish to see our pure Mind or reach nirvana we have to turn away from all views and thought-constructions.  This is what emptiness means.  It works like the via negativa.  In Zen, when we read about No Mind this really means the Buddha Mind that is empty of defilements which are various kinds of thought-constructions.  Buddha Mind is substance; it is empty of all possible constructions in the same way the element of gold is empty of shapes like a ring shape or an bracelet shape.  It can become shaped but is never itself a shape.