The Zennist

Going beyond the conceptual clear-light Mind

Eventually, we come to learn from Buddhism that all things or entities have a conceptually constructed existence which is far more subtle than an ox cart or a clay pot, for example. Yes, we could even say that there is a conceptually constructed clear-light Mind which is dependent on the mind's activity of conceptual construction. Or, on the same track, we could say there is a conceptually constructed nirvana or enlightenment.  

The beginner or even the seasoned veteran cannot help but to conceptually construct such a clear-light Mind while reading this blog who may have never actualized it.  Still, the goal is the same, namely, to meet this Mind face to face, hopefully, to be one who has actually realized the clear-light Mind; not just relying on a mental representation of it.

This brings us to the point where we have to decide whether to pursue gnosis of this clear-light Mind which is no longer just a concept or representation, or become what you might call an amateur scholar who reads books about this Mind by its various other names such as the One Mind, pure Mind, unborn Mind, etc.  This is an important point.  

Oh, and it is not always this black and white.  It can be more like, "I am thinking about trying to realize this clear-light Mind someday; it's sort of on the back burner. But I remain fascinated with the subject."

This falls, I think, under the category of self-deception where it becomes possible to believe that my aspiration for awakening is on the edge of gnosis of the clear-light Mind.  But aspiration (a strong desire for realization of Mind), although it is important, is not the same as committing oneself to the daring struggle to wrest the numinous from the vast ocean of primal ignorance.  The 'committing of oneself' is not thinking about jumping into deep waters—it is already to have jumped in; or at least to have been kicked in!

How strange and amazing then to have actually seen, face to face, the clear-light Mind; and even more difficult to explain it to others since it is nothing for our senses to consume or to enjoy.

Shakya the muni

The idea of the solitary meditator has played a significant role, certainly in the Indian religions.  The recluse, the anchorite, the hermit, the rishi (P., ishi), all speak to the fact that solitude, in particular, inner solitude, is a prerequisite for profound, firsthand intuition.  

It is important to understand that inner solitude is not simply a flight from the material world; rather this solitude is found to be necessary so that one can penetrate through the external fabric of the material world; no longer living in fear or being mesmerized by it.  In a very real sense it is seen to be illusory.  

The greatest of solitaries is the muni.  He is Shakya-muni recognized as the Buddha or awakened one.  The qualities of a muni are further explored in the Sutta-Nipata.  The muni has reached the other shore (210).  He has overcome all, who knows all (211).  He wanders alone (213).  He has perceived the highest truth (219). He meditates aloof in the jungle (221).  He is one who is freed from name and body (namakaya) and cannot be determined (1074).

To be sure, the muni, i.e., the ecstatic man, has gone beyond the material plane of existence.  He directly communes with spirit, which is beyond the nets of sensory consciousness. 

Today's three Zens

These days, Zen could be divided up into three kinds of Zen.  The first is dead word Zen or the same, literati Zen.  This is Zen that believes the words of the Zen masters, as especially found in koans, are interpretable. This Zen assumes that the concept forming intellect is capable of cracking the koan's secret.  

The second kind of Zen is live word Zen which is Zen that aims a kensho which means to see one's Buddha-nature, directly.  We might even call this Zen, kensho Zen.  With such Zen the words of the Zen masters are not interpretable.  Their words and strange gestures are barriers—like the monkey pitch ball trap.  Touch a koan with your intellect, you're caught in the pitch ball trap.  The only way to escape the trap is to apply the huatou which literally means "ante-word" or "ante-thought".  This means to turn the light of mind back to what, essentially, preexists mind-become-thoughts in which mind transcends birth and death.  This is mind that is pure, unconditioned, and radiant.

The third kind of Zen is sitting Zen.  This Zen is based on the physical practice of sustained sitting in a rigid upright posture.  It is used mainly by those who follow the teachings of Dogen Zenji.  Originally, this practice was developed by  Zen master Hung-chih and known as Silent Illumination Zen which made its way to Japan through Dogen Zenji which then became the school of Soto Zen.  Hung-chih taught, “Just being completely silent we are naturally illuminated.”  This practice was highly criticized by other Zen masters.  Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769), who fixed the orthodox Rinzai koan practice, called it "dead sitting in silent illumination" (koza mokushô).

 

Out of balance

Our culture is strongly oriented towards the linear and the empirical (sensory experience) which helps to support the hegemony of scientific materialism.  Most of us, for example, are unaware of this fact even though we use computers which retrieve information in a linear manner.  For that reason, it is not a culture oriented towards introspection which is a nice word for self-observation which takes place in the inner world of the first-person.  

Most people, if you could observe what is going on inside of their heads would, no doubt, find a madhouse.

While it is true that beings possess the Buddha-nature, which is their very essence or substance, it is also true that their ability to realize it borders on the impossible.  What I mean by this, beings are almost incapable of receiving the antidotal teaching necessary for them to see their Buddha-nature.  Most are incorrigible and obdurate.  Most have little or no faith in the Buddha’s teachings.  They only want to use a small portion of it so they can get through the day without being a total wreck.

In a number of ways our strong orientation and preoccupation towards the linear and the empirical which represent the two great pillars of scientific materialism, has caused us to neglect introspection and its importance.  Modern culture, in other words, is out of balance or the same, out of harmony.  While the linear and the empirical work on the outside to get us material things we believe we require, both prove inadequate for the job of introspection which may explain why there are so many psychological problems these days.  It is almost the truth to say that everyone suffers from an inclination towards madness!

Even Western religion has proven itself to not be interested in introspection as much as Buddhism is.  People pray—they don’t meditate.  Their practice is all about obedience to God.  But this is not introspection in the strict sense of the word.  It is more like learning to be a well trained dog.  Coupled with the strong orientation of Western culture to scientific materialism, religion has not shown much practical value with the exception of Buddhism which pop culture sees as bald headed monk meditating. 

Buddhism should be shocking

The biggest problem the average person faces in trying to understand Buddhism and with it Zen, is the ideas they form about Buddhism which they receive from their culture.  It is like trying to teach the average person the difference between classical physics and quantum mechanics or the difference between an ordinary computer and a quantum computer with its qubits. Niels Bohr was not exaggerating when he said: “If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.” 

Buddhism should shock us and so should Zen.  The fact that they don’t is that we don’t understand in the slightest what the Buddha really taught.  It almost goes without saying, but not a few have tried to tell us what the Buddha taught.  But it wasn’t shocking.  Buddhism only starts to get shocking when people like I.B. Horner, a translator of the Pali discourses and the president of the Pali Text Society (1959–1981), wrote:

“The Self (attâ) as both divine and human was no more repudiated by early Sâkya than were either the Âtman as Brahman, or the âtman as the self of man by the Upanishads” (The Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected, 41).

This is almost shocking because the movers and shakers of this culture, who’ve come from our fine universities, do not believe in a soul, much less a Hindu âtman or—believe it or not—introspection as the only path to the absolute.  Those who accept their values expect Buddhism not to be shocking; being as easy as lighting a stick of incense and sitting still for ten to twenty minutes on a fluffy pillow.

Buddhism gets really shocking when the discussion turns to our true self (attâ/âtman) which is clinging to what it is not, in the wrong headed belief that this is really what it is!  And just what is not our true self?  It is not our psychophysical organism consisting of form or material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.  No, we should not cling to these things because our true self is none of these things all of which are painful and murderous!  The Buddha even teaches us to abandon desire for what is not our true self.  

Whatever our true self is, it is not this psychophysical organism we cling to which is, at times, very painful.  We have to learn how to distinguish it from our true self or âtman.  Our inability to distinguish our self from what is not our self falls under the category of ignorance or avidya.  The most shocking part is that if we don’t learn, first hand, how to distinguish our true self from what is not our self, we will be reborn again, in a not so good next life, owing to the degree of our ignorance.

The monkey mind

Almost everyone before they spend serious time doing zazen or meditating suffer from what I like to call the  monkey mind (kapicitta).  This is the mind of our internal conversation or the same, thinking.  It is almost always disordered and chaotic.  The Buddha described such a mind this way.

"Just as a monkey swinging through the trees grabs one branch and lets it go only to seize another, so too, that which is called thought, mind or consciousness arises and disappears continually both day and night"  (S.ii.95).

This inner monkey mind depends on determinate objects including sounds and many other things such as the past or the future. Without an object (a branch) it is still unable to relax and just abide.  The monkey has to hold onto something all the time.  The restlessness of the monkey mind is sensory object dependent.

Taming the monkey mind is no easy task.  Most people cannot sit in zazen or some form of meditation for five minutes without their monkey mind grabbing branches right and left!  The I or the higher self is aware of all this craziness, but has lost control of the monkey.  And this is a big monkey, almost of gorilla-like proportions for some people.  On the outside such people look normal.  But inside, the monkey is jumping around, chattering, grabbing things.  In other cases, the monkey is depressed almost despondent grabbing at past branches; refusing to let go of this one particular branch.

Buddhism, especially, Zen Buddhism, needs to convert this wild monkey mind into an ordinary human mind that is capable of listening to the Buddha’s discourses, correctly.  The higher or lord self has to take charge and stop allowing the monkey to do as it pleases.  (From the Dhammapada (380) we read, “the self is lord of the self [attâ hi attano natho].”)

From the position of proper meditation, we have to be aware of our monkey mind as painful as it may seem to us.  The more we zoom in on the monkey the more he seems to calm down.  Aversion to our monkey mind is not helpful.  He only becomes more active.  Sometime in our life we have to face him.

Mindfulness: introspective and of the body

We can’t help but notice that mindfulness or in Pali, sati, has a transcendent ring to it.  Here is an example.

"His mindfulness (sati) is established (paccuppatthita) precisely to the extent necessary for the sheer knowledge (ñana-mattaya), for the sheer vision (dassana-mattaya), for the sheer awareness (pati-ssati-mattaya), dwelling without leaning (a-nissito ca viharati), without attaching to anything in the world (na ca kiñci loke upadiyati)" (M. i. 56).

This mindfulness is both introspective and helps to facilitate healing.  Mindfulness is like a probe used by the physician to determine where the bullet is so it can be safely extracted (the Buddha used the analogy of a poisonous arrow being extracted using a probe which then allows for proper healing).  By introspection we probe with mindfulness the various unwholesome states of mind that affect us thus removing them in the process.  

It seems that such mindfulness is able to probe and remove the unwholesome states of mind, provided we probe or introspect there.  Not going there, the poisons or the infection (meaning ignorance) grows.

With external or bodily mindfulness (kayasati) it has to do behavior, in general.

"And how, monks, has a monk comprehended a mode of conduct and way of living in such a way that as he conducts himself thus and as he lives thus, evil unwholesome states of covetousness and dejection do not flow into him? Suppose a man should enter a thorny forest. There would be thorns in front of him, thorns behind him, thorns to his left, thorns to his right, thorns below him, thorns above him. He would go forward, being mindful (sata), he would go back, being mindful, thinking: “May no thorn [prick] me!” So too, monks, whatever in the world has an agreeable and pleasing nature is called a thorn in the Noble One’s Discipline" (S. iv. 189).

Behaving in such a way that one isn’t the recipient of negative consequences for their behavior, requires mindfulness that understands how to apply proper restraint, in the sense of not being attracted to and overwhelmed by the senses and the bewitching pleasures that come through them. Thus one sets up mindfulness of the body.

Not just any anchor

So much of what we read and study in regard to Buddhism and Zen can sometimes rest on error.  In medical terms, this is called “anchoring errors.”  This is when a physician gives an initial diagnosis, which is actually wrong.  The attending physician that takes care of the patient assumes the initial diagnosis is accurate.  The patient ends up in a serious, life threatening condition, because of the first misdiagnosis.

There is hardly a day that goes by when preparing to write a blog for The Zennist I don’t come across an example of anchoring.  The most pervasive one is that the Buddha denied a self.  Nobody is really interested in reading what the Buddha actually said with regard to self or, to use another example, rebirth.  Nope, it’s don’t rock the boat of long established error.  If someone asks you if the Buddha really denied the self, don’t say, no he didn’t.  Just nod your head as if to say yes.  Or you could try to avoid saying either yes or no.  Confuse the asker.  Above all don’t tell the asker the truth:  The Buddha taught his followers not to identify their self with what is not the self, such as the Five Aggregates consisting of material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.

When it comes to rebirth the big anchoring here is the assumption that the soul or âtman transmigrates and since Buddhism doesn’t believe in the Hindu âtman, how can there be rebirth?

First of all, the only thing that transmigrates in Buddhism is consciousness (S., vijñâna), not the âtman.  This consciousness that transmigrates is laden with volitional impressions (yours of course).  Eventually, it latches onto name & form (nâmarûpa).  Whoops!  Now you are entangled in an embryo some where in the galaxy or maybe another one with in inhabitable planet.

Few Buddhist graduate students and scholars dare to write books threatening to rock the boat of “anchoring errors.”  A few get by, however.  One was Joaquin Perez-Remon who wrote, Self and Non-Self in Early Pali Buddhism and the other was Peter Masefield who wrote, Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism.  One that I can imagine in the future will be a dissertation that corrects the anchor error that âtman means self, or refers to an individual or a person.  It does not.  It will show that the Buddha’s teaching is much more sophisticated than is presently understood, that âtman means self, or refers to an individual or a person.  It does not.  

The two very different conversations

Much of our life is more or less involved in an external conversation that society is having with itself in terms of science, economics, and the management of our daily lives just to name a few items. We can also call this external thought or external thinking. But Buddhism doesn’t reside here.   

Buddhism moves in the world of the first-person conversation, particularly, between the I and the me (the self and the lord of the self according to the Dhammapada).  This is what thinking really is (Kant said, Thinking is talking to onself).  But there is far more to thinking than this—but it is a start.  This is where we go to find the world of the mystic in the example of Plotinus or Bodhidharma. But the most basic utility of Buddhism is that it teaches us how to converse with ourselves and, just as much, how to guide ourselves. Ultimately, we guide our self to the yonder shore of nirvana.

Reflecting on what I just said.  Most people are not that aware that thinking, in general, is twofold.  It is a conversation with the external world.  E.g., we can think/converse with others at the pub, in a coffee shop, at our job, or with family and friends, or even reading a newspaper or listening to the radio.  This shows our care for the external world we live in.  It grants us some measure of utility (in the sense of usefulness)—but it is not the whole enchilada!  

The social world we live and work in is, by in large, the product of external thinking, that is, a conversation between members of the society.  It could be in a university or at work, or just talking with our spouse.  By comparison, the psychological problems that internally confront us: the depression, anxiety, fears, and doubts, are the product of almost no education of how the I and the me should converse and interact.  The psychological state many of us are in is not often a pretty picture giving the amount of medications we find it necessary to take.  Something is missing.

Psychology, unfortunately, doesn’t understand as much as it should about the importance of correct thinking; or care of the mind (wherefrom thinking arises).  Our educational system is only geared for the external conversation which takes place between members of society.  There is no education of how to talk to ourselves, properly, that is, how to think, inwardly; thus to explore the world of I and me and what lies beyond it in the way of the absolute.  This is where Buddhism is necessary.

Enlightenment is difficult and so is Buddhism

 The difficulty of comprehending Buddhism (I include Zen Buddhism) is, naturally proportional, with what enlightenment is.  If we believe that enlightenment (samyaksambodha) is being always mindful of what we are doing in our daily lives instead of daydreaming, then the discourses of the Buddha would likewise be quite simple as well as the sermons of Zen masters.  But this is not the case.  The subtlety of enlightenment, its unconditioned nature, is reflected in a complex, difficult to understand literature.

People who believe Buddhism can be adapted to the needs of modern culture, it just needs to be dumb-down somewhat, are people who believe that the Buddha’s enlightenment was simple.  It might only mean that we meditate a few times a day or practice mindfulness when we brush our teeth or peel a potato.  But the simplification of Buddhism to just being mindful does not comport well with either the discourses of the Buddha or the sermons of the Zen masters.   

The enlightenment of the Buddha including the kensho of the Zen masters, in terms of what they actually realized, cannot be easily explained since enlightenment is beyond our thinking, thinking in the sense of having a conversation with oneself.  Even ‘thinking silence or calm’ is far from the shore of enlightenment.  The truth of the matter, there is something quite profound to directly recognize.  The realizer is perfectly intimate with it, but cannot share it in anyway because it is non-empirical.

The popularity of Buddhism and Zen should not be an excuse to make enlightenment and what it actually signifies other that what is presented in the discourses of the Buddha.  It is allowable, however, to summarize enlightenment as awakening to the unconditioned which transcends our empirical, conditioned world.  This doesn’t add anything to what the Buddha has already said in his discourses.  In fact, we can reduce almost to a summary the most important parts of Buddhism.  There is no justifiable reason for dumbing down Buddhism and Zen so that their original context is gone, favoring, instead, a modern context.