The Zennist

Going one step beyond the threshold

In the Lankavatara Sutra we read:

"The dhyāna [J., zen-na] practised, dhyāna itself, and the subject of dhyāna, the abandonment, the seeing of the truth,—all this is discrimination; he who understands is released."

We also read:

"When all these are abandoned and he is in the state of no-shadows, all the Buddhas will come together from their lands and with their shining hands anoint the head of the blessed with unguents; his [mental] state is in full conformity with suchness (tathatā).

Sound confusing?  As far back as the Pali Nikayas, dhyāna (P., jhāna) only takes us to the threshold of awakening.  It is not awakening, itself, that is, the direct communion with the absolute which is completely unconditioned.  From the perspective of the unconditioned, all practices carry more or less a trace of the conditioned—even the "cessation of thought," according to the Lankavatara Sutra. 

When the Buddhas with their shining hands anoint us, insofar as we are in complete conformity with suchness; as indescribable as it is, the unconditioned is the only reality; everything else is like an organized torsion wave of this essence for want of a better illustration.  And after this mystery, while one sees the world as the fullest expression of this unconditioned reality, looking back it is only by means of dhyāna that we came to the threshold, that is, the checkpoint (關) of the gateless.  From that point, one step more and we entered.  This is the Tathagata's dhyāna.

Still, there are some if not many who believe that the path with its practices does not lead to the threshold—just accept practice.  For, indeed, there is no need to seek the unconditioned because there is really nothing to be attained as such!  When I first began my study of Zen, I believed such nonsense.  But this idiotic opinion soon died since the default was my conditioned individuality which was not free from suffering.  I wanted to transcend this temporal heap of suffering.  I wanted to see the place beyond suffering.  I came to believe in a reality that transcended the conditioned reality of my birth.  After I had discovered the Lankavatara Sutra in 1965 I was convinced it was on the right track.  I had that much faith.  But few these days have the faith I had.  The are espoused to false dogmas and I dare say they will not change.

Avoiding the bad tapes

Neuroscience tells us that the subconscious controls 95 percent of our lives. This is like tapes that we continually play over and over again at somewhat of an unconscious level, of which many are necessary so we don't forget behaviors such as walking, for example, or driving our car. But others are not useful such as the bad behaviors we learned from our family and culture beginning as far back is when we were in our mother's womb.  Hopefully, our mother was not under a lot of stress when she was carrying us otherwise we would become physically affected with a somewhat larger hindbrain in addition to being more muscular so that when we left the womb we might have a better chance to survive. This is not good.  The cost is a smaller brain, one less intelligent.  This person would be better suited for sports or war.

The other 5 percent of our brain is what Zen Buddhism is interested in. Call it our consciousness or mind, which alone has the power to see our true nature. The other 95 percent doesn't.  The problem that the 5 percent faces, besides trying to see the true essence of reality, is dealing with the part of the 95 percent that is really screwed up in which the tapes keep playing the bad stuff again and again as in the example of depression or addictive behaviors.  This, in my opinion, is why it is necessary to have monastic or quasi-monastic institutions.  They help to make the negative tapes less operable and demanding.  This is somewhat like bootcamp in the military, minus the hazing.  This frees  up the 5 percent to begin its difficult work of trying to see true nature, or the same, the pure Mind.

Monastic institutions offer no miracle cures.  They are just a way for us to escape from our bad tapes so that we might better utilize the 5 percent and reach the goal of kensho or at the least appreciate its necessity; that Zen is not just about sitting which can become a ritual.  There is more.  It's the difficult part because the pure subject has to see the pure object which is the only way the consciousness of rebirth can be transcended.  This process of the subject and object letting go in which various opinions, preconceptions, presuppositions, images and beliefs are much less, is the only way we can reach the summit where lies the luminous Mind-substance.  

If the negative tapes are still rolling even when we are in a monastery or doing an intense retreat for three months, how can the 5 percent stop this?  It is difficult to bring one's awareness to the unconscious side of ourselves since it is still quite powerful.  It almost requires a teacher to make us aware that we are still playing these negative tapes too much; at the expense of the 5 percent where all of our faith must be put.  Very few if any teachers have the time or are willing to pay so much attention to a person dominated by the bad tapes.  It is a question of triage.  First, helping those who have only a few negative tapes.

Yes, Buddhism is a religion—a different kind

I can take a distinctly religious attitude towards this present life, which includes death, by seeking within myself ultimate reality which transcends my present life and death.  But also I have the choice to take a pleasure seeking, materialistic attitude towards life which is almost a life without conscience; seeing only value in the outer, showy part of life.  I might also think of myself as an aesthete being devoted to art and beauty; not just raw pleasure seeking or worse, becoming a substance abuser.  Further, I can take a distinctly ethical attitude towards my life while still enjoying aesthetic values in which the ethical side helps to temper and control pleasure seeking (Freud's "id").  I can have a number of such attitudes dominated, mainly, by religion and ethics or without religion and ethics the latter being, in my book, ignoble (an-aryan).

Looking at the religious attitude, there are many different kinds of religions, not just Judaism, Christianity and Islam who share, supposedly, the same god.  India has many different kinds of religions and many different kinds of gods.  India is the birthplace of Jainism, Buddhism and Vedanta.  Let's not forget the Vedas and the Upaniṣads.   We could even say that shamanism is religious including Chinese Daoism.  I would argue that even philosophy and science venture into the territory of the religious to the extent they seek ultimate reality.  Overall, we need to treat "religion" as a generic term meaning, in general, awareness or realization of what is beyond sense experience which may, or may not have anything to do with god or gods. 

Buddhism, without a doubt, falls into the generic meaning of religion.  At the same time, Buddhism can be much different than Judaism since the former finds a god, real or otherwise, to be useless and "unjust , who made a world in which to shelter wrong."  The idea of religion should be more inclusive even including spirituality. 

Affirming that Buddhism is a religion is something many Westerners run away from since they have been taught to reject all religion as being, essentially, mumbo-jumbo when in fact, it is only Judaism and Christianity which they mainly reject.  This leads to "secular Buddhism" which is a huge mistake.  Buddhism is not in any sense of the word "secular"; those who spend their lives trying to secularize Buddhism—even Zen—are hurting Buddhism and themselves.  They are simply followers of the current negative paradigm in biology and neuroscience which is still trying to somehow resurrect the mechanical world of Newton and keep alive the world of Darwin with its ideology of survival of the fittest.

All this works against the bigger picture of religion which then puts Buddhism into the hands of haters of not only religion but of spirituality and shamanism.  So of what benefit has Buddhism and Zen Buddhism been for the West?  Not much I would argue.  Only a small group of people see what the Buddha was aiming at while the rest are so preoccupied with trying to stay afloat in a culture of predatory capitalism they have scarcely anytime to look at Buddhism and Zen in a more profound way except to sit in meditation.  The only hope for Buddhism in the West is for it to stop trying to sell itself to people who care very little about religion; who mainly believe that there is no life after death.

Down the rabbit hole to the Buddha's Wonderland

Temporal reality which relates exclusively to the earthly, worldly life only provides us with the illusion of truth.  This illusion of truth is not something that is obviously an illusion, either.  We can't see this kind of illusion.  The illusion of truth begins with the belief this is true or the same, this is real, i.e., actually existing.  My life, including the world around me is, for me, true or real.  Now the Buddha comes along and says temporal reality is illusory and unreal.  By my glomming on to it I have made it seem necessary and all-too-real.  The Buddha wants me to believe that I have been deceived by appearances; that I do not know this because of primordial ignorance.  In fact, maybe I have confused sense certainty with truth.

Few wish to go down the Buddha's "rabbit-hole" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) which is a metaphor for entry into the unknown which can easily become disorienting; a land where our cultural compass doesn't work anymore.  Unlike Lewis Carroll's Alice, few are "burning with curiosity" to go down the rabbit hole.  For those burning with curiosity, life in the Buddha's rabbit hole is intended to undermine everything they once believed in as being truth.  But for those who are only committed to going down the rabbit hole a few yards:

"Like those of us who do not understand the basic premises of psychic life, Alice insists on applying the rules of logic, the laws of time and space, the assumed fundamentals of the world above the rabbit hole. That is her familiar world, the world of everyday consciousness, manners, routines, things known and loved. But once down the rabbit hole (which Freud would call a “parapraxis, ” an unconscious slip of the foot), she leaves all that and enters a realm where subversion is the order of the day, inversion is normal, logic has completely different premises, and Alice, because she doesn't understand any of this, is the only one in Wonderland who doesn't make sense" (Lyn Cowan, Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View of Modern Culture, p. 14)

Naturally, we would expect the Buddha's Wonderland to be viewed and understood through his discourses including the more recondite ones like the Lotus Sutra, Lankavatara Sutra and the mysterious Avatamsaka Sutra.  In this particular Wonderland, everyone is awakened to the One Mind, except us.  We are still trying to use our cultural compass to orient us.  It still hasn't dawned on us that everything we were taught is probably wrong in respect to the Buddha's teachings.  Our education was merely useful—not truth everlasting.  It helped us to get from point a to point b in an illusory world.  It did not, however, disclose the illusion we lived under.  The odd thing about our illusory world is that one day we find a venerated truth cast down (just recently Kirchhoff’s law of thermal emission was cast down).  Everything we thought to be true is sooner or later found to be false from big bangs and black holes, to genetic determinism.  We deal with this by cognitive dissonance, actively avoiding situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.

Lastly, the seeming irrational quality of Zen koans evoke in us the need to put these koans into a kind of ordinary or everyday logic although this is not where koans are coming from.  We fail the see the golden thread which unites all these koans and the so-called Mind to Mind transmission.  If we which to be part of the Buddha's Wonderland we have to have kensho: we have to see our true self or nature which is unconditioned; which is beyond the ken of our temporal world.  This alone is absolute truth; the ultimately real which cannot deceive us.  One final note, the means for getting us here to the Buddha's Wonderland is going to be a Wonderland discipline which takes us to our wits' end (yes, I have mentioned this before).

Buddhism and Incestuous amplification

"Incestuous amplification" is a very interesting military term which if overlooked can lead to a huge disaster. Incestuous amplification occurs when a group is committed to a particular strategy or solution which, at the same time, excludes contrary views, even going so far as to punish those who might have a better idea.  In what is known today as the Battle of the Bulge, in a very short period of time 19,000 American soldiers were killed.  However, the German offensive was no surprise to American G-2 intelligence officer of the First Army, Colonel Monk Dickson. His report no. 37 predicted almost to the day the German offensive.  In a state of incestuous amplification the group led by Major General William B. Kean didn't want to hear what Colonel Monk Dickson had to say.  In other words, at the time nobody wanted to hear the Germans were coming back on December 1944 and the Allies would have their backs against the wall.  The rest is history which few will learn from.

Which now brings us to Buddhism.  In Buddhism, it is believed that the individual or satkaya is made up of the conditioned five skandhas or aggregates, beyond which there is no ātman.  Simple enough—end of discussion.  Nobody wants to hear, in particular, that the Buddha did not deny ātman; in fact, made no unambiguous denial of ātman in his many discourses.  His main focus was teaching his followers not to identify with what is not ātman, namely, the five grasping aggregates or skandhas which constituted the individual/person or satkaya.  

Incestuous amplification extends to karma and rebirth believing that these were not authentic doctrines of the Buddha but mere concessions on his part to the Zeitgeist.  This same blinkered attitude extends to consciousness (vijñāna).  Many Buddhists fail to acknowledge that consciousness—not ātman—is the rebirth transmigrant which resonates with the nāmarūpa (embryo), which grows into a conditioned individual being that is subject to pain and death.

Zen suffers also from incestuous amplification.  Many Zennists believe that seated meditation (J., zazen) is the sure road to awakening.  Some even want to believe there is no awakening—no kensho.  Everything is already Buddha-nature (this is a utopian mindset). Hey, we're all Buddhas even the mountains, rivers and shrubbery!  So in this regard, just accept this.  Do it by "just sitting" (只管打坐) which before Dogen's borrowing of the idea, meant in Chinese Buddhist monasteries just attend to meditation insofar as a number of monks held no administrative positions—they had to do something, in other words. One could think of these monks as newly arrived beginners.  But proto-Zen and early-Zen contains no such teachings.  Only around the time of Song-Zen does a strong emphasis on zazen begin and then only in the school of Caodong (J., Soto) which was experiencing a revival.

The great casualty here is sentient beings who prolong their time in samsara being reborn again and again owing to the depth of their avidya.  But who thinks of casualties like this?  Most people are too deluded to think about such things, after all they believe this is the only life they will ever experience after they die—or is it?  Nor do their teachers care.  They are just happy to get a modest income.  But this is a perfect example of the blind leading the blind.  Still, it is dangerous.

We have a failure to communicate

I should not be surprised, but today I was. I used the analogy of raw clay as being like the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta) and a vase or a pot made from the clay to be like the conditioned (saṃskṛta).  The vase or the conditioned is subject to an arising and perishing (when it breaks) whereas the raw clay or the unconditioned is not subject to an arising or perishing. Such was my raw clay and vase analogy.  Anyway, this guy reminded me that raw clay is conditioned! 

At the time, I could only conclude that this guy suffered from a mediocre education.  He had a little knowledge about Buddhism that can also be a very dangerous thing coupled with the attitude of a know-it-all who doesn't need to learn anymore. All this could be doing him more harm than good.

One sees the importance of analogies, including the use of metaphors, similes, and models, in helping us in day to day communication trying to make the unfamiliar familiar. Analogies are especially important in the formation of theoretical ideas.  An analogy can be thought of as a tool or an aid to explanation and insight. Minus analogy, scientific insight would be impossible. It is the same in Buddhism. We require analogies, similes, metaphors, etc., to explain the recondite side of Buddhism in this example, the unconditioned (nirvana) and the conditioned (samsara).

Briefly stated, an "analogy" expresses a resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike. The analogy I used was intended as a helpful aid for a struggling student to help him begin to understand the important distinction between conditioned and unconditioned. So what is with some people these days that they don't even get what an analogy is?  Are we suffering from some weird new disease in which everyone is gradually devolving into a state of total ignorance?

The Zen checkpoint

Trying to pass through Wumen's gateless barrier or checkpoint (無門關) is no easy matter when one takes into consideration that this checkpoint will not allow anything to pass through it, even our thoughts!  The barriers confronting us are, in the big picture, are really only one, this being our attachment to all things (i.e., phenomena/conditionality).  Even our psychophysical body proves to be a barrier—an almost impassable checkpoint.  But in order to get to nirvana we have to find a way to pass through this odd and mysterious checkpoint. 

If we actually saw our true nature or the pure Mind we would be allowed to pass through the checkpoint.  If we had to say what is free from birth and death it would be easy.  We've realized it.  Even the four elements would be no longer of interest to us since this pristine nature transcends the elements.

But while we dream of passing through this gateless barrier our very mental constructs and language stand in the way.  They have become the barrier while the mysterious subject who sees these mental constructs; who is also caught in the snare of language, seeks to pass through.  It a way, the subject's mental constructs, no matter how sublime they may seem, are like a passport that is not being accepted.  The subject is holding on, you could say, to the barrier which prevents him from seeing the gateless.

To penetrate this barrier, or the same, pass through the checkpoint, depends on what we are glomming onto.  If it is conditioned, being some fanciful idea that we refuse to let go of, then the barrier before us turns into an iron wall.  We may not see it this way, but in terms of the gateless we have made an iron wall which we cannot pass through.  The more we are determined to force our view the greater becomes our burden.  

The four maladies

Yesterday I was looking at A. Charles Muller's book, The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment: Korean Buddhism's Guide to Meditation, which has a commentary by the Korean Zen/Seon monk Kihwa (1376–1433) which I hasten to add is a great book for your Zen library.  An interesting section is "The Four Maladies" which I found to be very timely especially in light of today's understanding of Zen.  Basically, the four maladies are: 1) contrivance; 2) naturalist; 3) stopping; 4) annihilation.  According to Kihwa:

"Contrivance" means "doing with intention" and implies the creation of all good dharmas.  "Stopping" means "stopping of thought" and implies the cessation of all mistaken thoughts.  "Naturalism" means "letting things follow their course" and implies going along with all that the mind creates, without grasping to "contrivance" or "stopping."  Annihilation" means "extinction" and implies the destruction of defilements through the two emptinesses of mind and objects.  Contrivance, stopping, naturalism, and annihilation are attitudes in which the practitioner should not get stuck.  As soon as there is something to which the mind get attached, then there is an obstruction to enlightenment, and so it is called a malady" (p. 224).

Personally, I have seen all four of these maladies, each in their own unique form.  Regarding contrivance it is attachment to the idea that doing zazen will reach perfect enlightenment.  To be blunt, such a practice will fall short of perfect enlightenment.  Besides the contrivance of zazen, naturalism is a great malady which seems to be prevalent among beginners.  I have seen it in the form of learning to be in the here & the now; accepting things as they are; the everyday mind is the enlightened mind and so on.  This is far from perfect enlightenment.  With the malady of stopping, the adept, during meditation, is willfully trying to suppress his or her thoughts but to no avail.  I see the malady of annihilation among students who take up the study of emptiness.  They try to annihilate or erase all defilements of body and mind by seeing all this as just emptiness.  But this endeavor never reaches perfect enlightenment.

Speaking personally, we all go through these maladies. I certainly did.  But my foolishness didn't last long.  I saw that I was on a fool's errand.  So what was left for me?  That is when it dawned on me to try to see the pure Mind in myself.  Where was it hiding.  In zazen I watched my thoughts.  "Where are you pure Mind?"  I wondered to myself is awareness this pure Mind.  But awareness is just another word for the subject who is looking at his body and mind.  No, there is something I am missing.  So I went on like this day in and day out searching for the pure Mind within.  I couldn't stop.  I was obsessed you could say.  Then one day I broke down.  I knew from that moment on I was too stupid to see pure Mind.  I had come to my wits' end.  At that point I was about to pass the checkpoint and go through the no-gate gate.  

Our good karma

The word "karma" (P., kamma) is certainly a popular word but it is not like a one size fits all sock. The Buddhist notion of karma differs from other ideas of karma. Briefly stated, the Buddhist notion of karma mainly applies, not so much to good fortune (e.g., winning the lottery) but to one's ability to understand the Buddha's teaching or Dharma. It is by correctly understanding Dharma that goodness is even possible. How many Buddhist practitioners from monks to a layperson, for example, have the necessary good karma to fully understand the Buddha's recondite teaching?  Not very many is my guess.

Karmic laws (P., kamma-niyāma) are only a special instance of causal laws such as physical laws or biological laws, including psychological laws (citta-niyāma) and laws pertaining to spiritual laws (dhamma-niyāma). In the big picture, karmic laws only state tendencies rather than inevitable consequences.  I hasten to add, that the meaning of niyāma is not so much about "law" as it is about a way or a tendency to a specific end.  

Karma as dhamma-niyāma is closer to Buddhist karma.  Our right or wrong understanding of Dharma depends upon our karma.  What if our way or niyāma is that of a Wall Street broker or a hardcore materialist?  Would we expect such a person to understand the Buddha's ideas of conditioned and unconditioned including rebirth?  Hardly.  Having good karma, in the example of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, meant being able to comprehend the essence or nature of absolute Mind.  On the other hand, having bad karma might mean not understanding Buddhism at all; being nonplused by the idea of the unconditioned Mind. 

Stalking the pure Mind

As the subject that is stalking pure Mind, we have a lot of ideas as to what the object pure Mind might look like.  Could it be this sensation or this experience that I had in zazen just the other day?  Nope.  Wrong guess.  Perhaps it is just being aware of being aware.  Nope.  Cross that one off the list.  Then one goes back to reading some Zen books.  Oh this looks interesting!

"Mind has no color, such as green or yellow, red or white; it is not long or short; it does not vanish or appear; it is free from purity and impurity alike; and its duration is eternal. It is utter stillness. Such, then is the form and shape of our original mind, which is also our original body—the Buddhakaya!" (Zen master Hui-hai)

But now the subject is just looking at possible ideas and images.  It's like a hungry man reading a menu or a cold man thinking of a warm fire.  Maybe it's more difficult than that since we have no idea what this pure Mind looks like even though it is, supposedly, right in front of us.  So we keep stalking our wild pure Mind.  We seem to be stuck.  The subject can't envision it while the object we hope to see doesn't seem to exist.  And still we read from the Zen masters that pure Mind is real—very real.  Perhaps more real than we are.

But what happens when the pure subject meets the pure object (pure Mind)?  Let's speculate.  The subject-object dyad, instantaneously, disappears.  Okay, but what's left?  We can't pre-envisage it.  We are just going to have to see it, face to face.  But how?  This is the question every beginner wants answered.  How about using drugs?  Nope.  That won't do.  How about hours and hours of zazen.  That won't work either.  Where do we go from here?

I found out that we have to be by ourself.  I cut firewood, hauled water from a well dug back in the 1870s and sat alone in a small mine.  One word describes it all, being "alone" although I wasn't lonely.  Even where there are no other humans around, the birds and the animals can make lots of noise.  All the time I was looking for the pure Mind.  That is what I did.  I did it every minute of the day.  I felt pushed by some unseen source.  Reflecting on those long past years, a beginner has to be pushed and pushed hard by their own need to see pure Mind.  This means going to their wits' end (I have mentioned this before).