The Zennist

Buddhism's closet materialists

Buddhism in the West is becoming a magnet for atheists and so-called agnostics who are basically not religious (even anti-religious).  For the most part, they lean towards philosophical materialism which sprang up in Greece and India before the time of the Buddha.  As far as admitting to being philosophical materialists, they prefer to stay in the closet except when subjects like reincarnation and consciousness come up and other like subjects which imply immateriality and a soul (atman).  Of these philosophical materialists who step out of the closet, they usually commence their attack under the banner of either science or skepticism; who will never say, “I am a materialist,” when in fact they are. 

Because materialism, under the banner of skepticism and science, so dominates Western culture, I meet very few Western Buddhists, these days, who are serious about Buddhism in its own right which did not teach a doctrine of materialism; nor was it at any time anti-religious, “religious” in the sense of relating to ultimate reality. 

I should mention that during the time of the Buddha, one school of materialism taught that the “atman is of the form of the body and is composed of the four great elements” ( D. i. 34).  Another school taught the real existence of this world and denial of an afterlife.  One school even taught the denial of this world including the next!  One of the defining characteristics of Indian materialism during the time of the Buddha was disbelief in an afterlife.  In other words, when you’re dead that’s it—there’s no more.  For anyone who has been around the block a few times with Western Buddhists, they are uncomfortable with the idea of an afterlife which puts them near the camp of materialism.

A notable materialist argument found in India during the time of the Buddha is: one cannot speak of atman unless it is verifiable by sensory experience.  Lacking such an experience, the notion of atman is meaningless.  Said another way, the atman for the materialist must have size, shape, color, smell, hardness or softness, etc.  Without such, atman has no verifiable content—at least nothing for the senses.  This would also include consciousness which also doesn’t appear to be something for the senses.

The Buddha’s own notion of atman which is found more in the notion of anatman (lit., not the atman) is the via negativa (setting aside what is not that atman, for example, the five skandhas).  The atman, in this regard, is transcendent (in Mahayana Buddhism the atman is the Buddha-nature).  This atman has no physical shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations (i.e., karmic impressions) or consciousness.  The Buddha goes on to tell his followers that the atman is an island and a refuge.  

The Buddha’s contemporaries even accused him of espousing materialism (M. i. 140) since his attitude towards the atman seemed all too vague and confusing.  Yet, in clearest words the Buddha taught his followers to abandon desire for whatever is not atman (S. iii. 77).  This, naturally, leaves us with the atman as the proper end state of Buddhism!

Turning back to our closet Western materialists who frequent the sacred temples of Buddhism, they are just as confused about the teachings of Gautama the Buddha as were his contemporary critics.  Today, many Western Buddhists believe the Buddha’s teaching denies atman and did not teach rebirth/reincarnation.  They see the Buddha as espousing materialism!  But what gets in their way is the Buddha's teaching of rebirth in addition to nirvana which he says is immortal and is realized by the very atman.

Clinging to suffering

In Buddhism the second noble truth, the etiology of suffering, is clinging to the five skandhas (physical form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness).  The etiology is just not clinging but clinging to something that is suffering which are the skandhas  This is an important point.  If I didn’t attach or cling to the dependently originated, conditioned five skandhas I wouldn’t be suffering.  Presented another way, if my physical form, the first skandha, were truly my ātman, I would not be exposed to suffering (cp. Mahavagga i. 6).  The ātman, above all, is free of suffering by definition.  This also should tell us that if we are suffering it is because we are clinging to the suffering (i.e., the five skandhas) and what is, also, not the ātman (anātman)—you might say a false ātman. 

A most inconvenient reality in all of human life is that we do suffer and sometimes suffer big time.  Obviously then, we are clinging to what is not our real ātman this being the skandhas.

For us to see, directly, what does not suffer; which is beyond the pale of the conditioned five skandhas, is to see the real Buddha, that is, the dharmakaya (having a body that is spiritual) or in Mahayana Buddhism, Buddha-nature.  Before I saw what does not suffer,  I was glomming more and more onto the five skandhas.  Now, awakened, I connect (samadhi) with my true ātman, also the dharmakaya and the Buddha-nature.  Oh sure, I am still deeply connected to my skandha body—and it is still painful.  But I am actually connecting more and more with this other body, the dharmakaya.  Now, if someone asks me to describe my ātman, based on the Udana, I would say that it is “unborn, that which is unbecome, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned.”

Before my awakening I was in a state of confusion or avidya.  I could not at all distinguish between ātman and anātman (also the five skandhas).  I took one or more of the five skandhas to be my ātman owing to my ignorance and confusion (avidya).  I could see nothing else; certainly not the actual non-suffering ātman.  I was clinging to the five skandhas which are never other than suffering.  I did not understand what the Buddha meant when he said that I should regard each skandha this way: This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my ātman. 

Reincarnation is bunk—my back is sore

More and more people are open to the idea of reincarnation and more the unlimited Buddhist idea of ‘rebirth’.  It is still a minority belief but one that is certainly on its way up despite the efforts of the corporate media to ignore it along with UFOs, ghosts and other such things.  Reincarnation certainly has its fierce critics like Paul Edwards (Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, 1996) who slams both reincarnation and karma even going on a modern day witch hunt against the research of the late Ian Stevenson, MD, who is noted for his research on the past life memories of children; having studied almost 2500 children who reported past life memories. 

Edwards' target audience seems to be in popular culture among those who think reincarnation and karma are close to being codswallop.  On a personal note, I find him also to be no friend of Buddhism.

Edwards launches his great attack against reincarnation and karma not with great armored divisions of persuasive facts and information, but with several fallacies the main one being question begging, giving the reader the illusion of having completely refuted his opponent's position.  In other words, Edwards asks us to presume that reincarnation is too incredible for any rational person to take seriously.  By the way, this includes any form of mind-body dualism since this assumes the existence of astral bodies or in Buddhism consciousness as the transmigrant.  Two academic reviews of Edwards' book can be found in a review by James G. Matlock  and one by Robert Almeder.  They help the serious student to cut through Edward's pseudo-scholarship.

An aside, Edwards was invited to the University of Georgia by Almeder to publicly defend his views, being offered a large stipend.  He refused complaining of a sore back. Edwards never got back in touch with Professor Almeder.

Getting the intellect out of the way

There are a number of koans that ask the Zen master the same question, “What is the Way?”  But the answers they give are notably different and, seemingly, unconnected.  Our intellect tries to make heads or tails of what could possible unite the differences, but it comes up empty.  The four different answers are as follows:

• Zen master Pen-shan answered, “Go out.”
• Zen master Hsing-shan answered, “The wonderful mountain.”
• Zen master Shih-t’ou answered, “Wood.”
• Zen master Chao-chou answered, “On the outside of the wall.”

 Try as we might with our intellect, it doesn’t work.  Sure, it is good for certain things.  My dictionary defines “intellect” as, the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively.  What the intellect can know is limited to external and conditioned things.  There is a boundary beyond which the usefulness of the intellect cannot pass.  More to the point, the intellect cannot achieve direct, one to one gnosis of the unconditioned which is transcendent.  One who uses their intellect to apprehend the unconditioned as if to see it as something determinate will ultimately fail.

With each answer to the question of “What is the Way?” the intellect, try as it might, cannot pass when it hears such answers.  They sound like nonsense.  At some point, the wise adept as to begin to learn the limits of the intellect; to be able to tell when it is at work, hopefully, to ignore it.

The koan is really designed to frustrate and suddenly stop the intellect in its tracks; to almost paralyze it.  The koan’s job is to change our orientation; to making us look at the source of “Go out,” or “On the outside of the wall,” to give two examples.  But there are many more.  Now imagine you are sitting in front of a rather fierce Zen master.  You ask him, “What is the Way?” when all of a sudden he does a karate strike right in your gut.  Admittedly, for a split second your intellect was put out of operation.  That small moment was an entry point into the unconditioned.  But most cannot enter because they haven’t been properly prepared, having emptied out most of their presuppositions.

The limit of Zen genealogies

The early genealogies found at the caves of Dunhuang claiming to have inherited their tradition from Bodhidharma, call into question the very act of seeking legitimacy in an external, contrived manner. Also, part and parcel of such genealogies is the important question of what was actually transmitted, for it is by Zen’s own admission, it’s crown jewel.  In addition to this, why is a genealogy required insofar as the Buddha’s profound Dharma is universal which means that it cannot be limited by a Zen genealogy? Why can’t other Buddhist traditions also awaken to the Buddha’s Dharma? 

Truth be told, the Zen genealogy can be characterized as something more like a Nietzschean will-to-power.  A genealogy is not a way or means of seeing what the Bodhisattva saw whereby he became awakened, i.e., became Buddha.  Rather, a genealogy is a clever way of convincing the credulous and the imperial government of China that you are legitimate so that the streams of money and power will flow to your sect.

The real issue as I see it boils down to a will-to-power vs. direct gnosis of the Buddha’s profound Dharma that he discovered under the Bodhi-tree.  On one side is Zen trying to gain respect and funding from the government and, on the other, is the practice of dhyana which is outside of the institution whereby the adept gains gnosis of the Buddha’s profound Dharma.  The orthodoxy that the institution of Zen believes that it has, is only through the creation and maintenance of a genealogy.  Ironically, nothing spiritual is transmitted this way.  There is only an institutional transmission consisting of robes, documents and other such paraphernalia.  There is no actual Mind to Mind transmission insofar as Mind is outside of the sphere of things; even thought.

The real limit of the Zen institution with its genealogy and seeming orthodoxy is when we come to a person recognized as a Zen master (C., Chanshi; J., Zenji).  Here “Zen” is no longer the institution, or Zenshu, but the means for attaining enlightenment and also one’s ability to distinguish between the conditioned and unconditioned this being prajña.  Faith then becomes a problem.  Do we have faith in our master of Zen who supposedly has the same enlightenment as the Buddha?  But how do we know that our teacher, personally, realized the same Dharma as the Buddha?  Our faith may, in fact, be quite superficial—perhaps too superficial inasmuch as we have too little faith in our own self; in our own ability to see what the Bodhisattva saw under the Bodhi-tree who became the Buddha.  Such a lack of faith in our own capacity is then wrongly transferred to the ‘Zen institution’.  But this is where we don’t want to go.  It cannot awaken us.  We must awaken our self.

Great doubt

Zen was earlier called the “Sudden School” or “Sudden Teaching”.  Such a teaching, to put it simply, meant realizing ultimate reality is the goal of the practice from the very beginning.  From this, we could say that the means was open and subordinate to the main goal which is realizing ultimate reality.  For example, we could do some meditation. Do prostrations.  Go on long walks.  Build a retreat cabin far from the madding crowd and try various methods including reading the discourses of the Buddha.  Ultimately, none of these methods work.  They help, that is true.  But the road they offer doesn’t go all the way.  It stops short.  This is when ‘great doubt’ comes into the picture.

Great doubt is not about the faith to doubt awakening.  That would be absurd.  Great doubt only means an eventual loss of confidence in practice for its own sake and the intellectual approach to realizing ultimate reality.  This is what I call coming to our wits’ end.  We come to a place where we have nothing left to depend upon.  We have no more devices left.  By analogy, in our effort to see the wave-less water we have to give up, eventually, our habit of trying to pat the waves down as a means.  It’s only making matters worse.

Hitherto, our efforts consisted of a path we made leading to a destination imagined by us.  But since we already have the Buddha-nature the actual path has to challenge us to let go of everything, suddenly.  What remains by this sudden letting go all at once is, suddenly, the eternal Buddha-nature or the same, ultimate reality.  Now things are turned around.  We see all things to be a configuration of this nature whereas before all things who served to conceal it from us.  Great doubt was necessary so that we might let go rather than hold on.

Flickering with his eyes

I was looking through my old copy of Sohaku Ogata’s book, The Transmission of the Lamp.  Incidentally, I was flabbergasted to learn later on that it’s selling for well over a hundred and fifty bucks! I bought it shortly after it was published.  Lucky me.  In any case, it has a few gems in it.  Here is one I just came across.

Two monks, T’an Jan and Huai Jang, arrived to ask about the message of the Patriarch who came from the West.

The Master [Hui An of Sung Mountain] asked them, “Why do you not aks about your own message?”

They asked, “What is the message of ourselves?”

The Master replied, “You should observe your secret function.”

They asked, “What is our secret function?”

The Master demonstrated by flickering with his eyes. T’an Jan comprehended where it returned and stayed on the place. Huai Jang missed the point and left the Master to go to Ts’ao Ch’i Monastery. (Sohaku Ogata, The Transmission of the Lamp, p. 115)

For most, this is a difficult conversation to make heads or tails of.  It’s not about a gay Zen master trying to pick up a monk!  The “secret function” is such because both monks have neither knowledge nor the right view of true reality.  In other words, they are unawakened to the unconditioned which is the animative principle (ātman).  When the Master flickered his eyes he essentially did the same thing as when the Buddha held up a flower then blinked transmitting the Dharma to Mahākāśyapa who just smiled.  This of course is anagogical: it has a particular spiritual meaning and significance.  Likely the Buddha didn’t actually transmit to Mahākāśyapa.  The profound Dharma is not like a flower.  You just don’t hand it over to someone.  Nevertheless this myth works well as an enigmatic koan.

Few Buddhists and few Zennist are open to the idea that what is absolute and unconditioned is always animating us.  In fact, we are it but don’t know this yet. And why? Because we crave and covet the animated—all appearance, including our carnal bodies and thoughts.  So deluded are we, that we imagine this animated world to be the true world.  It ain’t.  What animates it is.  It is not the flickering, but what causes the flickering that is Dharma.  The flickering is the function while what initiates the flickering is the essence.  The study of dhyāna (contemplation) is the means by which we come into communion with the animative principle, i.e., the ātman or Buddha-nature.

If I don’t believe in it

There is a huge gap between those in Zen who have been studying Mahayana Buddhism for a long time and the run-of-the-mill beginner who might be a member of a Zen center; who does zazen once or several times a week.  This becomes evident in their views on rebirth.  For the grizzled old veteran, it’s dawned on them in their inner voyage in an effort to realize their true nature that consciousness is the transmigrant.  It doesn’t perish with the death of the physical body.  In this regard, the veteran has learned to be careful: avoiding whatever prejudices that may have befallen him.  These prejudices can certainly get in the way and lead one down a path they will long regret in future years.  Not so with the beginner—even one of ten or twenty years who carries many prejudices with out any awareness of their spiritual harm.

Having to face the fact that the Buddha said there is rebirth after death, the typical escape plan of a prejudiced beginner is: If I don’t believe in it, it ain’t going to happen to me.  This is, arguably, where most Western Buddhists are coming from on the subject of rebirth, ones like Stephen Batchelor, for example.  It is certainly the mantra of secular Buddhists who can’t give up their cultural prejudices which are really chains, preferring to live imprisoned in Plato’s cave watching shadows, believing these shadows to be the true world.  These same people are also on a mission to close down any belief contrary to their own, for example, there is an afterlife which comes in many different forms from rebirth back into a human body or an animal, to living a divine life free of the shortcomings of a limited carnal body.

About disbelieving in rebirth, many Western Buddhists, especially, those new to it, are most grim.  I have decided, recently, that such people have no place in Zen and Buddhism.  They can read its text and enter its temples and even form organizations.  But they do not know its secret which is not really a secret to those with an open mind.  It is just a secret for them because they only wish to take up what the Buddha says about the conditioned world but not the unconditioned (i.e., nirvana) including consciousness which transmigrates from one life to the next.

Reddit Zen blues

I was on Zen and Buddhist chat forums during the introduction of Netscape.  Despite the years and all the change, I have learned that while chat room moderation seems to some to be a necessary evil it eventually becomes almost, totally, evil. Somewhat ironic, the only successful Zen and Buddhist forums, in my opinion, appeared on Deja.com which was unmoderated!

For the record, perhaps the worst forum of record, in terms of moderation, was E-Sangha. So where would I put reddit’s Zen and Buddhism?  The Buddhist chat rooms seems to be doing okay.  It is really a place for the curious and beginners.  As for the Zen forum (/r/zen) it is very accommodating to the pernicious view that Zen is institutionally separate from Buddhism, and Zen Buddhists should find another home, preferably, on the Buddhist forum (/r/buddhism).  To defend this position which, by the way cannot even define what Zen is, flame wars and flame baiting are almost the rule. Moderators who are not Buddhists seem to enjoy the battles. 

I would have to place the reddit Zen forum (/r/zen) somewhat closer to E-Sangha than Deja.com. In addition, most of the denizens on the Zen forum appear to be suffering from Buddhophobia and also religiophobia—who want such views enforced at all costs. They will not accept the fact that Zen is a special religious practice found in Mahayana Buddhism; only later, around the Song period, morphing into a school—even then with very little if any distinguishable marks.

It appears that reddit, understandably, can’t know everything about every forum; nor is it easy for reddit to detect moderators who permit some people to market their message and troll in its defense and punish others who point out that Zen, for example, was never institutionally separate from Buddhism.  Just recently, the moderators on the reddit Zen forum (/r/zen) changed the sidebar to the right which previously read, “Zen Buddhism” to “Zen,” something akin to the thin end of the wedge; eventually, to help create a false tradition otherwise known in Japanese as Gedo Zen, that is, Zen outside of Buddhism.

I am one of those Westerners who like to see Zen not separated from Buddhism.  With separation, Zen becomes absurd; truly a fool’s religion.  One might as well take up skiing or cultivating orchids.  But fools will persist who think they have a right to do this, forgetting that others have a right to oppose such foolishness with just as much force.  What this means for Zen’s future is that it will likely follow secular Buddhism where people just do zazen and practice political correctness.

Living with the inner idiot

It is not an easy matter having to deal with the external world.  What makes it so difficult, from a Buddhist perspective, is being embodied in our former karma (this is what our body is according to the Buddha) in addition to not understanding our will/desire which is going in the wrong direction, apprehending and coveting what is truly not ours; setting up future conditions for a rough life.  Our counter to this inconvenient message is to either ignore it or insist that it is not grounded in science.  Both solutions are born from the mindset of a Homer Simpson idiot attitude (“idiot” is a word of Greek origin that is very close to the Pali Buddhist term “puthujjana” meaning a common, ignorant person).  Regrettably, we have come to love this funny American idiot as if there were actually something redeeming in being such an idiot in real life.

But just how does the average “idiot” in real life cancel out the detrimental effect of living the unexamined life of a typical idiot represented by the likes of Homer Simpson in a humorous way?  This is the hard question because the answer required is not a trivial one.  As we might expect there is a learning curve if we wish to escape from the life of an idiot.  Being on this curve means dumping lots of bad behaviors and assumptions (Homer has many).  And given that the K thru 12 educational system in the U.S. is designed to create consumer idiots, the task of being on the learning curve is perhaps possible but not probable.   

Bearing all of this in mind, I am beginning to believe that Zen is being thought of as a religion for idiots something which Homer Simpson might find redemption in if only learning that living in the moment is all that it takes.  Of course, there is no kensho here, that is, seeing our true nature which is transcendent and deathless.  It is just about going from one thing to the next; living impulsively you could say: going with the flow.  How Zen got stuck with this is anyone’s guess.  But this attitude is not in the canonical literature.  This kind of frivolous behavior is almost antithetical to the purpose of Zen when, for example, Homer eats 64 slices of American cheese.

Proper Zen is, at first, always a search: a deep, personal look into one’s being.  One cannot be a full-time or even a partial idiot and hope to get anywhere in Zen.  A special kind of intelligence is required not to mention good karma which has all along suspected that there is something deep in side of of us that doesn’t share the same fate as the physical body.  Still, for some reason, modern culture needs Homer Simpson with his IQ of 55 (once his brain walked out on him).  We chuckle.  Still we find something admirable about him—perhaps only for the reason that he is a natural idiot whereas we are not.  We struggle in the bardo between being an idiot and sensing there is more to life than drinking Duff beer.  So we take up Zen.