The Zennist

We are the walking dead

In one respect, we can think of consciousness as the mortal soul which always finds itself in mortal rebirths; which has no recollection of the immortal soul or atman—certainly nothing higher than its own immediate predicament.  In a manner of speaking, the immortal soul or Buddha-nature is non-existent or dead for consciousness.  

What consciousness does not know is that according to the Buddha, during intercourse between the potential mother and father, another being, this being non-local consciousness, becomes captivated and enveloped in biological substance, that is, the embryo.  Again it enters into the mortal realms of life, the anatman, i.e., the perishable body (in Sanskrit anātman can mean the perishable body), which is unable to see atman.  Consciousness, in this regard, we can think of as the illusion making machine but with a self-trapping mechanism by which sentient beings never gain freedom from rebirth cycling.  As subjects they are always attached to their objects even adapting to their object conditions.

To break out of this vicious circle is to first accept that it is doable; that this vicious circle is not all there is.  This might not be as easy as it seems since much of modern culture (if we can call  it that) is geared to an appallingly limited outlook.  We are born, we work and reproduce like rats then we die—that’s it.  But that is not it, at least not for Buddhas and other advanced beings.  The material world is a trap in which the true world is hidden from us.  We are the walking dead, dead to the true world and our true nature.

Turning away from the hard problem

The hard problem for modern culture is how can mind existent in, essentially, a pluralistic, material world?  To be sure, mind (or consciousness) is not an objective determinate thing that can be measured by any kind of instrument.  Said again, mind is not some kind of special, localized object.  From our Buddhist standpoint if mind, as an observer, were to look straight at itself it would not recognize itself.  On the other hand, if we were to understand the world to be a phenomenalization of mind, then it would follow that we have to abandon phenomena for a split second, so to speak, for mind to re-member itself.  It would be like suddenly abandoning waves to see natural, pellucid water.  This is also to say that waves may appear to have individual existences but they are actually continuous with each other through the medium of water which is most fundamental.  When waves cease, the water does not cease, there remains natural water.  This of course implies monism: all from the one.  For Buddhism, mind is integral and universal which Western science doesn’t buy.  Nevertheless, all that we perceive is Mind-only.

Although this all sounds quite simple (I have blogged about this a number of times), the difficulty of living by this so as to go on a quest to realize Buddha Mind, personally, is almost out of the question.  It is not part of our culture.  Nor deep down are we all that convinced.  The world we were born into and live in seems to us more real and vivid.  It is certainly a pluralistic world.  Let’s face it, we are not Siddhārtha Gautama.  We have no intention of giving up our kingdom for the poverty and life of a mendicant.  The longing for truth is just a passing curiosity that befalls the young until they get a taste of sex, money, power and fame.  Should their quest of sex, money, power and fame fail, there is always the Siddhārtha Gautama fallback position or just having a family falling into Darwinian fitness.

It is unfortunate that our modern world doesn’t have more Siddhārtha Gautamas.  The culture which springs up from our mundane life is not a very high or noble culture.  The Tang dynasty culture of China was much higher and much more profound as was Greek and Indian culture before the Muslims began their invasion of India in the 8th century, eventually, putting millions to the sword who would not convert.  We have little or no interest in mind these days—certainly not a monism of mind.  It really isn’t on the radar screen of science.  It is just a hard problem which can be set aside and ignored.  But ignoring mind because it is a hard problem also means ignoring other things like who am I?  This culture has no answer.

Today's dangerous dreamers

Many of the intellectuals of our time who have gone through the university seem much more steeped in the outlook of technological progress than in the Renaissance, the Reformation or the Age of Enlightenment.  Nor are they deeply religious or spiritual.  Their various appeals do not come from this cultural past.  They have almost no regard for it.  This is why they can smash the older elements of modern culture to pieces.  Their appeal is to a deluded vision of a new culture.  They are not unlike Don Quixote whose great faith and action proved reckless and destructive as when, for example, he saw a great battle in progress when in reality it was a huge flock of sheep which he began to slaughter until the herder knocked him to the ground.  We can think of such people as ideologists who Napoleon called “dangerous dreamers.”   

But with this comes the dangerous all or nothing demand.  Whether the demand seems saintly or something that might lead to the infamous “Red Terror,” it can be marked as extremism and one-sided.  I have seen this in the Western treatment of Zen and in Buddhism.  Both have their soapbox just waiting for a dangerous dreamer who believes that much of the Buddha’s discourses can be ignored especially when it comes to the proper place of atman or the mysterious body made of spirit (manomayakaya).  These dreamers are quite happy to attack Mrs. Rhys Davids, I.B. Horner and many others who don’t see the Buddha as being an atman-denier; who also believe that Buddhism is at bottom, ontological (i.e., the knowing of what is most fundamental).

Our dreamers are completely deluded whose minds are immersed in a fragmented vision of reality.  They cannot see it as an interrelated, organic whole which stems from the one, much like the Bodhi-tree the Buddha-to-be sat under.  Their world is a collection of unconnected physical objects.  There is no unified whole and certainly no need for one in their view.  For their world is local and realistic being chiefly that of Darwinian fitness.

As for Zen, specifically, its tradition is all but ignored as a teaching directed to the accomplishment of mystic intuition whereby one awakens/recollects their true nature.  Zen becomes no longer dedicated to the training of intuition, which Zen should be understood as.  It has been taken over by the dreamers who imagine that they have been transmitted which means they are Buddhas and can do as they please which means Zen becomes psychologized. 

Mistaking the anatman for the atman

If we were to think of the atman as what is most fundamental within us which we have not as yet recognized, we would be close to understanding atman in Buddhism.  On the other hand, if we were to regard atman as something like a material object, a feeling of sorts, a perception, or a volition, or consciousness, this would not be the atman.  It would be anatman.  The atman has no such qualities because such qualities are constructs and therefore finite.  A construct is not fundamental enough, in other words.

According to Buddhism, each person is a finite biological entity made up of material shape, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness.  But this entity is not who we really are.  It cannot answer the simple question of, “Who am I?” or “Why am I?”  As we try to answer these questions we find the going difficult because we are too contaminated and confused by the biological entity in which we find ourselves trapped which in Buddhism is the five skandhas which are also the anatman.  To know who we really are or what we are we have to recognize what is most fundamental.  This is the atman which cannot under any circumstances be confused with anatman.

The anatman always refers to the constructed biological entity and the world it inhabits.  The anatman is not fundamental.  We can think of it as a false self which we believe is who we really are.  Such a view of self, however, is not the atman.  Far from it.  To reach the atman level since we are so attached to the anatman is a very difficult process.  We have to learn to make the right distinction between the atman and the non-fundamental constructed world of the anatman which includes our biological body.  In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra the Buddha said: “Oh followers! Do not abide (like the fools do) in hankering after the non-eternal, the anatman,  the sorrowful, the impure; and be like those people (fools) who take stone, wooden sticks, and gravel for the true beryl gem (atman)!”  Unfortunately, most of us are fools.

The unified world

The ordinary peson (P., puthujjana) does not see the world as a unified whole this being the way it really is.  The ordinary person knows the world through their senses; moreover, they are conditioned to see certain things and react to them in certain ways.  Such a visible world is a plurality of many different things.  Some things are useful for us, some things are not.  By no means can we say that this plurality is a unified whole.  Through what is it unified so it is one?  We have no answers.  Our ordinary world of biological fitness has no need of a unified whole.  Our needs are simple.  I just graduated.  I need a job.  I want a family.  Now I need to find a suitable sex partner.

But however much the ordinary person dismisses a unified world and shows almost no interest in it, in Buddhism it does exist.  By intuition, the Buddhist mystic becomes one with this world rather than observing it in its pluralized form wherein takes place biological fitness.  For the Buddhist, such a world as the unified world, which is monistic, contains no absolute barriers between things—even down to the smallest particles.  What these particles are is through this unified field; not through themselves. 

The unified world cannot be comprehended through the pluralized world the ordinary person lives in since such a world only consists of discrete boundaries.  It is all a convenient fiction which if we are to realize what is ultimately true, has to be shattered by the Buddhist mystic.  The mystic has to see, firsthand, the essence or substance the pluralistic world is composed from.