The Zennist

Comment turned blog!

Mathesis:  That is interesting about a "magnetic-like field". The mind can be conceived either as a living field-like being or a more solid-state fixed object or system. The most logical relationship between the two is that of the solid "mind" being a mere receiver of the transmitted "information" field-mind; also the field-mind can be conceived as a source of power, a kind of "wireless charging" of the psycho-physical organism. The field-mind is clearly the higher mind or the "true self"; the ordinary mind is a kind of mixed or imperfect interface between the field-mind and the solid mind; we think perceive the movie on the screen as originating and really existing in the screen. It is truly amazing how all these ideas are found in great detail not only in Buddhism but in Plotinus.

The Zennist:  On November 7th something strange happened; very strange.  Over time and to the present as I type out this blog, you could say that my physical body senses, at times,  a strong magnetic-like field (so far this is the only way to describe it).  At first it was at the top of my head including my eyes.  That, in itself, was very strange.  I felt dizzy but I was not. I could walk a straight line, easily.  Over time I could sense that my body was giving way to it.  I was glad when it, eventually, passed into my legs.  Then it seemed to pass into the earth.  There is a field-current connection that my consciousness senses.  In a way, I am between heaven and earth.  Perhaps even more strange I can communicate with this magnetic-like field.  But it seems way above me.  Right now I sense it.  But it is my old familiar mind (consciousness) that is doing the sensing.

Two close friends of mine that I see on a daily basis also sense this magnetic-like field and I am willing to bet a few of the people who follow this blog!  It can come unexpectedly (so be careful).  This magnetic-like field is just not confined to me except that I have gone through a very long tenure with the light of Mahayana which I have mentioned several times on this blog. 

This field-Mind, if we can speculate a little, could very well expand to others.  If this ever happened there is no way to resist it.  One must go with it.  The mind with which you are trying to resist it relies on it as its “source of power.”  It’s a no win situation, in other words, if you resist it.  It is, however, a win situation when you communicate with this field-Mind.  You are, in a way, two places at once.  You are the field-Mind and the  dependent receiver-mind that can also act, but acts only within its own biological domain of information (subject and object consciousness). 

Speculating a little further, for the ordinary person to sense this in a powerful way would be devastating.  It affects your vision.  Not that you lose your vision or lose focus it is just that you are both this field-Mind and your ordinary dependent receiver-mind which has not yet harmonized, fully. You have to accept that the field-Mind is now going to take over which means that you can communicate with it more and more.  I am guessing that one is moving from the station of the dependent receiver-mind into a body or kaya of the field-Mind.  As I experience this more and more I can see how Buddhism is very advanced, almost too advanced.  Humans are dickering around with petty crap while what the actual Buddhist Dharma is, is something beyond human conception. (The more I blog about this the stronger it is getting.  I have to stop.)

 

 

A better way

Both the practice of zazen and koans/gong'ans can lead us down a path that soon turns into a pathless jungle where we can easily lose all sense of direction.  Even with a teacher, one whom we believe is skilled, the path often falls short of where we think it should go.  Obedient as we are to our teacher we begin to doubt our journey (I certainly did).  Something is missing.

Very soon the institution of Zen takes over.  We get sucked into the politics.  We are interested in robes and ceremonies and becoming a great teacher although we haven’t had anything close to kensho which is the central idea of Zen.  Then we begin to reason with our self, “Even though I will never become enlightened—at least not in this lifetime—I can still help people.”  But isn't this a case of the blind leading the blind?

But what if there was a better way than doing zazen or working on koans?  What if our teacher taught us that the so-called “transmission of the lamp” was really the transmission of light; not ordinary light but rather involves, suddenly, waking up to the spiritual light which runs our psychophysical body?  Don’t we seen a hint of it in this passage:

"The pure Mind suffuses every part of his whole body, like a man whose head is covered by a white cloth. There is no part of his body untouched by the white cloth" (M. iii. 94).

As I sit here I am certainly suffused by spiritual light as I type this latest blog.  It is a significant amount.  It is more like I am in an unmoving magnetic-like field that my body moves around in which, itself, is unmoving.  If I were to break off with my psychophysical body I would be this field rather than the body.

If other people are around me they, also, can sense this magnetic-like light.  From this position it is much easier to explain Buddhism including how desire for illusory things gets us off track so that we lose our connection with this light.  Everything, Buddhist, in other words is easy to explain.  This is what I think went on with the Buddha and others.  Needless to say, the spiritual light side of the equation has been all but absent in the Western Buddhist discourse.  There has almost been a silent war against it.  Perish the thought that these people should read this: Light-bringers, dhamma-speakers, open the door of the deathless (Itivuttaka).

Dharma transmission as a formality

One thing I found to be of interest in Holmes Welch’s book, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism 1900-1950, which is an important source of information on 20th century Zen history in China, is the so-called “dharma transmission” which during that time had become a mere convention.

“A few days later a time was fixed to hold a simple ceremony for dharma transmission in the dharma hall. The three retired abbots—Ts’ung-shan, Ta-pei and Chih-k’uan—mounted the dais and handed dharma scrolls to us four.  In actuality this kind of “dharma transmission” has become a formality in the Ch’an sect. It is a million miles away from the dharma transmission by the direct imprint of mind upon mind. This kind of dharma transmission is simply a traditional formality of genealogical succession” (p. 165).

For those who believe that dharma transmission means the transmission of Buddhahood rather than consisting of a necessary and important formality for keeping some Zen center going, with its many members who have spent not a few years attending, are sadly mistaken.  They are confusing the ideal with pragmatic reality. 

One cannot read Holmes Welch’s book and not see the “mind to mind transmission” (Ch.,  i hsin chuan hsin; J., ishin denshin), which is the direct imprint of mind upon mind, to be wholly spiritual.  It does not depend upon written words.  Nor should it be confused with the dharma transmission as a formality described in Holmes Welch’s book. (Jeffrey L. Broughton mentions that a Zen encyclopedia published in Japan in 1979 contains a lineage chart of almost fifty pages.)

If anything, the dharma transmission might be something of a “secret transmission” (mi-shou), modeled on the transmission from the fifth to the sixth patriarch in which only the participants are present but no one else. (pp. 163–64).  But more likely this has also fallen into a mere formality.

What I know as a fact, is that when one awakens to Mind (which can be quite powerful) it is very easy to transmit dharma or the same, imprint mind upon mind.   One senses a powerful light entering them.  Asked to describe it the adept cannot yet he or she knows, absolutely, it is present.  That is your basic dharma transmission 101.

What merit have we gained?

At least a couple of times a year I encounter someone(usually a beginner) who reads about Bodhidharma from the Blue Cliff Records (Hekiganroku).  It is most often from the first case in which Emperor Wu asks Bodhidharma the following question: “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”  And Bodhidharma replies by saying, “Empty, without holiness” 廓然無聖.  From this they usually fall into the trap of nihilism (which is very easy to do these days).  So that's it.  There is really no enlightenment.  It’s all a big joke.  Everything is vast emptiness, like space.  There is nothing sacred or holy 無聖.

However, in the early accounts of this meeting which was probably a fiction we read the following:

“Emperor Wu came out of the city to welcome him personally. He had [Bodhidharma] ascend to the audience hall and asked the Venerable, “What teachings to convert beings have you brought from the other country?” Great Master Dharma replied, “I have not brought a single word.” The emperor asked, “What merit have We gained in having monasteries built and people saved, scriptures copied and statues cast?” The Great Master responded, “No merit whatsoever.” He replied [further], “It is is contrived (saṃsṛkta) goodness, not true merit.”  Emperor Wu was a man of ordinary nature and did not understand. And so [Bodhidharma] left that country” (Wendi L. Adamek, The Mystique of Transmission, pp. 311–312).

From this we could describe the Emperor as a do-gooder who was well-meaning and did a lot of great deeds to help his people but really didn’t have what it takes to understand the Mind of a Buddha.  The Emperor really wanted to know from Bodhidharma what all his good works amounted to in terms of merit (S., punya).  Bodhidharma said, “Nothing, there’s no holiness.”  And this is true because the holy is found within—not in the act of constructing monasteries, etc. 

We could say that the holy is empty of conditionality which always leads to suffering.  Nevertheless, we should not assume that doing good deeds doesn’t, in some way, facilitate the realization of the enlightened Mind.  Monks and nuns need a place to live and books to study.

 

Triggering the attainment of cessation even for a chicken?

There are some critical distinctions to be noted between saññā-vedayita-nirodha, (i.e., the cessation of perception and sensation) and nirvana.  Saññā-vedayita-nirodha is sometimes also refered to as nirodha-samāpati, the attainment of cessation. 

Nirodha-samāpati, I should elaborate, is close to a kind of cataplectic, trance-like state which comes after a extended period of immobility such as cross legged sitting during zazen.  It is not altogether uncommon during a sesshin.  Once I was showing a friend of mine how to do zazen.  After ten minutes (he was a beginner) I noticed that he was still sitting very still.  So I kept sitting.  I went on for maybe a half hour more.  Then I got up—he was still sitting.  Then I gently shook him.  He had been in a kind of trance almost the whole time. 

It has long been observed that when animals are put into a particular posture that they cease to struggle.  I was first shown this by a friend of mine at his farm.  He took one of his chickens and placing a piece of straw in front of the chicken, put the chicken’s beak on the straw, causing the chicken to freeze and stay with its beak on the straw for what seemed a long time.

Looking at nirvana, which is possible to attain by dhyāna (P., jhāna), although it is still independent of this exercise, it is a self-existing dharma (svabhāva-dharma).  Not only is nirvana unconditioned, whether we realize it or not, it exists by itself being independent of us.  By comparison, saññā-vedayita-nirodha has no such independence.  When certain conditions are met, it arises.  It is not self-existent.  It is triggered by the efforts of the adept and possibly the particular posture and some other aspects.

Religious illiterates

The typical modern person, who lives and works in an urban environment, is not the brightest person when it comes to religion in general.  I would not be wrong to say they are suffering from a bad case of religious illiteracy which can lead to some very serious consequences.  They know more about pop culture and pop stars than they do about the life of Gautama the Buddha, Jesus Christ or Muhammad.  They take the death of one of their pop stars or sports heroes worse than the death of their grandmother.  Their only answer to religion is to say, “I’m an atheist.”

With regard to Americans, only one-third can identify the founder of a religion other than Christianity.  This means they know practically nothing about the basic teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam.

Luckily, I learned about Zen Buddhism from a class in the 1960s on Western and Eastern philosophy.  But many of my generation did not have such a class; one taught by a professor who knew, personally, D.T. Suzuki and Martin Heidegger.  It may not have been about religion in general but I did learn about Zen Buddhism and got to meet the Dalai Lama’s big brother! 

Still, to this day, there is very little effort in schools to teach religion despite the fact that teaching religion has been consistently ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The modern university seems more interested in teaching “ideological courses”; what can only be described as “cultural Marxism” with an added course in “Islamophobia” (the university across the street from where I live teaches this course!).

Religions like Buddhism are, naturally, put on the back burner while the religious illiterates get to learn about “Islamophobia” where Islam is looked at through a variety of disciplines and fields such as ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, and political science all of which have little or nothing to do with religion or the history of religious persecution which is one of the hallmarks of Islam.

With such a course as Islamophobia we still will not overcome a bad case of religious illiteracy which will likely lead to some very bad misjudgments and consequences.  We have only to look to Germany to see the results of religious illiteracy.

For the study of Zen Buddhism this is bad news because most of the people I have had occasion to meet are religious illiterates.  They think of Zen as some kind of Asian self-help program; that if you meditate a lot your life will become vastly improved so you can fulfill your hedonist desires for worldly success!  Perish the thought that Zen is mysticism that came from the mystical stream of Buddhism.  It involves the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous reality which is the fundamental stuff things are made of.

 

They don't understand what animates them

When looking out of our window one cold winter’s day, we see that the leaves and branches of the trees are moving.  We automatically infer from this that there is wind although we don’t feel it—not until we go outside. 

This kind of deduction becomes more problematic when we are asked to have faith in a yet unrealized animative principle deduced from perceptually based knowns such as the movement of our physical body, the use of language and speech, and thought.  We can accept that wind is moving the branches of the trees and is scattering  leaves but does the movement and life of our psychophysical organism infer further a mover—a life giver? 

Ancient Indians would answer in the affirmative.  It is the atman which is the life giver or as I am in the habit of saying in many of these blogs, the animative principle which both describes mind (citta) and atman.  Buddhism, on the other hand, takes a different track.  It denies the life giving atman to conditioned phenomena.  In other words, the branches and leaves are not the wind.  Look all you want at the trunk or branches of a tree, including the leaves or pine needles—you won’t find the wind there.  But does this mean there is no wind?  Of course not.  That would be absurd.

What animates us, moving our body, speech and thought including our physiological system is not something the modern Western mind wishes to take up since it has no basis in the senses or sensory based reasoning (empiricism).  Yet for those of us aware of this animative principle who can even share it with others it is a cold, hard, magnetic fact!  This, I hasten to add, is what the Zen adept will be introduced to during kensho.  And from that moment on, will go through an expansion process where this life giving light becomes much stronger as time goes on.

When Bodhidharma said:

The Buddha said people are deluded. This is why when they act they fall into the River of Endless Rebirth. And when they try to get out, they only sink deeper. And all because they don't see their nature. If people weren't deluded, why would they ask about something right in front of them?  Not one of them understands the movement of his own hands and feet.

Bodhidharma was alluding to the animative principle; not the physical body which deluded people cling to, and by clinging to such undergo endless rebirth.  And yes, from my perspective and those who have experienced the principle, people are deluded who have no idea what gives them life.  In this respect, they are like toddlers who understand next to nothing about what animates them.