The Zennist

After awakening to our true nature

If we take into consideration the initial intuition (kensho) of our true nature which is also unconditioned, we can now distinguish between the unconditioned and the conditioned—between the essence of thought and thought.  Before this critically important intuition we could not.  We were only speculating and forming various ideas about the absolute.  We were still immersed in avidya or primal ignorance inasmuch as we could not distinguish the unconditioned from the conditioned. 

With awakening to our true nature, avidya comes to an end this being ‘sudden enlightenment’.  Still, we are not perceiving the world the way a Buddha or Tathagata does.  That will come much later owing to the problem of our long established habit of perceiving the world as ignorant beings.  This is where gradual cultivation fits in.  According to Zen master Heze Shenhui:

“All those who want to learn the Tao (Way) must achieve Sudden Enlightenment to be followed by Gradual Cultivation. It is like child-birth, which is a sudden affair, but the child will require a long process of nurture and education before he attains his full bodily and intellectual growth."

This long established habit is vāsāna which is why gradual cultivation is necessary.

Vāsāna, according to D.T. Suzuki in his Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, “is morally evil and logically erroneous inasmuch as it creates an external world and causes us to cling to it as real and final.”  I would add that vāsāna completely conceals how a Buddha perceives the world.

Even with kensho, vāsāna still dominates us, we fail to see the world the way a Buddha does.  We are just low grade Bodhisattvas at this point. 

The stages of a Bodhisattva are like way stations.  They represent degrees of progress, this being how far we have integrated (samādhi) with our true nature coming to see the true world as vāsāna diminishes.  Finally, after many years, we see the world as it is from a Buddha’s perspective which is unlike anything human.  It is our former avidya perception flipped over to vidya with the vāsāna removed which are the old habits of perception (which sees only the conditioned).  Put another way, as we integrate more and more with our true nature our former vāsāna looses its grip on us which kept us in avidya.

Wave collapse

Ultimate reality, which is unconditioned, is not something that is made or even conceivable.  It does not have a beginning or end.  What we see before us is ultimate reality that is conditioned like waves of water or a lion made from gold.  The world that we were born into, live and work in are like waves.  The names and objects (nāma-rūpa) we interact with, including our psychophysical bodies, are also wave-like.

When one investigates the phenomenal world which is never other than conditioned, in an attempt to see ultimate reality, this being our true nature or essence, the habit of looking for this reality is dominated by the assumption that this reality is in someway conditioned. 

It is somewhat like believing that we can use a conditioned instrument to help us capture the unconditioned.  This is an impossible task.  But what happens when before us the conditioned is reduced to zero?   It is the same thing when waves have subsided.  Only non-wave water remains.  This is unconditioned water.

In much the same way, when we use our conditioned, wave-like mind to find the unconditioned, waveless mind we are surely on a fool’s errand.  What we have to do is effect a brief, instant collapse of the wave-like mind.  As a result, what is revealed is unconditioned mind which I hasten to add, cannot be described or conceived.

What most Zen practitioners these days find impossible to believe is that the wave-like mind that they have had since birth can collapse to zero—be waveless and unconditioned.  This resistance to the possibility of mind’s collapse has to be overcome.

The Darwinian matrix

 

If there were such a thing as an evil matrix that we live in, something like the 1999 science fiction film, The Matrix, it is Darwinian fitness with its tremendous power to conceal the truth; to make truth an almost impossible goal.

"We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matter to our ancestors, not commune with correctness. . ." (Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 561).

But this Darwinian matrix that we inhabit with our bodies as its servants is not perfect.  There are some holes in it. Some humans, like the Buddhas, do manage to find a way out of the matrix although it is not easy to escape from.

The American Goldfinch that I saw this morning at the bird feeder did not need truth to survive.  Nor did he have to become a Buddhist and meditate.  The same goes with all creatures including humans.  All creatures and their various perceived worlds are more or less adequate for their survival, allowing them to reproduce their kind, but that is all such a world is good for.  A creature’s ability to solve problems is not sufficient to break out of the Darwinian matrix in order to get behind it so as to see the truth and even know the ‘why’ of this matrix.

I also believe that there is, at a deep subconscious level, an unsettling fear within the human creature that truth might be able to destroy the Darwinian matrix should its power develop and strengthen.  This fear evinced in apocalyptic literature to some degree or a great fear of some catastrophic geological event that will destroy all of mankind.  But this is just a fear of the truth twisted into a narrative of blind destruction. 

There are also, I suspect, counter forces to keep the bulk of humanity in this matrix one being sexuality which according to Malcolm Muggeridge is “the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”  This religion, unfortunately, keeps us in bondage despite the pleasure and pain we derive from it.

Leisure, I would argue, is necessary to help truth establish a beachhead for a prolonged attack on the matrix—but not just any kind of leisure.  Consider that one must self-deprogram themselves which, by the way, may have been what the Buddha had in mind when he started the monastic system in a society, at the time, that partially accepted truth. 

Self-deprogramming goes much deeper in the case of Buddhism.  It begins by understanding that our psychophysical organism and its constructed world that is perceived to surround it  is a virtual reality which belongs to Mara the Evil One—something akin to the Gnostic Archons.  The truth which always threatens to destroy the Darwinian matrix lies within us suppressed by the seductive and pervasive power of sexuality and its support structure.  The human is born as a result of this power into the confines of this power from which escape is not given but in every way thwarted.  Moreover, the human being is kept in a low-level trance sufficient to keep them disinterested in becoming awakened. 

A look within, but not far enough

‘To look within’ has almost become a trivialized expression in Zen.  It is somewhat ironic too.  I am going to look within by going to Japan or China.  I need to find a teacher to help me look within—I can’t do it myself.  To be frank, we are not engaged in looking within when we rely on externalities, even doing zazen which is an attempt to look within.

I know this might seem strange to ask, but what do we hope to find when we look within?  Our mental world is not going to change.  What changes is that we see, firsthand, the very stuff or suchness of our mental world which also happens to be the stuff the universe is made of.  Seeing this way is truly an awakening.

But oddly, if someone were to go into the mind of a Buddha it would be just like their own mind.  They would be unable to see or sense this spiritual suchness.  As far as their mind reaches is consciousness which might be called the “dualizer” since it relies on the aware subject and an object for it.  During awakening, however, subject and object disappear in the time of a finger snap.  They are, exactly, one and the same, namely, Mind-only (cittamātra) or the same, Mind-itself.  Consciousness we discover is totally dependent upon Mind-only.  It is not as fundamental as we imagined previously.

The Lankavatara Sutra says, in fact, “"Those who are attached to the notion of duality (object and subject) fail to understand that there is only what is seen of the Mind."

We are born into such a failure, unknowingly, as a given.  From this, all manner of error arises for us.  We are constantly self-deceived by consciousness.  And what we need to find, namely, Mind-only is totally hidden from us by the workings of consciousness. It allows us to look within, only so far — and this is not far enough.

Trying to keep it simple

Looking at postmortem Buddhism it appears to me that emptiness (śūnyatā) has come to represent both the older conditionality (saṃskṛta) and unconditionality (asaṃskṛta).

From the point of view of phenomena or empirical reality (dharmas) emptiness means devoid of self-nature or svabhāva. In other words, there is nothing really real which exists in its own right.  Nothing is independent or the same, self-dependent.  The world we live in is unreal.  It is the world of relativity.

From the point of view of the absolute or true reality, emptiness means that there is no manifoldness or diversity.  It means also devoid of thought constructs.  There is no plurality—only thatness (tathatā).  This emptiness is also inexpressible by language and unthinkable.

It seems to me that we can apply the older forms ‘conditionality’ and ‘unconditionality’ with equal or better precision which does not fog over emptiness.  Why, for example, does the Heart Sutra have to say that the five skandha or aggregates are ‘empty of svabhāva’?  Just say, instead, that skandha are ‘empty of unconditionality’ (asaṃskṛta).  This would work, given that nirvana is unconditioned.  Then nobody in their right mind would look for the unconditioned (i.e., nirvana) in the conditioned.  It ain’t there!

That all things are empty would mean, all things are empty of the unconditioned since ‘all things’ refers only to the conditioned.  Turning to the Lankavatara Sutra:

That all things are devoid of self-nature means that there is a constant and uninterrupted becoming, a momentary change from one state of existence to another; seeing this, Mahāmati, all things are destitute of self-nature.  So one speaks of all things having no self-nature.

What is really being said is that all things (conditionality) are empty of the unconditioned. Because of this lack of the unconditioned there is becoming, that is, constant change from one state to another which is the mark of the conditioned.  So why look for the unconditioned (nirvana) in the conditioned?

Siddhartha's journey was to awaken to the unconditioned seeing, as a result, that the conditioned world was a phenomenalization of the unconditioned.

Zen is not speaking for the all-too-human mind

The tendency to misread the words of teachers like Bodhidharma and other masters is especially great for the student who has yet to behold the pure Mind.  In fact, this negative tendency (a part of the negative personality that doesn’t want to look beyond the mortal veil) assumes that Zen is speaking for our all-too-human mind, this being somehow related to the pure Mind or the same, the Buddha Mind. 

It never fails that someone on any given day will say the ‘everyday mind’ or the ‘ordinary mind’ is the Buddha Mind.  But this is certainly not what Zen master Huangbo would agree with when he said:

“This fundamentally pure Mind is always perfectly bright and uniformly radiant. People of the world are not enlightened and only recognize their perceptive faculties as mind. Since their [understanding] is obscured by their perceptive faculties, they therefore do not witness the pure and bright fundamental essence” (transl. McRae).

Over the years I am convinced that the average reader of Zen texts somehow blanks out their mind when it comes across terms like “pure Mind” “unborn Mind” “unconditioned Mind” etc.  But when they see a term like “ordinary mind” or “everyday mind” that’s it!  It is just my monkey mind filled with emotions, worries, mental images, internal dialogues that is the Buddha Mind.

Then someone might say to me, “Who are you to say that my ordinary mind is not the Buddha Mind?”  This response for me shades off into Dogen’s understanding of Zen which is a kind of pantheism: the phenomenal, ever changing world is absolute.  In other words, “Impermanence is Buddhahood.”

Marketing Zen in the West is always confusing since almost everyone is more or less guilty of misreading Zen, especially, trying to keep any and all interpretations within the ambit of who I am now and the world I live in.  Mentioned earlier, this is the ‘negative personality’ which tries to maintain worldliness.  As might be expected, it has no problem with recontextualizing Zen much the same way that Stephen Batchelor recontextualized Buddhism with his book, Buddhism Without Beliefs—yes, our all-too-human mind is the Buddha Mind. How nice.  No real change required.

A reality beyond the everyday world

It doesn’t seem to matter how long anyone has studied Zen, almost everyone continues to make the mistake of applying concepts derived from the everyday world to the true underlying reality (tathatā) which is beyond the everyday world.

Of course I understand that Zen is really new uncharted territory for everyone, and it is difficult to give up old habits, especially, habits of thought and how we use our mind.  But this is what we must do.

Take, for example, looking for ‘pure Mind’ which consists of two words that evoke a concept.  This concept is a representation of what the actual pure Mind is.  This is a common way we use our mind.  We form abstract concepts that represent many things or form mental pictures about people and places we are going to visit. 

But no student of Zen has actually met, face-to-face, pure Mind.  They have only managed to form various concepts about it, thinking about it.  They lack the real thing.  As we can see, they can’t seem to tell the difference between their concept of pure Mind and pure Mind itself.  It would be no problem with a conceived or hoped for cup of coffee in one’s mind and a real cup of coffee on the kitchen table.  Anyone could tell the difference.

If there are a number of students of Zen, each one will attempt his own spin of realizing pure Mind.  Couple this with an unawakened teacher, the student will face almost insurmountable odds when it comes to seeing pure Mind beyond the framework of various concepts about it.  This leads me to say that Zen is not as successful as we might imagine it to be.

As I have said a number of times before, in so many words, the transition from concepts to seeing the spiritual reality of pure Mind is like the difference between night and day.  It is like having a deep and disturbing dream only to wake up to reality which has no part of the dream.  Incidentally, this is where prajñāpāramitā kicks in.  It is the further distinguishing of pure Mind from concepts and the phenomenal world.  But it can only be done with the authentic attainment of pure Mind, not its representation as a metaphysical concept.