The Zennist

Going for the gusto is not enough

Mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum, who was one of the founders of the theory of chaos, once said, “What artists have accomplished is realizing that there's only a small amount of stuff that's important, and then seeing what it was.”  I agree.  I found this to be true especially with Zen; that it was not necessary to read the entire Buddhist section in an academic library to awaken.   In my case, a half dozen books maybe.

Buddhism developed and spread throughout the world from the simple insight that Gautama had whereby he became awakened to ultimate reality.  What he beheld, although simple, was most primordial and fundamental to every conditioned thing.  More importantly, it was unconditioned.  If you took it away, conditioned things would cease to exist.  And because things have an existence, albeit a changing and impermanent existence, they are dependent upon the unconditioned.  See it, and you are master of the universe.

To awaken to what Gautama saw is to become, first, a spiritual artist during our spiritual journey, realizing that a very small about of stuff is necessary.  In Zen it is only to see our true nature, or the same, pure Mind when suddenly the stirrings of our mind just stop for a split second.  In this brief moment, the mystery of the universe is unlocked.

Of all the things in the world worth doing, seeing our true nature is one of the most important.  Then comes the hard spiritual work of actually seeing it.  Having said that, I don’t expect anyone to take my words seriously except a handful of people. 

I realize that the huge bulk of mankind are not spiritual artists.  A lot of things are important to them, just not awakening.  They want as much as they can get out of life and as fast as they can.  To use that line from the old Schlitz beer commercial, people want to “go for the gusto.” They are what I call “enjoyers” who are enslaved to their senses.  The world is their toy store—a world of delights.  It is useless trying to convince them that Zen Buddhism has better treasures.  They are too deluded.

 

Getting beyond self-deception

It is a truism to say that people who think they are doing good may actually be doing evil or harming people in the longterm picture causing some disease like Autism, for example.  It is also a truism to say that many people who read Buddhism and Zen Buddhism; who think they understand Zen, really don’t understand it.

The point at issue is what causes us, and people in general, to become self-deceived?  One possible answer (and not very good), we can believe that a deceiver was responsible which might be a particular ideology we got sucked into during college.  But upon further reflection we have to wonder if the deceiver was, like us, also deceived which may well be true. 

But none of this takes us to the problem of self-deception which, I have to admit, is paradoxical.  To be sure, the problem of self-deception goes much deeper than blaming a deceiver like a professor or a few years of college.

Looking back to my youth, during my first few months into Zen during the mid 1960s when I would visit my sensei, was I meeting a person self-deceived and was I learning how to become, like he was, self-deceived? 

The problem of self-deception is difficult to describe especially when it comes to Zen because the literary world of Zen with its sermons and koans seems to be, at first glance, irrational.  It points somewhere to something but the beginner never really connects with what the literature is pointing to.  So what you learn in Zen training is imitation, that is, to imitate your teacher or sensei.

In the religious context of self-deception, imitation proved to be an important factor in developing self-deception whether in learning to write about Zen or act Zen around people who were curious about it.   In the main, it was learning to act Buddha-like for an hour or so!  And this was easy to do because humans, especially at a very young age, are geared to imitate.  It is part of nature’s way to get them up to running speed in a complex world.

My teacher seemed to me to act very Zen like.  It was not all that difficult to imitate him.  And based upon the Zen stories I had read, his behavior seemed zenic.  So, I was well on my way to learning how to deceive myself feeling confident that if I could imitate my teacher, that would be Zen.

Now on the question, did I know I was deceiving myself? the answer has to be no, I did not.  Owing to the paradoxical nature of self-deception, that I am both deceiver and the deceived, the thought would not occur to me that I am deceiving myself today.

Eventually learning that I was self-deceived didn’t come all at once but came in stages.  What first broke apart my condition of self-deception was accepting the fact that satori, a transcendent experience, was a necessary part of Zen.  No satori, no Zen in other words.  With this frame of mind the more Zen literature I read the more convinced I was that I wasn’t there nor was my teacher who never mentioned either satori or kensho.  With the gradual loss of my self-deception came the dire need to realize satori.  This is when things really started happening for me and about the time I met Bishop Nippo whose lecture opened my eyes as to how to achieve satori: find this immaculate pure Mind within the maculate mind.  Yes, I admit that was a tall order which went well beyond mere imitation.

Buddhism is full of implications

The teachings of Buddhism are full of implications one being that our present moral and psychological state is not good and may get far worse.  In other words, it is much easier to not follow, for example, something like the five precepts (pañca-śīlāni) than to follow them.  It is as if we take not being as good as we can be for granted which is a growing problem in America's inner cities including the rise of terrorism going on in the EU, including the UK.  It didn’t used to be this way.

Looking at the five precepts, with the exception of murder, today’s modern world has developed lying into an art if not a science in the example of propaganda.  The press and historians will distort or ignore certain key and primary facts to fit with their narrative and think nothing of it.  Nor is science adverse to fudging the data to support a pet theory which brings in a lot of grant money.  People will say anything that will forward their ambitions. It is certainly easier to lie and deceive others than to tell the truth. 

Looking at the other precepts, stealing, sexual misconduct, and intoxication are a part of daily life for many people.  Shop lifting happens every day from people stealing a candy bar to credit card fraud. Making knock-off items such as designer bags and clothes, and even fake genuine car parts, is done all the time.  The list goes on. 

Sexual misconduct is rampant in the elite circles of business, politics, and the Catholic Church, for example, including Buddhist circles.  Turning to drugs and alcohol, the use of intoxicants is a way of life for most people these days.

To learn that we humans are not all that good, I suppose, comes as a shock to most people but in Buddhism it is expected because this life, and the present composite body we inhabit will not fundamentally improve owing to ignorance (avidya)—Buddhism’s version of original sin.  We might be able to extend the life of people to a certain degree, but that doesn’t make us better and wiser for having lived over a hundred years. Eventually, we will still die by accident or naturally having to let go of our carnal bodies and go with what remains which is unknown to us. 

This brings us to another important implication in Buddhism.  Since all creatures have the eternal Buddha-nature, which is still potential and not yet actualized, all creatures have one goal which is awakening, that is, becoming Buddha.  Other than that, life is samsara—the bad infinite—with no escape.  The Tibetans liken this to bees in a large sealed jar.  They fly upwards and then downwards trying to escape but to no advantage.

Facing our imperfect human nature, it is not surprising that many hope death is final; that this one life is the only life.  What we humans do not see is that our intrinsic Buddha-nature does not agree with that.  It, naturally, wants to awaken which means that every living thing represents the expression of a drive to awaken from ignorance.  There is fundamentally no death for this drive is intrinsically eternal trying to awaken to its very essence or nature.

Avoiding rebirth

Buddhism has always been concerned with the great matter of avoiding rebirth which, I should add, was not foreign to the Greeks.  Their rebirth was metempsychosis in which the soul at death passed into another body.  In Buddhism, it is consciousness or in Sanskrit, vijñāna, which passes into another body or form. 

Buddhism, perhaps more than any religion dwells on the recognition that conditioned existence is finite.  It can never be, in the final analysis, other than impermanent, suffering, and insubstantial.  And this is where rebirth always takes us, i.e., back into the conditioned world.   

The biography that most Buddhists are familiar with is the one where Gautama Siddhartha was born and raised as a prince by an overprotective king for a father who tried to shelter his son from the ills of the conditioned world so that he might never have to experience suffering. When Siddhartha finally managed to sneak out of his father’s palace, he was deeply shocked by the sight of the aged, the sick, a corpse and an ascetic (sramana) who had devoted himself to finding the cause of human suffering.

After seeing these four sights, Siddhartha then realized that his very own life was subject to the same fate. So troubling was this that he renounced his parents, wife, child, and possessions, to seek the solution to the problem of suffering, becoming an ascetic.

Eventually, Siddhartha awakened, becoming a Buddha (one who is awakened). He realized that rebirth is due to the fact that in our sleep of ignorance we cling to conditioned reality which is never other than impermanent, suffering and insubstantial, mistaking it for what is permanent, blissful and substantial (ātman).  Because of this sleep, we are never free from the cycles of rebirth (samsara).  

Most people find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe in rebirth or that there is such as thing as the unconditioned and that this conditioned body of ours is not our true self or ātman.  Nevertheless, this is what the Buddha taught.  The sleep of ignorance makes people deluded, angry and greedy—but mostly deluded.

Only by setting aside the conditioned

If what we are is naturally most primordial, calling it such names as One Mind, the ātman, Buddha-nature, tathatā and so on, how do we come to recognize it, directly, face to face?  This is the challenge for us because everything that we might possibly witness to be most primordial is not primordial.  It is conditioned; it possesses determinate being insofar as it has a form or defined limits being also changeable.

We learn in the commentary to the Udana, that the nature of nirvana is that of being unconditioned.  In other words, there is no trace of the conditioned to be witnessed for those seeking the most primordial.  This fact doesn’t make matters easier because the terrible habit of approaching the most primordial still relies on looking for something conditioned.  This then becomes a form of self-deception which is hard to rid ourselves of.  Most people who take up Zen stop here.  They can’t manage to overcome the problem of looking for the primordial by way of the conditioned.

This is why the negative path or the via negative is so important which is the correct form of meditation.  It understand that we are naturally the most primordial which is unconditioned.  We can only see in our present state of being what is conditioned and not primordial.  It is only by setting aside the conditioned suddenly, all at once, does our primordial nature come to rest in itself.  Like goes to like, in other words.

When we become arrogant

A certain amount of arrogance is in all of us.  We can’t help it.  We want to make others aware of our station in life, the important people we know, our academic degree and certainly our vast knowledge [sarcasm].  But there is a price to pay with arrogance.  When we become arrogant we begin to lose our inner sense of humility.  As a result, we close our self off to being further educated.  We forget the words of Thomas Huxley who in a mood of humility said,

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

But arrogance instructs us not to give up every preconceived notion.  We imagine that we have almost everything figured out.  But soon we find that we are coasting downhill into the abyss because of our arrogance, being content with security and not truth.  This may lead to our eventual extinction.

Just an aside, over the past 20,000 years the human brain is not growing in volume.  So far we have lost a chunk of brain about the size of a tennis ball.

Traditionally, we in the West have suffered from a humanistic arrogance towards nature which comes down from Christianity.  It has become much worse in the 20th century.  This arrogance has also grown into egoism, a kind of selfishness in which our self-interest acts to put blinders on us.  Our vision then becomes quite limited.  This collectively grows and spreads.   This then becomes “humanism” which still falls under the banner of arrogance.

In a way, humanism is modernity’s religion.  Economics, politics, science, medicine, and technology accept the religion of humanism which in no way diminishes man’s arrogance returning him to humility where he is open to a new and higher vision. It only serves to strengthen it.

Buddhism and, especially, Zen Buddhism have failed to make any inroads in the new religion of humanism.  In fact, it looks like humanism has almost swallowed up both Buddhism and Zen Buddhism.

Arrogance is also spiritual blindness.  Relative to our potential to realize our true nature and, thus, to free ourselves from the prison house of rebirth we have made no progress.  We are still prisoners.  Instead, we deal with the problem by arrogantly saying in our prison of the five skandhas, “I don’t believe in rebirth.”  Yet we have no assurance that born once, already, we won’t be born again.

The heart of the Buddha's teaching

If we talk about the ‘heart of the Buddha’s teaching” we are talking about the central or innermost part of Buddhism which is where Zen tries to go.  If someone had asked Zhàozhōu (J., Joshu), “What is the heart of the teaching?” he might have said, “I hear you question,” or again, he might have said, “Here, have a cup of tea.”  Zhàozhōu’s replies to many questions were even strange to monks of his time because few if any went far enough to be interested in the heart of the Buddha’s teaching, which, incidentally, drew me to Zen.

In my 72nd year on this planet I know the heart of the Buddha’s teaching.  I discovered it in 1969 which for me was like finding a bar of gold.  And wisely, I invested it and got even more dharma wealth in return. 

How amazing when I look around me and see insects, birds, hawks, squirrels, a possum or two, and humans.  All are moved by what the Buddha discovered under the Bodhi-tree.  Humans, the pitiable creatures that they are, have no idea what gives them life, activates their vocal cords, or causes their bodies to move to and fro.  Nor do they know whence comes their thoughts and to where they, by necessity, must return.  How strange.

If you ask someone, “What animates you?” this is asking them, from the fact that they are obviously animated, to intuit, directly, the animative principle.  Judging by the responses I have received from asking this question, nobody is able to intuit this principle.  Once, I even asked a four year old.  She answered, “My bones.” Not bad but not close.

So maybe the next question is, “Why can’t we intuit that which causes our bodies to move to and fro?”  That is an excellent question.  The answer is because our thoughts are in the way and no matter what we try, we can’t seem to get past them; even when the teacher smacks us with a bamboo flute.  Sadly, people can’t see how they are deluding themselves by chasing after this principle, trying to think it into being or worse, trying to think of not-thinking it into being.  Sorry, it can’t be done that way.

The arising of fascism

 

I decided to do a blog on the subject of “fascism” for the reason that I think the West is entering a phase where cultural degeneration seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.  I have been toying with this subject for over a month and have not come to a concise and cogent definition of it until just today.  The definition is a useful predictor of future events insofar as the definition is part of the reparative process of the disease and not the disease itself.  So permit me to start with the definition of fascism.

Fascism expresses itself in a marked political concern for the degeneration or unbinding of a once thriving culture.

Degeneration happens to individuals and to nations when the ties which bind people together become loose or rotten.  Such ties are cultural which include language, religion, social habits, music, art, literature, film, a shared history, cuisine, technology, and many other things.

All of this can be undermined in which case culture begins to become destabilized and degenerate which logically leads to a rise in fascism which is a protective factor.  Perhaps no better illustration of this is Germany from the time of the Weimar Republic to Hitler’s Germany and its golden moment in the 1936 Olympics.

“Yet the economic problems of the postwar period meant that, even in its best years, the Weimar Republic was an ‘over-burdened welfare state’. The onset of the Depression and the growth of mass unemployment after 1929 destroyed republican democracy and the welfare state upon which it was based” (David F. Crew, Germans on Welfare, 6).

When Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in January 1933, a staggering 34% of Germany’s work force was unemployed. But by 1936 much of the unemployment had disappeared. The recovery was certainly genuine relying on work creation programs and German people's faith that hard work and cooperation would pay off.  It was not due to the production of military equipment which was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.

I must stress that fascism began as a marked concern for the degeneration of German culture and its people that had become all too obvious.  Unemployment, as noted earlier, was at 34%.  Crime and suicide rates rose sharply.  Many people, as a result, turned to either the Communist Party (KPD) or National Socialism.

Neither Communism nor National Socialism were the cause of Germany’s degeneration.  But both competed for the vote of the public the Communists being more utopian and unrealistic while the National Socialists were more pragmatic and evidence based.

Fascism cannot help but arise when a culture is falling apart and starts to become degenerate.  The problem is, what corrective form do we take?  Unfortunately, this is when the greatest tension for a nation and its people are to be felt. 

Making matters worse is the lack of a true religion such as Buddhism which strengthens the inner person with its spiritual morality and discipline, including its vast wisdom.  The West needs Buddhism to keep it from falling almost periodically into a state of social degeneration where nihilism is rampant and people have lost their sense of decency and compassion.

 

The art of Zen larping

First of all what is meant by the newly coined word “larping”?  Before we get into that we need to understand what does LARP stand for?  This is not too difficult (thanks Google).  It means Live Action Role Playing.   In a fantasy game the player eventually tries to physically act out the role of his character.  So the person who is larping is pretending to be a special character they strongly identify with. 

“Zen larping" then, is when someone pretends to be a Zen master.  He or she might even go so far as to make robes, study koans including the recorded sayings of a Zen master like Joshu.  But mainly Zen larpers are found on forums like Reddit and others who are playing out a fantasy about Zen they have (this might also include playing the part of a Tibetan Lama).

While larping is harmless, it can also turn into a form of self-deception when it comes to Zen because the goal to which Zen strives, which is very difficult, is the same awakening as the Buddha attained or in Japanese, kensho.  A larper has to be severely deluded to imagine that they have the slightest idea what the Buddha realized and that it can be imitated and externalized into some kind of odd behavior.

Zen, I must say, lends itself to being larped especially if one imagines that Zen is wearing robes, chanting, and living in the moment or doing everything with super awareness.  That is just a lot of rubbish, to say the least.

While it is easy to recognize larpers in costumes playing knights, for example, or samurai, to the extent that one sees themselves as a Zennist without having had kensho that person has entered the world of fantasy live action role playing and this extends to the Zen institution itself.  Admittedly, larping is akin to acting but one in which the actor gradually forgets they are actors.  They become so absorbed in their fantasy character, as is everyone around them, who serve to reinforce this strange drama.

 

Adventure and the quest

An adventure is different than a quest.  It is more of an undertaking that can be risky or even dangerous.  An adventure always involves facing the uncertain or the unknown.  It is anticipated that luck will oversee the adventure.  The adventures of Marco Polo and Huckleberry Finn come to mind. 

A quest, in the spiritual use of the term, is an investigation that is tied to an inward seeking, culminating in a discovery.  It may first involve finding a spiritual guide or teacher, one who is willing to challenge us and call into question all of our beliefs and point us in the right direction.

For some people their interest in Zen is closer to an adventure and that is well and good.  But then sometimes the adventure turns into a serious quest which is what happened to me.  I am inclined to believe that youth needs an adventure, a way to test their wits and their inner strength and powers.  They may want to go mountaineering, for example, which is not without severe penalties where luck can soon turn into misfortune.  But given time, eventually, some turn to the quest who then take up seeking what Gautama sought who awakened to the unconditioned, i.e., nirvana.

The quest is a whole different ballgame.  The quest is not so much concerned with opinions, or science, as it is with illumination.  Illumination is like bringing a light into darkness (our avidya or nescience) the source of the illumination being the One Mind.  Here the quest is lofty and far reaching; not something that can be appreciated by the many for they have no interest in leaving their darkness; who suffer from hubris.

“For those enveloped there is darkness (avidya); [there is] blindness for those who cannot see.  But for the wise who see there is an illumination, like a light” (Sutta-Nipāta 763). 

The world truly lives in darkness.  And it should not be surprising to learn that those who lead us demand obedience to darkness, that all should remain blind and not speak of this mystic illumination with its quest.  Of this generation the Buddha likened them to a dog tied by a leash that keeps running around and circling a post.