The Zennist

Buddhism with rebirth

Western Buddhist teachers all too often seem to find it necessary to apologize for rebirth, I guess in an effort to appease the religion of modernity, namely, big science.  But this attitude only demonstrates a willingness to misrepresent Buddhism rather than accept the fact, based on the canon, that rebirth is at the heart of Buddhism and only ends when nirvana is attained.

Some teachers even go so far as to suggest that Buddhism is scientific (in the Western sense of the term) and that rebirth was just a concession by the Buddha to the spirit of the time because at that period it was an accepted and established popular view.  Be that as it may, the idea of rebirth does not appear infrequently in the canon.  There is no reason to dismiss it as trivial.

In some of my blogs on this particular subject, I have made it clear that consciousness (vijñāna) and not the ātman is the transmigrant. Further proof can be found in O. H. de A. Wijesekera’s paper, The Concept of Viññāṇa in Theravāda Buddhism.  Wijesekera observes:

"In view of the evidence the conclusion is difficult to avoid that the term viññāna [consciousness] in Early Buddhism indicated the surviving factor of an individual which by re-entering womb after womb (gabbha gabbham: Sn. 278, cp. D.iii.147) produced repeated births resulting in what is generally known as Samsara."

Nowhere has the Buddha taught that there is no transmigration from one life to the next.  He basically tells Ananda in the Mahānidāna Sutta that in order to have birth, aging, death and suffering consciousness must find a resting place in the embryo (nāma-rūpa) otherwise there would be no birth, aging, death and suffering.

It is only in recent, modern history with its strong bias towards materialism that we find Buddhists, who are skeptical of the Buddha’s teachings on rebirth, who in order to make a living, have to sell intractable materialists on Buddhism without rebirth.

 

Fake teachers and the way of fake Zen

Modern day Zen teachers are not liars.  It is not their intention to deceive their students.  That being said, on the other hand they can be fake Zen teachers.  Being a fake teacher first begins with self-deception, that is, one’s ability to be both deceiver and the deceived (I mentioned this in a previous blog). 

The next step for the Zen teacher is about convincing their students, to some palpable degree, that they are really an enlightened Zennist.  This can be done in a variety of ways from having a transmission certificate, an academic degree, having published a book about Zen, wearing robes, having befriended other Zen teachers and so on.

Next, and perhaps the most important part, is the degree to which the Zen teacher’s students believe that their teacher is an enlightened Zen master.  Here is why.  The strong belief in their teacher serves to reinforce the teacher’s own belief in their own enlightenment which, at first, is on shaky grounds (remember the requirement for self-deception).  We have to look at this as a reciprocal process, in other words.  Both sides benefit in this process.  It’s a kind of mutual admiration society.  This is what the late Zen master Robert Aitken was alluding to when he said:

“The fundamental fact is that I cannot survive unless you do.  My self-realization is your self-realization."

I dare say that the late Aitken Roshi was a fake Zen teacher—though not a liar.  And that goes for the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Maezumi Roshi and Joshu Sasaki Roshi just to name a few.  These teachers needed students to follow them as much, if not more, than the students needed a teacher.  It was a reciprocal, reinforcing process.

Having said that, as a rule of thumb, most Zen teachers are fakes but nice and honest fakes—even fakes you might learn something from.  Pressed, however, these teachers will even admit that they have not had real kensho. 

What is important for the beginner to understand in this blog today is the fake interpersonal dynamic that takes place in virtually all Zen centers even those in Japan and China.  It is easy to get sucked in to a particular Zen center and the community which centers around a fake teacher.

But now a word of caution, it is not healthy for Zen to get too much into faking it.  This is why I maintain that part of our path has to be a full retreat dedicated to winning kensho.  One has to become a Zen hermit for a while (sorry folks that is just the way it is).  The first thing we learn in our retreat is the fact that we have been deceiving our self for a long time.  This leads to doubt.  For Zen master Dahui such doubt was the antidote to one’s bad habit of conceptual thinking which acted as a barrier to kensho.  In my view, doubt also helps to get us out of our self-deception rut as in, I think I have had kensho.

A goal which can never be reached

Max Planck said in his book, Where Is Science Going? (1932), that physical science rests on two theorems which, by the way, I tend to think are closer to assumptions.  The first is: There is a real outer world which exists independently of our act of knowing.  The second is: The real outer world is not directly knowable. Then, surprisingly, Plank says “to a certain degree these two statements are mutually contradictory.” 

We can draw from this that the physical sciences are always operating under a certain degree of limitation and contradiction in dealing with the outer world, that is, third-person knowledge.  Planck then goes on to say on the same page:

"And this fact discloses the presence of an irrational or mystic element which adheres to physical science as to every other branch of human knowledge. The knowable realities of nature cannot be exhaustively discovered by any branch of science. This means that science is never in a position completely and exhaustively to explain the problems it has to face. We see in all modern scientific advances that the solution of one problem only unveils the mystery of another. Each hilltop that we reach discloses to us another hilltop beyond. We must accept this as a hard and fast irrefutable fact. And we cannot remove this fact by trying to fall back upon a basis which would restrict the scope of science from the very start merely to the description of sensory experiences. The aim of science is something more. It is an incessant struggle towards a goal which can never be reached. Because the goal is of its very nature unattainable. It is something that is essentially metaphysical and as such is always again and again beyond each achievement." (Emphasis is mine.)

So, the goal that the physical sciences aim for by its very nature is unattainable.  But this is not to say or to suggest that the inner goal of self-knowing is also unattainable.  It may well be attainable whereas complete knowledge of the outer world is just another hilltop that discloses still more hilltops—like in the example of galaxies when there, at first, was only our Milky Way, which was the sum of the universe around 1900.  And now there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe beyond our galaxy!

Yet, from the standpoint of Buddhism this is nothing to be in awe of.  For all that we could ever imagine or see, which is conditioned, is composed from the unconditioned (a term that has many other names).  Realizing the unconditioned which is nirvana is awakening to the glorious realization that all is but an expression of the One Mind.  I would only add one more thing.  Absolute science is taught by Buddhism which includes third-person knowledge which is rooted, fundamentally, in first-person knowledge of what is the substance or essence of our thoughts.