The Zennist

Enlightenment is not a sharable experience

Zen Buddhism aims at first-person knowledge, that is, the personal realization of one’s fundamental nature—who I really am.  In this regard, it is not a sharable personal experience but, nevertheless, personally discoverable if one makes the right effort. 

To make this fundamental nature sharable it has to be put into third-person knowledge which is impossible.  An enlightened teacher would be required to give his or her student the same exact enlightened experience they had!  But this can’t be done.  An enlightened person is limited to explaining the Buddha’s enlightenment and even their own enlightenment with words.  But this is not the same as actually giving a person enlightenment on demand.

This hasn’t sunk into the mind of beginners who believe that a good teacher can enlighten them or at least make the path easy for them so that in one or two years they become enlightened.  Sorry, but the practice of Zen is not like going to college and getting a degree. 

A beginner can read all the Zen books they want, even learning to read classical Chinese and Sanskrit.  But this is not going to open a closed mind, that is, a mind loaded with prejudices, especially modern prejudices, such as there is no transcendent spirit or Buddha-nature which is what we really are.  Nor will this same close mind admit to a conscious transmigrant that survives death only to be reborn and experience birth and death again in a vicious circle.

If anything, a good Zen teacher should help students learn how to read and understand Zen sermons and the discourses of the Buddha so that it becomes clear to the beginner just what Zen Buddhism is aiming at which they may not like.  In this regard, skillful means is not like the holy lie but rather the skillful use of language to help orient the student in the right direction.  And just what is that right direction?  It is striving to awaken to your true nature which is eternal and undying. 

The Buddha and Socrates teaching the same thing

Essentially, the words of the Buddha and those of Socrates are teaching the same thing when it comes to identifying with what we are not in the belief that this is what we are.  Yes, we all believe this psychophysical body is who we are.  We work hard to feed and shelter it.  But for the Buddha and for Socrates this lump of flesh is not who we really are.  First, here are the words of the Buddha taken from the Catuṣpariṣatsūtra.  It is about the five skandhas or aggregates.

“Therefore then, O monks, whatever material form there is, past, future or present, inside or outside, gross or subtle, low or eminent, far or near, “all this is not mine, I am not this, it is not my self”.  In this way it must be seen, in truth, by means of correct discriminative knowledge (prajñā).

And whatever sensation there is and whatever conception, whatever psychic conformations there are and whatever consciousness, past, future, or present, inside or outside, gross or subtle, low or eminent, far or near, “all this is not mine, I am not this, it is not my self.”

Now here are Socrates’ words taken from the Phaedo (83d – e):

“Because every pleasure and every pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together.  It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is.  As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable to reach Hades in a pure state; it is always full of body when it departs, so that it soon falls back to another body and grows with it as if it had been sewn into it.  Because of this, it can have no part in the company of the divine, the pure and uniform.”

Both the Buddha and Socrates are telling us that we are wrongly attached, or riveted, to what we are not.  This might we hard for some Buddhists to accept who have been wrongly taught by their teachers to believe that the Buddha denied a self which is incorporeal. 

But truth be told the Buddha taught us that our psychophysical body is not our true self or ātman.  The psychophysical body is really anātman (not our self).  This would be the same as Socrates teaching Cebes not to regard the corporeal body as his soul.  For otherwise the soul of Cebes will soon fall back to another body and grow with it as if it had been sewn into it.

Work on maturing yourself

People mature to a certain level rather than profoundly change.  It is like planting a tomato seed.  The seed grows, eventually, reaching maturity.  While in this process, the tomato doesn’t change into another kind of fruit or a rose.

All of us have certain and important karmic predispositions.  Add to this, the first seven or eight years of our life in which nature fast tracks us to learn a language and the basics of a particular culture.  All this is difficult to change especially if there has been child abuse.  And likely we will never change very much although we imagine otherwise. 

In spite of this, we have the potential to reach a high degree of maturity which involves education; not just K12 or a university education, but also a life education, the so-called college of hard knocks in which we experience new things which make up our life education. 

The real danger for us lies in trying to change what cannot be changed, except very little, and failing to mature what can be matured over time in which we come to know more about the world around us and more about ourselves as psychological and spiritual beings which is what Buddhism teaches us.

But I dare say, not everyone is interested in Buddhism’s ability to mature the individual.  The popular alternative, which sometimes finds itself embedded in Zen, is just to learn how to enjoy life moment by moment and day by day.  And so one never  actually matures.  This lifestyle is done in the interest of personal freedom with a minimum of personal responsibility.  Eventually, however, the future catches up with these individuals who have followed the way of immediate gratification.

Eventually, they become aware—maybe in their 50s or 60s—that life really is finite and the body they’ve inhabited for all these years is growing older and will not be around for them very much longer.  Faced with this doom they become resentful towards Buddhism for its “I told you so” and some seem to adhere even more to materialism that after I die, that’s it.  There is no rebirth.

What do you say to these people?  You can’t say much.  Why bother?  There are other people who have an open mind who are open to the belief that life goes on after death; that our journey doesn’t end with this life.  Life is a great learning curve for many people and a vicious circle for others who refuse to reach full maturity by awakening to their undying, true nature which Buddhism teaches.

Getting in harmony with that mysterious field

If meditation were about getting in touch with some kind of mysterious primary field, you could even say getting into harmony with it, then meditation might be more complex and difficult than previously believed. 

Rather than just sit for forty-minutes, several times a day, what if it were possible to harmonize with this mysterious primary field in only a few minutes?  And what if this is what samādhi is really all about, viz., being harmonious with that field?  There are several definitions of samādhi in Sanskrit and one of them is "putting together, joining or combining with."

For the one who is meditating there is nothing to harmonize with as far as the carnal body is concerned which are the five aggregates or skandhas.  We want to harmonize, not with the body but, instead, with our Buddha-nature which is transcendent.  But first we must attain direct intuition of this nature if we are going to harmonize with it.  Subsequent to attaining an intuition of it, then the work of samādhi commences as does the life of the Bodhisattva.  In the Daśabhūmika Sūtra, the Bodhisattva's charge gets larger by orders of magnitude as he advances from stage to stage via many samādhis.  First he has 1000 samādhis, then a 100,000, then a 1,000,000 etc.

Where Buddhism and modern science part company

In Buddhism, the memory of one’s deeds are not stored in the brain.  This idea is alien to modern thought which is materialistic or more technically is based on ontological materialism.  Modern theories of memory tell us the brain is a kind of data storage center where our memories are kept and when the brain dies so do all of our memories.  This is where Buddhism and modern science part company.  For Buddhism memory is not stored in the brain. 

For Buddhism, what beings really are is consciousness (vijñāna) that is attached to a material embryo which becomes entrained with the embryo being subsequently incarnated.  With maturity and finally death this consciousness that was attached to the embryo leaves the dead carnal body, having all the senses, assuming an ethereal form.  This is where we find the memory. 

“When the consciousness leaves the body, it carries all the body’s attributes with it.  It assumes an [ethereal] form as its body; it has no body of flesh and bones.  Because it has the senses, it has feeling and subtle memory and can tell good from evil” (Maharatnakuta Sutra).

This after-death state seems to be borne out by what is currently termed NDEs or near-death experiences.  According to Dr. Bruce Greyson:

“When some people come close to death, they go through a profound experience in which they believe they leave their bodies and enter some other realm or dimension, transcending the boundaries of the ego and the ordinary confines of time and space. Such experiences had been described sporadically in the medical literature since the 19th century (Greyson, 1998a) and had been identified as a discrete syndrome more than a century ago (Heim, 1892). Moody (1975) introduced the term near-death experiences (NDEs) for these phenomena, and outlined 15 characteristic features commonly reported by American survivors. These 15 features, which have come to define near-death experiences both among the academic community and in the popular imagination, include ineffability, hearing the news of ones death, overwhelming feelings of peace, hearing a noise, seeing a tunnel, a sensation of being out of the body, meeting nonphysical beings, a "Being of Light," a life review, a border or point of no return, coming back to life, telling others about the experience, effects on lives, new views of death, and corroboration of knowledge not acquired through normal perception (Moody, 1975)."

I consider such NDE experiences to add weight to the argument that consciousness—not the brain—is where our memory is kept.  Added to this, is the theory of “Conscious Realism” developed by Dr. Donald Hoffman in which phenomena, such as brains, are the creations of conscious agents (In previous blogs I have mentioned Hoffman).

The world that we perceive and live in is the illusion while conscious agents are the truer reality which are composed of pure Mind, the highest fundamental reality/substance.

Transcending the imagination

Buddhism and especially Zen Buddhism can leave a lot to the imagination as with most religious works.  But of all religions, Buddhism leaves less to the unbridled imagination.  In this regard, Buddhism is truly about a personal, sudden awakening to the unconditioned foundation of our illusory world.

Because Buddhism teaches such an awakening it stands to reason that many people upon engaging with the path of Buddhism will eventually stop at a certain point refusing to go any further preferring, instead, to remain attached to the conditioned world.

There is something in our relationship with the conditioned world including our temporal bodies that prevents us from completely transcending it although we would like to imagine that giving up such an attachment is not all that difficult.  And so our imagination begins to do its work and through its work, over time, we fail to access the transcendent (i.e., the unconditioned).  Yet, at the same time, we don’t lose faith in our imagination together with its power to delude us into believing we are on the right path.

All of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism's literature, which is skillful means, is couched in the imagination which has been intellectualized—in simple words, the imagination is given a rational form or content.  This outcome is the superficially plausible explanation of Buddhist ideas.  But here is where we reach the point of being unable to transcend the conditioned world including these temporal bodies of ours.  We are locked into our imagination which has been sufficiently intellectualized.  The path of Buddhism cannot stop here if it is to succeed in reaching yonder unconditioned shore, i.e., the transcendent.

The radical shift from this intellectualized Buddhist world to the transcendent has no bridge; no apparent means by which to cross.  We can go no further.  Still, we have not crossed over to the transcendent, although we are weary of the profitless journey thus far.  We have only been going in circles imagining otherwise and yet, from the perspective of the Buddha our very core is the tathāgata-garbha (the unconditioned spiritual embryo) which is also the original pure Mind that is hidden by our imagination’s work.  Imagination is like a cocoon which surrounds the tathāgata-garbha keeping us in the false light of this cocoon.  Yet, the slightest penetration of this cocoon reveals the unconditioned pure Mind which floods our being completely.  This, I hasten to add, is Zen’s ‘no-gate’ which we effortlessly enter having laid aside our imagination and its works. 

Programmed and manipulated by nefarious powers

Buddhism and those who practice it in its various forms such as Zen, in general, would like to believe that they live pretty much outside of the current social environment; that they don’t have a political or ideological bone in their body.

Truth be told, not only has Buddhism been reformulated to be what it is not, but those who practice it in Europe and North America have been, to a certain extent, programmed and manipulated by nefarious powers through the educational system and social networks, to find it almost incomprehensible.  Said again, it is difficult if not impossible for people to understand Buddhism and Zen Buddhism the way it was meant to be understood. 

Just recently, Chamath Palihapitiya who was a former Facebook top executive said that the social media is “eroding human interaction.”  He then dropped this bomb on his audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business:

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The bold section of Chamath’s words describes the symptoms individuals suffer from who have been infected by these nefarious powers through the educational system and the social networks.  We see this, especially, in the political discourse which is non-existent.  People now are learning what the word ‘hatred’ means and the inability to control it. This is not going to get better.

But the worst thing in Chamath’s words is misinformation and mistruth.  I hate to keep bringing this up but a primary example of misinformation and mistruth in Buddhism is to be found in what Stephen Batchelor publishes most notably his book, Buddhism Without Beliefs.

Before the rise of the Internet, the symptoms of “No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth” (hereafter, the “four evils”) was occurring at a much slower rate.  One really, in fact, didn’t notice it.  But with the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963 the nefarious cabal grew in power having decided to seize the day, so to speak.  You could feel the change in the pit of your stomach.  And not long after that was the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968.

What during the 1960s seemed like a movement heralding a new utopian vision, as I saw it having lived through it, was really announcing our future doom.  And now we see this doom more clearly.  With the speed of the Internet and the use of smart phones, half the world is infected, bent on destroying everything and starting anew while the other half is pushing back trying to maintain what is good in the past, wary of utopian dreamers, having lived through Communism.

Beginning in 1965, Zen Buddhism became for me a wonderful path by which to see what the Buddha saw under the Bodhi-tree.  But its practice in the West, gradually over time, became a microcosm of this doom and the four evils.  It was like the canary in the mine. 

Western Buddhists seem to be defending the dark, nefarious powers.  Today, this is manifested in a general unease with the notion of nirvana, an afterlife, karma, immortality, even the ātman, and aryan values all of which the Buddha taught.  Few Buddhists were willing to come forth and declare that modern Buddhism is not faithful to the Buddha’s teachings. 

Modern Buddhism, without a doubt, has turned into nihilism couched in the language of Buddhism—but still nihilism.  In addition, there is nothing systematic in modern Buddhism because the very awakening required to make it systematic is lacking in Buddhism’s practitioners, nor is it sought for by them.

Buddhism like Judaism, Christianity and Islam is turning into a hodgepodge.  I know this sounds pessimistic and it will be for anyone who thinks that Buddhism is not spiritual and does not aim at the gnosis of the absolute.  But for those of you like me, there is an adventure waiting for you.  Just don’t follow the herd and their values. They are about to fall into the abyss.

Zen sets up no-thought as the main doctrine

In the Treatise on No-Mind (Wuxin lun 無心論) attributed to Bodhidhama, his treatise is not really about Mind in the absolute sense but, instead, thought. In this regard, wunian 無念 meaning, no-thought or the same, absence-of-thought, a term we find in Huineng’s Platform Sutra (17), is preferable to wuxin. 

“Good friends, in this teaching of mine, from ancient times up to the present, all have set up no-thought as the main doctrine, non-form as the substance, and non-abiding as the basis. Non-form is to be separated from form even when associated with form. No-thought is not to think even when involved in thought. Non-abiding is the original nature of man.” (Bold is mine.)

What is revealed by the absence-of-thought, or no-thought is the ultimate principle this being True Mind 真心 which is unconditioned unlike thought which is never other than conditioned.  Thought, I hasten to add, is what is hiding True Mind, making it seem unattained.

In English, ‘thought’, the noun, is the action of thinking; the process of bringing up concepts and ideas.  It is like the constant rippling of a pond’s surface because of a breeze sweeping across it.  With the absence of the rippling the translucently clear pond is revealed.  When Bodhidharma says in the Treatise:

“Just no-mind is seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing. And it is no-mind which has the ability to be aware of the absence of mind.”

Bodhidharma is saying that the absence of thought is the fundamental basis or essence of seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing.  With the absence of thought which reveals True Mind, the latter has the ability to be aware of thought’s absence which reveals itself.  

In the same treatise Bodhidharma says: “Indeed, no-mind is nothing other than true mind mind.  And true-mind is nothing other than no-mind.”  There is nothing confusing about this if we read it this way: “The absence of thought is nothing other than True Mind.  And True Mind is nothing other than he absence of thought.”  When thought is suddenly stilled in satori or kenshō, totally disappearing, what is revealed is True Mind.  Thought from that point on is seen to be a phenomenalization of True Mind.  In that regard it really has only an illusory existence which is capable of deluding us if we are not awakened.

Said again, with the absence of thought, True Mind is uncovered.  Now you are aware that thoughts originate from True Mind which is always absent of thought.  But more amazing, the entire universe originates from True Mind!

 

 

 

Who carries the torch of nihilism?

The hardcore nihilist has come to the realization that everything is ultimately meaningless such that he tries lives that way.  Heaven and hell are fictions for him, but also his everyday life is nothing more than a series of ‘here and nows’ that add up to nothing.  The living body and the dead body are essentially the same in this regard. 

For the less than hardcore individual, nihilism can often express itself as their inability to overcome pessimism or the same, to lose one’s optimism for a certain period of time.  Such people are burdened with a lack of hope or confidence in the future.  Even a culture, at times, can seem to be moving towards a pessimistic outlook falling gradually into decay and degeneration.

But who carries the torch of nihilism if not science who worships at the temple of ontological materialism: the belief that physical matter, which makes up physical objects, is the only reality; everything else including mind is a result of material interactions.  Such a view will always result in nihilism.  Such a view is far too limited.

Perish the thought that science has it wrong from the view of Buddhism.  Buddhism reverses this. Physical objects are, at bottom, the nature of mind. To begin to grasp this requires a radical reformulation of our modern notion of objective reality. Rather than physical objects, including spacetime which they occupy, which seem to exist outside of us the world, instead, rests upon the ālaya-vijñāna, lit., the abode of consciousness (plural and singular). 

As for how physical objects together with spacetime emerge and appear before us, they emerge from the interactions of consciousnesses (plural).

As primarily immaterial conscious beings within the ālaya-network, we have the means within us to rise above the condition of nihilism and to even discover from what consciousness, itself, is composed which is pure Mind. 

What we perceive and imagine the world to be out there for us is not veridical, although we believe otherwise that it is true.  It is only a representation of the interactions that are going on in the ālaya-network of consciousness-es which help the human species survive and flourish—not see the truth.

By the way, what I've briefly presented is based upon the work of Dr. Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, Irvine.  His work gave me the modern language I was looking for by which to explain Lankavatara ideas and how radical they are from a modern scientific world view.

Systematic Zen Buddhism

If we can picture a tree as being like a ‘system’ from its roots in the earth to its leaves and flowers above, then much of what we understand about Buddhism is really just the leaves.  And no matter how many leaves we collect we’re not going to understand the system.

The present image we have of Buddhism is far from being systematic, that is, manifesting a system in which all of the diverse parts of Buddhism fit together for the common purpose of awakening (nirvana).  This system also includes even overcoming the illusion which hides the system. 

Even with Zen, we don’t have a tree before us.  Instead, with all of our efforts we only find a lot of leaves.  Where it should be obvious that koans are systematic insofar as they are based upon the response of a supposedly awakened teacher who is alluding to buddhatā (the state of being enlightened), it’s not seen that way by those who study koans.  They are off on some wild goose chase.

According to Mumon in his work, the Mumonkan, the Zen adept must pass through the barriers 關 set up by the Zen teachers (another translation for 關 is checkpoint).  Each of the 48 koans presents a barrier beginning with the barrier ‘Mu’.  From the standpoint of the Pali scriptures, all Mumon is saying is that to get to the unconditioned, i.e., nirvana, the adept must pass through the barrier 關 of the conditioned—here is your Mu barrier!  But as it turns out, all the adept has is conditioned experiences and presuppositions which are stopped at the checkpoint 關.

When the adept finally awakens, passing through the gateless 無門, there is an instant seeing of the tree, so to speak, from mysterious root to leaf and flower.  And when the adept looks back over all those years in blind pursuit, trying to pass through the barrier, what can he do except laugh because of the ease with which he passes through it now is so profound!