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.
In scholar terminology, the expression transcendental means - an elevation above and beyond any given ordinary reality or conventionally experienced and understood attributes.
The mind is said to transcend when it ascends beyond the conventional consciousness and its conditioned dispositions found in the aforementioned samsaric field of form, sensation, perception, and volition, emerging into a super-reality (its true nature and reality) that is unconditioned (Nirvana).
Posted by: Jung | December 16, 2017 at 04:59 AM