The Zennist

Driving to Kenshō City in an old car

Especially, Zen is like driving an old car, a luxury car or a new spiffy SUV to a given set of coordinates.  The kind of vehicle a person has is not as important as the destination which allows no modification.  This is where Zen is found. 

If a person is not too bad at reading and understanding literary works, Zen is fairly straightforward.  No need for a library.  Zen is about realizing the Mind of tathatā or if you prefer, the unconditioned Mind, or Buddha-nature, etc.  Incidentally, according to Zen master Mazu 馬祖, this mind is not to be confused with the mind of birth and death.

Back to the car analogy.

If we are driving in an old car like a 1936 Chevrolet before radio, GPS, and air-conditioning were standard features we will eventually arrive at our destination using our Zen roadmap which shows us how to get to Kenshō City.  But if we are in a new SUV, the tendency is to visit various Zen centers and Zen monasteries using our new GPS navigation system, before we head off to Kenshō City.  It might be helpful to visit a lot of different centers and talk to other people.  We might even inquire into their opinions about Kenshō City such as, is it really worth the trip?

What I am trying to say is that the Internet, like the SUV, can easily deceive us.  It allows us to get thousands of different opinions about what Zen is all about—not one, however, could be correct.  Yet, in less than a half dozen Zen books, one being the Platform Sutra of Huineng, if we spend some time thinking about what Huineng is saying, it becomes obvious that Zen is about kenshō, that is, realizing our true nature, or the same, realizing the Mind of tathatā. 

Yes, we can still manage to get to Kenshō City driving even an old car (i.e., just a few books).  Long before the Internet (the big powerful SUV), it crystalized in my head, that I had to awaken to what these Zen masters awakened to—see what Siddhartha saw under the Bodhi tree.  This crystallization happened to many Asians before me who carried around a book titled, The Chan Whip Anthology 禪關策進 which as been masterfully translated by Jeffrey L. Broughton with Elise Yoko Watanabe. 

 

A proper understanding of duḥkha

The general sense that one gets from the Sanskrit word duḥkha is pain, uneasiness, sorrow, trouble, and difficulty.  But such words don’t tell the whole story.  Duḥkha seems more subtle to me than just pain or suffering which is usually the way it is translated in English. 

Duḥkha implies a subject:  one who is subject to duḥkha and who should not be.  The presence of duḥkha for the subject is something different or foreign to the subject’s nature.  It's there and shouldn't be there.  The implication here is the subject is bound to or connected with something that is duḥkha.

The Pali Nikayas inform us that dukkha, which is Pali for duḥkha, is the five khandhas or aggregates which constitute the psychophysical organism.  These aggregates are also the first noble truth of suffering.

"And what, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering?  It should be said: the five aggregates subject to clinging; that is, the form aggregate subject to clinging [all the way to] the consciousness aggregate subject to clinging. This is called the noble truth of suffering" (S. v. 425).

The Buddha wants us to understand that there is not just duḥkha floating around in the air waiting to grab us, but something that we can specifically point to that is duḥkha.  These are the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.  They make up the psychophysical organism that we identify with as being our self.  But if we attach or cling to these aggregates, we will experience duḥkha.  What do the Nikayas say?

“And these five aggregates affected by clinging are dependently arisen. The desire, indulgence, inclination, and holding based on these five aggregates affected by clinging is the origin of suffering. The removal of desire and lust, the abandonment of desire and lust for these five aggregates affected by clinging is the cessation of suffering” (M. i. 191).

Here we discover the second noble truth which is the cause or origin of duḥkha in addition to the third noble truth which is the cessation or stopping of duḥkha.

Now we get the big picture.  We won't suffer if we do not desire these aggregates.  Intrinsically, they are not us.  However, the consequence of clinging to them is always duḥkha.  But now the question is who are we who is doing the clinging?  All we appear to know are these five aggregates.

Since these aggregates are always conditioned it must follow that we are actually unconditioned, except, that we have blindly latched on to these conditioned aggregates. 

"The five aggregates are “impermanent, conditioned, dependently arisen, subject to destruction, to vanishing, to fading away, to cessation” (SN 22:21).

In other words, we have wrongly identified with the five aggregates, which are conditioned, and for us, are duḥkha.  Our only means of escape is to identify (samadhi) with the unconditioned this being nirvana (P., nibbana).  Isn’t this what the Buddha is saying here?

“He [thus] dwelling contemplating impermanence in those feelings, contemplating dispassion, contemplating cessation, contemplating renunciation, does not grasp at anything in the world, and not grasping he is not perturbed, not being perturbed he attains utter nibbana in his very self (paccattamyeva parinibbāyati).  He knows ‘Destroyed is birth, lived is the holy life, done is what was to be done, there will be no more of thus-conditioned existence” (M. i. 255-256).

To escape from duḥkha we have to connect (samadhi) with the unconditioned, this being nirvana, otherwise we will continue in conditioned existence and with this continuation experience only more duḥkha.

The need for radical uncertainty

Thus far, I have not had the chance to meet anyone interested in Buddhism or the school of Zen who enters in a state of radical uncertainty, self-admittedly, aware that they, personally, know that they don’t know.  Instead, the typical adept, whether just curious or serious, is looking for certainty—to be filled with certainty as they practice.  They also believe they already know something, if only a little, about Buddhism or Zen and that further study will confirm what they already know.

But just imagine that when doing zazen or seated meditation you, the adept, became more uncertain.  But nobody expects that to happen when they begin to practice.  People who do zazen are growing in certitude—that's what they believe and expect.  They are convinced that they are approaching the true meaning of Zen as they meditate which, I dare say, is not true at all.

For Zen master Dahui 大慧 the feeling of doubt or uncertainty was an indispensable part of Zen practice!  It acted to push the adept toward awakening which went beyond certainty, certainty being just an intense feeling that gives the adept the illusion of true knowing or sambodhi.  In light of this, it is a truism to say, that just being certain or convinced about something is not always true knowledge.  One can easily be deceived and still be certain.  And the more certain or convinced we feel about something, it is not necessarily unvarnished truth or true knowledge.

When we consider the koan on this score, we are forced to come to the conclusion that each koan works to eliminate any feeling of certainty about Zen we may have acquired which ironically can lead us astray.  I always had the sense that koans were making me more uncertain about Zen and its ultimate aim or experience.  I was gradually coming to my wits’ end or the same, I was having to admit, and rather painfully, that I know now that I don’t know. Whatever certitude or convictions I had going into my retreat, were gone.  I was devastated.  The tears flowed, heavily.  I had nowhere to go or anyone to turn to.  I had run out of turns!

What I subsequently learned from my struggles in Zen, is that much of the training of Zen is about weaning the adept off the feeling of certitude—preparing the adept to face radical uncertainty or great doubt.

If Zen master Dahui said, "A great doubt will definitely be followed by a great awakening,” I will say, “Great awakening must be preceded by radical uncertainty.”  This implies that the adept has to be weaned off of their convictions about enlightenment until they have nothing left to rely on.  This is to say, that before the adept can realize pure Mind, the thoughts that arise from Mind have to stop all at once, suddenly.  However, whatever the adept does to stop their thoughts will not work.  Why is this? Whatever the adept does is part of the problem—even not doing.  Actions directed at entering the no-gate 無門 constitute the very barrier 関 to the no-gate.  This is why the need for radical uncertainty—Dahui’s great doubt.  Mind’s luminosity can only enter an empty vessel because the knowledge entering is so radical and fundamental that the slightest thought blocks it.

An open mind free of opinions and prejudices

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was right when he said that the discovery of truth is prevented more effectively by our preconceived opinions and prejudices.  The entire struggle of the Zen adept to attain kenshō (見性) is made almost impossible by the extent to which the adept clings to their opinions and prejudices about Zen and enlightenment. 

If you could look inside the mind of the Zen adept there would be a small library of wrong opinions and deep-seated prejudices.  Making matters worse some of these people rely on teachers who have ignored kenshō; who see no necessity for it in Zen preferring, instead, to stick to lots of seated meditation.

Beginners often come pre-packed with lots of wrong opinions and prejudices.  I think I have blogged about this a few times before.  Some of these beginners cannot even manage to articulate their opinions about Zen, certainly not coherently.  It’s even worse when it comes to koans.  They think they understand some of them.  But when they are pressed as to what the koan is alluding to, they can’t find any words.  Having difficulty with koans doesn’t mean that they are open minded, either, free of their long held prejudices.  Far from it!  They are still entrenched.

For me back in the 1960s, I had read enough of D.T. Suzuki’s books about Zen to come to the conclusion that there was an experience one gained whereby they had mastered Zen.  But it took me several more years to look inside my self for this pure Mind like it was a matter of life and death.  I certainly had the faith that it was there even though I had not yet seen it face to face. 

Do I think the average person today who is interested in studying Zen is where I was at?  Not from what I have seen.  Zen has become a cult of doing seated meditation and reading koans both of which lead to a dead end.  Studying Buddhism from the Pali canon or studying Mahayana Buddhism doesn’t work either.  What is missing is an open mind free of opinions and prejudices.

What is missing in Western Buddhism?

As far as what Western Buddhism seems to be about, it’s teaching various forms of meditation, practicing awareness, and extending loving kindness.  It is still undecided about the transcendent vs the secular (I guess you could also say ‘mundane’).  This last part is sometimes found in the debate between self and no-self. 

Many Western Buddhists are of the opinion that the Buddha taught a doctrine contrary to Brahmanism’s Ātman which is not true.  If anything Buddhism is more of a reformation of Brahmanism according to the Buddhist scholar Christian Lindtner.

Western Buddhism faces some major challenges.  Especially, its adoption of meditation seems almost gimmicky for the reason that if anyone sits down on a cushion like a zafu or a chair with good posture, in a quiet place, for twenty to forty minutes each day, this exercise will act to calm them down.  They don't have to join a Buddhist community. But there is much more to meditation than just sitting and calming down.

And it is here that we come to what is missing in Western Buddhism.  Is it awareness?  No, not really.  How about loving kindness?  Again, no, not really.  Truth be told it is meditation, but meditation that is about discovering in us what perfectly transcends the finitude of our psychophysical body including its eventual death.  This can be illustrated using Zen master Tosotsu's Three Barriers:

1. You leave no stone unturned to explore profundity, simply to see into your true nature.  Now, I want to ask you, just at this moment, where is your true nature?

2. If you realize your true nature, you are free from life and death.  Tell me, when your eyesight leaves you at the last moment, how can you be free from life and death?

3. When you set yourself free from life and death, you should know your ultimate destination. So when the four elements separate, where will you go?

What Zen master Tosotsu is pointing out is the only thing worth realizing.  This is what meditation is supposed to help us to realize.  It’s not just about calming down.  So this means that meditation is closer to being about intuition, that is, gaining direct insight into what our very being is made of.  As strange as this might sound to the Western Buddhist this is what Siddhartha realized sitting under the Bodhi tree.  But more importantly, if Western Buddhists don’t wish to go here are they really practicing Buddhism?

 

The conventional life

The danger of the conventional life with its morality is that it conceals from man his capacity to transcend the human inheritance of suffering which is always his doom.  In this life, only death awaits him.  And with the prospect of death he imagines there will be no more suffering for him because there is no more of him.  But mankind is greatly deceived.

Resembling more of a journey through a morass, the conventional life intends always to weaken our innate ability to see a higher world beyond our inherent limitations so that even the strongest of souls must eventually weep, and want no more of this fruitless journey.

The truth we must face is conventional reality cannot be investigated to its end because it has no end.  It is the bad infinite.  It is an endless journey which in Buddhism is called saṃsāra.  Here the eternal and undying part of us is fixed to the temporal world finding it almost impossible to detach from it; having to suffer again and again countless rebirths. 

Only ultimate reality (paramārtha-satya) can be investigated to its end.  But remember this is kept from us by conventional reality.  We are forbidden by our cultural norms to have a public discourse about unconventional reality.  We are taught to be skeptics and laugh at the thought of ultimate reality.

But ultimate reality is not passive.  Nor is it nonexistent and without intelligence.  A small kernel of it lies within each of us.  And should it enter into our conventional life by some mysterious means we would come to sense a great battle going on between truth and the lie.  

Ideological Buddhism with a new narrative

Our modern political narrative originates from the socio-political imagination.  The validity for this is to be found in ideology which is dependent upon the authority of our feelings.  In other words, ideology is tied to sensationism in the belief that all our ideas are based, ultimately, on physical sensations.  There is nothing philosophical or transcendent here.  Ironically, the so-called 18th century age of reason was really the beginning of ideology which seems to have taken over modern culture.

Today, we are living in a kind of story book world which is what a narrative does.  It is a recounting of various facts and events of history but connecting the facts and events in different ways.  The narrative is right for us if it seems to feel right.  But more importantly, everything is to be judged by our feelings.  While more intelligent people may see the narrative as a distortion or even false, in the example of Hollywood movies about the old west, others trust the narrative because it feels right to believe the story, for example, that all black people are still oppressed by whites.  Of course, the actual historical evidence paints a much different picture but it is never enough to overthrow the almost hypnotic power of ideology.

But what about the meaning of life as it pertains to Buddhism when it is examined through the lens of ideology?

The first order of business for a Buddhist ideology is to eliminate Buddhism’s religious message by ridding it of the tenets of rebirth and karma, finally ignoring nirvana, the chief goal of the Buddha’s discourses so that its basis is ideological, hopefully, to create a secular narrative.  The people who do this call their new Buddhism “secular Buddhism.”

Yet, the Buddha’s enlightenment goes far beyond the world of the senses and even thinking.  In light of this it is not secular but religious by realizing ultimate reality allowing us to see the world the way it really is.  This has nothing to do with sensationism.  The Buddha’s enlightenment is not limited by the human imagination or ideology.  And the real meaning of life is to awaken from the dream of conditioned existence which confines us to the cycles of birth and death.  But if we are left with an ideological Buddhism the meaning loses it salvific message to the eternal spirit which is hidden within us.  It becomes run-of-the-mill as if to say that the existential condition of suffering is caused by self-centered craving!  But craving, in itself, is not the problem in Buddhism.  It is what we crave and desire this being the conditioned psychophysical organism otherwise known as the five skandhas.

 

 

 

 

 

What is the meaning of evil?

I sometimes wonder if an age of evil can even define evil, succinctly, without the usual word games.  I admit that people have a sense of evil, maybe from seeing Hollywood movies or reading novels or comic books.  Still this doesn’t get us to what evil really means.

As a start, wanting to know the root of evil I went to Skeat’s A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.  According to this dictionary it says the term evil is “Prob. allied to over (G. uber), as meaning ‘excessive.’ 

Yep, that was just what I was looking for—boom!

Evil then is about going beyond limits.  In the example of eating, it is gluttony or it is alcoholism which is an addiction to liquor.  It could also be substance abuse.  Add to this all manner of sexual excesses.  We could even throw in plastic surgery—people who are obsessed with how they look!  There are thousands of examples of people who are excessive, hence, evil although each and everyone would deny that they are consumed by evil.

When we study Buddhism, we notice that we can no longer allow our self to be evil, especially, if we are in retreat for a few days or months.  We eat just basic food—and not too much—two times a day or just once.  All our habits of excess are put on hold.  No music, no iPhones with their games.  We even limit who we can see and communicate with. 

No lazy habits are permitted such as staying in bed for a long time or staying up late.  In my example, get up before sunrise and study the discourses of the Buddha and meditate.  I would often hike a few miles each day or cut firewood.  Then it was meditation at night in the mine which had an adit of a little over forty feet.  I put up a little shrine at the end of the adit with candles and an incense burner.  Again, excess was put on hold.

Buddhist training has to wean us off of evil, in an attempt to bring clarity to an otherwise chaotic pattern of thinking together with crazy emotions and a lack of thoughtful attention on our part towards our everyday world from cooking our breakfast to sawing off a branch of dry wood for our wood stove to keep us warm during the cold. 

The more we put our house in order, so to speak, trying to stop our excesses the more we come to recognize calm and peace.  Our concentration grows and as a result we better understand the teachings of the Buddha who never intended his world to be understood by evil people.

Surprisingly, most people cannot do this.  It is mainly because they are under the dominion of evil even taking pride in their decadence like many of the stars in Hollywood.  They are unwilling to let go of their downfall into degeneracy and perversion.  These people are not worth our time.  Yet people who are evil are attracted to evil which is why Kim Kardashian, for example, can have sixty million followers as in the blind leading the blind to more samsara.  And do not doubt that the vast majority of those who are running the world are evil.  You just haven’t heard of their excesses.  You would be horrified to learn of them.

Like faith credulity has its own problems

There is a point in the definitions of credulity and faith when they are almost the same.  For example, credulity is the readiness to believe based on slight or uncertain evidence.  Faith, by comparison, is unquestioning belief in something for which there is no proof or evidence.  Faith appears to be the older word.  This is understandable insofar as the word is generally used in the context of religion which in the case of Buddhism, is more of a science of spirit or Mind for which there is no material evidence since spirit is different than matter.  By analogy, Buddhism would be the study of radio waves whereas the natural sciences would study the radio and its various parts.

Our modern scientific and technological age has no use for religion since it is based upon faith.  Buddhism is accepted as long as it doesn’t demand faith in a beyond or the transcendent.  Ironically, this same age requires a great deal of credulity on the part of the individual in which persuasion arguments are more than often confused with arguments of fact.  In the persuasion argument reasons—often clever or fallacious—are given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is either right or wrong.  We observe this in the big bang theory, in neuroscience which is a multidisciplinary branch of biology, and the social sciences.

Technology has also given us a false confidence in science as if using an iPhone proves the universe was created during one explosion a little over 13 billion years ago.  But this is just credulity on our part to accept this as settled.  The big bang theory is basically a gravity driven model of the universe which takes no account of the electrical force which is 39 orders of magnitude (a thousand billion billion billion billion times) stronger than gravity.  Where did the powerful force of electricity come from?  Recently, some of Albert Einstein’s manuscripts in which the physicist debunked the idea of a big bang surfaced.  He believed that the universe expanded steadily and eternally.

Technological facts certainly don’t add up to proof that the big bang happened or consciousness is a product of our brain.  Science is not infallible.  Nor is its place to criticize rebirth and postmortem survival and least of all that Mind/spirit (G., Geist) is the matrix of all matter according to the Lankavatara Sutra and Max Planck the physicist.  One must even be careful of reliance on skepticism.  It is an unproven philosophical claim about the limits of what we can know.

Buddhism doesn’t rest solely upon faith like most religions.  It aims at direct knowledge of the unconditioned, that is, the winning of nirvana.  In the Nigantha Nataputta Sutta we learn that faith leads to knowledge (jñāna) that comes as a result of the dhyānas. 

Under the dominion of evil

Besides suffering and disharmony, the Buddha also teaches us that life is actually about dying.  Yes, everyone will eventually die.  Even the infant just born is already dying.  Death is at work in every sentient being.  For Buddhists it is Māra, the adversary of the Buddha, who is death and killing; who is the tempter and the principle of evil and destruction.  When Radha asks the Buddha, How far is there [the realm of] Māra?”  The Buddha answers him, “Where a body is, there would be Māra or a thing of the nature of Māra perishing.”  Māra is also applied to the whole body of worldly existence including the realm of rebirth.  Māra is also opposed to nirvana.

Human beings today are under the dominion of Māra although they believe otherwise.  If you are a Christian reading this you are under the dominion of Satan.  Both are the same with respect to evil.  Mankind doesn’t know it but happiness is always short-lived.

Māra is always working in our corporeal body and our mental activity. If we lose our temper and become hateful we have taken Māra’s bait.  If we are craving sex unable to control ourselves, we have taken his bait.  If we are greedy and jealous, we have taken Māra’s bait.  The list goes on.  Since Māra rules the psychophysical body we don’t have to look very far to find him.  We are always under his dominion.  You could even say he governs the conditioned world. 

We can see from the aforementioned that Buddhist training is about teaching us how to recognized Māra saying, “No!” to him, not only physically but in the activity of our thoughts and emotions where our passions and desires are strongest.  Why is this training so necessary and important?  The simple answer is that in order to realize nirvana, i.e., the unconditioned, we have to gradually cut our ties with our old conditioned habits which only serve to strengthen the dominion of Māra rather than reduce it.

These days, teachers of Buddhism are not very good.  They seldom teach that Māra is also the Skandha Māra, that is, the Māra of the five aggregates that makes up the psychophysical body.  Here is an example:

“When there is form, Radha, there might be Mara, or the killer, or the one who is killed.  Therefore, Radha, see form as Mara, see it as the killer, see it as the one who is killed.  See it as a disease, as a tumor, as a dart, as misery, as really misery.  Those who see it thus see rightly.  When there if feeling ... When there is perception ... When there are volitional formations ... When there is consciousness, Radha, there might be Mara, or the killer, or the one who is killed” (S. iii. 189).

Logically, this also implies that anātman, which means not the self, is connected with Skandha Māra since what is not the self (anātman) is synonymous with the five skandhas of form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.  And if the Buddha says that the first noble truth of suffering are the five aggregates, then also anātman is the first noble truth of suffering!