The Zennist

Modern Zen is more of a farce

Zen, that is, modern Zen has turned into almost a farce.  It’s like obese people writing books about how to diet and stay thin. 

Carrying this one step further, dieting is actually easy if you know the mechanics, so to speak.  Basically, you have to eat fats to lose fat, that is, you have to go into ketosis.  This is where your body turns fat into ketones for use as energy.  It you want to put on weight just keep yourself in a state of glycolysis in which blood glucose provides energy.  The dieter always fails because they never get off of the glycolysis addiction.  End of story.

Zen explained or taught by the common person, that is, a person who has never achieved kenshō, is almost as absurd as reading books on dieting authored by people who are obese; who say they speak from experience having dieted hundreds of times!  In Zen any experience is almost useless if one fails to achieve kenshō.  Kenshō occurs when we have transcended this mortal coil we call our body including the metal activity that buzzes around in our skull.  Said again, suddenly,  in kenshō plurality returns to the point of origin this being One Mind. 

From this most sublime vantage point, over time, what we once took to be real, namely, our body and this world, turns into an illusion.  What was transcended during our awakening was actually the illusion, and what this illusion was composed from, kenshō showed us clearly.  Using the ancient Indian allegory of a rope in the dark being mistaken for a deadly snake, we can understand that the rope could easily be mistaken for a deadly snake in the dark.  But when the light is upon it, there is only a length of rope—no deadly snake.  The One Mind being universal shines like a light upon the universe—to even the most distant galaxies—so that what appears is illusory.  Only Mind is real which is not an appearance. 

The heaven soaring imagination of Dōgen

There is in Dōgen’s understanding of Zen an air of indifference to the singleminded quest for enlightenment (J., kenshō); to see what Siddhartha realized under the Bodhi tree. 

Dōgen’s emphasis is, instead, placed on faith rather than gnosis, but not faith as we think we understand it in which, eventually, faith turns into reality.  Dōgen’s faith is, instead, faith that enlightenment is already attained, which takes the form of passive zazen; which if we look deeper, has been impeded by Dōgen’s own imagination, an imagination unconsciously raised above Siddhartha’s actual awakening through the four dhyānas (contemplations).

Turning to the typical Sōtō 曹洞 practitioner, the raising of one’s imagination above Siddhartha’s awakening is not difficult to do.  In fact, it is very easy if one believes as Dōgen believed, that enlightenment is in the phenomenal world which includes the temporal body and not beyond it as a matter of transcendence which is the teaching of Indian Buddhism.

Thus, the impermanence of grass, trees, and forest for Dōgen is buddhata, that is, the state of being Buddha.  This includes the impermanence of our physical body and mental activity.  Here is where imagination over actual enlightenment or kenshō kicks in.  Once the practitioner drops anchor here there is no chance of them leaving the safe harbor to sail to the shore of nirvana. 

Sōtō Zen is a kind of half-way house for those still caught up in materialism who imagine they have found the elegant solution to their problem which is, just sit in zazen which they believe is an affirmation of buddhata.  But this is an inversion of Buddhism, itself, which teaches the transcendence of all conditioned reality, including even the physical body of birth and death and the phenomenal world it depends upon to survive.

This kind of Zen which goes no further than faith in the practice of zazen is not engaged with the Buddha’s teaching but only ends up undermining it.  There is still that looming, almost unconscious indifference to enlightenment—satori—that cannot be reconciled.

Buddhism's turn towards annihilationism?

If there is any real difference between primitive Buddhism and Brahmanism it is how each approached the absolute.  I hasten to add that the differences may not be all that great.  I would argue that Brahmanism may have approached the absolute by a cataphatic method (posit what the absolute is), but this is not entirely true since, for example, the Brahma Sutras state: Whenever we deny something unreal, it is in reference to something real.  This is certainly not completely cataphatic. 

Primitive Buddhism approached the absolute by the apophatic method (non-identification with conditioned things so as to reveal the unconditioned).  This is evident with regard to the conditioned psychophysical person which is a transmutation of material shape, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness, none of these constituents being my real self or ātman.  The Buddha taught his followers to reject what was not their self or ātman in order to be free from the perils of conditioned reality.

After the pari-nrivana of the Buddha and the subsequent rise of Buddhist sectarianism there came to be Anātmavāda this being the doctrine that there is no Ātman or the same, the doctrine that there is no absolute.  This seemed to be hardly different from ucchedavādā, the doctrine of annihilation, which was opposed by the Buddha.  By this, later Buddhism tried to differentiate itself from Brahmanism but at the risk of turning towards annihilationism.  

The dogma of Anātmavāda led to another problem, that of the doctrine of the empty or śūnyavāda which was supposed to mean that appearances are svabhāva-śūnya, that is, devoid of true or ultimate reality, being only configurations of true or ultimate reality.  By the same token, true or ultimate reality was prapañcha-śūnya, empty or devoid of pluralization meaning that true or ultimate reality was one and increate.

On the one hand, postmortem Buddhism masks ucchedavādā with Anātmavāda then later disguises a negative absolute in the form of emptiness doctrine or śūnyavāda.  However, after the Buddha's enlightenment he made no mention of either Anātmavāda or śūnyavāda.  In simplest words, the Buddha's awakening was the realization of the unconditioned, afterwards teaching the path leading to it (S. iv. 368).  It was also synonymous with the far shore, the deathless, the sublime, the amazing, nirvana, purity, the island, the shelter and the refuge (S. iv. 370–372).  Truth be told, Buddhism is very positive—a remarkable spiritual religion that would later send its missionaries to Alexandria Egypt and farther.  All this before the birth of Christ. (Later I hope to get into why much of Christianity stems from primitive Buddhism.)

Real Buddhism and real Zen are supposed to be upsetting!

To practice Zen such as doing zazen, unfortunately, can act to conceal what is, exactly, the authentic teaching of Zen, namely, to intuit one’s true nature.  This caution also applies to those who read Zen books and get involved with the romanticism of the so-called “golden age of Zen” narrative.  This can have the unintended consequence of turning Zen into a kind of literary idolatry.  This makes any future experience of transcendence in Zen impossible.

Can these problems turn Zen into something that eventually makes Zen nihilistic as in, how to cope with nihilism and enjoy it?  But maybe these people are not aware that this is happening right now to Zen including Buddhism.  I don’t know who these people are, personally, who come to Zen this way, with this attitude; who are already suffering from nihilism.  Yet, they are there on Reddit and other chat forums who will have nothing to do with intuiting one’s true nature. They are at war with it.

These people practice Zen by just sitting on a zafu, and read koans without the slightest idea what they are about (literary idolatry).  The Buddhists, equally and stupid, submit pictures of their home shrine (idolatry), read a few discourses (literary idolatry), sit in what they believe to be meditation and seem not to really care about what the Buddha actually taught (it was nirvana).  Their mind, by the way, is not open but firmly shut as tight as a steel safe.

It seems to me that “generation y” as become closer to de-generation y!  While being adept with digital and electronic technology many of this generation are not only moral relativists but they are spiritual dunces in almost every imaginable way including being almost, fanatically, anti-religious. This is not meant to condemn all in this generation but certainly I have met plenty of them at the coffee shop across the street from the university and on chat forums—call it my informal, unscientific survey.

This is not an easy trajectory to change—and likely cannot be changed—and at my age I tend not to care all that much about people who say or suggest that facts or truth no longer matter. I already know what they are thinking: What matters is how I feel about Buddhism and Zen.  I expect it to be like this. It is upsetting to me when it is not.  It makes me angry.

But I dare say real Buddhism and real Zen are supposed to be upsetting!  Just as it is upsetting when anyone has to kick a habit they are not too happy about kicking.  To begin, you have to be wise enough to see how unwise you really are.  Only then will you make great effort and see the final truth.

Buddhism is for pioneers — not your docile types

Many pioneer types seem to like mysteries and the adventure that goes with it.  They are not your usual run-of-the-mill types who are far too docile to take up an adventure which, by definition, is often a dangerous or risky undertaking.  One could certainly lose, and lose everything. 

Zen for me became an adventure—a twenty year-old guy who fell in love with the mystery of Zen that seemed to say to his rational mind, “You can’t enter here—go away! Take all your intellectual baggage, too!”  And he responded, “But I want to see what the Buddha and these Zen masters saw by which they became awakened.”

From that time onward, every road I took turned into an adventure in which I had to lose in order to gain awakening into Zen’s great mystery.  What I lost were the components of a closed mind; a mind that was conformist and too eager to believe those in authority.  One road I took showed me that Zen masters (in my case an abbot) could be fakes—just an old gay man looking for a young male. 

Unbeknownst to me, I seemed to be following the Four Reliances Sutra (Catu-pratiśaraṇa-sūtra), one being “rely on the teaching, not the teacher.”  But perhaps the most difficult road upon which I had to lose everything was “rely on gnosis not worldly knowledge.”  The knowledge I had been using to grasp Zen could, in no way, get past Zen’s checkpoint which banned all that is conditioned.  These two reliances turned out to be the most important because you can’t understand the other two without them, the other two being “reliance on meaning, not on phrasing,” and “reliance on sutras whose meaning is already drawn out, not sutras whose meaning is to be guessed at.”

Losing everything to enter gnosis and uncover Zen’s mystery demands being totally open to gnosis of an absolute (yes, there really is an absolute).  It means also entry into Zen master Dahui’s “great doubt.”  This is total darkness before the dawn.

Buddhists today, and I include practitioners of Zen, Dzogchen and the rest of what I shall term the ‘mystical paths’ all rely on the intellect which is the means by which we acquire temporal knowledge.  Yes, it even includes sitting in zazen for long hours and reliance on unawakened teachers. 

Unbeknownst to these practitioners following their intellect only inches them closer to a non-essentialist view of Buddhism when adepts find that they really haven’t gotten anyplace after twenty plus years of trying.  Their pursuit actually goes agains the essentialism doctrine of Buddhism which assumes an essence or nature as the common core of all beings which any individual can personally realize, what we have come to call “mystical.”

Waking up from modern Buddhist dogmas

Some things we believe in without hesitation—they never were tentative for us.  This is dogma.  Yes, you could say we have walked into a kind of prison cell of the mind.  Was this credulity on our part?  Yes, to a certain extent it was.

Such things as the Nazis killed six million Jews, and radiation can kill you, are examples of very powerful dogmas although for the careful researcher they are still hypotheses.  We can surmise that if the evidence were to suddenly come forth overturning these dogmas people would experience acute cognitive dissonance and likely punish the bearers of the bad news.  But what if William Casey, former director of the CIA, said was absolutely true: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”  Our first response to this might be something like this, “I can’t be fooled.”  But the fact is that we are being constantly fooled and suffer from credulity, holding on to many dogmas which we refuse to let go of. 

I mean, we can’t be that easily fooled, right?  Wrong.

If I were to do a book on the actual way Buddhism is, I would receive a lot of scorn, to say the least (this is why I do a blog).  And this is because those interested in Buddhism including long time Buddhists have been dogmatized to such an extent that their open minds are firmly shut and have been this way for many years.  I am only going to be able to change a few minds that are more open; that have an inner sense that what is presented as Buddhism is far from Buddhism.

Some if not all of their information came from the academic world which had been spoon fed on the not-self and emptiness dogmas which can be put under the rubric of non-essentialism.  But this was about to change.  Eventually, when the tathagatagarbha doctrine and the pro-ātman doctrine found in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra hit the scene, those who still adhered to the dogma of non-self (anātamn) and emptiness were forced to explain it away or just ignore it for as long as possible.  What they were faced with were words like the following:

“The Self spoken of in Buddhism is the Buddha-Nature.”

“O good man! "Self" means "Tathagatagarbha" [Buddha-Womb, Buddha-Embryo, Buddha-Nature]. Every being has Buddha-Nature. This is the Self. Such Self has, from the very beginning, been under cover of innumerable defilements. That is why man cannot see it.”

“The nature of the Self and the Buddha-Nature do not differ.”

“And the non-Self is nothing but birth and death. The Self refers to Great Nirvana.”

Excerpts like these, and many more, confront the old dogmas causing much consternation.  The only place where the old dogma of non-self (anātamn) and emptiness appear to be maintained is on social media like Reddit whose moderators are bent on looking at Buddhism through the prism of non-essentialism.  Social media is out of touch with the tathagatagarbha doctrine and the Mahaparinirvana Sutra which fall under the rubric of essentialism which my dictionary defines  as “a theory subscribing to the idea that metaphysical essences really subsist and are intuitively accessible.”

Realizing the animative principle

How do some Buddhists prove the prevailing theory that Buddhism teaches there is categorically and absolutely no self?  Thus far no evidence has been found in either the Pali Nikayas or the Mahayana cannon that the Buddha declares there is categorically and absolutely no self. 

It seems that the only proof is that today’s Buddhists cannot observe a self when they look for one within their heads. They have no recourse but then to go into an emotional argument where they mete out punishment, in some form, to those who disagree with them (I am a prime example). But this is somewhat like the simile of the blind man who declares there is no color.  This can be reduced to, “I do not see X” ergo “X does not exist”.

But the question these people fail to answer is in what discourse or discourses does the Buddha come up with the notion that there is, categorically, or the same, absolutely, no self or ātman?  Or did the Buddha just look out into the starry sky at night, and unable to see a self, declare there is no self?  Or looking within his own mind, observe that there is no self?

In the religious world of India the Buddha already knew what the special term self or ātman meant.  Predating the Buddha, Yāska in his hermeneutical work, Nirukta, defined ātman in several ways.  One definition for ātman was cetanatattva which I translate as “animative principle” (like the light of life in Christianity) given that cetana can mean “animate,”while tattva can mean “principle.” This fits precisely with what the Buddha had in mind insofar as ātman is not something the worldling can recognize.  The typical worldling is only aware of the conditioned world including his conditioned psychophysical body—not what animates it.  Such a person has never met, face to face, with the animative principle and likely never will.  Only Buddhas can do this.

Knowing what the ātman is from the Buddha’s standpoint he would certainly be able to tell his followers what it is not.  He will tell them that the ātman is not material shape, feeling, perception, volition or even consciousness (the five aggregates or skandhas).  Said again, the ātman is not the psychophysical organism. 

Furthermore, it is only with the complete cessation of one’s attachment to the psychophysical organism that one discovers the animative principle which is also described as luminous mind.  It reminds me of this passage from the Mahaparinirvana Sutra:

>“Due to impermanence, there arises suffering; due to suffering, what there is is void [insubstantial]; due to the void, what there is is non-Self. If there are impermanence, suffering, void, and non-Self, what does one kill? If Impermanence is killed, what there is is eternal Nirvana. If Suffering is killed, one must gain Bliss; if the Void is killed, one must gain the Real. If the non-Self is killed, one must gain the True Self. O great King! If Impermanence, Suffering, the Void, and non-Self are killed, you must be equal to me." I, too, killed Impermanence, Suffering, the Void, and non-Self, and I am not in hell. How could you fall into hell?"

Can you imagine what it would be like trying to teach this to today’s Buddhists?  I only dare mention it in The Zennist blog because Buddhists I have met, recently, are almost stark raving mad!  They are like brainless zombies.  It is somewhat like arguing with people who don’t understand how a radio works, denying that the radio amplifies the radio signal which is totally invisible.  Their understanding of the body is totally mechanical and extremely limited.  They would need an IQ of at least above 130 to even begin to comprehend Buddhism.  The few that have personally realized this animative principle for the first time are absolutely astonished — I sure was.  That was back in 1969 one lonely night.

The fake self and cagey Buddhists

What we believe our self or this person we look at in the mirror to be, is really a false or fake self.  It is the non-self or anatmān composed of conditioned phenomena, for example, the cells, the bones and organs of the body.  This non-self or fake self we have identified with is always subject to suffering in one degree or another.  In fact, the Buddha says yaṁ dukkhaṁ tadanattā (whatever is suffering is non-self).

Conditioned phenomena from which our fake self is composed is always passing away.  It is also insubstantial (P., asārato) and empty (P., suñña) being devoid of real essence.  This fake self is the opposite of the real self which attains nirvana.  The fake self can never be eternal or happy like the real self.

But today we learn from various cagey Buddhists that the Buddha taught against the self.  This is to suggest, oddly, that in the cannon no one personally attains nirvana although scripture in several places (five?) says that one "personally attains Nibbana" (SN 22:51)  So what then is Buddhism in light of this kind of belief of no personal attainer when there is clearly such an attainer in scripture?  I would have to say that this Buddhism is going down the road to nihilism.  However, our cagey Buddhists would not admit that they are actually espousing nihilism. 

And just what is nihilism?  According to Donald Crosby, expert on nihilism and author of the book, The Specter of the Absurd:

“I stipulate that nihilism be conceived primarily as existential nihilism, i.e., as a denial of meaning in human life (or state positively, as the conviction that human life is pointless and absurd).”

But isn’t this exactly where Buddhism is today—being almost pointless and absurd with regard to its denial of self?  Certainly we can put Zen into that category.   To be more charitable lets just call Buddhism, for now, “existential nihilism” which means that as observers we have not observed a self.  Personally, this means that as I look within myself, I observe no self!  But this is totally absurd if you consider it logically.  Who is this observer (if not a self)?  Who says that there is no self (if not a self) ?  Who argues against the self (if not a self)?  What these Buddhists fail to see is that the Buddha never denied the self, he only denied that the self is the insubstantial five aggregates which are synonymous with suffering.  They are not the self, in other words.

 

Dark days for Buddhism?

I think I am beginning to see to whom modern forms of Buddhism, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, have their appeal.  It is to people who are carrying a lot of emotional baggage and don’t know how to handle it in the example of anger, being easily ticked-off or irritated by someone’s remarks which they find offensive.  At other times they sink into some kind of emotional funk or a depression requiring meds.

Such people, by the way, might be from a well-educated, middle-class family but apparently their education proves inadequate because they keep doing stupid things being unaware of how much of their so-called decisions and reasoning really stem from their emotional baggage which involves some kind of personality disorder. 

In addition, compounding the matter, they tend to be agnostics or atheists which is just another way of saying that they are uncomfortable with religion and metaphysics which might explain why they drift, politically, to the direction of Marxism which has neither regard for religion nor metaphysics (Marx, in his early years, was a Satanist).

What is the prognosis for people like this who could eventually make up the majority of Buddhist practitioners?  I don’t see it as being all that good because too many Buddhist organizations have not seen the danger that these kind of people pose because many of these organizations tend to be led by these kinds of people or people who are in sympathy with them and not the demands of the Dharma.

It is really dark days for Buddhism when someone like Ed Brown, a Zen priest of good standing who I met many years ago, was recently barred from SFZC because someone falsely claimed that he spoke of having an erection.  This is just the tip of the iceberg in which Buddhism is being gradually taken over by personality disorder types.

Still I continue to find much in the words of the Buddha that paint a much different picture of Buddhism that if it were laid out the way it was presented at the time of the Buddha, might be very upsetting to most of today’s Buddhists.  Statements like this, for example, help to unlock more about karma (P., kamma) and why it is important to understand and not dismiss.

At Savatthī. “Bhikkhus, this body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. It is old kamma, to be seen as generated and fashioned by volition [abhisañcetayitaṃ], as something to be felt” (SN 12:37).

We are, so to speak, makers or willers of our future life.  Our birth in this life is not a haphazard affair but one previously willed out.  And we are still doing it, putting ourselves into danger by neglecting our spiritual life, being hooked on the flesh—our old kamma.

The real aim of Zen

The odd thing about Zen Buddhism is that we have to be enlightened to know what Zen is all about, that is, what it actually means otherwise we will be approaching it, almost always, by means of our personal opinions even ignoring much of what the literature says in the example of Bodhidharma's definition of Zen 禪 which is about seeing our true nature.

Even if we imagine scholars arguing back and forth over what Zen means, they would get no closer to Zen.  But the history of Zen before it became a Zen tradition 禪宗, during the time of the Song dynasty, was nothing more than an introspective praxis consisting of various techniques by which one, hopefully, gained nirvana (direct entry into the unconditioned).

This praxis we see in the Dharmatrāta Chan Sutra (411 C.E.).  If there was a tradition/tenet position 宗 (S., Siddhānta) to emerge later during Song dynasty, it was based on meditational experience itself culminating in nirvana. And this seems evident when we look at all the Zen literature including koans and the houtou (lit. ante-word).

In light of this, the beginner needs to beware of claims about Zen, for example, that it is about living in the now or Zen is the everyday mind.  Zen’s real aim has always been the attainment of nirvana which is just one way of describing the unconditioned, the stuff the universe is composed from but certainly not a dead stuff or material stuff.  It is Mind or the same, absolute spirit.

Looking and the big picture from the highest perspective of Zen everything is a derivation of absolute spirit’s originative nature.  Because of this, creation and the increate interpenetrate but the increate does not depend upon the created.  The eternal and the temporal interfuse but the eternal is never temporalized.  And samsara and nirvana uniformly pervade one another but nirvana is forever free of samsara.