The Buddha’s enlightenment was not born from his own reason, that is, personal authenticity. Nor was it born from metaphysical solipsism this being akin to the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’— the authority and privilege of the private self: a reason of one’s own.
For starters the Buddha’s enlightenment has nothing to do with reasons or reasoning. We see it here where the Buddha sends out a warning.
Whoever, Sariputta, knowing me thus, seeing me thus, should say: ‘The recluse Gotama has no conditions of further-men, (no) excellent knowledge and insight befitting the ariyans; the recluse Gotama teaches dhamma on (a system of) his own devising beaten out by reasoning and based on investigation;’ if he, Sariputta, does not retract that speech, if he does not retract that thought, if he does not give up that view, he is verily consigned to Niraya Hell just as a burden is set aside (MN I.77).
But all who come to Buddhism come with a reason of their own: a particular and unique ground of explanations including even logical defenses which will not easily budge. Is this the mindset that will take the adept to the summit of enlightenment or Zen’s kenshō? No. It will fail. But who can help us to see this? Is it a popular Lama or some Zen master in Japan or Korea?
If our clothes are dirty we wash them until they are clean. But what of our unclean, persistent and stubborn reasoning that lies at the back of our reading of the Buddha’s teaching or Zen master Hunagbo’s teaching, for example? We are, in a way, asking the teacher to clean us up! But that will not work when one takes up Buddhism’s spiritual journey. Yet, ironically, we have everything we need to realize what Siddhartha did, this being our innate Buddha-nature which lies hidden from us by our misplaced desires.
At this point we are either refusing to use what we, innately, already have or we don’t know how to use it — maybe both! Surely, we don’t expect our own devising beaten out by reasoning to be the message of the Buddha. Yet, I have met Buddhists over the years whose practice is their own devising; who reason quite well; who say nothing meaningful or profound yet defend this as Buddhism.
> The Buddha’s enlightenment was not born from his own reason
Sure a lot of Buddhist traditions would have the story go "Buddha turned off his mind and was smacked with the truth." But I've been reading the first few pages of F.L. Woodward's 'Some sayings of the Buddha' today for the n'th time, and in the autobiographical suttas from Mahjima and Digha Nikayas that Woodward has placed at the beginning of the book under the "BEGINNINGS" section, Buddha represents his enlightenment as occurring to him through a series of thoughts clearly following a logical sequence. That is not to say that this logical chain of thoughts does not constitute "excellent knowledge and insight befitting the ariyans" or that it is "his own devising beaten out by reasoning and based on investigation" in the way that those who said that in the sutta you cited were saying that. There is clear spiritual insight in his logical chain of thoughts--yet at the same time there is logic there. In other words, his spiritual insight is not stoner-logic; it makes real logical sense. The doctrine of no-soul and the doctrine of the unity of all souls to the point of identity and even worse the doctrine of the unity and identity of all things to the point that both souls and dog dung are one and the same are all stoner logic that makes no sense. Its one thing to say that someone hammered out a system by logic with no special spiritual insight, and another to say that with special spiritual insight one discovered a system that is still actually logical.
Posted by: dave b | September 25, 2019 at 10:19 PM