The Zennist

During intense meditation

The whole, naturally, is likened to the absolute but not the things that arise from within it which are its illusory phenomenalizations.  On the other hand, the substance or essence of these illusory phenomenalizations from which they are composed (saṃskṛta), is absolute.  We can also think of the absolute as pure Mind or spirit. 

During intense meditation we are aware of our thoughts (manas) but never the actual content which is the absolute.  We are unable to supersede our mini-world of personal thoughts with their unending displays.  No matter our efforts, we always come to a limit, or the same, we have come to Zen master Mumon’s barrier 關 that we cannot pass through which, by the way, is what all koans represent — answer one you get ‘em all. 

The content mentioned earlier is what the serious meditator is fixed upon; endeavoring to intuit it.  The meditator already knows the nothingness of thought; that it is something stirred up so that it is nothing again and again — never the actual content which is concealed by the stirring.

The stirred content is also the othering of the actual content that appears real but is only an illusion of the real.  Said again, the meditator already knows the nothingness of their thoughts even as both imagination and mental images.  Thought or the process of thinking is stirred content become other to its unstirred self that is not remembered (smṛti) by us. 

What is lacking for the meditator is they have not left the boundary of the altered or stirred content.  They are still facing Mumon’s barrier unable to make heads or tails of it.  Koans bring out this frustrating fact to consciousness.  One never is quite sure they fully understand, and never will until they see/remember the essence or content face-to-face.

Reading Buddhist books: a search for context

The modern academic style of writing as regards Buddhism, it seems to me, is often more of a search for Buddhism’s authentic context.  Lacking a context there can be no meaningful unpacking of Buddhism that brings, so to speak, a light to darkness. 

In this search for context, it is easy to stray into the world of opinions which, granted, are more than impressions but still fall under the category of being suppositions.  But Buddhism’s context should not be that hard to find; not has difficult as, for example, Christianity.

When people ask me if there are any helpful Buddhist books that I should read, I am often frustrated to reply because I know the beginner’s mind in addition to knowing that Buddhism’s context is not easy to see in many of today’s books.  But let us pretend that there is a rather remarkable book that you can buy on Amazon that lays out Buddhism giving the beginner its proper context.  In other words, it gets straight to the point.

Buddhism is the teaching of Siddhārtha Gautama who awakened to the essence or substance of the universe which includes all of its galaxies, all the way to thought and its essence.  His awakening, itself, can be best described as a sudden intuition or the same, immediate cognizance of essence that goes beyond reasoning and inferring.  This essence is totally uncomposed or the same, unconditioned.  It has neither shape nor is it thinkable.  Nevertheless, it is completely real and vital.  With proper effort are, personally, able to realize it by intuition.

But these words from this fictitious book can easily turn into a stumbling block:  an impediment to our understanding of Buddhism’s context, especially, when we enter, so to speak, the temple of Buddhism with too many wrong assumptions about Buddhism which don’t amount to a hill of beans but, nevertheless, are clung to like a child holding onto their baby blanket. 

Now comes an important question.  How are these wrong assumptions about Buddhism removed?  I guarantee you that it is not without difficulty.  Adding to this, we have to do most of the removing on our own with very little help from a teacher whose only real job is to admonish us, from time to time, showing us what should be avoided; reminding us also that our world, including even our thoughts, is only a configuration of this essence and that we must intuit this essence, directly, not just believe it or accept it on faith.

I know this also sounds easy and just common sense, but then if you are a teacher how do you deal with those who believe that Siddhartha denied the ātman (he didn’t) or the ātman transmigrates from one life to the next (consciousness, not ātman, is the transmigrant)?  What about all the confusion with emptiness or śūnyatā, which Western Buddhists turn into some kind of absolute negation without positive implication?  This doesn't even touch on what meditation is all about which I hasten to inject, is not about sitting.

Many times the Buddhist books, including books about Zen a person reads and believes are important, only help to reinforce their wrong beliefs about Buddhism and Zen.  We have never once in our lives intuited what thoughts are composed from.  This is a very alien idea for us.  In fact, we turn our thoughts into our last bastion of hope even engaging in logomachy.  See what thoughts are made from, transcending them — are you kidding?

Our age has more in common with Dante’s Inferno

In the Dhammapada (80) one line reads, “wise people (paṇḍitā) master their self (attānaṃ).”  The overall context here (verse 80), is about overcoming obstructions in the example of an engineer who builds canals and aqueducts to lead the water where it is needed or a fletcher who makes the bent wood straight to become an arrow.

Today, the idea of mastering one’s self, that is, perfecting it so that it is in unity with the absolute nature of reality, is not well understood nor is it taken, seriously, in Western culture. 

By not taking it seriously, few people can hope to rise to the level of a wise person (a pandita) and much less an awakened one (buddha) whose personal essence, perfectly, resonates with the essence of the universe.

In some respects, our age has more in common with Dante’s Inferno which is a realm of suffering for the dead who have willfully forsaken all spiritual inclinations and values; who have wallowed in bestial pleasures, gluttony, and avarice; even delighting in undermining every human virtue with fraud and deceit.  It even reminds one of the Buddha’s three poisons, namely, stupidity, hostility and desire which prevent one from ever attaining nirvana.

In such an age as ours, why would anyone wish to become wise so that they might master their self?  Anyway, what is there to gain that exceeds unbridled desire and pleasure — having it always your way without repercussions?  Just look at Hollywood.  There is the future — or is it? 

But what have we really done?  Look at what the Communists did beginning in the 20th century.  They murdered something like 150,000,000 people not counting war dead.  They made the Nazi’s atrocities look, seemingly, minuscule.  Thus far, we have managed to sweep this Communist horror under the historical carpet.  But why?  Perhaps, so we can bring it back again, repackaging it into some new kind of horror that hides behind words like “social justice" or “equal outcome.”

We did not recognize it but the 20th century was a modernized Inferno or Hell — not for the dead, but for we the living, and the 21st century is not far behind with new horrors looming on the horizon.

And where, exactly, is the source of this Inferno; its architect?  The source lies hidden by the media.  You will have to look hard for it in some university library.  And even if a few manage to find out who is behind the construction of this new Inferno, who is awake enough to believe it and not dismiss it as a conspiracy theory?

The problem with youth culture

The typical college campus can be and often is more of a reflection of youth culture’s transition to self-identity and with it adulthood which stands on the foundation of Darwinian fitness—like it or not.  But this transition is neither smooth nor easy and can easily turn into somewhat of a rebellion (a rebellion against leaving youth). 

The youthful urge to rebel can also be manipulated in which the curriculum is changed so that indoctrination gradually replaces education, the typical education being more about scholastic study, critical thinking, learning how to speak and write well, debate and learning about classical wisdom. 

By the way, this is all for the greater good of the individual helping them to transition to adulthood and not stay in a sort of Peter Pan Neverland where, to borrow the psychologist Erik H. Erikson’s term “role confusion” dominates preventing “identity” or the same, self-identity. 

During my time on this planet having made my own transition to self-identity through Buddhism, the huge majority of people I see today who are interested in Zen Buddhism are still immersed in youth culture trying to make the transition to self-identity.  Some have an easy time but most do not. 

Often more youth than adult, they are still very much self-conscious, that is, concerned with how they appear to others, and just as concerned with how they feel about themselves.  There is very little stability or self-confidence.  Such youth still cannot parent themselves.

A fake or partial transition to adulthood, if we could call it that, is to become ideologically minded, that is, to think and draw conclusions from our feelings and emotions which never rise to the level of knowledge or a -logy, that is, a science.  An example of this can be found in today’s climate change movement in which youth is enlisted by wealthy elites to carry their message, in the example of the Swedish teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

Buddhist training doesn’t waste its time in movements conducted on ideological terms which only delay one’s transition to adulthood; offering, instead, a youthful utopia which is far from the shores of reality. 

My training under a Zen abbot was first about realizing that all conditioned life, without exception, is suffering and that my thirst for it is causing me to suffer the more I cling to it.  It was like one of those pot belly stoves that keeps the cabin warm in the winter.  Yes, it keeps you warm, but don’t put your hand on it.  You will get burned and suffer as a result.

Buddhism is meant to show us that the reality of our world is not what we imagine it to be.  It is an illusion which we gradually have to wean ourselves off of.  But youth culture is not here—not even close.  They remain confused as to who they really are.  They have not the slightest clue as to what is most profound and true within them. 

If youth doesn’t achieve some level of mature self-identity, somewhat like Freud’s “ego” whose job is to stop the untamed passions from destroying us and our future, youth will bring itself to ruin. 

I grew up in the 1960s and became a Zen monk in 1965.  It was a time of youth, from sex, psychedelics, rock & roll, to various liberation movements.  Some of them violent.  But all of this was led by youth.  Looking back, it was a great diversion from growing up and coming to self-identity.  It is happening again.  But now our colleges and universities are failing.  People don’t know who they are and they don't seem to care.

Consciousness is not the substratum of our everyday world

I have touched on the importance of consciousness or vijñāna a few times.  Unlike the western notion of consciousness, Buddhist consciousness is more subtle.  It not only contains spacetime with its countless worlds, it includes cycles of birth and death otherwise known as saṃsāra and the conscious agents who are going through this.  I should mention, also, that consciousness, according to the Buddha, is like a magical illusion (māyā). 

Vijñāna also contains within it the notion of duality (dvaya) both external (the individual and the world) and internal (observer  and observed thought and sensory phenomena).  But with this duality there is an implicit unseparatedness which is still no unity since the two sides of vijñāna would have to be transcended in order to reach unity or oneness. 

To attain unity, the adept must reach the origin of vijñāna before it becomes dyadic in order to transcend it.  From Zen’s perspective, the only way to reach unity is by intuiting the uncreated or the same, the unconditioned, which answers neither to the observer or the observable or even thinkable phenomena.

With the overcoming of vijñāna, no longer being enclosed by it, one passes through vijñāna.  It’s no longer a limit which is also a resistance (i.e., matter) but now permeable since it is illusory.  Spirit (ātman) passes through it which is not to be confused with a self, individual or subject.  It is the Buddha-nature according to the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra.

I am sure some will be aghast at this part of Buddhism.  But if we take into consideration where science is at today, following their logic,  the world we believe and trust in is not real at all.  This is to say, objects in spacetime are not as fundamental as we imagine.  Truth be told, our reality is an illusion, nevertheless, sufficient to make the bulk of humans accept it as non-illusory truth.  Buddhism overturns this belief.  Yes, there is something which supersedes vijñāna.  Vijñāna is not the substratum of our everyday world.  It is only useful for keeping us in the illusory Darwinian fitness game.

Don't worship what is not the Tathāgatha body

In the Milinda Pañha (The Questions of King Milinda) we read:

“Hinder not yourselves, Ānanda, by honoring the remains [sarīraṁ] of the Tathāgatha.”  Paying reverence is not the work of the sons of the Conqueror, but rather grasping of the true nature of all compounded things, the practice of thought, contemplation in accordance with the rules of Satipaṭṭhāna, the seizing of the real essence of all objects of thought, the struggle against evil, and devotion to their own (spiritual good).  These are the things which the sons of the Conqueror ought to do, leaving to others, whether gods or men, the paying of reverence.

The Buddha is basically telling Ānanda not to honor the dead body (sarīraṁ) of the Tathāgatha but, instead, honor other things like realizing the essence of all conditioned things which is unconditioned and so on. 

Perhaps even more basic, seek the primordial nature that animates your soon-to-die body.  It alone is transcendent and deathless.  Don’t be only aware of what is conditioned and animated.  That’s not good enough.

There is a popular Zen story of a Zen master by the name of Danxia 丹霞 who lived on Mount Danxia.  As the story goes, he visited Huilin Monastery in Loyang.  It became rather cold that night.  To keep warm Danxia took a carved wooden statue of the Buddha, chopped it up and used it like firewood to keep himself warm.  Needless to say, the monks were astonished by his seeming sacrilegious behavior and scolded him.  Zen master Danxia said, “Hey, I am burning it to get the Tathāgatha body."  Confused by his words the monks then asked, "How can you get the Tathāgatha body from burning wood?"  Seizing the moment, Zen master Danxia said, "Since this wooden statue doesn’t possess the Tathāgatha body, get some more statues to burn!”

Worshiping a wooden, gold plated, or clay Buddha statue won’t save us.  I think we all know that at some level.  In a temple or in a great monastery the statues act as reminders of our vow to realize, firsthand, what Siddhartha intuited who became, suddenly, a Buddha!

The only sacrilegious behavior of a seeker, monk or nun is treating the goal of enlightenment with contempt or irreverence; becoming almost irreligious.  Such arrogance is truly pitiful.

Capitalism helped to make Zen a beautiful reality for me

Our lives are committed to Darwinian fitness which shapes our senses, including our mind (S., manas) to help keep us alive and reproducing. 

Next time you go outside look at all the homes.  Look at the power lines that go into the various homes which are, in this day and age, necessary.  Also, there are water and sewer pipes which are hidden beneath the asphalt road.  There are also natural gas pipes.  This is human progress from a Darwinian POV. 

Life in an average American home is certainly a lot better than life in my dad’s little home in the 1890s which was basically four walls with a wooden floor and a canvas roof.  That’s it.  No running water, flushing toilet or electricity.

Looking far back into our past when we first began walking on earth, natural selection has always guided us towards useful actions that insured our survival.  In fact, it is a huge part of our life if not the main part of our life today.

Turning to religion, there might be an absolute or God beyond the world of Darwinian fitness but in order to contemplate it like Siddhartha did, we must first establish a social order in which Darwinian fitness and contemplative leisure are coordinate, even harmonious like during the time of the Buddha and later periods in China.  This is of vital importance if we are to advance our species.  Religion cannot be willy-nilly dismissed or secularized. 

Capitalism, by any other name, rests upon the foundation of Darwinian fitness.  When the foundation of an economic system like capitalism breaks down so that people live in poverty and fear; where, in addition, crime grows, and families breakup (social degeneration), this is not an example of useful actions that insure our survival.  If allowed to spread and continue, this would be a modern version of the Dark Ages.  In such a time, a religion like Buddhism will have no adequate means to continue its growth.  People will become almost barbarians, not understanding the demands of the contemplative life and what the Buddha is teaching.

I studied Zen Buddhism through the 1960s and beyond.  I was able to study Zen because there was an abundance of jobs where in three months I could make enough money to last the rest of the year.  I could do this because of a successful form of capitalism in which manufacturing had become huge in the United States and good paying jobs were easy to find. 

Besides studying a religion like Zen Buddhism it was also a good time to raise a family.  Homes and apartments were affordable.  Cars were basic like the VW.  I had a 59 VW.  It didn’t have a radio or a gas gauge but it was easy to take care of.  Going to college meant little or no tuition and almost no student debt.  For me it was a good time to study the Dharma.  But around the 1980s things began to get worse.  By the 1990s the places where I once worked were closed; inflation was eating away at gains in wages.  Everyone was goin into debt, be it large or small.

I began to see more and more decadence making its way into mainstream culture pushing out the culture that I was used to which allowed me to study Buddhism.  Frankly, I would like to see those old days return when simple was also a beautiful life, a life in which it was easy to study religion and raise a family.  I saw a happy time and its fall.  I met lots of wonderful people but I also met people who were fascinated with evil (for me this means 'excess').  Today, the San Francisco where I used to be hunting for Buddhist books, sometimes walking for miles, or meeting a teacher, has become a horrible place to live if a person is not wealthy.  I wish it were not this way but it is.  It's seems to be getting worse.  Arrogance together with a strange kind of impotence has taken over many minds.

The danger that consciousness poses

The growth of excessive consciousness has profound consequences for the way we experience ourselves and the world. — Iain McGilchrist

 

Basically, the Buddha is telling us that the arising of suffering is caused by consciousness and that with the complete ending of consciousness there can be no arising of suffering.  This is borne out by this passage from the Sutta-Nipāta:

“Whatever suffering arises, all is caused by consciousness.  With the complete ending of all consciousness there is no arising of suffering” (734).

As humans, before the nine months in our mother’s womb, we were consciousness in the bardo/antarabhāva or intermediate existence (between our last death and a new birth). This same consciousness connects us to a new birth place by attaching to our next mother’s fertilized embryo. 

It is thus from the bardo/antarabhāva, that consciousness causes itself to experience another round of birth and with it more suffering by clinging to the illusory shadows of its previous existence (this is not so for those who have transcended consciousness thus acquiring the intuition of that which forever lies beyond consciousness). 

This backward review by consciousness, if I can call it that, is reified and intensified by the conscious agent who then blindly and willfully attaches to another life, that is, connects with a new embryo.

As a result, the world of conscious agents never seems to leave the enclosure of consciousness.  This enclosing further develops into an individual existence with a head, arms, torso, legs and the rest of the things that make up a body.  This is a catastrophe, opening up new problems and new forms of suffering. 

But, believe it or not, there is an advantage to this.  Because consciousness is compressed into an individual with its outside world together with the subject and their mental and emotional activity it is now possible to overcome the implicit duality that makes up consciousness since it is now disclosed.  By right meditation; overcoming the deceiving power of consciousness; returning to the primordial enlightened state (buddhatā), this new, transformed being is able to help rescue those lost in the enchanting and dangerous powers of consciousness.

Switching gears, I find it odd that latter-day Buddhists don’t realize what meditation is supposed to achieve and overcome.  Not only that, but also the danger that consciousness poses if not transcended.

 

Rejecting the transcendent in Buddhism?

From day one, if we decide to study Buddhism, we are supposed to believe that most Buddhist traditions reject the idea of a transcendent, unchanging atman.  But in many ways this is just an assumption that has found its way into Buddhism with little or no evidence or solid proof that the Buddha ever made such a claim.  In fact, many Western Buddhists would like to believe he denied the atman, but where in scripture did the Buddha clearly and unambiguously reject the atman as if to say, “There is no atman,” and on what grounds?

 Where the no atman proponents are confused is the Buddha only denied the atman relative to the five aggregates which embrace all the essential properties of human beings.  The Buddha realized the true atman and knew the aggregates were not it.  In other words, the aggregates are not your likely candidate for an atman which is supposed to be beyond the reach and range of conditionality which certainly excludes the troublesome and finite aggregates.

In fact, we learn from the Buddha that the instructed disciple doesn’t regard any of the five aggregates to be his atman (P., attā) (MN I.136).  The disciple can distinguish his atman from the five aggregates.  He also understands that it is self or atman that realizes nirvana (MN I.255) which is unconditioned and not connected with the aggregates since they are conditioned.

Logic also tells us that the atman which realizes nirvana, which is unconditioned, must be, itself, unconditioned to realize nirvana.  On the same note, a self that is drawn to the aggregates as being itself, in the example of Saccaka the Aggivessana (MN I.230), is on a fool’s errand.

But perhaps the bigger problem with assuming that the Buddha rejected a transcendent, unchanging atman, is that Buddhism becomes like a magnet for those who are materialists; who refuse to accept even a transcendent state which is a problem with modern Buddhism.  Yet, despite their wish to see Buddhism as a form of materialism they fail to recognize that a Buddha has transcended all things (pāragā sabba-dhammānam) (AN I.162).  Isn’t this what a Buddha is supposed to do?  Later in Mahayana Buddhism it will be declared that the Buddha-nature is the atman.

 

 

Backing up into spiritual territory

We are so weakened by our attachment to the five aggregates/skandhas, namely, form, feeling. perception, volition and consciousness that we have lost almost all sense of the spiritual which transcends these aggregates and the six senses, as well, which includes even mentation (manas) and its objects.

Because our mind is set on the skandhas we have also set our mind upon receiving suffering as our reward because the five skandhas, according to the Buddha, are suffering (DN II.305).

For those who live in accordance with the Buddha’s spiritual teaching which points to what transcends the skandhas, and thus suffering, they have their minds set on what is spiritual and beyond suffering.

To be charmed and desirous of the world of the skandhas, including the six senses, is also to become enslaved to the misdeeds of our biological body becoming even more spiritually blind as we indulge in corporeal passions.  In truth, indulging in the pleasures of the skandhas is contrary to the Buddha’s teaching.

To escape this predicament, we have to gradually withdraw our attachment to our body with its 37.2 trillion cells (an estimate).  This is when our spiritual side begins to kick in, so to speak.  Unbeknownst to us, to back away from the corporeal with its various passions is to back into spiritual territory—not much at first.  This is the basic training of Buddhism, 101.  The life of a monk or a nun is a backing away from the skandhas and sensory attachment, and thus entry into the spiritual world like a blind person gradually regaining their sight.

To be sure, it can be a long process and one not without its share of ups and downs because we are dealing with nature and an attachment to our body so deep as to believe we are this body rather than what actually animates it which is incorporeal and not a body.