The Zennist

Buddhism & Zen: a soapbox for the follies of postmodernism

I have watched American Zen change for about fifty-four years, many of those years without the Internet.  American Zen and with it American Buddhism, have always struggled to present the proper context of Siddhartha’s religion.  Especially Zen, cannot help but absorb some of the culture that it was transplanted in. 

The spectrum of Zen seems to extend from the 1950s “Beat Zen” and presently to“gender theory” and a few other oddball things which I see as being closer to bullshit.  (According to  Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay, On Bullshit, he puts bs this way:  “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit”.)   

When I began my study of Zen Buddhism back in the mid 1960s these and other concerns either did not exist or were still growing in the womb of postmodernism. 

I had no idea that in the future, American Buddhism and Zen would become a soapbox for the follies that would soon emerge almost full grown from the womb of postmodernism. 

At that point, Zen began turning to the world of postmodernism supported by an army of pseudo-intellectuals whose job is to guard the temple of postmodernity at most major universities.    

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that American Buddhists are, presently, of the disposition to allow Buddhism—and Zen—to be taken over to a certain extent by dangerous idiots who have become the victims of self-deception if not autosuggestion.  An aside, before I finished this blog, as luck would have it, I came across this, Meet the Inventor of Gender Theory.  The implications are fascinating and astonishing. 

 

Bad conscience: losing our spiritual sense of direction

Abraham Lincoln, for me, summed up a good or bad conscience saying,

“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad I feel bad.”

But these days matters of conscience tend not to be this simple.  The question often becomes how to cope with the fact that “I feel bad — but you make me feel bad. It’s your fault!”  Another example might be, “I feel bad but my intentions are good—I shouldn’t feel this way.” 

There could be many other such examples but suffice it to say that we cannot will our bad feelings away as we might hope to or counter them by virtue signaling.  Good or bad feelings seem much stronger than our will or our ability to reason them away.  Even drugs or alcohol fail.

Living our life in such a way that we feel good (having a good conscience) most of the time is difficult; some might say almost impossible.

From the perspective of Buddhism having a good conscience is relative to enlightenment itself: whether or not we succeed in seeing (intuitively) our true nature.  Short of this, our intentions can and often do lead us stray.  Our karma becomes not so good to the degree that we manage to deceive our self thus losing our spiritual sense of direction.

How we deceive our self is not an easy question to answer, especially, if we haven’t any courage to face our self; gradually letting go of the false self; getting on the right path, so to speak.

Going into a retreat so as to experience solitude both outer (being away from others) and inner (abandoning mental activity to reach no-mentation 無念) is typical of great sages.  Today, we might understand it to mean rebooting our spiritual system which has almost become asleep in most people who suffer from bad conscience (which means the huge bulk of mankind).

Whether the retreat is for two days, ten days, a few months or years there is a clean break from others and a time to connect with our self which has lost its whereabouts in the group or we could say groupthink where it is easy to become deeply and profoundly deceived.  One my even argue that the group is the source of bad conscience.  It can be often the madding crowd.  The stability it seems to offer doesn’t last long because any and all groups consists of interactions between people.  These interactions are constantly changing.  Nor is such change always for the good.  It could be degeneration in disguise.

A swap between master and student: boundary confusion

Using the film Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi as an example, it seems evident from the film that the function of the teacher and student can become transposed.  For Zen, this can lead to a great deal of confusion if not shutting the door forever on the spiritual path.  The late Zen master Robert Aitken explained this problem best when he said:

“The fundamental fact is that I cannot survive unless you do.  My self-realization is your self-realization.”

This view can inevitably lead to boundary confusion, real or otherwise, even resulting in a swap in which the beginner acts more like the master while the master, either to himself or to the student, seems more like an older beginner who has done more meditation than the beginner; who also has an official certificate from a Zen institution.  In other words, there is no real intrinsic difference.

In this Star Wars film we learn that the heroine Rey has become quite powerful; maybe stronger and wiser than Jedi master Luke Skywalker.  She is a ‘natural’ in other words.

But in Zen or the same, traditional Buddhism, its world is not at all like this.  What is taught to the student is basically how to clear away all that blocks them from intuiting the absolute which lies deeply within them, but as yet unrecognized (which is why they are beginners).  At some point they must go into a self-imposed retreat and self-awaken.  The only natural ability is by way of good karma like in the example of Huineng, the Sixth Ancestor. 

The teacher hands nothing over to the student.  Nor even can the teacher share his or her intuition of the absolute.  At some point the student is fully on their own carried by faith alone.

It is difficult for people today to get it through their heads that Zen culminates in an intuition so profound that all the previouis disjointed pieces of Zen’s puzzle, suddenly, connect.  Intuition, I hasten to add, has nothing to do with the analytical intellect.  The intellect can only see the trees, not the forest. 

It seems to me that those who study Zen these days are so greedy for power that they are unable to come to Zen’s profound intuition or at least see its necessity.  For example, in the history of Caodong school (Sōtō Zen) this is what happened.  Over time, more and more of an emphasis was placed on quiet sitting (宴坐).  Eventually, the emphasis on direct intuition was discarded.  The boundary between the awakened master and the beginning student disappears.

Whoever was responsible for Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, totally missed a wonderful opportunity to put into film traditional Zen training.  On this matter, I envision Jedi master Luke Skywalker deciding to teach Rey, but after he tests her finding her to be worthy of his time.  She then learns the nuts and bolts of how to connect with the Force, but also learns about a much higher Force that Luke, inadvertently, discovered during his self-imposed exile/retreat on Ahch-To which appears to transcend the lower dark side of the Force. 

Related to this, in Zen there is, first, the awakening to our Buddha-nature or kenshō, but there is also the Light of the Mahayana which is far more powerful and profound which the Lankavatara Sutra describes.

“Then, Mahamati, sustained by the power of the Buddhas, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas at their first stage will attain the Bodhisattva-Samadhi, known as the Light of Mahayana, which belongs to the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas. They will immediately see the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones appearing before them personally, who come from all the different abodes in the ten quarters of the world and who now facing the Bodhisattvas will impart to them their sustaining power displayed with the body, mouth, and words.”

Few make it this far. The imparting of their sustaining power is quite real and powerful.

A Buddhist interpretation of Christianity

A Buddhist interpretation of Christianity is not without its problems when one takes into account the expansion of different sects of Christianity each with a different interpretation. 

Under a Buddhist interpretation, which is only a rough sketch on my part, the context is all important.  Christianity begins and ends with spirit (pneûma) or more properly, ends with the realization of spirit.  Spirit is absolute unlike the world of flesh (sárx). 

In light of this, we are to understand that God is spirit (Jn 4:24) or more accurately, God is the same as spirit and should be always understood in this sense.  There is no God outside of spirit.

Jesus Christ, who is generated from spirit (i.e., God), is the mediator (1 Tm 2:5-7) between spirit and man, man being a slave to what the flesh desires and all this implies (e.g., death). 

In order to save man, spirit’s son, Jesus Christ, comes in the guise of flesh, but is really self-knowing spirit, the purpose of which is to ultimately liberate man from the sinful flesh through crucifying the flesh with its passions and desires (Gal 5:24).  Only in this way do beings belong to Jesus Christ and gain eternal life which is also their eternal inheritance.

Flesh is only the shape of spirit or its form.  As such, flesh can never become spirit which is formless.  To reach spirit, the flesh must be crucified not the spirit.  Thus, to crucify oneself means complete transcendence of flesh such that one even appears forsaken by spirit (God).  Flesh, in the ninth hour calls out, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (Mt 27:46), but spirit does not cry out.  This is a mystery being very close to Zen's "great doubt"大疑.

 But the clue to spirit and the true Christ rather than one in the guise of flesh or our imagination, is found in these words:

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18).

This is hardly different than Zen master Niutou Farong’s spiritual words:

“The Ultimate Essence of things is what is most important. But in the realm of illusion it becomes different from what it is. The nature of Reality is invisible and cannot be understood by our conscious mind.”

Here we must assume that Buddhism and Christianity arrive at the very same fountainhead which is absolute spirit which is certainly beyond the world of flesh, the six senses, and the five grasping aggregates.  Both the Buddha and Jesus Christ are mediators between spirit and the finite human world that is filled with sin and suffering.

The problem with both science and religion

Today, science seems to be our new religion which is still anthropocentric as much as it would like to deny it in the hopes of surpassing religion. 

Like religion, science is forced to look at the universe through all too human senses and, especially important, the human mind (manas) which includes man’s thoughts, intellect, and imagination.  The universe, in other words, can only be interpreted in terms of the human instrument because there is no way to get outside or beyond this instrument at least for science.

In both science and religion, as we know it today, there is hidden anthropomorphism — where the hand of man set foot!  It’s more obvious in man’s religions.  To be sure, the God of the Bible is very much human.  He has a face which he sets against evil.  He stretches out his hand.  He has eyes and feet.  He also has emotions.  He is jealous, or moved to pity.  He is grieved.  He changes his mind.  He gets angry.  This is a man-made God.  It has human attributes which stems from the human imagination.

The problem with both science and religion is this, they are not fundamental enough.  Both are still too human.  Neither aim high enough.  They only show us something derived from something else being thus dependent upon it.  A real, attainable absolute is missing which contains man but transcends him, also.

If we assume that Siddhartha’s awakening surpassed everything human including our modern ideas of science (also technology) so that what he awakened to was not caught up in the human world then, in order to become enlightened, we are forced to search beyond the human mind (manas) which is, exactly, what Buddhism teaches which includes Zen.

All the descriptions of Buddhism’s transcendent absolute defy our grasp through our human intelligence and understanding.  In other words, ordinary, everyday human thought, which includes science, cannot grasp what Siddhartha awakened to.  Still, there is a growing antagonism between man's needs and wants which science tries to meet and true religion which reveals, so to speak, the Isle of Spirit (ātmandvīpa) that lies beyond man's woes but is still attainable by man thus ending his suffering.  

Who or what placed us in transmigration/saṃsāra?

Beginners want to know who or what placed us in transmigration/saṃsāra (repeated cycles of birth and death).  First, let’s hear what the Buddha had to say. This is from the the Dutiyagaddulabaddha Sutta.

“Mendicants, transmigration has no known beginning.  No first point is found of sentient beings roaming and transmigrating, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving” (SN 22:100).

The simplest answer to the beginner’s question is we placed our self in transmigration. Nor do we have any memory of having done so because of ignorance and craving.  It’s dark to dark for us. 

We are self-made victims of transmigration.  Unbeknownst to us, the perceiver, and the countless illusory objects perceived, are composed from the same essence.  As long as we depend and exist through the mode of perceiver and perceived which make up ‘consciousness’, which is dual, we are trapped inside the world of transmigration.  To repeat myself, we are self-made victims.

But there is more to the story.

When we are in a state of transmigration being ever conscious of it, living and dying in its world countless times, we are appropriating its illusions, too, always being dependent upon them.  But this is not the case upon the realization of nirvana in which  the perceiver and the perceived (the two sides of consciousness) become one (P., ekattaṁ) through gnosis of the transcendent essence.

In the transcendent state of buddhatā one has ceased appropriating illusions.  The adept is no longer dependent upon them as being real having, finally, arrived at ultimate reality thus able to see their emptiness.

Escaping the doom of rebirth

We look at our external world from the perspective of our biological body.  We must admit, however, that our body gives us a restricted, distorted picture of reality.  Our body is adequate for Darwinian fitness but not much more.  We can, in other words, be deceived by its desires and drives.

As humans we begin as a fertilized ovum then pass into the infant stage after which we become a child. Eventually, we experience our youth and grow into adults.  Over time, we lose our beauty and vigor only to become old, wrinkled and decrepit. 

We are witness to all this and cannot escape it.  Some hope their death will be final.  The logic here is that I believe I am 100% this biological creature.  When it dies so do I.  But this belief doesn’t accord with Buddhism.

In Buddhism, it is consciousness (vijñāna) that attaches to the fertilized ovum.  It then becomes attached to the growing and developing biological body.  Like a spectator, it goes through the ups and downs of adult life.  It eventually experiences death only to enter another existence. 

Consciousness, in other words, survives death.  It is consciousness that takes up a biological form; even a spirit like form. 

The consciousness which is continually reborn into biological forms, partaking of the allness of the all, is samsaric consciousness.  It can only lead us to different degrees of suffering.  It seems that it cannot escape its doom.  But according to the Buddha there is a way to escape this.

When consciousness is no longer hampered and bewitched by the senses including the sixth sense, thought (manas), it becomes transcendent, that is, unfixed consciousness (viññāṇaṃ anidassanaṃ) — infinite, radiant all round (DN I.223).  The subject-object split, which is inherent in samsaric consciousness, suddenly, ends insofar as the adept perfectly intuits what the two sides, ultimately, depend upon, thus escaping the doom of rebirth.

There is within us something much more fundamental and profound

Of the six senses described in Buddhism mental activity or manas, which includes thinking, the imagination, and intellect, is the sense organ that Zen is mainly concerned with. 

The object of this sense are the five outers senses which help to situate us in this world.  With the manas we construct mental images, concepts and ideas.  The senses including the manas have nothing to do with our Buddha-nature or the same, the self (ātman).  (In the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra the Buddha said: When the Bodhisattva-mahasattva sees the Buddha-Nature, he gains the Eternal, Bliss, Self, and the Pure.)

From our modern perspective we can also say that we recognize spacetime by the manas, which also includes every possible thing that can arise from it even our most sublime thoughts to the most ridiculous.  But what even the six senses cannot behold so as to get a handle on, is the essence of reality this being the Buddha-nature.  It is beyond the reach and range of the six senses.

There is within us something much more fundamental and profound than what can be apprehended by our senses.  The Buddhas are the mediators who, personally realizing this essence, out of compassion, teach others how to awaken to this essence or nature.

And now we come to Zen which is all about awakening to this essence or nature — a bare bones approach to Buddhism which tries to confront and transcend the six sense or manas.

In light of this, we have to see, personally, what Siddhartha awakened to does not reside in a single thing or dharma so that it is foolish to speculate or argue about it not having realized it.  Zen will show us the futility of the intellect’s approach to this essence through the study of koans; that it can only be intuitively seen in a sudden and direct way.  And in this moment one is totally immersed in the clear-light.

To walk on the path of Zen requires intuition

The primary existential problem asks and tries to  answer the question, “Who or what am I?”  However, the question doesn’t come without hidden assumptions yet to be revealed to the questioner.  For example, I might assume that I am this ever growing and changing body, including its senses.  At least I know that I am connected with it and cannot disconnect with it as far as I know. 

If I think about this more, I might ask myself who is it that uses the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and touch?  Who is it that thinks and speaks internally?  At this point I only have guesses which are inadequate.

Now, let’s put this existential problem into a fitting Zen framework.  Imagine that you are visiting your teacher for the very first time.  This is an important interview.  You enter the room, bow then sit at a respectful distance from your new teacher.  So far so good. But then he looks at you and asks, “Who or what drags your body of flesh around, covers it with a robe, and seeks enlightenment?  When you have the right answer, comeback and I will test you.”

Immediately, you think to yourself, “That’s it?  After all this trouble I have been through just getting to this temple and learning the language?”

Believe it or not we all have what it takes to answer the teacher’s question.  Studying Zen in an Asian country; becoming a monk or a nun isn’t, magically, going to help us answer the question, “Who or what am I?” or “Who or what drags my body of flesh around, covers it with a robe and seeks enlightenment?”

In this predicament, whether we know it or not, we are expected to turn away from the six senses in order to find the right answer — the very same answer Siddhartha found under the Bodhi-tree. 

Any authentic Zen teacher wants us to look for the answer in a place the six senses can’t go.  Yep, sounds simple.  But from Zen’s mysterious angle this is the most difficult thing that you will ever do in this life or the next. 

To walk on the path of Zen requires intuition.  Such intuition is not taught in our elementary schools or our universities.  We have no idea what it is.  Back to our imaginary Zen temple.  The teacher is supposed to teach us a path based on intuition.  The question he asked can only be answered through intuition — not the intellect which only intensifies the problem.  Without intuition the question turns into a barrier that we cannot pass through no matter how hard we try.  The intellect may work for everyday problems but not for Zen.

 

Getting your head around Buddhism's proper context

Without context we don’t know what to make of what we read or watch in movies (if you lateralize to the right hemisphere of the brain you really like context — if to the left hemisphere you’re basically a clueless idiot). 

In Buddhism, without context who is this guy many today call the Buddha?  Maybe he was some guy in ancient India doing a lot of virtue signaling, or India’s version of a Stoic basically saying, “Take the pain!”  Who knows!

Without context Buddhism and especially Zen can be anything you want it to be and that ain’t good.  The West’s fifty or more years of de-contextualizing Buddhism and Zen has pretty much destroyed our understanding of Buddhism and Zen.

Remember, that when Siddhartha had his epiphany, he awakened to something very profound.  Let me give you a hint dear Zennist, it was nirvana he awakened to, which is unconditioned (P., asaṅkhata); not made by anything.  And what does it mean to be unconditioned?

“Mendicants, there are these three characteristics that define the unconditioned.  What three? No arising is seen, no vanishing is seen, and no alteration while it persists is seen” (AN I.152).

Speculating, one could also say that the conditioned world (i.e., the world of appearances that we live in) is empty, in the sense of being empty of the unconditioned.  E.g., our thoughts are empty; this includes all mental activity.  We might conclude from this that nirvana cannot be attained by taking up thought which is never other than conditioned and not nirvana.  We can’t think our way to the yonder shore of the unconditioned (i.e., nirvana).

We have entered the proper context of Buddhism and its scion, Zen.  Most of you who follow this blog are not shocked.  But for those who don’t understand the place of context and its iron rule as regards the Dharma, you’re in real trouble.  You’re going to have to crash and burn, figuratively speaking, before you get your head around Buddhism's proper context.