The Zennist

Mundane Meditation and Holy Riches

Modern forms of meditation such as found in Soto Zen, for example, amount to resetting the body into more of a parasympathetic mode which lowers anxiety thus putting an individual into more of a relaxed state of being.  Essentially, this kind of meditation amounts to stress (duhkha) management.

A person’s life consists of confronting stressors many times during the day which means the autonomic nervous system is constantly being activated many times.  The sympathetic ‘fight or flight system’ has to be reset many times by the parasympathetic system to bring the individual into a resting mode.  This is the so-called stress cycle.

Meditation is important for modern life with all of its burgeoning stressors.  Still, it is not the meditation that the Buddha used to attain enlightenment.  It does not bring the Buddhist adept to gnosis of the unconditioned, which transcends the carnal person.  It should be called ‘secular meditation’ or ‘practical meditation’.

It is fair to say that this kind of meditation which helps people cope with their day-to-day stress is the bread and butter of modern Buddhism especially in the form of Zen—not the Buddha’s meditation.  There is little spiritual virtue in lowering one’s blood pressure or heart rate to a normal stress free level.  Nor will such meditation help one answer koans which rest on the intuition of one’s true nature otherwise called kenshō.

I dare say that Buddhism has turned into a religion of stress relief.  It is especially prevalent in the practice of Zen.  This is not unlike prosperity theology, a religious belief among Protestant Christians, that financial well-being is the will of God.  Faith in God delivers prosperity and security.  Both boil down to the intrusion of the secular into the religious domain.

 

The Mind of Birth and Death

Most people, when put under pressure, will acknowledge that they are materialists without knowing precisely what matter is. The Buddha was not a materialist which meant someone who didn't believe, among other things, in postmortem survival... when you die that's it.  Life essentially is meaningless insofar as it comes to nothing. From this standpoint all human conventions are folly. You might also call materialists naive realists, who take life at face value. They believe their perception of the world is an exact copy of it. The belief in a hidden reality which only awakened ones are able to see is absurd. A life dedicated to seeing this hidden reality is just another human folly. 

Hidden in the core of the modern social structure is 'spiritual skepticism,' which does not accept anything beyond materiality. Life is centered on the somatic which leads to Darwinian fitness. In this regard man's life is totally conditioned. He only sees himself existing between the poles of birth and death. The antecedents of mankind's conditioned life are almost ignored except in religion. Yet man as a kind of self-system is not infallible. He cannot know what he does not know. His knowledge can only arise by the sublation of non-knowledge. Man mysteriously can supersede himself. He does this by attaining gnosis of the unconditioned. This is what Buddhism teaches. 

But the average person who takes up the study of Buddhism cannot see this. They assume that physical meditation is the path to enlightenment. And just what enlightenment consists of they have no clue except that sitting in meditation might be the answer. But real meditation is about setting aside mentation, the sixth sense.  Those who indulge in mentation have lost their way. It does not stop so easily. Man is a willing slave of his mind which includes his intellect and his imagination. This mind answers to the world of the five human senses. It only knows birth and death. 

The Search for Truth

Great disappointment is often preceded by high expectations. These expectations often come by way of a wrong or inadequate understanding. These same expectations can be defended to the hilt which end up driving away truth. When our expectations become a substitute for truth, we are lost even before we can begin a meaningful search for what is true.  

Such expectations (which are assumed to be truth) can be utterly false and misleading in which the truth is all but lost. Nothing of the truth remains; fear of disappointment drives the defense. One is immersed in complete falsehood at this point.  This has been the general story of religion. In fact, in the modern age the context of religion is not well understood at all. The question, “Is Buddhism a religion? “ finds no answer because Buddhism is not about the worship of a deity but instead seeks ultimate reality or spirit. This gnosis is puzzling since it goes beyond the senses and human mentation. The human is surpassed. 

Ultimate reality or absolute spirit is no deity or God to be worshiped. It is not anthropomorphic. It has no human form or characteristics. According to the Apocryphon of John, “It is not right to think of it as a God or as like God.” This Christian text expresses the same sentiment as Buddhism. God is just a higher, more perfect human but is by no means ultimate reality or absolute spirit.  Hence, the problem with religion. 

Man, apparently, cannot transcend himself. But a Buddha has transcended himself-the man of flesh. In true religion, man must transcend his own human-nature to know the ultimate truth.

The Tragedy of Mankind

The Buddha and Christ both represent self-knowing spirit. What both the Buddha and Christ realized was beyond the world of the flesh and for that matter all worldly things. Accordingly, nature is the vivid ignorance of spirit. It is only by transcending nature that spirit is fully realized.

Each sentient birth represents a fall into ignorance in which spirit is hidden by the forces and forms of nature. In the case of mankind it is his very thoughts which hide spirit and bind him to nature. No amount of thinking can reveal spirit in itself. The price of thought is delusion; Yet, the greatest minds of the world do not fully understand this. It is like pursuing reality by way of dreams  What is accomplished is only more dreams. And soon mankind tires of its dreams. But where can it go? Both the Buddha and Christ show the way.

But the way is no human path. The way cannot be conceived of in human terms anymore than the vertical can be conceived of in horizontal terms. But this does not stop the human mind from trying to turn the way into a human path. This is why religion ultimately fails to get it's message across. The passions of the flesh are not easily curtailed or transcended. They undermine the pursuit of religion. But ultimately mankind’s very thoughts and imagination undermine religion. He becomes at some point skeptical and nihilistic. 

Both Buddhism and Christianity reveal their secrets to the spiritually minded. The secular mind, on the other hand, is excluded. The passions of this mind are ruled by the daemonic which is an impulse towards the contingent and conditioned. Suffering is never ended as a result. This is the tragedy of mankind.