Configured spirit (saṃskṛta) is nothing but ignorance (avidya)—our outer and inner world. A good example of this are our thoughts which cannot reveal, in the slightest degree, spirit (tathātā). These thoughts which are empty are also insubstantial. Yet, pure spirit is revealed in the highest wisdom as it shines throughout the world. It alone is true knowledge (vidya). It is eternal, blissful, its own self-and purest simplicity; it is invigorating, immutable, and free.
It is rather a strange kind of behavior that we Zennists should pursue spirit as something for the senses and thinkable, that is, capable of being thought about. Yet in Zen, we do this in our practice whether it is sitting in meditation (achieving quietude) or taking up koans. But Zen doesn’t answer to any of this. Its real aim is the unthinkable (無念). Zen hopes to catch us off guard with nothing thinkable in our noggin. But as humans, our reality is composed (saṃskṛta) only of thinkables. We reject the unthinkable, even its possibility. Along with this rejection is also the rejection of the path.
As humans we cannot handle the path that leads to the pure unthinkable—a moment of kenshō. For us, we cannot think of or imagine an unthinkable reality.
We can certainly understand the predicament of Stephen Batchelor when as a Korean Zen monk with Zen master Kusan Sunim he had to face the unthinkable in the koan “What is this?”
“Once again, I found myself confronted by the specter of a disembodied spirit. The logic of Kusan Sunim’s argument failed to convince me. It rested on the assumption that there was “something” (i.e., Mind) that rules the body, which was beyond the reach of concepts and language. At the same time, this “something” was also my true original nature, my face before I was born, which somehow animated me. This sounded suspiciously like the Atman (Self/God) of Indian tradition that the Buddha had rejected” (Confession of a Buddhist Atheist p. 68).
Zen is not for the Western mind that clings, tenaciously, to the conditioned world with its thinkables. A Buddha has gone beyond the mind of ordinary beings (prithagjana). He has awakened to uncomposed spirit which is unthinkable.
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