The Zennist

A time of universal deceit

Using George Orwell's words, the author of the novel 1984, we live in a time of universal deceit.  Here truth is either concealed or it is misrepresented.  In either case, there is no real truth to be found and we run the risk of deceiving ourselves to believe otherwise.

This is not to suggest that there is absolutely no truth but truth is not as it appears so that what appears is not the truth.  Yes, appearances are deceiving.  Novelist, philosopher, and semiotician Umberto Eco said:

“If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.”

In Zen, the student eventually learns to treat words like a finger pointing to the moon with the proviso that Zen’s moon has never been seen by the student.  This moon only consist of spirit, that is, spirit not yet formed or turned in to a mental picture or a thought.  Truly, Zen’s moon is beyond anything we might imagine the moon to be like. 

Truth only becomes available to the Zen student when they have thoroughly exhausted their search.  Moreover, this exhaustion cannot be pretended.  To illustrate this, what does it mean when the Vimalakirti Sutra says: “Suddenly you regain the Original Mind”?  This Mind is nothing thinkable.  We have not exhausted our search if we are trying to find the corresponding thought for the Original Mind.

We are still deceiving ourselves; we have not left the world of universal deceit.  We still are trying to forge pure spirit into something thinkable.  But the Original Mind refuses to be formed into something determinate like a particular thought or concept.  I hasten to add that this Original Mind is very real and can be intuited.

Swimming in a sea of words

The intellectual mind swims in a sea of words and therein drowns in the same sea without ever finding terra firma.  Zen or dhyāna is intended to rescue us from this sea by delivering us to solid ground.  At the back of our words with their word-based meanings there is a more profound reality.  It can be met with face-to-face but not with words or mental images which are born from our imagination. 

It is not enough to say don't conceptualize or don't use words, or just sit in silence.  Such a practice is doomed to fail.  Yes, it is true that Zen uses words but these words are meant to point to that which cannot be put into words.  Only a few manage to accomplish this, the rest fail. 

What is our Buddha-nature?  First of all, it is not something we can share with others.  And it is certainly not our awareness which only attends to things which are conditioned and finite (this even includes our thoughts). 

The Buddha never shared his enlightenment with anyone.  Sure, he talked about it and made constant references to it but he didn't hand it over to a single person.  The transmission of the True Dharma is not interpersonal.  Not a thing is transmitted to the student.  One simply awakens to what Siddhartha himself intuitively realized.

But how long is it before Zen and with it Buddhism finally become taken over by the intellectuals of our age?  How long did it take the Chinese literati to dominate Zen, who had enormous political power, and by doing so seemed to forget that Zen is an intuitive path which transcends the intellect?

Personally, I have nothing against the intellect or intellectuals except that they cannot go where Zen goes which is on a path of intuition.  Eventually, we come to a point in our Zen practice where we have to drop mentation, including our prized intellectual approach.  We have to leap out of this sea of words to draw our first breath of spirit.

Awareness of an emotional state

Alluded to in many conversations, ironically, the word emotion and its various forms, is extremely difficult to define.  Emotions seem to emanate from the physical body (our desire for it).  Closely related are feelings.  How we feel is a kind of awareness of an emotional state such as enjoyment, sadness, disgust, fear or anger. 

How we practice zazen, for example, could fall under the emotion of enjoyment.  I feel so calm and relaxed after doing zazen.  At other times, I lack this kind of enjoyment.  At times, I worry too much about my job and my family.  What will I do if I get laid off?    

Our body can be excited and moved in many different ways, both positively and negatively.  In light of all this, we are involved with many emotional changes that are taking place within us throughout the day.

A Buddhist monk or nun tries to keep a tight rein on their emotions exercising more discipline and control over them than an ordinary person who lives in the secular world. 

The monastic life does not allow us to indulge too much in the body where all the emotions live.  By indulging in our emotions we soon lose sight of Buddhism's goal which is to realize the unconditioned which lies above the conditioned world into which we have been thrown. 

For those who live emotional lives, but decide to dabble in Buddhist meditation or zazen, there is some enjoyment to be derived from sitting in meditation and joining a Buddhist community.  Still, such people have no idea what it is like to begin to detach from the emotions.  This, of course, is the life of a Buddhist monastic which is not an easy life.  One cannot come and go like a lay person when they join a Buddhist community. 

A major part of Buddhist training is to have your emotions always confronted until you learn to stop overreacting so them when they are triggered.  Needless to say, this is very difficult for the modern person living in today's culture to do.  They would rather run away into their safe space and not have to learn how to control their emotions.  Others, I have noticed, want Zen Buddhism to adapt to their emotional world even though they suffer from difficult psychiatric disorders.

Our modern day pact with the devil

Maybe in our modern day pact with the devil we have traded our soul for power, that is, power to delude others, even ourselves in the process.  This giving away of our soul is easy for us to do because the soul is not seen by us as having the power to connect with the absolute while being attached to the flesh.  Modern Buddhists even goes so far as to proclaim there is no soul much like the annihilationists did during the time of the Buddha.

But this attitude does not free us from the penalty of denying a soul if there is one which has access to higher kinds of knowledge which go beyond the terrestrial man.  It is almost a modern fad to assume that we humans are soulless.  This belief is usually regarded as nihilistic insofar as man is considered to be only the sum of his anatomical parts.  Even his thoughts are considered to be an epiphenomenon of the brain.

If one is so naïve as to believe this malarkey then they find themselves moving towards a dead end when it comes to their lives.  This dead end is absolute finality, nothing goes beyond it. There is no hope of a future.  Even the belief that life is an illusion still depends upon the reality of something that is not illusory providing the ‘fairy dust’, so to speak, for the illusion.  While an artist can make a monster out of clay, fundamentally, this monster is still just clay.  The assumption that an illusion or appearance is based on other illusions and appearances, all the way down, is naïve.

Let us believe that duality/duplicity is an illusion.  What is the origin of this duality depends upon the one (eka) which is not an illusion.  In other words, the source of the illusion is not itself another illusion.  There is not an essential scarecrowness in the scarecrow that is in the cornfield.  The Buddha told Sakkaka there is no soul in form, or the same, appearance.  Sakkaka believed otherwise.  He believed the basis of form is the soul including the rest of the aggregates.

Our release from illusion does not depend on illusion but upon the intuition or gnosis of what is not illusory, or the same, what is unthinkable   (thinking being a congealing of spirit or the One Mind).  Some Zen students are aware of this but, unfortunately, the bulk of students are not.  They are engaged in sitting meditation marathons which don't really help at all.

Personally, I have no plans to reform Zen Buddhism although it needs to be reformed.  It is, inevitably, going to collapse by its own accumulation of errors.  In that regard, the religious mind has no place in modern culture and with its loss comes also the loss of the intuitive path which Zen Buddhism represents.  Among other things, we have lost our common sense to a kind of intellectual irrationality where abstract ideas and ideological arguments substitute for reality. 

A time when our certainties pass into relative truths

What about the problem of illusory enlightenment which is about believing that we know when in reality we don't know?  This question is like asking ourself can I deceive myself? 

We live in a time when our certainties or convictions pass into relative truths.  It would seem that there is no certainty of what is right and true; much less what is wrong and false.  For example, is pedophilia or homosexuality right or is it wrong?  We cannot say.  All this tends to carryover when we look at the problem of illusory enlightenment.  But it shouldn’t.

The Zen adept under the illusion of enlightenment has not even come to the place where they can understand that spirit or Mind is unthinkable; that it cannot be constructed into a thought.  The implications of this are scarcely understood whereby one is able to transcend the world of thought.  Yes, Zen is not without clues providing the adept with a better picture of how to transcend thought.  The Lankavatara says in just one small example, “There is an essence entirely covered by thought-constructions and hidden inside all that which has body.”  One teacher of Zen wrote:

What is your Original Face and what is Hua Tou 話頭?  Your Original Face is without discrimination.  Hua Tou is the Reality before the arising of a single thought.

One more example.  It was Zen master Huineng who said:  “True Reality is the substance of thoughts; thoughts are the function 用 (manifesting) of True Reality.” As we can see, Huineng‘s true reality is spirit or Mind before it becomes manifest (or congealed) into a thought.

Illusory enlightenment never gets beyond thought, that is, never awakens to pure spirit or Mind before it congeals into thought.  And no matter how convinced the adept is of their awakening they cannot get past Mumon’s barrier 關.  This adept will spend their time trying to convince others but in seclusion without the presence of others, this illusory enlightenment fades back into doubt.

The final product of Zen?

What is the product of Zen?  Hopefully, you might guess that the product would be satori or enlightenment.  We have to keep in mind that Zen is not like an automobile factory where the product is a car.  Nevertheless, the serious Zen student eventually realizes what the Zen masters of old and Siddhartha realized who became the Buddha.  It is exactly the same. Yes, we could call it the source of all things. 

Mind, which refers to uncongealed spirit not yet become thought, is the source of the triple world according to the Lankavatara.  When Mind becomes congealed there appears this vast, endless world which is an illusion that does not really exist the way we imagine. 

Yes, even our most sublime thoughts are a little more than congealed spirit (also conditioned or composed spirit).  For the serious Zen adept, spirit always eludes them while their thoughts remain ever present.  For the average person, all that they are aware of are thoughts such as pleasant thoughts, troubling thoughts, or fearful thoughts, etc.

It is next to impossible for the ordinary person to break through the phenomenon of thought.  They might, in a last ditch effort, rely on the imagination believing that they have achieved satori!  But in the long run, even this proves inadequate.  No matter what we do we end up with no product.  Maybe we are holding out for a particular kind of thought, maybe a thought about enlightenment?  But be forewarned that this thought is still congealed spirit. 

It must be kept in mind that great Zen masters understood what no-thought 無念 meant.  This is an important part of Zen because to overcome thought we have to enter into no-thought, this being spirit which is uncongealed.  One Zen master even went so far as to say that when there is truly no-thought, then no-thought itself does not exist.

Jumping the shark Zen

The idiom “jumping the shark” is generally used to refer to some misguided attempt to add new life to something no longer popular.  Involving Zen with identity politics is one such example of jumping the shark Zen. Let me back up and say, this is not an overt involvement but a quiet involvement; one that almost goes undetected. 

Identity politics is one of those things that's easy to see but hard to define.  One writer defined it as the struggle for political "voice" by marginalized groups in society.  In other words, I want control over the discourse about who I am and what I need from society to make me happy.  Even deeper, I don't want you to label me as a psychiatric disorder!

Today, Zen, including Buddhism in general, are facing an influx of people who are attached to identity politics; who feel that they no longer have a voice but hope to find a voice for their identity in Zen or Buddhism.  In answer to this wish, I can only say that Zen will not give you a voice for your identity but will rather take it away from you! 

Whether it's gender or sexuality Buddhism doesn't want us to identify with the five aggregates (skandhas) of physicality, feeling, perception, karmic formations, or consciousness.   This much is very clear in Buddhism or should be.  These aggregates, by the way, are conditioned.  Attachment to them means being swept away by the flood of samsara. 

We humans suffer from a bad case of mistaken identity, identifying with what is conditioned rather than seeing, firsthand, what is unconditioned, that is, nirvana.  What is unconditioned is pure spirit or Mind; what is conditioned is thought which is congealed spirit.  But few understand this.  More people, in fact, disbelieve this.  As we can see, teaching Buddhism or Zen is an uphill battle.  It is difficult to give up one's identification with a figment of the imagination.  Incidentally, this is where “power” kicks in (a fight for control over the discourse).

Those misled by identity politics need power.  Who they believe they are, are also convinced they need to control others for fear others will control them.  One constantly feels bereft of power and status.  They think of themselves as victims. 

Buddhism pushes its students to get past identification with a false self comprising the five aggregates.  The student must regard the five aggregates as not their self.  In the Paṭisambhidāmagga, to help the student get past the five aggregates, it says:

See the five aggregates as impermanent, as painful, as a disease, a boil, a dart, a calamity, an affliction, as alien, as disingegrating, as a plague, a disaster, a terror, a menace, as fickle, perishable, unenduring, as not protection, no shelter, no refuge, as empty, vain, void, not self, as a danger, as subject to change, as having no core, as the root of calamity, as murderous, as due to be annihilated, as subject to cankers, as formed, as Mara's bait, as connected with the idea of birth, connected with the idea of aging, connected with the idea of illness, connected with the idea of death, connected with the idea of sorrow, connected with the idea of lamentation, connected with the idea of despair, connected with the idea of defilement.

There are a few these days in the circle of Zen or Buddhism who will tell the student that these aggregates are evil and that the reason they are not our self should be obvious.  In fact, it is our very self (paccatta) which realizes nirvana according to the Buddhist canon.

Interfacing with Mumon's barrier

Think of Mumon's barrier 関 not as something like a gate but, instead, as the entire human body with its 37.2 trillion cells.  In addition, you are interfacing with this barrier — so much so, that the only thing you can be aware of is this barrier!  You have no way to escape except to find a Zen master who can give you the right answer. 

Sound familiar?  When interfacing with this barrier there is nothing more than the barrier.  But this barrier has no essence or self-nature; it is completely empty like an illusion.  In our frustration and ignorance we are unable to meet with the one who is interfacing.  It seems that the barrier always blocks us standing in our way. 

After a few years of searching for a good Zen master you realize that there are none out there who can give you the answer that you're looking for.  Forlorn, almost without hope, you are about to give up your search for the one who is interfacing with this corporeal body (which is totally different than what it interfaces with).  You almost believe that pure Mind/spirit or Suchness (tathatā) which does not arise or disappear is an illusion.  Or is it?  (Maybe it's the only true reality and all else is an illusion.) 

It seems obvious that desire for this body with its 37.2 trillion cells has made all of us a slave to this barrier which we have no means to escape from.  What is more, as this body ages it becomes more unbearable and less pleasurable to be with.  As we begin to find out, for all the small pleasures it gives us, it gives us more suffering, frustration, and unhappiness in the long run, than we care to experience.

Catching a glimpse of pure spirit

As far as Zen is concerned the student cannot reach Zen’s pinnacle by way of thought.  Human thought is never more than conditioned.  We have to consider thought to be like a solidification of pure spirit.  In Zen, pure spirit is usually represented as Mind with a capital M.

The problem can be crudely illustrated by using the analogy of a car and the driver, the car being thought.  Going down the highway to Zen the driver takes the exit to Zen but soon finds that they have reached a dead end.  The car cannot go any farther.  At this point the driver can either stay seated in the car or get out.  It's when the driver decides to get out of the car that the path of Zen really begins.  The driver who decides to remain sitting in the car never makes any further progress.

To reach Zen’s pinnacle is a matter of intuition.  We have to leave, all at once, our familiar world of thought which is never other than congealed spirit.  Suddenly, we catch a glimpse of uncongealed spirit or the same, the One Mind.  This was also the insight of Zen master Mazu who said,

The Great Master Bodhidharma came from India to China, and transmitted the One Mind teaching of Mahayana so that it can lead you all to awakening.  Fearing that you will be too confused and will not believe that his One Mind is inherent in all of you, he used the Lankavatara Sutra to seal the sentient being's mind-ground. Therefore, in the Lankavatara Sutra, Mind is the essence of all Buddha's teachings, no gate is the Dharma-gate.

As long as we hold that the term One Mind or Mind is thinkable (both of which refer to pure spirit before it is congealed into thought) we have lost the direction of Zen.  The biggest barrier that the student has to overcome is the barrier of thought itself.  To reach the abode of no-thought is an almost impossible quest for the average student.  Ironically, they are surrounded by thought; their whole existence is submerged in thought; yet they do not seem to know this.  They pursue Zen as if it will allow itself to be put into a cage of thought. 

Zen Buddhism aims at making us intuitive

Without the intuition of our true nature or kenshō there is no Zen Buddhism.  It all rests upon intuition:  that extraordinary moment when all our presuppositions and ideas are emptied out.  Only then are we open enough to have kenshō.

A significant part of Zen Buddhism aims at making us intuitive; not filling our heads with just words and concepts but going much further and deeper.  In the words of  Sixin Wuxin 死心悟新,

“As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.  The experience is incommunicable, though you yourselves know perfectly well what it is.”

How can we know this sublime depth of which Sixin Wuxin speaks without intuiting it directly?  The short answer is that we can’t.  This is why Zen seems so strange to many people because Zen is teaching those who decide to follow it how to be intuitive and that is not an easy subject to teach or learn.

When we decide to learn Zen it is somewhat like trying to remember what we have completely forgotten in the example of a person whose name we can't remember even though we are standing right in front of them.  The harder we try to remember the more difficult it becomes to remember until we just have to quit trying! 

By comparison, Sōtõ Zen’s just sitting (sitting for its own sake) must be viewed as an oversimplification of Zen Buddhism:  a reduction of its real practice which is intuition, putting it into a single uncomplicated physical exercise.  Such a practice gives rise to wrong views about Zen which only serve to obscure the meaning of Zen.  Only when Zen’s path is related to intuition, not just sitting, does Zen become Zen.  Only then can we understand the teachings of the past Zen masters and the Buddha.