The Zennist

Mistakingly chasing after what is unreal rather than what is real

Desire in Buddhism is about mistakingly chasing after what is unreal rather than what is real and unchanging. But so long as we have not directly realized the real and the unchanging we cannot give up attaching to the unreal.

 

Stopping our desire for one thing does not help us give up our attraction to other desirable things. We first have to realize the real and the unchanging. This makes transcendence (pāramitā) doable which is about actually getting out of the cesspit of human existence.

 

From the time that we attached to the fertilized egg in our mother's uterus we have been chasing after the unreal while at the same time becoming more and more immersed into the world of the unreal. Even in death, we find another rebirth in another world.

 

Once we get a glimpse of the real which is what the Hinayana is really about, we are then able to move eventually to the Mahayana path which is about being immersed in the Light of Mahayana.

“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 [mahāyana-prabhāsa], 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.” — Lankavatara Sutra XL (Suzuki’s translation)

This is a real transformation and it can be taken in a literal sense. One sees the world the way a Buddha sees the world and especially beholds the spiritual light (prabhāsa) which is missing in the ordinary world of the human being.

Our true self (or nature)

Our human world is always covering our true nature with emotional downturns, speculation, and misinformation that only rebirth can remove so we might have a clearer vision of our true nature, although it is far from perfect.

For those who don't accept rebirth their attitude doesn't change the fact that life is continuous.  Death is far from a final ending.  Each death is only the end of a single life.  In the world of Buddhism, consciousness (P., viññāṇa) is the transmigrant that ensures the transition from one life to the next.

The antidote to the poison of the belief that death is final and that our lifeworld or Lebenswelt ends with our death is Buddhism.  It is always telling us that our attachment to this temporal body, also the five aggregates, is suffering because we are mistaking the real self with a false view of self.  In this respect, we will always be going from one false self to another false self until we wake up and see our true self.

I have found over many years that Westerners find it hard to believe that Buddhism does accept rebirth and does not accept the belief that there is no fundamental self.  In point of fact, the Buddha teaches us not to take what is not the self to be the self.  Our true self is never found in conditions.  It is not a dependent origination nor the five aggregates.  In truest words our true self is the Buddha nature.

Nirvana is not self-explanatory

Key terms in Buddhism are not all that self-explanatory.  Few are, if any.  Least of all is ‘enlightenment’ or ‘nirvana’ self-explanatory.  Making the matter of explanation even more difficult nirvana or realizing the unconditioned is not a sensory experience.  Much less being something shared with others.  But this is not the end of our travails.

Most importantly we cannot realize nirvana with pre-loaded suppositions or assumptions about what Buddhism is.  We have to attain the very same insight that Siddhartha did long ago.  We first have to purify our minds.  This is the extremely difficult part of Buddhism because most of practitioners never end up fully purifying their minds to be adequate with Siddhartha's mind when he awakened.

They imagine they have adequately purified their minds but that is all delusional thinking.  Only when the practitioner exhausts all of their presuppositions are they considered purified.  So when does this happen?  Not when a practitioner expects or believes it is so.  After awakening, only then does the practitioner realize that he or she had come to the end of their wits.

This is another one of those Zen mysteries that is difficult to explain with conventional words.  Everything in our life it's like a dream or it is like being in a play in which we have forgotten who we actually are.  And all the people that we know in the play are in the same boat as we are.  They have over-identified with their character, so much so, they have forgotten who they are, too.

Another odd way of putting it, we are like appliances who have no idea what electricity is.  All the appliances have identified themselves with what they do such as opening cans, or washing clothes or vacuuming.  The term 'electricity' like the Buddhist notion of spirit or Mind (G., Geist) is a complete and unfathomable mystery.

An inconceivable reality

No matter how far we travel in outer space we will never reach the end of it.  It is the same when we go into the microscopic world.  This is the bad infinite, a maze-like infinity that, seemingly, we cannot escape from.  But there is a way.  We have to give up consciousness (vijñāna) and that is most difficult.  It contains perceiving and perceiver: an implicit duality that cannot shed itself.

Even the enlightened Siddhartha could not express his awakening to mortals except to explain it through consciousness.  His words can only be fully understood after we have awakened, intuiting directly what he intuited. 

This enigmatic problem is woven into the fabric of Buddhism.  Those who are looking for ready-made answers will not find those answers in Buddhism.  As for those people who seek ready-made answers they will eventually be disappointed with the path they have chosen.

Nations will eventually fail as well as all religions.  In fact, all of mankind's endeavors given enough time will fail and still there is no escape from this bad dream that seems so real.  Even the hope of absolute death will fail.  It is just as illusory as is the life we lead.

Tragically, we do not understand that the beginning of things is not a thing, and likewise the end of all things is not, itself, a thing.  And still, we expect to find a thing or something.  This is the spell of consciousness at work deceiving us.  Dissociated from this consciousness becomes inconceivable for us.  But this is precisely what is attained by those like Siddhartha: an inconceivable reality.

Those who come to Buddhism such as the curious have no business entering the doors of Buddhism because they are deeply asleep in the spell of this mysterious consciousness which puts everything in an unresolvable duality. 

Yes, we depend upon consciousness to live our human life but when we wish to transcends this life it cannot be used.  This is what we don't understand and seem unwilling to give up or learn a new way of seeing.

Mistaking our biological body as our true self is a grievous error

It is difficult to distinguish the lie from truth especially when truth and the lie are put together becoming information that obscure's the truth and deceives the reader. 

From Buddhist scholars to war historians assumptions which often lead to works of half-truths, where you can't tell the lie from the truth, are typical.

One might even say that the road to truth is never paved and could be mistaken for a modern highway leading to any number of towns and more deceptions.

For the curious reader of Buddhism and Zen much of what they read consists of half-truths.  For example, did the Buddha actually teach that there is no self or attā/atman (P., natthattā)?  No, of course not.  The Buddha is only telling us to "Abandon desire for whatever is not the self” (P., anātman).  We are only to reject whatever is not our true self this being dependent originations which are derivative phenomena that make up the biological body. 

Our entire biological structure originates from our parents and their parents, etc.  After the sperm joins the egg, our very perceiving follows a biological process that leads from the mother’s womb to birth, and develops on its own until the very death of the body.  Wanting to live again the perceiver takes up another body which can be formed in a woman's womb. 

This is the beginning of our wrong association with our biological body as if it is our true self and refuge.  To mistake our biological body as our true self is a grievous error according to the Buddha.  The truth of Buddhism is that the Buddha affirmed that the true self is transcendent and is beyond the biological person's grasp but still can be attained by an intuitive path. 

They are truly enigmatic

Many of us entered Buddhism and Zen through our expectations of what we supposed Buddhism and Zen would be about.  Many of us found out that it was like any other religion.  There was the pastor and the congregation, only they had different names, but it seemed like the same routine.

We didn’t, fundamentally, have to change or adapt to something new and unexpected.  Basically, it was a religion without God.  Or if there was a God it was represented by Amitābha Buddha (J., Amida Butsu) or some other Buddha. 

What I didn't find until much later was Buddhism, and this includes Zen, was about transforming yourself to be able to intuit, directly, your true nature.  But one has to first abandon all presuppositions about what they think or imagine their true nature is. 

This seems impossible to do because we have to transcend the binary structure of consciousness/vijñāna in which perceiving is a relative process which proceeds from a perceiver.  This dual nature can never converge with the source which is never other than singular (S., eka).

Those who have accomplished realizing their true nature; who have transcended the perceiver and perceiving; who no longer swim in the ocean of relativity are truly enigmatic:  their words and gestures are not understood by the unawakened.

Master Tao-wu's dance with his tablet, Master Shih-kung's aiming a bow, Master Mi-mo's holding a pair of tweezers, Master Chu-ti's raising a finger, Master Hsin-chou's striking the ground, Master Yün-yen's toy lion—all were displaying he great functioning of the Mind’ — Chinul (Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul's Korean Way of Zen)

The Buddhas teach mysteriously

The Tathāgata has never stopped teaching.  But this teaching is not by sound waves or by waves of light or, for that matter, anything humanly imagined or conceived. 

Yes, we can represent some of the teaching in print.  But what the actual teaching is can only be fully received when one has completely transcended their all-too-human condition.

Given, that Buddhism is the quest for our true nature or essence, in this light how can one perceive what is absolutely simple and unconditioned?  The only thing we have is our intuition which if we are on the right path will make direct contact with this nature or essence.  But what we will discover is absolutely impossible to describe nor is there any time by which to understand it.

Our reasoning about it comes afterwards.  But anything we use to describe or explain this singular moment of discovery, in the long run, will always prove inadequate.

Still we cannot erase the sudden moment in which we saw it.  Nor can we overtime forget it.  It is there yet it is not there.  It is truly mysterious.  We do not fully realize it yet but we are seeing it by its own light.  This light is not reflected light that reveals the temporal world.  It is not photon or wave.  Nevertheless, we meditate (samādhi) upon it daily thanks to our intuition.  What else can we do?  This is our faith.  It governs our progress if we can call it that.  Nevertheless we undertake meditation.

From this meditation the bodhisattvas path opens up in which this light becomes absolutely manifest in our life for a small period of time.  It is the beginning of the true Mahayana teaching, the so-called bodhisattva-bhūmi staging.

Imagine, if you will, that our sun all of a sudden became very bliss emitting.  Everything was flooded by this blissful light; still we could not see this light.  Even our thoughts became blissful; there was nothing in fact that was not influenced by this mysterious light.  Gradually people began to confess to each other that they felt this light; many people didn't want to go back to work.  Then one day the light just stopped.

Many people were brokenhearted and sad that the light that made them feel so blissful was now gone.  Only a few (the bodhisattvas) could figure out how this light manifested itself and the fact that it was still manifesting itself but the people had so much evil habit energy that it eventually covered the light with darkness.