The Zennist

The ingenious trap

Our human birth is immersion into illusion and with it samsara.  Still we have the potential or capacity to transcend this illusion.  Ultimately, we can transcend the subject-object relationship or the same, the perceiver-percept duality and forgo samsara. 

By the way, this dual knowing (vijñāna) is what is necessary to produce an embryo that will leave its mother's birth canal in approximately nine months. 

But most of don't negate the subject-object relationship.  We don't because we are still deeply tied to our previous memories.  These memories have their own realness and allure.  These memories always point back to samsara.  They cannot go beyond it.

The trap of samsara is ingeniously made by us.

 

Lost in appearances, looking in the wrong direction

We could call the Buddha the conqueror of appearances or the same, illusion.  His triumph was to overcome the human belief that our world is real when in fact it is unreal and painful.  We might even call our world a high definition illusion. 

Maybe the pixels in our illusory world that make it appear are, precisely, the smallest composition or combination possible which is a dyad (a unit = “as if” one).  This in Buddhism is vijñāna.

While the ‘I’ conceit is the first to arise in the mind of the seeker it is already combined into a unit.  There is an implicit dyad-ness in this unit.  When the inquiry “Who am I?” is pursued we can’t get beyond this dyadic condition.  Even being in the moment or in the here and now is this implicit unit but one dyadic, nevertheless.

We have reached, let us say, the minimal unit of appearance or the same a pixel.  In no way have we transcended it.  Here begins the so-called spiritual journey of the seeker.

With regard to all appearances whether outside of this body of flesh or inside of it, according to the Buddha, all this is not mine, I am not this, it is not my self or ātman.  So we might ask, “Who then am I?”  To find the right answer to this question is the most subtle journey of all.

Whether we call it nirvana, satori, or kenshō it means the same thing, we have arrived at the transcendent or tathatā.  I should add that this arrival cannot be shared with others least of all by language.  Language, we could say, is directional.  It cannot mysteriously produce the object of our search or transport us to the revelation of our Buddha-nature.  Our true nature is always here but we are always looking in the wrong direction.

The ring pass-not

Our life as sentient beings is actually more like an unending simulation game than anything else.  Being unawakened we continue endlessly in a ‘stream of consciousness’ (viññāṇasota) also called the stream of becoming (bhava-sota) or the wheel of becoming (bhavacakka) in which appearances are always changing but we are forever trapped within the sphere of appearance, what is called the ring pass-not.

What happens to characters who die in a simulation game; is there a heaven or hell for them?  (It depends if the heaven or hell is written into the game.)  On the same card, as a game player can I play other games going on to be other avatars? The right answer should be obvious. In dealing with illusion usually anything goes. 

But there is a catch to this.  Once I make the decision I am bound to my decision, especially, if I elect to play in another life simulation game. I think we could call this attachment to playing games.

However, once I break the spell of being trapped within a game, seemingly unable to escape from it, this applies to all games.  In other words, I can can overcome the need to play games. Welcome to the Buddha's message.

 

Beyond power

Power itself is difficult to define because it offers nothing.  This offering is totally empty and hollow like a plantain tree.  It gives no support except the illusion of support.  Yet, almost all beings desire power. 

They put their manipulative intellect to the task of achieving power while the thirst for it never ends.  A source of strength and fulfillment is not found within power itself, that is, within its own world.  Still, it must have dominion over others.

Enters a kind of black magic.  One lives in houses of power, drives cars of power, and dresses in the fashions of power.  Those who flock around people of power are awestruck by their power who do the bidding of the powerful.  It seems true to say that power always desires more power.  There's no end to power's craving for more power.

Humans cannot see the illusory world in which they are immersed where nothing is real.  Yet strangely, this is where they begin their search for enlightenment, within the illusion itself, as if enlightenment confers infinite power.  If anything enlightenment is about being free from the need for power.  Men of power and those who have gone beyond the need for power are truly a sight to behold.

Such beings remind me somewhat of Star Trek's "Q" entities who all belong to the "Q Continuum" which is an ultramundane world. We see the Q entity in the Bodhisattva:

"How is it that a Bodhisattva acts perversely and lewdly?  In that he elicits thoughts about perversity of the sensual desire of sentient beings" (Mahāyānasaṃgraha, Taishō no. 1593).