The Zennist

A good book with great passages on the ātman

I read Florin Giripescu Sutton’s book quite a few years ago.  I use it like a reference book now.  The title of his book is, Existence and Enlightenment in the Lankavatara-sutra.  I think it is a very useful book for the advanced student who is at the stage of trying to look for the trunk of the tree and its root—not interested in leaf collecting! (Yep, it is autumn and the leaves are beautiful from where I am—I was just out sweeping a few.)

I have picked out some passages from pages 94 and 95 that refer to the ātman.  I want the reader of this blog to see first hand that Buddhism is not preaching there is no ātman.  The brackets are mine.  Sutton didn’t include the Sanskrit, but I thought it should be included. 

The best of speakers points out that the originally clear mind (citta), along with the defilements, (such as) pride, etc., are united within the Self (ātman).

The clear Self [ātmā prabhāsvaraḥ] has been soiled by primal and adventitious defilements and (therefore) is regarded like a soiled garment which has been washed off.

As the destruction of dust in a garment, or as the gold is free from its impurities, they (the garment and the gold) are not destroyed (completely), but remain as they are (clean, pure); so is the Self (ātman) freed from its defilements.

Indeed, as the womb cannot be seen by the woman who feels it, in the very same manner he who lacks wisdom cannot see the Self (ātman) among the personality aggregates (skandhas).

Needless to say, there will be some people who don’t agree with this.  They will manage to find something to contradict these passages.  But whatever they find, it won't abrogate what I’ve submitted.  There are other passages in the Lankavatara that are very explicit; which state that,

"Those who propound the doctrine of non-Self [nairātmya-vādino] are to be shunned in the religious rites of the monks, and not to be spoken to, for they are offenders of the Buddhist doctrines…"(p. 98).

 

 

The afterlife vs rebirth-deniers

It is rather odd that secular Buddhists believe in the liberation of mind, and seem to be somewhat open to the fact that nirvana is deathless according to the Buddha.  Why is it odd?  It is because it chimes with the survival hypothesis, namely, that something does survive our corporeal death. Yet, these same Buddhists refuse to accept survival in the form of rebirth which may well be a natural part of our life.  In this respect, they have become rebirth-deniers.  On the same track, these same Buddhists also, vehemently, deny psychical phenomena.  Much of this tension arises from an ideological standpoint they harbor which is uncompromising materialism.  This is the same materialism that believes mind/consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain which is a ludicrous hypothesis.

Buddhists who wish to confront such heterodoxy would be wise to read Chris Carter's book, Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness.  It is the third in a trilogy of books attacking the underpinnings of materialism together with their bogus assumptions, which has been the reigning philosophy of the West.

The present book, contains important elements of the first two books.  For the average Buddhist who needs a cannon—not just the canon—this book is an important weapon.  Carter shows that the evidence for rebirth has not, in anyway, been falsified.  While this book is not going to convince hardcore rebirth-deniers, for the open-minded this book contains the most important evidence and the best arguments.  Carter meets all challenges being well aware of the counter arguments. 

The book has everything interested minds wish to know about the after life (maybe after death would be better way of putting it) such as children's past-life recollections including mediumship (communicating with spirits and the deceased) and other related subjects.  Most of all, Carter's presentation of the evidence really says that we are, to use Dr. Donald Hoffman's term, conscious agents.  This resonates with the Buddha's teaching which says that consciousness is the transmigrant.  It is what survives death and is eventually reborn into another body living another life.

What books about Zen should I read?

Not an uncommon question for a beginner is what book about Zen should I read?  Believe me, I have had to do some thinking about this.  It is not that easy—what would I recommend?  There are lots of books about Zen.  I am familiar with many of them.  But for the sincere beginner something special is needed than starting with a book of koans such as Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps, for example.  

Nietzsche was right when he said:  "He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."  Unfortunately, almost all beginners try to fly into flying.  It is difficult to get them to understand that a book of koans is almost useless without sufficient grounding in Buddhism and how Zen fits in with it.  The same goes with even doing seated meditation.

For the most part, Westerners have only been guessing about Zen Buddhism.  Some of the guesses are refined and very good; others are almost laughable.  Ironically, Zen doesn't go out of its way to be difficult.  In almost every Zen sermon or letter to a student by a Zen master, what Zen is actually pointing to is to be found, but only if beforehand we understand the context of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, this context being mysticism.  If we fail to comprehend the importance of this context, harking back to Nietzsche's words, we are only standing—not even walking.  Flight at this point is impossible.

Western culture is still not quite capable of understanding Zen or even Buddhism.  When in the 19th century Buddhism was disclosed to the West, many thought it to be a creed of reason without God or a soul, without a heaven or a hell, without miracles, even lacking anything remotely transcendent.  But the West was all wrong.  Buddhism turned out to be a unique religion much broader than the Judeo-Christian concept insofar as there was no need of relationship between man and a personal God.  Buddhism recognizes that all beings have the potential to awaken to the transcendent.  However, the transcendent is hidden and undeveloped within them.  They can't see it because of their unbroken clinging to adventitious phenomena. 

Awakening to the transcendent, which is at the heart of Zen Buddhism, should be recognized in the West as mysticism.  But the Buddhist notion of mysticism, including Zen, is not concerned with sorcery, black magic, divination, or metaphysics.  It is deeply involved with penetrating through the veil of phenomena; seeing on the other side of this veil the very stuff our thoughts and the world are composed of.  In this sense, mysticism can be further described as the apprehension of ultimate reality, a reality, however, empty of all conditioned things and, itself, unconditioned.

If I had a class such as Zen Buddhism 101 much of my lecture would come from Heinrich Dumoulin's book, A History of Zen Buddhism (1963).  I wouldn't follow it to the letter but certain chapters I would cover more thoroughly.  Also, I would supplement Dumoulin's work with Hajime Nakmura's wonderful book, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-China-Tibet-Japan (1971) especially his sections on China and Japan.

Your homework :)

The Lankavatara Sutra shall ever remain a difficult discourse to comprehend because, mainly, it is suggesting that we do the impossible which is to transcend our species-specific world.  Of this species-specific world Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Science at University of California at Irvine, has this to say:

"We must recognize that all of our perceptions of space, time and objects no more reflect reality than does our perception of a flat earth. It's not just this or that aspect of our perceptions that must be corrected, it is the entire framework of a space-time containing objects, the fundamental organization of our perceptual systems, that must be recognized as a mere species-specific mode of perception rather than an insight into objective reality."

This is quite an amazing statement but then Donald Hoffman is quite an amazing dude who is doing is own 21st century version of a Copernican revolution.  Instead of trying to prove that our consciousness comes from our brain, in which every major university is trying to do, it would be much easier to prove that human brains—in fact, our entire species-specific world—comes from consciousness.  Yes, it's what the Lankavatara Sutra is teaching.  Donald Hoffman is just giving the Lanka the scientific power to attack the materialist defensive position and destroy it.  Here is a lecture by him which I have watched several times.  When you are done, read his paper, Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem. 

 

 

Waking up Sam Harris

The author Sam Harris who is a philosopher and a neuroscientist is an interesting guy. On the one hand he has a strong dislike of religious institutions but finds something worthwhile in spirituality such as meditation, for example.  Still, I believe, at bottom he is a diehard materialist as most neuroscientists are.  He also has a certain fondness for Buddhism.  Just guessing, but from what I have read on his blog he moves in the direction of secular Buddhism.

 Yesterday I was reading the first chapter of his book, Waking up when I came across this paragraph.

 That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.

 Taking the Buddhist standpoint, I will say that it is true that as unawakened people we are always dealing with illusion and, most of all, self-deception.  We do it so much day in and day out that the illusion becomes our reality while deceiving ourselves becomes how we deal with the problems of living with illusion.  In light of this, we eventually come to regard our psychophysical body as this is mine, I am this, this is my self.  Illusion, at this point, becomes concrete—it's all too real and painful.  

 How we disengage from the psychophysical self is a core issue in Buddhism.  It is no easy task to get out of such a mindset. 

 Harris is not wrong in saying that spirituality is cutting through the illusion of self.  But the self he is referring to is the psychophysical person who came into the world through their mother's birth canal.  It is the one I am glomming onto believing: this is mine, I am this, this is my self.  This is also the self the Buddha says, again and again, is not the self!  Let me say it again, the psychophysical person that I am glomming onto is not who I really am.  It is not my self or in Pali, anattâ.

 The problem that many Buddhists face and those like Sam Harris is in realizing that complete, all at once disengagement from the psychophysical person, lands one in a positive, spiritual state of being which is indescribable in terms of the former psychophysical person.  One has awakened, in other words, to the animative principle (in Sanskrit, âtman, citta, cetana) only to discover that they are spiritual agents.  From this we can say that we live in the psychophysical body but we are not of it.

 Of those who are disposed to materialism but who like Buddhism they still don't understand the notion of transcendence; that fundamentally we are clinging to what we are not; that if we let go we return home to our true nature which is also the essence of our universe.

Is secular Buddhism really Buddhism?

Stephen Batchelor, to my knowledge, was one of the first Western writers to try and render Buddhism secularly intelligible.  Let me back up a little and say that many Western Buddhist writers have always felt a need to make Buddhism chime with the demands of modernism but never to quite the extent of Mr. Batchelor who has no problem, it seems to me, ignoring much of the Buddhist canon (the Nikayas).  The big thing he is missing is nirvana.  It seems not to be an important part of Buddhism which I must say is rather odd since it is the most important part of Buddhism!

So how does Mr. Batchelor treat Buddhism in his most important secular Buddhist work, Buddhism Without beliefs?  First we begin with:

“Over time, increasing emphasis has been placed on a single Absolute Truth, such as "the Deathless," "the Unconditioned,” "the Void," "Nirvana," "Buddha Nature," etc., rather than on an interwoven complex of truths” (p. 4).

Next,

“We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana—analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates” (p. 102).

And finally (yes, really),

“After his awakening, the Buddha spent several weeks hovering on the cusp between the rapture of freedom and, in his words, the "vexation" of engagement. Should he remain in the peaceful state of Nirvana or share with others what he had discovered?” (p. 106)

By the way, this is the extent of Batchelor’s treatment of nirvana!  This should tell anyone a lot about the depth of secular Buddhism, that first of all it is pseudo-Buddhism!  I hazard to guess that Mr. Batchelor could not care less about nirvana; certainly, not the way Guy Richard Welbon did who was the author of The Buddhist Nirvana and its Western Interpreters (1968).  This omission—and that is what it is—puts secular Buddhism on one side of the Buddha’s teaching, that of impermanence, suffering and the absence of self or âtman.  The other side is simply not there, that is, nirvana.  This is extremely pessimistic and also incomplete.  For those who are strongly inclined towards materialism this is what is to be expected by such deranged minds. 

Two different terrains of Zen

Reading Zen, especially, older works, can be a difficult task, especially, if we are looking for something in Zen that is not there.  For example, looking for a panacea to help us solve our psychological problems.  To be frank, Zen will not take us there.  It's road is not like that—nothing is permitted to pass through Buddhism’s no-gate which includes our psychological problems.  Zen's teachings are not therapeutical.  We may wish to see a forest of trees, but Zen is describing, let's say, a desert.  The approaches are each different, as they should be, because one is Zen and the other is not the Zen we find in much older works. 

A psychologized Zen, in the example of Joko Beck's book, Nothing Special: Living Zen, is nothing at all like reading Jeffrey L. Broughton's excellent work, The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen.  Let’s imagine we sat down and read books back to back.  So what is the connection between the two books besides the word ‘Zen’?  One is like a forest of trees; the other is a desert.  Their terrain is altogether different.  Yet, to expand my point, both are in California.

Zennists can make and wear robes, build temples, teach zazen and even give sermons.  But this is not the terrain of Zen that Broughton’s book is looking at.  The two are quite different.  I should also point out that modern Zen is have less and less to do with what the Buddha taught.  It’s all moving in the direction of what can only be characterized as Zen psychology—which is not real Zen.

Back in the early 1960s my thinking was not like the popular thinking today.  If a person had mental problems they usually went to a psychiatrist or to the state hospital for ECT—not a Zen center to sit in zazen hoping things will get better.  Zen appealed to me because of its mystical orientation which was still connected with philosophy.  I will even go so far as to say that Zen, for me, was closer to the emerging category of psychedelic drugs.  I viewed satori as a kind of natural mind expansion.  Enlightenment, I thought at the time, was a new way of seeing our old reality.

The Zen, shall we say, of Joko Beck is butting heads with the Zen of Jeffrey Broughton.  There is hardly any connection between them except in name only.  With such a wide separation, I expect Zen to go the way of yoga.  It will be watered down, dumbed down, institutionalized, and split, itself, off from Buddhism.  The last thing will be the formation of Zen nihilism (Zen has no meaning) along with secular Buddhism which is already nihilistic.

Changing context

Heinrich Dumoulin’s book, A History of Zen Buddhism (1963) might well need to be updated given that we know much more about Zen from the hoard of manuscripts found in a sealed cave at Dunhuang.  But this doesn’t change the overarching context of Zen Buddhism that he gives the reader.  

On the other hand, history, in many examples, can be nothing more than a collection of discrete primary documents such as dairies or manuscripts.  This is not yet with a context.  The task of a historian like Dumoulin is to contextualize these documents.  In the case of Zen, its context is an association that takes place between certain ideas found in various documents.  These ideas must in some way cohere thus forming a context.

Based on all the historical material thus far discovered, Dumoulin has captured the context of Zen when he said, “Zen is the school of enlightenment born from the mystical stream in Buddhism” (A History of Zen Buddhism, p. 52).  Even before Zen became a “school” or “tradition” (ch’an-tsung) in the ninth-century, going as far back as the Lanka School in which Zen is rooted, enlightenment was central.  And it was central because the mystical stream of Buddhism was still flowing.  It had never stopped despite China’s political ups and downs.

One can hardly read translations of the sermons of Zen masters, in the example of Thomas Cleary’s fine little book, Teachings of Zen, and not find the enlightenment theme expounded in various ways.  But this doesn’t mean that Zen is free of being de-contextualized and re-contextualized in which Zen is about sitting or learning to live in the moment.  Zen, in this form, is no longer a school of enlightenment or kensho.  We are not trying to see ultimate reality and become Buddha.  Dumoulin’s context no longer applies in many circles of Zen. The new, revised context, it seems to me, is Zen has to help people who have no real interest in enlightenment but still want to pretend that they are seekers of the Way so they can feel ‘as if’ they are enlightened or at least getting close to enlightenment.  But this will never be Zen.

Beginner's mind is not Zen mind

I never had high regards for the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.  Although it proved to be a very popular book for those who want to learn about Zen but haven't the time to study what Zen is really about, I saw it as a very bad book.  For one thing, it preyed on the great weakness of beginners: their tendency to be overconfident in addition to their spiritual ignorance of the fact that the tradition of Zen Buddhism is about reaching a mystic awakening beyond the confines of the temporal world.  

Beginner’s overconfidence, which they take for wisdom, tends to be very strong and difficult to change.  It takes an enormous amount of effort on the part of a good teacher to wean the beginner off of their overconfidence; to teach beginners that they should have great doubt which can generate great seeking.  The only thing a beginner should know is they don’t know.  

No beginner should assume that the beginning mind (初心) or in Japanese shoshin is the same as the pure Mind which is effulgent and supramundane.  They are world’s apart.  No amount of zazen, holding the beginner’s mind, can change this difference.  What is really being done as far as the beginner’s mind is concerned is trying to calm the monkey mind down.  A bad teacher might even go so far as to suggest that the monkey mind is part of the big mind like waves are part of water.  The two can’t be separated.  Thus, big mind and monkey mind are one!

Another problem that is overlooked as regards beginning mind is that it is in constant non-knowledge (avidya) of the pristine substance of mind, this substance being pure or unconditioned.  Because of this non-knowledge  beginners more than often take the wrong path and go to the wrong teachers.  Even their thinking is offtrack.  Back to the wave & water analogy, beginners don’t understand that waves are not fundamental or equal with water.  Only the water is truly real.  Likewise, when deluded thoughts or the monkey mind suddenly stops, only then is the pure Mind seen, as it is, without distortion.

The Zen whip

Sometimes, I have to read a fair amount to material to do these blogs.  It is great when you come across some new material that is really good.  Of late I have been reading Jeffrey Broughton & Elise Watanabe’s new book, The Chan Whip Anthology: A Companion to Zen Practice.  If you were a Chinese student of the Lin-chi/Linji Zen, this is the handbook you might carry in your pack or in your sleeve.  It is truly an anthology.  It contains many selected passages from Zen literature and the discourses of the Buddha.  A student seeking kensho would find it useful to spur them on (oops, whip them on!).  A student of Dr. Broughton told me that Hakuin carried this book around in his sleeve.  This book from what I can see is one of those must-have-books.  I need to add, that for graduate students studying Chan/Zen it is also a must-have-book.  It has a scholarly component as well—a rabbit hole that you can go down if you wish to expand your knowledge of Zen and its practice.

For the average Soto Zen student who follows Dogen Zenji’s teachings this book may not be your cup of tea.  Unlike with Soto Zen, awakening or kensho is foremost in Lin-chi/Linji Zen.  One must whip themselves constantly to awaken from the sleep of the conditioned mind of birth and death so they might behold the supramundane, unconditioned Mind of which Huang-po speaks.  Just sitting does not make one a Buddha anymore than just standing or just walking.  

The seeker’s intent is to break through the mind of birth and death and behold the unconditioned Mind before it is stirred.  This takes a lot of energy which is the gongfu (kung-fu) of Zen, which The Chan Whip Anthology describes in the introduction.  Indeed, gongfu is the real practice of Zen which consists of sitting and working on the huatou (hua-t’ou).  The huatou is especially important in this book and much is said about it.  It is a word or a phrase in a gong’an (koan) that we lock onto which, ultimately, points to the real substance of the universe which is transmitted from Mind to Mind.