The Zennist

A different beginner's mind

Chinese Zen master Guo Jun said that the beginner’s mind is like a vessel that is dirty. No matter what we pour into this dirty vessel; no matter how nutritious it is, it becomes contaminated.  Zen Buddhism, and with that, Buddhism, in general, cannot be poured into a mind filled with prejudices, especially, prejudices which run contrary to the discourses of the Buddha.

In a word, the beginner’s mind is a closed mind.  Whatever they seem to have learned  about Zen Buddhism is wrong.  Sometimes their attitude is like an inverted vessel which doesn’t want to receive anything; sometimes they are like a vessel overfull so that it can’t receive anything.  The mind of a beginner is also like a vessel with cracks in it.  Anything of value that is poured into it is not retained.

From the standpoint of Chinese Zen, the beginner’s mind is like a raw recruit’s first arrival at MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot).  The recruit is not yet a Marine.  He lacks the proper Marine Corps attitude.  He has to drop his former attitudes—all of them—and fully adopt the Marine Corps attitude.  What Shunryu Suzuki says in his book, Zen Mind, Beginner‘s Mind, runs contrary to Chinese Zen and the required attitude of a Zen beginner.

“In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means "beginner's mind." The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind. Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it. The same thing will happen in your other Zen practices. For a while you will keep your beginner's mind, but if you continue to practice one, two, three years or more, although you may improve some, you are liable to lose the limitless meaning of original mind.”

Suzuki seems to not remember his own days as a Zen beginner; who couldn’t tell shit from Shinola; who was clueless as to the actual goal of Zen which is to realize our true nature.  When he says nonsense like,  “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few,” he is really saying the beginner’s mind is the monkey mind while the expert’s mind is disciplined and understands that Zen demands that we see our true nature—it’s a life and death matter.  This is what the expert is seeking with every fiber of his or her being.  Nothing else.  Unlike the beginner's mind, the expert’s mind is not distracted by infinite possibilities and deceptions.

The big attack

Typepad which carries The Zennist blog just experienced a huge DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. You can read about it here.

During the attack I have been trying to get a few new ideas for a blog by reading Donald Crosby’s book, The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism.  For a long time I have held the opinion that Zen runs the risk of falling into nihilism.  It is a kind of nihilism in which there is disbelief in a higher reality than the present one which is never other than impermanent and unsatisfactory as in today’s dreams may turn into tomorrow’s nightmare.  It also includes disbelief in gnosis of the transcendent, for example, that we can directly intuit our true nature.

This goes with what Cosby describes as epistemological nihilism which I read as a denial of absolute truth other than relative truth.  This means there is no ultimate reality or higher world (lokuttara)—certainly no parayana (the final destiny or chief object of realization).  This leads to cosmic nihilism which asserts the meaninglessness of the cosmos or nature itself.

Already we have entered into what Crosby calls moral nihilism.  Look at the great wars of the 20th century and the senseless slaughter.  Look at our leaders who are moral cowards (this is  political nihilism).  It is like the world is being run by psychopaths who could not care less whether they blow up the world, as long as they get what they want.  This moral nihilism has trickled down to the average person, or should I say teenager, who thinks nothing of committing mass murder.  There is also economic nihilism which finds no reason for market place regulations; doesn’t blink an eye when the entire nation collapses into an economic recession caused by gaming the system to the advantage of a few.

Moral nihilism declares the sole obligation of individuals is to themselves and their own set of values (which are nothing more than personal desires).  It takes an ugly form in Buddhism when some Buddhists say they don’t believe in karma or rebirth!

These are some of my thoughts for the day, during the DDoS attack.

Sinification of Buddhism

The Ch'an or Zen school is just as much a sinification of Buddhism as Hua-yen and the earlier T'ien-t'ai not to mention other Chinese Buddhist schools. One of the remarkable feats of sinification, in my book, is that the essence of Buddhism wasn't lost by the efforts of the Chinese sinicizers.  One could even argue that the core essence of Buddhism was significantly enhanced and popularized, bringing it well within the reach of the Chinese population including the Chinese literati who helped popularize Zen.  Helping the sinification was the adoption of Tathagata-garbha doctrine, that all sentient beings have the germ or seed of the Tathagata whereby they can become Buddhas if it is cultivated, correctly.  In other words, all creatures are potentially, Buddhas.  Robert Buswell, Jr. is insightful to observe this.

"To accommodate the lay practice of Buddhism, many of these new schools adopted a relatively minor strain of Mahayana thought that never developed into a formal school in India—that of tathagatagarbha (ju-lai-tsang 'embryo of Buddhahood')—as the basis of their doctrinal frameworks.  Tathagatagarbha doctrine conceived of all sentient beings as being already Buddhas and thus inherently enlightened" (Sudden and Gradual, p. 324).

At the heart of Chinese Buddhism is Tathagata-garbha which I hasten to add, has very positive soteriological implications unlike the negative not-self doctrine (anâtma-vâda).  This may account for why not-self doctrine is noticeably absent in Zen which, being only prevalent outside of the circle of Buddhist China's influence.  Zen was not without its Tathagata-garbha influence, its early school being named after the Lankavatara Sutra (a good book on Zen's early history is Cleary's book, Zen Dawn, which deals exclusively with the Lanka School of Zen).  Incidentally, D.T. Suzuki takes up the influence of Tathagata-garbha doctrine in his book, Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra.

It almost goes without saying this but Zen is clearly a product of sinification yet, remarkably, nowhere in this sinification do we find the fundamental essence of Buddhism removed.  Even in the later Sung period, Zen encounter dialogues (chi-yüan wen-ta), which are the bread & butter of koan practice; which are the tools of K'an-hua Ch'an, the bright pearl of Tathagata-garbha is still there, although not in the way the conceptualizing Zen practitioner wishes it to be.  The sole intent of these koan dialogues is to paralyze the conceptualizing intellect in such a way that mind is able to realize itself winning, finally, Buddhahood.

 

The mystical element

I certainly agree with Heinrich Domoulin who said, “The mystical element is an essential part of Buddhism,” but it needs to be further stated that Zen Buddhism has historically been one of the traditions of Chinese Buddhism in which the mystical element is the entire tradition which is supposedly transmitted.  

It may surprise the reader of this blog, but the mystical element is hidden from view in the teachings of modern Zen.  It has been replaced by self-help psychology.  In the four slogans of Zen, we can still see the mystical element. 

A special transmission outside the teaching;
Without dependence upon written words;
Pointing directly to the mind of man;
Seeing into one's nature, realizing Buddhahood.

The last slogan is an explicit statement about seeing the mystical element which has many sundry names from One Mind, Mind-ground, pure Mind, to our true nature.  Becoming awakened to this nature, which is the meaning of becoming Buddha, certainly transcends teaching about it, the teaching acting like a finger pointing to the moon.  Nor does this nature rely on words and letters.  

Still, this nature  is to be found within us.  It is the very substance of our thoughts.  It is what animates this mortal body of ours; raising a finger or raising a monk’s staff or just walking.  It speaks—it says “Mu,” or “Cypress tree in the courtyard,” or such nonsensical things as, “The eastern mountain sails on the river.”  But all these are just its expressions (yung)—not it, our true nature.  Zen demands that we directly merge with this nature which is wholly and purely animative.  This is why the Buddha called it the luminous or clear light Mind. 

The more and the longer modern Zen ignores the mystical element of Zen the shorter will be its survival.  I agree with Alan Watts who said, "The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego" (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are).

Zen under siege

At times, I think Westerners don’t seem to like either Buddhism or Zen Buddhism.  Why do I say this?  Well, it’s not too difficult when, for example, you examine very popular contemporary books about Zen such as Zen and the Brain by James Austin which is not a book about Zen so much as it is an attempt to reduce Zen to brain functions which suggests, at least the way I see it, that the brain is the Buddha (i.e., the awakened one) insofar as all experience—even awakening (sambodhi)—is subordinated to the brain.  

Such ideas may go further so as to permit us to conclude that our brain acts by itself which is absurd.  It is always the self that transcends the brain who acts.  When this self acts the brain functions.  When the self thinks certain pathways become active.  The brain doesn’t think anymore than watching an automobile’s front tires moving right and left lead us to conclude that the automobile is doing this when it is the driver who is not a mechanical thing.

Zen, simply put, can’t be reduced to brain functions.  It’s not authentic Zen.  Nor can Zen be reduced to the physical act of just sitting in meditation which many Westerners seem to believe it can be.  When Western Zen teachers teach their students that meditation is the most important aspect of Zen they err.  

Zen is under siege insofar as its core principle in the West is being all but ignored which asks us to see our true nature and become awakened (buddha).  According to Zen master Huang-po:

“Your true nature is something never lost to you even in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of Enlightenment. It is the Nature of the Bhutatathata. In it is neither delusion nor right understanding. It fills the Void everywhere and is intrinsically of the substance of the One Mind” (trans. Blofeld).

Sounds simple, but such words as these are foreign to Western ears.  Huang-po’s words have the ring of ‘mysticism’ or the same, the esoteric, which gets thumbs down from most Westerners.  It’s mumbo jumbo, not backed by science as if today’s science has the final say on what is ultimate reality.  Be that as it may, the siege is on and has been on for some time.  Zen, for now, will have public acceptance only if it rejects the esoteric.  Only then will it be allowed a fair hearing.  But this means the destruction of Zen. 

Making the facts fit the interpretation.

The West’s reception of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism is certainly a monumental event.  The translation of the bulk of the Pali canon into English is to be praised.  Translators of Zen Buddhism like D.T. Suzuki and others also deserve our praise.   But translations eventually get put on the back burner.  This is when the interpreters take over so that what we know of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism in the West is largely an interpretation.  At this point, there are two ways of interpreting the actual texts.  The first way, is to see that the interpretation fits with the Buddha’s discourses.  The other way is to make the discourses fit the interpretation.

Surprisingly, the latter method of making the text fit with the interpretation is, arguably, the most prevalent methodology employed.  Many books which address the Buddha’s discourses in the Pali canon try to make the discourses fit with the interpretation.  A notable example is Walpola Rahula’s book, What the Buddha Taught.  Certainly more academic is Peter Harvey’s book, The Selfless Mind which proves to be more sophisticated than Rahula’s book but nevertheless uses passages from the Nikayas to support the standard Theravada interpretation.  The most egregious example of this methodology is to be found in Stephen Batchelor’s book, Buddhism Without Beliefs.  The book is little more that Buddhism according to Stephen Batchelor.  It has little or nothing to do with what the Buddha actually taught.

When it comes to Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts tries to make the words of the Zen masters fit with his interpretation.  This seems to be the case with his early book, The Spirit of Zen.  In 1935 writing in the Preface to the First Edition, Watts acknowledges that his chief source of information about Zen came from Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.  The Spirit of Zen is a teenage Watts using Suzuki’s translations to make his own interpretation of Zen which he will later change many years down the road.  Another Zen writer who tries to make Zen fit with her interpretation is Joko Beck with her book, Every day Zen, which uses Zen in the tile but scarcely anything else in her book is about Zen.  There are many other Zen writers I could add to the list who try to make the words of the Zen masters fit with their own interpretation.

It is really important for beginners to stick as, much as they can, with the discourses of the Buddha, both the Nikayas and Mahayana Sutras including the sermons of the Zen masters like Huang-po, Bassui and many others.  Failure to do so is not to advance a step further in realizing our own true nature. 

Nobody cares about liberation it seems

Yesterday I received a Shambhala Publications catalogue of Buddhists books and audio in the mail.  It’s an interesting collection of books.  However, I didn’t find anything in it I would call ‘transcendental’ where the adept goes beyond the psychophysical body of the Five Aggregates becoming awakened to their true unborn nature.  There are books on mindfulness, conflict resolution, Dakini power, awareness (I don’t quite know what the difference is between mindfulness and awareness).  There is one book on Buddhist yogi exercise.  

There are not a few books by Pema Chordron helping people to deal with fear, uncertainty and change, including her classic book, When Things Fall Apart.  One book that was next to her books, caught my attention, Three Steps to Awakening (I guess a person could become a Buddha without too much difficulty—certainly no need to find a Bodhi-tree).  There were lots of books on meditation strategies.  The books on Zen include Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.  There are not a few books by Thich Nhat Hanh such as You Are Here (glad to know that), and True Love.  There are lots of Tibetan books and a beginner’s favorite section.  The catalogue sort of ends with some books on dying which are always interesting if you are my age.

What most all such books don’t mention is what the heck is Buddhism really about?  It would sure help to know, that way a person could decide, that is, decide whether or not to take up a serious practice of Buddhism—that includes Zen Buddhism, by the way.  I am still looking at the catalogue for something on nirvana or liberation.  I haven’t found anything yet but I will keep looking.  I am beginning to think that what modern Buddhism is all about boils down to learning various ways of coping with life’s ups and downs.  Nobody cares about liberation from samsara it seems.  Temporal life is still fun.  

So what is Buddhism really about?  It is about clearly distinguishing between what is absolute and undying in you and what is dying, ever-changing, and suffering in you, so you won’t keep attaching to the latter in the crazy belief it’s the former.  This way you avoid rebirth.  Now if you ask, “Hey Zennist, I thought the Buddha denied the self—you seem to be implying there is a self?”  Bingo—I am.  We are most, primordially, the âtman which is absolute and undying, but we are fast asleep as to what it is.  Hence, we are unawakened suffering from a bad case of avidya (nescience) attaching ourselves to the wrong things.  The Buddha only taught us how to avoid attaching or clinging to what is not our âtman.  From the beginning, the problem was never the âtman but, instead, false âtmans .  My body is a false âtman including the senses and their objects.  Each day we look in the mirror believing we are real, real like the âtman.  Surprise!  We are not the face in the mirror.  Don’t glom onto it.

Nirvana or liberation only comes when we behold, directly, our âtman.  One could even say that nirvana and the âtman are synonymous. 

Entering the solitude

In some of the older strata of the Buddha's discourses such as the Khaggavisâna Sutta of the Sutt-Nipâta the serious adept lives alone, away from the madding crowd, so to speak.  The adept is not with a group of fellow monks.  He has fear in intimacy (37).  He is free from entanglement like the new bamboo shoot (38).  The adept is like the forest deer who roams and feeds at its leisure (39).

To be sure it is difficult to get attached to mountain streams, trees, rocks and such solitude.  There are no things to delight and upset the mind by their illusions (50).  The Buddha says that even temporary deliverance is impossible to anyone who is fond of society (54).

With such solitude and contemplation (P., jhâna; S., dhyâna) deliverance is possible.  In my case, solitude was quite effective (my nearest neighbor was more than six miles away), especially, when you find it necessary to devote yourself to realizing pure Mind.  You can’t afford to be encumbered with anything that tends to affect your search.  

At times I found more of a help to walk five to ten miles in the woods.  The sense of solitude was overwhelming at times.  When I got back from my walk I would write poems almost as prayers expressing my hope to awaken to pure Mind.  As strange as it might sound, living in solitude with nature is an emptying out process.  You are forced to face a lot of silences; even hear the buzzing of your brain and your heartbeat.

Helping matters, and important, I read Blofeld’s The Zen Teaching of Huang Po and D.T. Suzuki’s Lankavatara Sutra.  There were, of course other books I read.  But since my search was for pure Mind, I found these books very helpful.  I was still at the level where I thought I could find a reasonable answer to what pure Mind was.  Little did I know, and I have mentioned this in previous blogs, I had to go to my wit’s end.  I had to exhaust, thoroughly, my clever schemes for figuring out pure Mind.  It is only in the stillest of all still moments that your old monkey mind stops.  Then, in one finger-snap you see it: an immaculate reality.  Then your body begins to fill with a mysterious luminosity.  It grows and grows for hours.  It is like you are being raised to another level of being.

Looking back over those years I gained the ability to plug into Mind which I did over and over again.  Then in 1976 I saw what it was all about.  Call them Buddhas or super beings, with this ability to plug into Mind they came.  There was actually a moment I can vividly remember when this deity told me, “Show me what you know.”  In a split second, I went to Mind, Bingo! My body filled with an incredible amount of luminosity.  I had entered on a most sublime and mysterious path that Westerners would not believe—but it was absolutely real—and it was only the beginning.  This is when I learned what Buddhism really was.

The man with almost no brain

Several years ago, to the shock of French doctors, a man in 2003 who had gone to a hospital complaining of a slight weakness in his left leg was discovered to have what can only be likened to a black hole for a brain!  He was a 44 year old, tax official, married with two children with an IQ of about 75.  Judging by the man’s day to day life he was normal.  He faced no major neurological problems in his life despite the fact that he had no normal human brain.  He managed his life with only a thin sheet of actual brain tissue which was on the inner walls of the cranium.

For the vociferous advocates of "our mind is created from brain cells" this is like someone falling off the Empire State building and walking away from it.  No extant scientific models can explain it.  We also have to keep in mind something the late Carl Sagan said about consciousness.  He said in his book, Cosmos, on page 229, that the cerebral cortex transforms matter into consciousness! (Nobody has ever proved Sagan’s incredible claim.)  But where was the cerebral cortex in our French tax official’s skull?

Maybe it is time for our neuroscientists to go back to the drawing board.  This brings me to Donald Hoffman’s theory of “conscious realism” that can be found in his paper, “Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem” which underscores the fact that we are not our brain.  Not wishing to oversimplify his work, what I get out of it is that he turns upside down the present theory that mind or consciousness arises from brain cells.  He proposes that “consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world.”  The thrust of conscious realism is that our world consists of conscious agents, not a world of unconscious particles and fields.  Consciousness is first; matter and fields depend on it for their very existence.  (I have not gone into Hoffman’s Multimodal User Interface or MUI.  It is much too heady for this blog. I shall leave it up to the reader.)

This is about as close as it gets to the Lankavatara Sutra via Western science. By the way, think of Hoffman's "conscious agents" a sattvas and all this term implies (which is a lot).

Attâ is âtman

The PTS’s Pali-English Dictionary, Childers’s Dictionary of the Pali Language and The Critical Pali Dictionary leave out the fact that the Prakrit from of âtman is attâ which is used in Pali.  Let me give you the entire passage from Kalatattvakosa: A Lexicon of Fundamental Concepts of the Indian Arts (2001).

“The Prakrit form of âtman is attâ, which is used in Pali.  Appâ is the Prakrit form of âtman in the sense of vyâpti (permeation); it is not used in Pali, whereas in Jaina Âgamas both attâ and appâ are used” (p. 52).

To be sure, attâ and âtman are cognate, this also includes appâ.  These terms are not pronouns which some Pali experts imagine attâ is, in the example of A.K. Warder in his book, Introduction to Pali on page 184.  Attâ coincides with the âtman of the Upanishads as Mrs. Rhys Davids insisted long ago.  

Attâ is not the lesser of âtman.  If in the Sutta-Nipata (514) it says “One who by the path made by the self (pajjena katena attanâ)” why not use the stronger “by the self” instead of the weaker, “by himself” (K.R. Norman)? The 'pro-nouning' of attâ is an attempt by some to deprive the Buddha’s words of their expressive, spiritual power.  Permit me to give an example.  The first passage is not so expressive:

“Just as if a man had a house with eleven doors and when that house caught on fire, he could flee to safety by any one of these eleven doors, so I can flee to safety by any one of these eleven doors to the Deathless” (trans. Bhikkhu Ñânamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi).

This passage is more expressive:

It is as if there was for a man a house having eleven doors; if that house were on fire, he would be able to make himself safe (attânam sottim kâtum) by any of those doors.  In the same way I (aham) will be able to make the self safe (attânam sotthim kâtum) by anyone of those eleven doors that lead to the Undying (amatadvârânam)” (M. i. 353). 

The purport of this passage is that the self or attâ is saved by a door that leads to the Undying or amata.  This self is not a lesser self but the âtman which can also be a refuge like an island, protecting us from the flood of samsara.