The Zennist

The ox and the man are transcended

The circles (ensō) shown in the two presentations of the ox-herding pictures in D.T. Suzuki's book, Manual of Zen Buddhism illustrate the actualization of non-duality (advaya), the real goal of Zen Buddhism. 

The ox-herding pictures are a series of ten images that depict the stages of a practitioner's journey toward enlightenment. These stages range from the initial search for the ox (symbolizing the true self or original nature) to the realization and embodiment of this true nature. The process involves searching, finding, taming, and ultimately transcending both the seeker and the sought, symbolizing the dissolution of duality and the realization of non-duality.

In the final stages of the ox-herding pictures, the man (the seeker) and the ox (the object of the search) disappear. This disappearance represents the dissolution of the ego (I am this carnal body) and the realization that the distinction between the seeker and the sought was illusory. What remains is a state of pure, unbounded radiant awareness, free from the dualistic distinctions that characterized the earlier stages of the journey.

This state of non-dual awareness, whether called the One Mind or Tathata, represents the ultimate goal of Zen practice: to see through the illusion of separation and experience the true nature of reality as a unified whole. This profound insight into the nature of existence aligns with the core teachings of Zen Buddhism and emphasizes the importance of direct, experiential understanding over conceptual knowledge.

The highest of beasts

To get read into the program of Buddhism is really to first become intuitively cognizant of our Buddha or enlightened nature which is transcendent (lokuttara). We are going from the mode of "all this seems real" to "none of this is really real". This means we have had direct intuition of the waveless from which waves arise. The waveless is incomprehensible insofar as it cannot be grasped by our all too human intelligence.

 

From Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Man is a rope stretched between the beast and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss." With these words before us, the practice of Buddhism demands that we transcend the beast to reach the Buddha lineage (gotra ). Even now we are looking into the abyss about to fall where we shall become ropes again.

 

Nietzsche is expressing the precarious nature of humanity. We are the highest of beasts even though we are still caught between our bestial drives and the potential for transcendence. The abyss is saṃsāra.  And once again we complete another human journey that is going nowhere so long as we attach more to the beast within us than our potential for complete awakening (samyaksaṃbodhi).

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 Fish and the Turtle (Is Nibbana Nothingness

Once upon a time there was a fish. And just because it was a fish, it had lived all its life in the water and knew nothing whatever about anything else but water. And one day as it swam about in the lake where all its days had been spent, it happened to meet a turtle of its acquaintance who had just come back from a little excursion on the land.
"Good day, Mr. Turtle!" said the fish. "I have not seen you for a long time. Where have you been?"
"Oh", said the turtle, "I have just been for a trip on dry land."
"On dry land!" exclaimed the fish. "What do you mean by on dry land? There is no dry land. I had never seen such a thing. Dry land is nothing."
"Well," said the turtle good-naturedly. "If you want to think so, of course you may; there is no one who can hinder you. But that's where I've been, all the same."
"Oh, come," said the fish. "Try to talk sense. Just tell me now what is this land of yours like? Is it all wet?"
"No, it is not wet," said the turtle.
"Is it nice and fresh and cool?" asked the fish.
"No, it is not nice and fresh and cool," the trutle replied.
"Is it clear so that light can come through it?"
"No, it is not clear. Light cannot come through it."
"Is it soft and yielding, so that I can move my fins about in it and push my nose through it?"
"No, it is not soft and yielding. You could not swim in it."
"Does it move or flow in streams?"
"No, it neither moves nor flows in streams."
"Does it ever rise up into waves then, with white foams in them?" asked the fish, impatient at this string of Noes.
"No!" replied the turtle, truthfully. "It never rises up into waves that I have seen."
"There now," exclaimed the fish triumphantly. "Didn't I tell you that this land of yours was just nothing? I have just asked, and you have answered me that it is neither wet nor cool, not clear nor soft and that it does not flow in streams nor rise up into waves. And if it isn't a single one of these things what else is it but nothing? Don't tell me."
"Well, well", said the turtle, "If you are determined to think that dry land is nothing, I suppose you must just go on thinking so. But any one who knows what is water and what is land would say you were just a silly fish, for you think that anything you have never known is nothing just because you have never known it."
And with that the turtle turned away and, leaving the fish behind in its little pond of water, set out on another excursion over the dry land that was nothing.

Source: "The Buddha and His Teachings" by Maha thera Narada.

A book, The Secret Of Zen

Back in the early 60s, if I went into a bookstore in Berkeley or San Francisco and bought a D.T. Suzuki book about Zen I might pay close to $3 for the paperback book.  In today's money the same book would be $26!  For all that money whether in the 60s or 2021 Zen still remains incomprehensible for the vast majority of people who buy books about Zen.  Even the translations, no matter how accurate they are and close to the original, most remain incomprehensible for the majority of the curious.

Since 2007 I have endeavored to write about Zen in The Zennist blog from my own awakening back in 1969.  Notice, that I used the word “about” which means for me an approach through language to the exactness of my intuition.  My endeavor has not be an educated guess or a probe into the unknown to find Zen’s truth.  Far from it.  My word-arrows always hit the target.  It is just that the target remains invisible and incomprehensible for the many!  Yes, my arrows are clearly visible for all to see except for the target.

For the last three years or so I've been working on a book.  I had amassed a considerable amount of quotes from the Buddha’s discourses including  quotes from Zen masters.  But these quotes were not intended so much for a book as they were proof that what I was saying about Buddhism and Zen from my own awakening were in fact true. 

When I wrote the book I found it unnecessary to do much quoting.  I already understood where Zen and for that matter Buddhism was coming from.  The book in a way expresses what I would want to be told by a great teacher where the second part of the book is about my personal journey into the mysterious land of Zen where lies its secret.

With the help of Otomo, an old student of some 17 years, the book, The Secret of Zen was recently put on the Amazon's Kindle and Books.  There might be a few errors here and there but the bulk of the book stands ready to read and enjoy.   I really hope that the reader will one day be able to see the target that I look at every day and find no problem hitting the bullseye.

The making of a diabolical world

In order to establish a diabolical world of samsara one must first change the perception of people.  In this direction, one need only make it impossible to make the right decision in the face of an impending interpersonal crisis. 

Nor does it matter how much good information people have in front of them, they are still unable to make the right decision about what to do.  In other words, all the information a person has access to they still don't know if it's true or false.  But this leads to a worse state of affairs, that is, the likely manipulation of good and evil.

Key in the manipulation of good and evil, is the ability to invent one crisis after another to keep the people from coming to any kind of rational way of overcoming the crisis which could, in reality, be only a made-up crisis.  Let’s call it for now a product of social engineering the source of which is carefully hidden from the public.

On this rather somber note our world is not the happy place we imagine it to be or could ever be in light of the fact that our way of life and our values could very well be manipulated by powers that we cannot see.  I am even more convinced that Zen is really no longer Zen.  It has been taken over by a certain kind of political ideology that controls certain groups of our society.

By the same token I am even more convinced that Zen or Chan as it was known in China acted as a means for harmonizing the two sides of the human brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.   Naturally, both hemispheres can become, overtime, antagonistic towards each other which may account for why civilizations weaken then fall.  This phenomenon is behind the thesis of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World .  I see a certain irony in the subtitle which is the unmaking of the western world by over-focusing on the left hemisphere of the brain helped along by made-up crises. 

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.

The Power of Intuition

Truth is never realized when it is always a product of our imagination including our linguistic imagination (the intellect).  Direct intuition of the truth (kenshō) is more important than an intellectual grasp which comes through the imagination.  We could even say that direct intuition bypasses our intellectual imagination and its attempt to reify what is only imaginal.  

Zen (dhyāna) is only a path to direct intuition.  While it includes all the literature found in Buddhism it fundamentally understands that Siddhartha's revelation can only be achieved by intuition, a sudden direct seeing of the absolute, which certainly surpasses the imagination and all that comes from it.

Scarcely is the subject of intuition taken up in today's Zen Center and very seldom written about in the academic literature if at all.  This fact suggests that intuition is being ignored as the royal road to enlightenment having been replaced by just sitting which becomes more of a therapy for relaxing the body, somewhat like a massage.  Does such a practice reveal our true nature or the same our Buddha nature?       

The mystical tradition is also ancient in origin.  The oral teachings recorded in the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, and similar records go back thousands of years and provide evidence that mystical teachers of widely different cultures say remarkably similar things.  Also concerned with human suffering, they propose that human beings are ignorant of their true nature and that ignorance leads to the lives of pain and futility.  The sages describe a Way that leads to a higher level of existence, one infinitely more desirable than the level on which most people conduct their lives.  The mystical tradition does not offer therapy in the usual sense of the word, but achieving the goal of mysticism — experiencing the Real Self — is said to cure human suffering because its very basis is thereby removed (Dr. Arthur Deikman, The Observing Self, p. 3 ).

 Intuition is the mystical tradition and the mystical tradition is intuition. The problem we face is how to keep ourselves open to intuition and not close it off by overuse of intellect.  There is no reason to believe that Siddhartha found a way other than by direct intuition.  Such intuition is independent of just sitting or any physical effort for that matter. 

The Transformation of the worldly Caterpillar into a Spiritual Chrysalis will birth the Butterfly Buddha

We like to explore new things, especially, new ideas.  In doing so we are really extending ourselves to other things and ideas not putting our personal biases aside.  We, unconsciously, interpret Buddhism and Zen in our own way.  As a result, both seem familiar to us.  There is nothing in either that is alien to our personal ideas or understanding.

On the same score, we are drawn to teachers who seem to share our ideas; who seem to represent the true Dharma.  But what most of us see and understand is really a reflection of what we expect Buddhism and Zen to be.  We are looking at both from our own side.  We have yet to peel away our own tainted and peculiar understanding.  We have yet to meet the Dharma on its own terms.  To do so requires a spiritual transformation.

It is interesting to note, that a caterpillar must digest itself before it can become a butterfly.  This digestion process digests everything except the imaginal cells:  the cells that help create the transformation that occurs when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly.

These special cells hold the potential for the butterfly body.  The immune system of the caterpillar, however, identifies the imaginal cells as threats and attacks them but to no avail.  Eventually, the imaginal cells stop acting as individual cells.  They become a multiple-celled butterfly that uses the digested caterpillar (a kind of soup in the chrysalis).

This transformation could be an exemplar for spiritual birth:  the digestion or transformation of the conditioned into the structureless unconditioned.  When there is no more of the conditioned to be negated (digested) the unconditioned is reveled free of distortion:  one intuits it directly.

Enlightenment is about the transformation of a human into a Buddha (one who is awakened to the unconditioned).  One has, essentially, digested the false self to reach the true self, that is, Buddha-nature. Those human beings who do not wish to go through this spiritual transformation can be likened to caterpillars!  They remain ugly with one purpose in mind:  to feed their appetite. 

Slouching more and more to the closed mind

There are many kinds of reformers.  Those who feel the need of introducing if not enforcing a better course of action with regard to the status quo.  This is what is hoped for in the mind of the reformer.  But any such reformation brings with it, its own set of problems, that is, unintended consequences. 

This is apparent when we look at the history of educational reforms starting with Horace Mann (1796–1859) who was perhaps one of the most influential of American educational reformers, going all the way to Allan Bloom with his book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987).

No one can say today’s educational system is not without its problems many of which, arguably, came from the reformers themselves, especially, on the left of the political spectrum.  In other words, no reform can guarantee to solve the problems which it tries to address.  The problems continue and may even grow worse over time.  Most are simply swept under the carpet or ignored: see problem, say nothing.  Then a new narrative is put into place to hide the failure of the reform.

But now let’s look at Buddhism in America and then how it connects with our educational system. 

Buddhism’s reformers are more like interpreter-gatekeepers who wish to make the words of the Buddha palatable for the general population who don’t have a mind for religious thought, in part due to reformers like Horace Mann who feared the passions that might be raised by the study of religion and also politics; only allowing a limited, watered down study of religion and politics in the curriculum.  This results in a false “openness” (closer to credulity or blankness) by keeping the mind closed, especially, when it comes to religion.

The educational system seems then to have been created and maintained as a kind of academic Peter Pan world for dreamers.  These young dreamers have avoided, thus far, a serious life which includes the depth of religious thought and a political landscape that affects wages and the options they might have by which to live a life without poverty.  Moreover, they have no idea of the risk and hardship behind important choices they will have to make in the future.  For them choice is somewhat of a triviality.  This may explain the phenomenon of Dr. Jordan Peterson but also the popularity of his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018). Peterson’s book comes on the heels of academia’s slide into the closed mind: a mind that refuses to acknowledge or live in the real world.

When today’s graduate steps into the real world for the first time with such a closed mind with its fake openness, they are shocked.  Over time, they can’t help but grow more resentful and vengeful because their promised entitled life is slipping away.  As a result of this growing problem, and even in some cases depression, they try out Buddhism or Zen only to find out that their mind becomes even more closed.  In other words, reality is never allowed to set in.  They try their best to stop it. 

A Dharma center or a Zen center is really a group of lost, close-minded people who huddle together in subconscious fear using meditation to overcome their immaturity.

The parts of Buddhism that are usually closed off to such people have to do with rebirth and the transmigrant who survives death, the self or ātman, attachment to this world of appearance, and the fact that nirvana is not third-person knowledge which makes its realization mystical in the sense of requiring spiritual intuition.  With the absence or playing down of these important components of Buddhism what is left?  It’s western Buddhism which to be honest is Buddhism in name only.