The Zennist

The Christic-nature and Buddha-nature

If we accept, tentatively, that the crucifixion in the New Testament represents the transcendence of the flesh and entry into fleshless spirit, then we have the same in Buddhism which is about the cessation of the conditioned and direct entry into the unconditioned, this being nirvana.

Whether we speak of a transcendent Christic-nature or a Buddha-nature both mean the same insofar as the real essence of the earthly creature is absolute spirit which has been conjoined to the flesh (an illusory projection) which is never other than conditioned (appearance) and suffering (the flesh suffers, not the spirit). 

The unfortunate destiny of the earthly creature is to always find itself embodied in the flesh in which death seems to be the only escape and not a preferable one.  But that is just the very life of flesh.  To project oneself into the other (appearance) is to lose the self in the other.

Profound religions are never about saving mankind from its own errors and misdeeds.  It is about showing mankind the way to the immortal self which always transcends the flesh.  All purification, including the Christian crucifixion, are for removing that which obstructs absolute spirit causing us to suffer as a result

A continuity abides in all sentient beings

Figuratively speaking, there is an absolute continuity which abides in all sentient beings despite their differences from each other, including death (yes, this continuity surpasses death).  There are many names for it such as soul, One Mind, pure Mind, Buddha-nature, ātman, Spirit, or God (theos). 

That we cannot conceive of this continuity with thought or by conceptualizing it, is to be expected according to the great mystics like Siddhartha.  Still, we try to do it which turns into religion, philosophy and metaphysics.  Here, we are using thought as an equivalent of the unthinkable and inconceivable. 

Thought is useful for our imagination which can be used to make a virtual world (ancient Rome, Paris, London or St. Petersburg are good examples) which we fall prey to in the sense of attaching to this architecture when there is nothing fundamentally real to attach to.

Ultimate reality is always found in this continuity.  Everything else is an appearance which is transitory, which is the snare of suffering, and is not real.  But we are already entangled in this snare during rebirth.  Joy is short-lived while suffering is long-term.

Religions like Buddhism and Christianity offer mankind an escape from the world of appearance.  But this escape usually becomes only hope which is just another kind of appearance (even secular progress rests upon hope). 

If there is any kind of escape it has to be direct intuition or gnosis of ultimate reality hidden in this continuity which entails a process of negation of all appearance including thought, upon which our human world is based.  And since there is nothing higher than ultimate reality there is no way to see it except to merge with it, completely.  This mergence, the noun, is absolute knowing but nontransferable (mergence cannot be transferred by teacher to student).

Eventually lost in a psychological wilderness

Modern religion has not given up its reliance on the emotions, on feelings, on the belief that the conditioned life is the only life possible.  Modern religion must also satisfy secular consciousness.  It must help me in achieving my worldly goals but also help me to cope with my unhappiness and misfortunes.  If religion cannot do this then what good is it? 

It seems that modern religion is unknowingly undermining itself by its over willingness to please those who have not renounced, sufficiently, the secular or worldly life. 

What hope religion at one time offered has shifted over to the miracles of technology.  Unless religion can out miracle technology it doesn't have much of a chance of winning the hearts and minds of the people.

But wait a minute, during the period of the golden age of Egypt, India, China, Greece and Rome religion was very important.  What we have today is an extremely watered down version of what the religious mind actually was. 

What has been substituted for the religious mind over time has been the ecclesiastical mind which has been allowed to merge gradually with the secular mind and its demands in which the interpersonal life overshadows the intrapersonal life in which the contemplative life has its existence. 

Everyday life eventually falls into a kind of conformism as a result of degradation of the intrapersonal.  As a result, the socio-cultural landscape becomes all too mechanistic.  Human existence becomes confined to what is biological and physical and therefore measurable. 

This limitation eventually finds an escape.  It expands itself into a kind of psychological wilderness in which people anchor themselves in the imaginal and the ideological, that is, filling fiction with a density of feeling tones and emotionalizing the formation of ideas.  Incidentally, perhaps this gave rise to the popularity of the novel, a work of narrative fiction which we fill with our own personal feelings which originated from our life experiences. 

Those who are destined to walk in this psychological wilderness (most of us) cannot escape from this wilderness because even the escape, itself, is imagined.  The truly real is absent from it.  And so we turn to Buddhism and with it, especially, Zen.  It is a search for true reality or the same, ultimate reality, which necessitates the religious mind.

Our overindulgence in the corporeal body

How we relate to the corporeal body is critical in Buddhism.  Sex, for example, is not the problem so much as the love of sex is the problem: the frequent need to engage in it.  It is the same with eating.  It is our love of food that is the problem which leads to gluttony.  In other words, the big problem with our corporeal body is our overindulgence in it.

With our overindulgence in the corporeal body our spiritual life is put on hold.  Our love or preference is not for the spiritual but love for a bowl of Ben & Jerry's ice cream or a slice of pizza.  These many moments of indulgence add up to a growing love for the corporeal and much less love for the spiritual which we are trying to realize.

Those who are serious about Buddhism first understand that they must give up their love for the corporeal while turning their mind to the spiritual hoping to realize spirit, directly.  This sounds simple enough but is it?  It almost goes without saying but serving the needs of the corporeal and being on the path to spiritual intuition do not often agree.  In fact, there is a great deal of conflict between them.

No matter how ideal our words are they can't erase the fact that we live in a world primarily based on Darwinian fitness.  Nor should we draw from this as biological creatures that we see reality the way it really is. 

The data that we receive through our senses only relates to the creature and its survival and whether it will be successful at reproducing its kind.  But for those on the spiritual path this is not their goal. Their goal is to Intuit absolute spirit, the very substance of the universe.  This leads to seeing the universe the way it really is which is an illusory composition as far as appearance is concerned.

 

The conditioned is empty

Śūnyatā should represent emptiness of essence/intrinsic nature (svabhāva) in what is conditioned.  On the other hand, the unconditioned is svabhāva.  Related, one should understand that ‘no-thought’ (acitta) is the domain of the supreme essential nature (paramārthikaḥ svabhāvaḥ) which is never other than unconditioned.  If this sounds confusing then perhaps the reader is reading these words with a nihilistic bias.

Unfortunately, the modern understanding of Buddhism is for the most part nihilistic and quite extreme.  The Buddha preached against nihilism.  He did not deny the transcendent or absolute spirit which was unconditioned and non-dual (advaya).  In fact, I should add that enlightenment or gnosis proves this.  One, in fact, attains this transcendent state which is totally unthinkable. 

Trying to explain this with words which give rise to thoughts is a fool’s errand that a good teacher, nevertheless, has to partake in.   Our human form is like the 305-meter-wide dish at Arecibo Observatory into which data enters but the absolute is not one of those things.  No matter how subtle our thoughts are, our thought/reasoning stops us from entering the so-called kingdom of heaven.

Being replaced by the ecclesiastical mind

It is inevitable that the religious mind should eventually be replaced by the ecclesiastical mind.  The religious mind’s focus is on the spiritual which transcends the flesh or the corporeal whereas the ecclesiastical mind is set on the church:  the institution of community worship which has not attained the religious mind.  The ecclesiastical mind can only venerate the religious mind.

With this shift or change by which the ecclesiastical mind comes to power, the religious mind gradually sinks into the background.  In one respect, the religious mind is closer to the world of heresies because it is difficult to understand by the ecclesiastical mind.  Still, the religious mind is never heretical if it has realized spirit or the same the One Mind. 

Generally speaking, most religions fall into the snare of the ecclesiastical mind which can be highly intellectual and at the same time emotional.  Yes, Zen Buddhism fell into this trap long ago in which seated meditation became a substitute for gnosis or the same, intuition.  Yet truth tries to tells us that nothing fundamental can be gained by either rituals or by physical sitting.

Still, stubbornness pushes on hoping that it can turn the ecclesiastical mind into the religious mind.  What eventually happens is that, overtime, the ecclesiastical mind grows tired of religion and chooses to go back to the secular life.  What then becomes of religion?  It falls back to the religious mind.  It alone is capable of understanding religion, religion being the discovery of spirit which has been hidden by the corporeal or the same, the flesh.

Each culture has different sins that prevent the understanding of Buddhism

From the time of our birth our true nature has been clothed in the five aggregates (skandhas) which only act to conceal this true nature.  These aggregates are empty, hollow and insubstantial.  Still, we cling to them like a drowning man clings to straw. 

We do not want to relinquish our hold upon them.  However, there are those who are able to relinquish their hold upon the aggregates and see their true nature or self (ātman) which is luminous (prabhāsa).  At the least they have the faith that this nature is real and is worthy of contemplating. 

Even though Buddhism is truly a spiritual religion that asks mankind to see and behold spirit, directly, each culture has different sins, so to speak, that clothe this pristine spirit or nature. This false garmet has to be removed entirely and suddenly—a naked seeing. In Zen we call this sudden enlightenment. 

Because each culture is different, Buddhism seems to be different but it is not.  The adept still has to relinquish the false garmet to behold the unconditioned like Siddhartha did long ago.  The strength and demands of any culture can act as a barrier that is difficult to penetrate through. 

Modern culture is a techno-materialist culture that makes it difficult to relinquish.  It only accepts what the senses perceive together with what the intellectual mind can conceive of using the imagination.  It knows of no higher knowledge that has to be gained by direct intuition (dhyāna). 

Virtually all cultures are more or less trapped by the dualizing consciousness which in Buddhism is vijñāna.  Subject and object, observer and observed never meet to become one which is the original source of this duality which in turn gives rise to our illusory cosmos.  Every culture more or less guards this dualizing consciousness (all illusion depends upon this kind of consciousness).

Only those who are naturally oriented towards the spiritual path can transcend this consciousness through intuition thereby realizing the One Mind or spirit that brings the disparate sides of consciousness together (ekatva). 

Totalitarianism's most insidious form

All through the 20th century totalitarianism has reared its ugly head in many forms.  Its most insidious form is to attach to what we are not this being our physical body we acquired at conception. This is akin to the reflection Narcissus saw of himself in the pool which he believed was his true self.

We know this attachment (it’s kind of psychosis) in Buddhism as clinging to the five aggregates which are not who we really are.  We also know this as the the conceit ‘I am’ (asmimāna) based on these five aggregates.  In light of this, today’s Buddhists are so much under the spell of totalitarianism that they believe there is no fundamental self like the annihilationists (ucchedavādā) did during the time of the Buddha.  There is this body which is me and when I die that's it!

Like Narcissus we are deeply attached to what we see in the mirror (or even a selfie).  Transfixed by the image of what we believe to be our true self, we are close to becoming somatic narcissists (a preoccupation/obsession with our body and sex).  In this condition, we run the risk of becoming sidetracked by our preoccupation which might take up a large part of the day. 

All of our love or preference for our physical body begins to wane, seriously, when we grow old.  With death, our lifeless body returns to Māra’s bone orchard or bone-mountain which the Buddha describes in the Aṭṭhipuñja [bone-heap] Sutta.  After the death of the body, we are ready to descend into another fertilized ovum, following the zygote as it develops. 

 

Thoroughly addicted to the biological body

My inner sense is telling me that we live in the age of spiritual boneheads.  These are people who have no religious sense, that is, the strong inclination or drive to contemplate ultimate reality, directly.  This is not to suggest that the boneheads are not members of various kinds of religions and cults who appear dedicated.  But there is more to religion than meets their superficial eye.

Zen Buddhism keeps telling us that seeing or intuiting our true nature is its goal or in Japanese, kenshō.  This, to be sure, is not a somatic experience but to the contrary a spiritual one that is about the nature of spirit, itself, rather than the corporeal (spirit become flesh). 

From this point on, the demands put on the adept are tremendous:  a burden that one may not wish to carry for any length of time since it goes against our natural biological urges.

Already our passion for the physical body is too much.  As Plato said, our passion has nailed the soul down to the body.  This can only mean that our life's journey will always be incomplete and unsatisfactory so long as we attach to the corporeal which is an artifact of our imagination.  We know nothing yet of spirit where lies fulfillment.   

Most who study Zen Buddhism these days can be ranked as curiosity seekers.  As yet, their superficiality has not come to their attention.  They are living in a trance thoroughly addicted to the biological body trying, at the same time, to cope with its almost irrational demands.

 

Removing the spectacles

With the coming of atheism comes also Marxism which has zero toleration for the religious mind.  By the religious mind I mean direct, first-person knowledge of ultimate reality.  In other words, ultimate reality cannot be apprehended by the intellect which Marx was biased towards..

If you want to call ultimate reality God that's okay but keep in mind that God is a word that points beyond words to direct experience of the absolute.  Spirit and God are synonymous terms in Christianity.  Spirit and pure Mind or the One Mind are synonymous terms in Buddhism.  In many respects, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism are cut from the same cloth.

In Buddhism, our thoughts are nothing more than congealed spirit or pure Mind.  Enlightenment is the transcendence of thought (congealed spirit) and a return to spirit or pure Mind.  We detect this in the words of Zen master Huang-Po who said: “

“This pure Mind, the source of everything, shines on all with the brilliance of its own perfection, but the people of the world do not awake to it, regard only that which sees, hears, feels, and knows as mind.  Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of the source-substance.  If they would only eliminate all conceptual thought in the flash, that source-substance would magnify itself like the sun ascending through the void and illuminating the whole universe without hindrance or bounds.”

Key in understanding these words is to grasp the fact that Zen master Huang-Po is talking about “conceptual thought” which is little more than congealed pure Mind.  For the Zen student they must transcend congealed spirit, i.e., thought—not becoming deluded in the process of gaining enlightenment.

Looked at from another perspective all congealed spirit is Mumon's barrier 関.  A specific example of this barrier is Jōshū’s Mu 無.  A student once asked Jōshū “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature or not?”  Jōshū said Mu.  Unfortunately, neither scholars nor students of Buddhism understand Jōshū’s reply which implicitly asks us to go beyond the congealed spirit of Mu—a mere thought.  How else might we learn what Buddha-nature is which is uncongealed spirit?

We cannot expect to behold, intuitively, Zen master Huang-Po’s pure Mind while looking for it through the spectacles of congealed spirit or thought which filters out pure Mind which is also our Buddha-nature.  We have to take off these spectacles.  But how can we do it by being so attached to our congealing spectacles?  Maybe a slap across the face by a good Zen master might knock off these spectacles.  What then might we see as a result?