The Zennist

Zen Buddhism looks at Christianity

To look at Christianity from Zen is really saying to look at Christianity from the perspective of intuition, the sense of which is more about the act of coming to direct knowledge without reasoning or inferring. 

The Zennist would hope the Christian to see intuition as direct contact with absolute spirit in which even the subject and the object disappear into a transcendent singularity.  Explained another way, intuition is the sudden leap from flesh to spirit in which the ineffable presence of spirit is realized.  This is also an epiphany if not also Zen’s satori.

Zen’s view, I assume, will not sit well with contemporary Christians who are overly consumed with literalizing the Bible.  Their understanding of religion has to come through the human senses and also imagination without which they think not to have religion.  This of course is where Christianity and Buddhism differ.  Buddhism has an implicit prohibition towards literalizing its religion.  In other words, it is against making direct intuition palatable for the senses especially for the imagination.

It is unfortunate that the message of Christianity has to be sold to those people who are overly attached to the flesh and their imagination.  Like with Zen, it is only when the Christian fully understands what spirit is about that progress can be made. 

Yes, spirit and flesh are antithetical to each other just as in Buddhism the unconditioned and conditioned are antithetical.  The very crucifixion of Jesus on the cross is nothing more than the total and absolute transcendence of the flesh.  Spirit is incarnated in the flesh but is not of the flesh.  It is through the crucifixion that spirit is resurrected transcending the man of flesh.  In this wise, Zen Buddhism and Christianity are very much the same.

A kind of bottomless negativity

The central message of modern atheism is not so much that God is dead as if to say there is nothing divine or sacred in the world that transcends birth and death, but rather it goes further.  We are to believe in nothing (not even ourselves) so as to become perfect nihilists.  But then, where does this take us if not to overlooking an abyss, a kind of bottomless negativity.

Maybe this condition begins with doubt then moves from there into skepticism in which truth does not seem to exist.  This is reflected in the notion of prasajyapratisedha, that is, absolute negation without positive implication.  In other words, I have searched for truth nothing can be found.  Bt there is an obvious contradiction to this which forbids any nihilist from asserting the truth that there is no truth!

The bigger matter to consider is that by using our imagination we are really saying there is no truth other than what is imaginable.  And if I can't imagine it then there is no truth.  The error to consider here is that since truth (tathatā) cannot be imagined it must not exist.  But for Buddhism truth cannot be imagined since it is beyond the ken of the imaginable.  It is supramundane knowledge.  Gnosis or intuition is the only way to reach it.

Atheism is a cop-out just as much as imagining the divine or ultimate reality.  Nihilism in this regard is only gazing into the abyss limiting oneself to prasajyapratisedha.  It is really a form of insanity in so far as one is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.

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. 

Returning to the original one

The price we pay for our dualistic perception (vijñāna) is living in an infinite unreality (samsara), a life which never returns to the original one.  In other words, observer and observed, subject and object never converge back into the original one.  Also, this duality is never in harmony; there is always a tension between the two.  Their difference from each other remains unresolved.

It is only the sages or the Buddhas who close the gap; who return to the original one and transcend the unreal.  They realize that the phenomenal world which is duality based constantly emerges from the one and returns to the one.  The becoming apparent (the created )and the return (the fleeting) are the stuff of duality.  Yet, intrinsically, nothing fundamentally arises and nothing fundamentally terminates.

During the intuition of our true nature, this being kenshō, the so-called realizer and the realized disappear.  You could even say that they've returned, suddenly, to the original one.  This mystical intuition cannot be put into the framework of an object or a subject.  In the sage’s return to the ordinary dual world for the purpose of teaching, nothing about true reality can be said without situating it in the dual which is inherent in all information conveying systems.

Going a little deeper, we could be looking at reality through our imagination (the sixth sense for Buddhism) which rests upon duality.  This means that our reality is not entirely real but a figment of our collective imagination which we have concretized/reified and emotionally loaded.  From this, philosophy and religion could be about how to live and survive in an imaginary world.  On the other hand, true religion could be how to realize the absolute one that is not imaginary, thus freeing oneself.

An illusory difference

In Buddhism, our English word consciousness is used to translate vijñāna.  It misses the mark completely.  Vijñāna means lit. in two parts knowing.  In Buddhism, it is a kind of antinomy which is more like a difference in the One from itself which is an illusory difference. 

In order to create and live in a virtual world vijñāna is necessary.  It is, so to speak, the price of admission.  It is responsible for our rebirth into a virtual world.  We would not be here today if it were not for this consciousness.

To keep us in this virtual world what is diabolically important to believe, we have one life and after we die that's it.  And here we come to Zen Buddhism in which intuition plays a prominent role in leaping beyond the confines of consciousness—a return to the One which is hidden from those deeply attached to consciousness. 

In perfect kenshō or gnosis realizer and realized disappear (so do the experiencer and experience) into the One or absolute Spirit.  This means that the illusory difference within the One which creates a virtual world has disappeared.  One learns how the magical trick is accomplished thereby breaking the magical spell.

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

If we look deep enough within ourselves there seems to be 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) or Christ. 

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 although very few get that far so as to have direct knowledge of it.  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.