The Zennist

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  This fact suggests that intuition is being ignored as the royal road to enlightenment having been replaced by just sitting which becomes more of a therapy for relaxing the body, somewhat like a massage.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. 

Existential Angst Arises From Embodiment

Suffering (duhkha) in Buddhism is not so much about pain, itself, as it is about an underlying sense of foreboding.  A few examples include worrying about one's death or worrying that one may have a fatal illness, or that one may die in combat.  Suffering casts a foreboding shadow over our entire life; there is no escaping it as we grow older.   

This foreboding is only related to the corporeal body (rūpa).  Under the spell of ignorance each individual identifies mainly with their corporeal body.  They know of no higher state of being which transcends the corporeal body. They only know how to follow the fate of the corporeal body.  They cannot understand words like these:

“This body is inert, like the earth; selfless, like water; lifeless, like fire; impersonal, like the wind; and non-substantial, like space. This body is unreal, being a collocation of the four main elements. It is void, not existing as self or as self-possessed. It is inanimate, being like grass, trees, walls, clods of earth, and hallucinations. It is insensate, being driven like a windmill. It is filthy, being an agglomeration of pus and excrement. It is false, being fated to be broken and destroyed, in spite of being anointed and massaged” (Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra).

In contrast with this negative view of our corporeal body we have more or less set our sights on finding pleasures for this body of ours.  Those who study Buddhism expect to learn how to have bodily happiness or at least make it through life without much suffering.  But being dependent upon our corporeal body makes us always subject to a feeling of forebodingness.   

Our culture is not all that open to a conversation about postmortem survival.  We tend to rely more on the interpersonal than the intrapersonal where we look within to see what is immortal or finite within us.  Siddhartha's revelation came intrapersonally:  we are fundamentally a transcendent, spiritual body that is free of suffering unlike our corporeal body. 

Two Sides of the Same Coin

The transcendent unseparatedness between subject and object or, the same, observer and observed is neither addressed nor realized in the forum of public thought.  It is only theorized at best by academics.  Few intuit this transcendent unseparatedness, directly, except to imagine it.

Is there another name for this transcendent unseparatedness between subject and object?  In Buddhism it is called the light, or the clear light, or the radiant light, or luminosity and many other names.  Zen master Danxia丹霞 said: “This abundant light, wherever you are, in every situation, is itself the great way.”  In the older canon we run across it in the Itivuttaka and elsewhere.

Light-bringers, dhamma-speakers, open the door off the deathless, set free the many folk from bondage.

It should go without saying that this light is absent in our world.  Yes, we can imagine it but this is not the same as the light the Buddhas talks about whereby the dualizing nature of sensory consciousness (vijñāna) is overcome.  

The hard reality of our dualistic world is maintained by the seeming difference between subject and object.  This difference can either be great or small but still a difference exists or seems too.  From this division or gap grows fear and mistrust, even alienation and a host of other negative things. 

Social Justice and Zen

Today, the typical materialist denies that there are any innate ideas, self-knowledge or intuitional knowledge.  All these terms are pointing beyond the spatiotemporal world which is the only world the materialist believes in.  

On the other hand, Zen wants to take us beyond the spatiotemporal world to ultimate reality or absolute spirit where the discordant asymmetry of the mind (vijñāna: knowing in two parts) is overcome.  

This is a return to the original one before mind split into two parts, subject and object (vijñāna).  All differences are transcended.  In the embrace of this clear light all resentment or claim of requital also disappears.  There is neither the need for justice nor injustice.  In a single flash of this clear light conditioning and spiritual blindness have been suddenly erased.

This return however does not depend upon the written word or concepts created through words which arise in our imagination.  The second slogan of Zen says, “[Zen does] not depend on written words.”  Making matters worse, we live in an ideological age where the triumph of the words over reality has taken place.  In this age, special terms are saturated with feelings or emotion, for example, the word racism.  

Now the word enlightenment signifies how we feel.  Aren't we all Buddhas deep down?  Nirvana has long ceased being an attainable but transcendent reality.  The word has triumphed backed by how intensely each of us feels about the word.  We are lost. 

The Key to Infinite Consciousness

There is a tension between the subjective standpoint and the objective standpoint.  A kind of unceasing asymmetry yet still an unseparatedness between subject and object.  Buddhists know this as empirical consciousness or in Sanskrit vijñāna meaning, literally, in two parts knowing.  It is also spacetime where space represents the objective standpoint and time the subjective standpoint.  

Here also does our consciousness go from one birth and death to another birth and death, endlessly.  Without our empirical consciousness there is no rebirth.  But how do we put an end to this empirical consciousness?

It appears in Buddhism that consciousness can also reach a state of symmetry where subject and object perfectly converge (ekatva); where there is neither subject nor object but, instead, Mind or spirit is revealed which I hasten to add is non-spatiotemporal.  This appears to be “consciousness (viññāṇaṃ) [that] is non-manifesting, infinite and luminous.”  And “With the transcendence (nirodhena) of [empirical] consciousness that’s where this ends” (DN 11).

This transcendence is a sudden overcoming of asymmetry inherent in our every day consciousness.  Now consciousness is non-manifesting, infinite, and luminous.  Subject and object are indistinguishable.  Our many attempts at seated meditation (zazen) has only been an attempt to reach symmetry by use of our our will but it ultimately fails.  Intuition opens the door. 

The Importance of Mysticism in Religion

Perhaps the main difference between mysticism and mainstream religion is that mysticism says the key to personal salvation lies with gnosis, that is, direct intuition of what is absolute and most primordial.  We personally awaken and, at the same time, we awaken to what is absolute.  

Only when our mind is fully open is it capable of receiving the illumination of the absolute.  But our minds are seldom open enough—even being 99% open is not enough. They are more often closed to any possibility of seeing the absolute.  It is a great irony of history that people consider the Buddha or Jesus as saviors who will forgive their stupidity and save them.  In reality, we have to save ourselves.

A path where the Buddha or Jesus saves us is a path of deception.  Such a path encourages people not to give up their mundane lifestyles or make meaningful changes.  The savior is going to do it all for them!  But real change is about no longer attaching or desiring the five aggregates, seeing that they are void (rittaka), hollow (tucchaka), and coreless (asāraka) and most of all not our true self.  

While the components of an intelligent being are the five aggregates beings, nevertheless, remain conditioned along with the world of the senses which includes mind or manas/mano which oversees the five physical senses.  The knowledge-world that beings amass by studying the conditioned sensory world is always inadequate but, nevertheless, is also useful and practical in some cases . Still, it can never shine a light on the real world.  Only Buddhas do that, and they do it, mystically. 

 

 

Surviving the End Times Unperturbed

Important in the Judeo-Christian belief is the understanding of history as, implicitly, salvation history which falls within the sphere of eschatology (i.e., concern with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind).  

This eschatology alludes to the eventual salvation of the flesh—the carnal man.  There is no transcendence of the temporal here:  seeing beyond samsara which is the repeated birth and death cycles that are always conditioned.

When Marx wrote, “The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world.”  Marx couldn't help but see that truth is always this worldly.  What lies beyond us cannot be our world.  Maybe one day the flesh can be genetically modified into an undying flesh by science!  

Marx’s words, I must say, are not lost on any generation in the first stages of physiological adulthood.  None today really believe the words of the Buddha who taught that “rejecting the other world (paraloko), there is no evil that could not be done.”

This naive rejection leads, inevitably, to activism or at least a call for activism that first falls on immature ears.  This can only be accomplished by indoctrination which transforms nascent sensations and feelings into a political perspective that can be scaled up at some future point into rebelliousness.  

But salvation never comes.  Eschatology does not include the fleshy man who is always mired in the senses.  He must be transcended.  This includes even his thoughts which are the biggest problem Zen faces.  The transcending attitude is difficult to inculcate in the student’s mind.  Yet, while seemingly impossible it can be accomplished.  This is what Zen’s history teaches us. 

The Menace of Mentation

Our thoughts are enclosures of spirit.  This enclosing is illusory so that by taking up thought we cannot enter unenclosed spirit which Zen calls on us to do.  In light of this, our thoughts are produced only seemingly, not in reality.  Their unreal appearing, or dependent origination is, in other words, a fictional existence we have become deeply invested in.

 

How our fictions become true reality (spirit) in Zen is a difficult question to answer.  Letting go of our thoughts to reach the state of no-thought (無念) is not easy which tries to represent enlightenment—but the thought of “fire” is not the real caloric fire.  The same is with enlightenment. 

 

Blocking our thoughts is not the way either which beginners often do in their meditations.  Zhang Rinpoche said that “blocking thought is itself a delusion of troubled thoughts, a great darkness veiling the Dharma Body.”  Our thoughts make up our discrimination.  But it is only when one is suddenly released from discrimination (forming thoughts) that there is liberation.

 

The way to no-thought has been explained in the past and the way has been well trodden by past Zennists.  Whether we discover that no-thought is the sudden transcendence of thought or detachment from thought, altogether, the long road ends at the same indescribable spot where all things disappear.  And where, so to speak, the drop of water returns to the great ocean.

 

Our awareness is never pure because it is always attached to thought.  Zen teaches us how we delude our self; that taking up thought is not the way.  Moreover, just being aware cannot be liberation because thought conditions our awareness.  Only when our awareness suddenly beholds no-thought only then does our awareness becomes unconditioned and pure.

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. 

The Unconditioned Light is Reality

Vidyamāna can mean what is actual or real vs. not being real or actual (avidyamāna).  From this we get a better sense of vidya and avidya.  The real is the unconditioned while the unreal is the cosmic illusion (māyā).  The illusion is always conditioned.  It is something constructed, i.e., an appearance that attracts us to it; to become conscious of it and thereby become embodied and bound to it.

"Avidya has vanished, vidya arises.  Gone is the darkness, arisen is the light, as it does for one who dwells serious, ardent and composed in the self” (Itivuttaka 99).

The newly awakened Buddha doesn’t see a total absence of external things including his thoughts.  The illusion doesn’t vanish in other words.  As the reader might guess, light has arisen but not light as we know it but, instead, āloka, a spiritual, transcendent light beyond the conditioned world.  That is what is missing in the all-too-human natural experience.  It is what Siddhartha awakened to.  It alone is real, unchanging, and unconditioned.

Although we should seek the unconditioned, if our life is to have any meaning, we always try to grasp it with the conditioned, that is, with darkness.  We seem to forever fail at trying to become enlightened.  We are still under the power of the cosmic illusion going from one existence to another without stopping.