The Zennist

The real crown jewel of Buddhism

Do most Buddhists and for that matter Zen Buddhists, if at all, discuss or even mention the fact that Mara is the five aggregates (P., khandha; S., skandha), who is the equivalent of the Buddhist devil?  Let me also say that Mara is an important part of Buddhism.  We can learn a lot about what Buddhism is and is not by studying Mara. 

Rarely, in Buddhist publications have I seen Mara and what he is all about mentioned.  In Walpola Rahula’s book, What the Buddha Taught there are a lot of references to the five aggregates but not a single one, from what I can see, telling the reader that these five aggregates are also Mara. 

"At Sāvatthī. Seated to one side, Venerable Rādha said to the Buddha: “Sir, they speak of this thing called ‘Māra’. How is Māra defined?” “Rādha, form is Māra, feeling is Māra, perception is Māra, choices are Māra, consciousness is Māra. Seeing this, a learned noble disciple grows disillusioned with form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they’re freed. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand: ‘Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is no return to any state of existence’” (Mārasutta, S. iii. 195).

On the part of Walpola Rahula, is this just a mere scholarly oversight — an accident?  No, not if you are writing a serious book that is to have any credibility. 

However, if you can manage to sneak it by, i.e., not mention that Mara is the five aggregates for what reason might someone like Rahula do this?  I have one likely answer.  It is to maintain the false belief that not-self is the crown jewel of Buddhism and that self or ātman was rejected by the Buddha. 

However, simple logic should tell us that if, in fact, the aggregates are Mara—which they are—and these aggregates are also not the self—which they are—which in Pali and Sanskrit would be, respectively, anattā and anātman, then we have a major problem with the crown jewel.  It’s a fake.  Not only does the not-self belong to the five aggregates but by implication it belongs to Mara. Yes, the not-self is Mara!

Let’s be honest, the Buddha never taught a not-self or no-self doctrine.  He only taught us to reject it, that is, abandon desire for whatever is not the self (S. iii. 178).  But don't you think it strange or at least odd that so many people who are curious about Buddhism may have learned a false doctrine?  Was this just a coincidence in which there is no apparent concerted effort to distort the Buddha's teaching? And when we get to the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra which states, clearly, a Buddhist Ātman doctrine, why has it been such a stumbling block for many Westerners?

The simplest answer for now is that there has been a gross misinterpretation by Buddhist monks who sold their misinterpretation to western scholars but really have no leg to stand on when you plug Mara into the equation and the fact that the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness are Mara, which by implication means that Mara is also not [the] self or anātman.  This surely cannot be Buddhism's crown jewel.  So what is the real crown jewel?  It is the attainment of the unconditioned or nirvana by the very self (P., paccatta; S., pratyātman).

 

Bodhidharma probably never sat gazing at a wall for nine years

Bodhidharma, the Indian Buddhist teacher who is regarded as the First Patriarch of Chan or the Zen Buddhist tradition, is sometimes called the "wall-gazing Brahmin."  However, from older, primary sources such as the Dunhuang manuscripts we learn that Bodhidharma probably never existed in the way we imagine he did.  He was most likely a fictional character.  A lot of what we believe is Zen's history is really the product of Zen mythographers in the Song dynasty.

Bodhidharma could very well be a composite of several Indian Buddhist masters such as Dharmatrāta, Buddhabhadra and Buddhaśānta.  According to Chi-Chian Huang (1986 dissertation) Zen master Heze Shenhui added “Bodhi” to Dharmatrāta creating a new name, “Bodhidharmatrāta, a name found in early Zen literature such as the Lidai fabao ji, and in Tibet (keep in mind that Zen came to Tibet).  Later, “trāta” was dropped, and we have Bodhidharma.

But more importantly, Bodhidharma probably never sat gazing at a wall for nine years! 

Bodhidharma’s so-called wall-gazing 壁觀 (wall-vipaśyanā/insight) was not so much about sitting in the lotus posture gazing at a wall but more about insight into the adamantine absolute.  Heinrich Dumoulin says that “Zen masters of later centuries saw it [壁觀] as an expression of the awakened spiritual state, hard as stone.” This seems likely when one recalls the Diamond (vajra) Sutra (Skt. Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra).  Vajra in Sanskrit can mean adamantine, hard,  impenetrable.  

Bodhidharma is more like the figure of Christ insofar as any attempt to see him as a real historical figure is almost doomed.  History, here, appears to be more mythological, based on speculation which, nevertheless, contains much religious truth.  But like the importance of Christ to Christianity, Bodhidharma personifies a unique Buddhist tradition.  Zen would not be Zen without him.

 

 

Facing our passions

The somatic side of us is in a constant state of breakdown and reconstruction whereas the deepest part of us, which is psychical and extra-somatic, seems unchanging and constant.  It is also invisible to the senses.  This is the part we can’t get at.  It defies observation.  We only observe conditioned arisings such as our thoughts and feelings or the inner voice.

With the arising of the existential question of, who am I? we are only aware of the question, try as we might to see its source.  It always ends up that we have no direct perception of the actual source (wherein lies the answer).  Still, something deep within us tells us that we know this as yet unobserved source.

In the meantime, we have to face our passions which stem, it appears, from the somatic part of us.  As every human soon realizes as they mature, nature has made sexual desire the strongest and most exciting of our feelings, which is difficult to control.  By comparison, sexual non-gratification, while we are young adults, seems to be the most dismal and depressing part of our life. 

But if we were to take away the sexual side which, by the way, being in your 70s or 80s manages to do, our psychical and extra-somatic being—the inner person—becomes much more apparent and pronounced.  But then we have only a few years left in the flesh by which to take advantage of this situation.  And that is not going to work in most cases very well.  Starting Buddhism at this time is like digging a well when you are thirsty.

If we are going to get involved in Buddhism when we are young adults (which we should do), we have to focus on controlling our sexual passions and especially the urgent need for sexual gratification.  This is not easy.  It is just one more obstacle in our way but no doubt one of the biggest since it can divert us from the path.  It also needs to be kept in mind that the ways of the world in which our sexual passions can come to fruition runs contrary to Buddhism's path so that when we enter this world we have to be on guard so to speak.

The Western view of man is not the same as Buddhism's

I have noticed over the years that empirical science, when it comes to the human being, is operating under the bias of third-person knowledge, looking and observing the human being from the outside to the inside.  However, most of the data is from the outside.  To really look at the inside of a human being one must enter the world of first-person knowledge.  But so far this is impossible.  As close as empirical, outside-to-inside observation can go is maybe an fMRI scan of the brain, assuming that the first-person somehow originates from brain tissue.

On the other hand, Buddhism is just the reverse.  We are observing man from the inside to the outside, who lives within a bio-physical body with its senses, observing feelings, ideations, volitions and consciousness.  Moreover, it is understood that we have, out of ignorance, identified with all these constituents as being our self although not one of these constituents is our self which is extra-physical.

Much of the reason that Buddhism still remains a mystery to the West is that the West treats man as a physical object whereas Buddhism treats man as an ‘inwardly dwelling, extra-physical being’, that is, a sattva, a term which has a spiritual connotation.

The difference between the two positions is striking.  One imagines scientists looking at an fMRI scan of the brain, studying the  cerebral cortex in the belief that the brain somehow transforms matter into consciousness.  In the other, we can imagine Siddhartha sitting in meditation awakening to the very essence and truth of the universe which is Mind (G., Geist); seeing that all phenomena are configurations of Mind—configurations, that are empty, being only illusions.

In the case of morality, the Western view encourages duplicity and hypocrisy insofar as individuals are judged by certain external signs which then allows them to hide their real intentions.  In Buddhism, moral behavior begins within, with one’s ability to control their sensual passions and desires, including greed and hostility.

Evil in small steps

We like to think that evil just occurs all at once like some invading army that suddenly conquers us.  But evil can also conquer us in an insidious way by taking countless small steps to finally dominate us. 

In many examples we find ourselves bending over backwards to accommodate someone whose opinions—even their religious views—we disagree with.  In a way, if we don’t push back just a little, our psychic territory has just been occupied by these people.  A small step forward for evil has just won the day.  And given ten or twenty years, we will have been taken over by evil.

Have you ever heard of “political correctness” or “hate speech” or “equity” as in equal outcome?  How many small steps, backed by a lot of money, did it take for such, arguably, evil ideologies to invade our culture and even our own mind?  This is where we are at today with a lot of brainwashed college grads who even imagine Muhammad was like the Buddha or Jesus, and not a brutal warlord who had 28 males slaves and 12 female slaves!

And once established, how long before these same evil ideologies began to enter the unlocked, back door of Buddhism?  It is certainly bad enough that Buddhism has its own set of problems that it must constantly deal with such as being misconstrued as a nihilistic religion or a religion that denies a fundamental or deep self.  These views, by the way, are the result of small steps taken by some Buddhists who are unaware of their nihilistic outlook on life and will continue this pattern unless they’re confronted.

The world will no longer be physical but, instead, mental

Well, my iMac just experienced the black screen of death.  I am glad that I have two iMacs. Why I am telling you this my blog for Monday was on the iMac that went dark.  Not too long after that, another idea popped into my head.  It was the words “materialism is not fundamental” which is essentially what Quantum Mechanics wants to say but it too cowardly to outright say it.  It would put an end to dogmas espoused by Hugo Elliott, “there exists no kind of spiritual substance or entity of a different nature from that of which matter is composed. . . .there are not two kinds of fundamental existences, material and spiritual, but one kind only. . . . (Burr and Goldfinger. eds., Philosophy and Contemporary Issues (1972), p. 259).  Truth be told we are not machines—not in the Buddha’s teaching. 

During the first part of the 20th century, the wave of mechanistic science was about to come crashing down on the West and with it the darkening of the Newtonian horizon.  The particle-material model of the universe was suddenly bedridden. The new kid on the block, Quantum Mechanics, seemed to be saying that the world we commonly experience through our senses is really an appearance which has no objective existence independent of the observer who may turn out to be very important.

The accepted belief that matter refers to all that exists outside of and independently of the observer remains a tentative theory in the face of Quantum Mechanics.  It may well prove in the future that the observer is not only extra-physical but creates our physical world in which matter is rather something derivative.

And if this is true, it doesn’t mean that our world is less real for us and that living in such a fictional or māyā like world is not without suffering.  Even if tomorrow some physicist said that our reality is a fictional creation of consciousness, which means it is fundamentally immaterial, but is real enough for all of its conscious agents, life as we know it would still go on as usual.  Darwinian fitness would still captivate us and be a major part of our life.

Thousands of years ago many believed in another fictional world.  It was a world in which the earth was flat and the planets, including the sun, circled the earth.  What is more, both types of knowledge worked.  Some would even argue, and rightly so, that we still accept the sun rises and sets although it doesn’t really do that.  Later this fictional world turned out to be illusory. 

From the perspective of Buddhism the world is an illusion and so is our psychophysical body which we adhere to in the belief that it is our true self although it is not.  It is all an illusion relative to enlightenment but still very real when our self remains, unenlightened, attached to the psychophysical body and knows no other way of existing.

Buddhism is the next phase of human wisdom which is far above the primitive words of Hugo Elliott.  We will look back upon our primitive beliefs like we once did understanding the illusion of the flat earth.  We will see that bigger picture that we are spiritual creatures and gain control over appearance.  The world will no longer be physical but, instead, mental.

The importance of first-person knowledge

When a person awakens to the very essence or substance of thought, reaching pure Mind which is devoid of mentation, i.e., mental activity, this realization is first-person, not third-person.  It cannot be shared like a conventional object, although two people enlightened recognize a connection.  Even the attainment of nirvana is first-person which in Pali is paccatta and in Sanskrit praty-ātman, both meaning the “very self,” or “inmost self.”

Why is this important?  Because Western Buddhists generally believe in only one kind of knowledge this being third-person knowledge.  As close as they will allow to first-person is autobiographical personal facts such as information relating to one’s birth, schooling, jobs, criminal record, etc.

If you’ve made a claim of having had kenshō, which is first-person, then it is demanded of you extraordinary proof which is always something third-person like a certificate.  This is only fair some might argue.  Don’t we demand proof that a person is a qualified surgeon before they can operate on a person?  But in this situation, surgical skills have already been demonstrated, third-person, through a kind of medical apprenticeship program.  As a student you have to work with a qualified teacher-surgeons in a specialized type of surgery.

In spite of this problem, first-person knowledge in terms of mentation has to be admitted by all.  We all have an inner voice, thoughts, mental images and feelings.  Just precisely what they are from one individual to the next is where we differ.  We are able, so to speak, to get behind our mentation so as to have an awareness of it—of what is going on in our heads.  But what we are unable to do is get in back of behind.  This would be the primary, inmost self or paccatta.  But this is what enlightenment achieves.  And this is accomplished by the sudden negation of mentation.  The adept enters into an indescribable state of oneness (ekatva).  Even consciousness (vijñāna), which is bifurcated knowing, has returned to the one.

One more way of looking at this, if we can imagine a substratum of our mentation it would be pure Mind or the same, the unconditioned Mind.  All mental activity arises from the substratum of the Mind which is universal.  This is something along the lines of the late quantum physicist David Bohm’s ultra-holistic “Implicate Order,” which he describes as an “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”  He further says:

In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement. In this way, we are able to look on all aspects of existence as not divided from each other, and thus we can bring to an end the fragmentation implicit in the current attitude toward the atomic point of view, which leads us to divide everything from everything in a thoroughgoing way (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 14). 

Bohm's Implicate Order adds a measure of credibility to the validity of Buddhism's first-person knowledge in which I would argue that the Buddha's awakening had direct insight into Bohm's order in which thought and matter returned to the original whole or one which cuts against the current fragmentalist view of reality which still dominates the sciences and impacts our way of thinking in an unrealistic, negative way.

God and Buddhism

The word “God” can evoke in some people unsettled, negative feelings.  It can even evoke misotheism, a hatred of God (or the gods) which is often the case today with atheists. 

But the word God, as far as its etymology is concerned, is the past participle of the Indo-germanic root ghu which means ‘to worship’, meaning ‘the being worshiped’.  We could even say that God means, that which is worshiped. 

A good modern example is our worship of money.  Money is our God.  Or power is our God.  It is what we worship most. 

God as a subject or noun takes on different meanings such as the creator and ruler of the universe or an mutable divine nature believed to be present in all things.  Akin to this, God can also mean, ultimate reality, or the whole of the universe in its unity. 

Dr. Jordan Petersen has said a few things about God from a modern perspective, for example, that God is the existence of consciousness across time or that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.  God can also, he said, be the highest value in the hierarchies of values.  God can be the voice of conscience or the source of judgment, mercy and guilt.  I would add to this list and say that God can be justice, mercy and compassion, including providence.

In Buddhism God shifts more to a “principle” or the “absolute” in the sense of a supreme or ultimate nature, but never as something that is a factum (made or done) and certainly nothing that is conditioned, to be found in the dead world of facts. 

Buddhism seems to stand between God the creator and ruler of the universe and atheism which seems to be at war with any form of an absolute including religion.  The absolute in Buddhism is closer to home; it is immediate with us, so immediate that we fail to see it.  Our endeavor to see it is like riding an ox in search of an ox.

A raging battle between the physical and the psychical

The West’s reflection-correspondence view of knowledge means that any expression of our language which cannot be immediately interpreted in terms of observable, physical objects, is meaningless and misleading.  Where I am going with this is that immaterial things like awareness, the observer, consciousness, and thoughts tend to be of less interest in the West in the sense of having less importance and value than the physical.

When we turn to Buddhism the whole realm of mentation, as psychical objects, is considered to be both important and observable.  This also includes the physical body and the world we normally perceive through the body’s senses.

The Western view appears to exclude the non-physical and immaterial, while the Buddhist view is much more inclusive and includes the non-physical.  Also, it is important to add that the fundamental ground (you could use the One Mind or any number of like Buddhist terms) includes both the physical and the psychical—in fact, they emerge from it and return to it.  The separation between the physical object/fact and the psychical object/fact is overcome from the perspective of the fundamental ground which is realized through dhyāna which is a direct intuitive realization of this ground.

This is a far cry from the view of today’s materialism that physical properties are ontologically prior to psychical objects like consciousness or even our personal thoughts.  In fact, the physicalist believes that mind is derivative, arising from matter.  For the Buddhist both the physical and the psychical are derivative, being configurations of the fundamental ground of reality which is ontologically prior to the physical and the psychical.

The split between the physical and the psychical is overcome in Buddhism whereas for the Westerner there is still a war going on, a raging battle between the physical and the psychical which borders on a kind of madness.  Frankly, I think the physicalists are stark raving mad.

Buddhism is unlike most religions

Buddhism is not like other religions.  It different than Judaism, Christianity and Islam insofar as the direct, personal realization of the unconditioned absolute, which would be nirvana, is what Buddhism teaches. 

Siddhartha Gautama set the example with his own awakening teaching others who followed him how to awaken.  In this context, what Buddhists believe in is that they can attain nirvana.  There is also the matter in Buddhism of how does one go about attaining nirvana which makes up the bulk of the Buddha's discourses.

Measured against Buddhism, Judaism and Islam do not believe that their followers have the obligation to have the same vision as their founders.  Followers are taught to be obedient to a certain message.  There is, however, an exception within Christianity which is found in the Orthodox and Oriental Churches  which is theosis (theopoesis) or the same, divinization.  St. Clement of Alexandria said:

“Yea, I say, the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.”

Neither theosis nor divinization is accepted by Catholicism.  The Catholic Church makes up a large portion of the Christian faith which broke away from the old Christian tradition in 1054 and seems, presently, to be on the brink of collapse because it, essentially, went against Christianity although Catholics would argue otherwise.

Theology, which is the interpretation of religious beliefs in relation to contemporary thought and life, has had a hard road to travel in the modern era having to fight against scientific materialism, a corrupted Christianity, and an increasingly militant Islam. 

Turning to Buddhology, which has its own set of problems, it is trying to find its place in contemporary culture.  There are many forces acting on it, trying to get it to adapt to a world view unlike its own.  Buddhism’s reformers want, eventually, to reduce the importance of nirvana, karma and rebirth because these particular tenets don't exactly chime with their doctrine of nihilism and moral relativism.  Instead of Buddhism acting as a light by which to guide people in a dark world, that light is being extinguished by some very arrogant and misguided people who think they are doing good but are not.