The Zennist

One last barrier remains: the point of no return

On my youthful journey to see what Siddhartha saw and gain the necessary intuition of Zen masters I came to a place that you could call the point of no return in which reversal is not possible.  I came to realize that I was in Zen too far to give it up but I had also failed to uncover Zen’s secret having exhausted my all-too-human means for discovering Zen’s secret.

I had inadvertently put myself between a rock and a hard place.  I was stuck in a real life and death koan that I couldn't see the way out of.  Even an answer was not forthcoming of what a person should do in a situation like this. 

Looking back to that time I can see that this is the path of intuition that inevitably leads to a kind of cul-de-sac.  Human consciousness (vijñāna) can go no further.  Still, one last barrier remains which bars the way home.  But nothing can be done.

Finally this barrier unexpectedly disappears.  In that moment of disappearance, consciousness is not there anymore—still something is there, though not of an empirical nature which consciousness demands.  You have just merged with something that your six senses cannot perceive much less your consciousness frame.

Few practitioners get this far .  Instead, they substitute the experiences found in their imagination for enlightenment.  This is a process of reification where the imaginary becomes seemingly real.  It seems to work for a while but then fades away.  One has still not escaped avidya, that is, non-knowledge.

As strange as it sounds what we can measure or observe with the senses including the last sense which is the intellect/imagination is all an illusion—the seemingly real.  It is like turning a piece of lit incense in the dark so fast it appears to be a circle.  Yes, we humans are very good at creating virtual realities and deceiving ourselves.  But our consciousness demands subject and object, observer and observed, experiencer and experience.  But take away this consciousness one lonely night—there is much more that is beyond the grasp of human consciousness. 

In search of what transcends the searcher

Looking for our glasses when they are perched on our nose is something akin to a fool's journey as is riding an ox in search of an ox.

"What is Zen?" asked a novice monk.
Master Hyakuja replied, "It̍s like riding an ox, and seeking to find it."
Said the student, "After we understand; then what is it?"
The master replied, "It̍s like riding an ox, and going home on it."
Asked the student, "Then, what do we do with it?"
"It̍s like an ox-herd who keeps it out of other peoples rice fields."

Zen understands that the beginner is such a stubborn fool.  While the fool searches for the mysterious awakening (the ox) he or she has no idea what moves this mysterious search.  The beginner, also, has no idea what puts on the robes and bears the body’s pains and delights.

The madman whips the ox furiously trying to reach the goal that he imagines in his imagination.

The cultures or institutions of Zen Buddhism have little to do with Zen which is a Japanese word meaning in Sanskrit dhyāna.  This, by the way, is the methodology/investigation Siddhartha used to attain enlightenment.  In English, dhyāna would be intuition or gnosis.  Both of these terms cover transcendental knowledge.

As long as we project our ideas and our values on what Siddhartha sought we will never arrive.  Zen tries to take away all of our assumptions and presuppositions of what Siddhartha attained.  Siddhartha's attainment will only begin to resonate with us when we start to give up trying to be the knower of this mysterious state.

Mistakingly chasing after what is unreal rather than what is real

Desire in Buddhism is about mistakingly chasing after what is unreal rather than what is real and unchanging. But so long as we have not directly realized the real and the unchanging we cannot give up attaching to the unreal.

 

Stopping our desire for one thing does not help us give up our attraction to other desirable things. We first have to realize the real and the unchanging. This makes transcendence (pāramitā) doable which is about actually getting out of the cesspit of human existence.

 

From the time that we attached to the fertilized egg in our mother's uterus we have been chasing after the unreal while at the same time becoming more and more immersed into the world of the unreal. Even in death, we find another rebirth in another world.

 

Once we get a glimpse of the real which is what the Hinayana is really about, we are then able to move eventually to the Mahayana path which is about being immersed in the Light of Mahayana.

“Then, Mahamati, sustained by the power of the Buddhas, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas at their first stage will attain the Bodhisattva-Samadhi, known as the Light of Mahayana [mahāyana-prabhāsa], which belongs to the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas. They will immediately see the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones appearing before them personally, who come from all the different abodes in the ten quarters of the world and who now facing the Bodhisattvas will impart to them their sustaining power displayed with the body, mouth, and words.” — Lankavatara Sutra XL (Suzuki’s translation)

This is a real transformation and it can be taken in a literal sense. One sees the world the way a Buddha sees the world and especially beholds the spiritual light (prabhāsa) which is missing in the ordinary world of the human being.

Our true self (or nature)

Our human world is always covering our true nature with emotional downturns, speculation, and misinformation that only rebirth can remove so we might have a clearer vision of our true nature, although it is far from perfect.

For those who don't accept rebirth their attitude doesn't change the fact that life is continuous.  Death is far from a final ending.  Each death is only the end of a single life.  In the world of Buddhism, consciousness (P., viññāṇa) is the transmigrant that ensures the transition from one life to the next.

The antidote to the poison of the belief that death is final and that our lifeworld or Lebenswelt ends with our death is Buddhism.  It is always telling us that our attachment to this temporal body, also the five aggregates, is suffering because we are mistaking the real self with a false view of self.  In this respect, we will always be going from one false self to another false self until we wake up and see our true self.

I have found over many years that Westerners find it hard to believe that Buddhism does accept rebirth and does not accept the belief that there is no fundamental self.  In point of fact, the Buddha teaches us not to take what is not the self to be the self.  Our true self is never found in conditions.  It is not a dependent origination nor the five aggregates.  In truest words our true self is the Buddha nature.

Nirvana is not self-explanatory

Key terms in Buddhism are not all that self-explanatory.  Few are, if any.  Least of all is ‘enlightenment’ or ‘nirvana’ self-explanatory.  Making the matter of explanation even more difficult nirvana or realizing the unconditioned is not a sensory experience.  Much less being something shared with others.  But this is not the end of our travails.

Most importantly we cannot realize nirvana with pre-loaded suppositions or assumptions about what Buddhism is.  We have to attain the very same insight that Siddhartha did long ago.  We first have to purify our minds.  This is the extremely difficult part of Buddhism because most of practitioners never end up fully purifying their minds to be adequate with Siddhartha's mind when he awakened.

They imagine they have adequately purified their minds but that is all delusional thinking.  Only when the practitioner exhausts all of their presuppositions are they considered purified.  So when does this happen?  Not when a practitioner expects or believes it is so.  After awakening, only then does the practitioner realize that he or she had come to the end of their wits.

This is another one of those Zen mysteries that is difficult to explain with conventional words.  Everything in our life it's like a dream or it is like being in a play in which we have forgotten who we actually are.  And all the people that we know in the play are in the same boat as we are.  They have over-identified with their character, so much so, they have forgotten who they are, too.

Another odd way of putting it, we are like appliances who have no idea what electricity is.  All the appliances have identified themselves with what they do such as opening cans, or washing clothes or vacuuming.  The term 'electricity' like the Buddhist notion of spirit or Mind (G., Geist) is a complete and unfathomable mystery.

An inconceivable reality

No matter how far we travel in outer space we will never reach the end of it.  It is the same when we go into the microscopic world.  This is the bad infinite, a maze-like infinity that, seemingly, we cannot escape from.  But there is a way.  We have to give up consciousness (vijñāna) and that is most difficult.  It contains perceiving and perceiver: an implicit duality that cannot shed itself.

Even the enlightened Siddhartha could not express his awakening to mortals except to explain it through consciousness.  His words can only be fully understood after we have awakened, intuiting directly what he intuited. 

This enigmatic problem is woven into the fabric of Buddhism.  Those who are looking for ready-made answers will not find those answers in Buddhism.  As for those people who seek ready-made answers they will eventually be disappointed with the path they have chosen.

Nations will eventually fail as well as all religions.  In fact, all of mankind's endeavors given enough time will fail and still there is no escape from this bad dream that seems so real.  Even the hope of absolute death will fail.  It is just as illusory as is the life we lead.

Tragically, we do not understand that the beginning of things is not a thing, and likewise the end of all things is not, itself, a thing.  And still, we expect to find a thing or something.  This is the spell of consciousness at work deceiving us.  Dissociated from this consciousness becomes inconceivable for us.  But this is precisely what is attained by those like Siddhartha: an inconceivable reality.

Those who come to Buddhism such as the curious have no business entering the doors of Buddhism because they are deeply asleep in the spell of this mysterious consciousness which puts everything in an unresolvable duality. 

Yes, we depend upon consciousness to live our human life but when we wish to transcends this life it cannot be used.  This is what we don't understand and seem unwilling to give up or learn a new way of seeing.

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 Buddhas teach mysteriously

The Tathāgata has never stopped teaching.  But this teaching is not by sound waves or by waves of light or, for that matter, anything humanly imagined or conceived. 

Yes, we can represent some of the teaching in print.  But what the actual teaching is can only be fully received when one has completely transcended their all-too-human condition.

Given, that Buddhism is the quest for our true nature or essence, in this light how can one perceive what is absolutely simple and unconditioned?  The only thing we have is our intuition which if we are on the right path will make direct contact with this nature or essence.  But what we will discover is absolutely impossible to describe nor is there any time by which to understand it.

Our reasoning about it comes afterwards.  But anything we use to describe or explain this singular moment of discovery, in the long run, will always prove inadequate.

Still we cannot erase the sudden moment in which we saw it.  Nor can we overtime forget it.  It is there yet it is not there.  It is truly mysterious.  We do not fully realize it yet but we are seeing it by its own light.  This light is not reflected light that reveals the temporal world.  It is not photon or wave.  Nevertheless, we meditate (samādhi) upon it daily thanks to our intuition.  What else can we do?  This is our faith.  It governs our progress if we can call it that.  Nevertheless we undertake meditation.

From this meditation the bodhisattvas path opens up in which this light becomes absolutely manifest in our life for a small period of time.  It is the beginning of the true Mahayana teaching, the so-called bodhisattva-bhūmi staging.

Imagine, if you will, that our sun all of a sudden became very bliss emitting.  Everything was flooded by this blissful light; still we could not see this light.  Even our thoughts became blissful; there was nothing in fact that was not influenced by this mysterious light.  Gradually people began to confess to each other that they felt this light; many people didn't want to go back to work.  Then one day the light just stopped.

Many people were brokenhearted and sad that the light that made them feel so blissful was now gone.  Only a few (the bodhisattvas) could figure out how this light manifested itself and the fact that it was still manifesting itself but the people had so much evil habit energy that it eventually covered the light with darkness.  

We are participants in consciousness

From Zen Buddhism's perspective we are participants in consciousness (vijñāna = dual/vi knowing/jñāna).  Mankind is a conscious being of extraordinary intelligence.  But what consciousness is derived from is unknown to this conscious-ness being. 

We cannot use consciousness to find the origin of consciousness.  What consciousness depends upon shall always be unknown to us if we use consciousness as our means to find ultimate reality. 

We are so immersed in consciousness that we have no idea where it begins and where it ends.  And being in this predicament we are unable to transcend it, much less understand what we are facing which is consciousness which will not allow us to transcend it on its terms.

Still, consciousness is giving us hints of the difficulty we are in which is the difference between the unenlightened and enlightened; between the ones who are immersed in consciousness and the ones who have transcended it like the Buddhas.

Also, this consciousness is in the form of what the unenlightened sometimes refer to as relativism, that is, observer/knower and object/known duality.  They are mutually dependent upon each other.  This is Buddhism’s dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). 

But ultimate reality, that is, nirvana is not to be found here.  The Buddha's is dependent origination only speaks to the conditioned not the unconditioned where consciousness is transcended.

Buddhists are shocked to hear the truth of Buddha's teaching

The real teaching of the Buddha is missing in the modern Buddhist interpretation.  By a careful reading of the words of the Buddha one is able to put together the true teaching which is quite different from the one that most people believe he taught which lies mainly in their own imagination.

In light of this, even the first noble truth is not fully understood.  To the consternation and surprise of most Buddhists they are shocked to hear that the truth of the Buddhist teaching is that the first noble truth of suffering is about what is not the atman this being the five aggregates. These aggregates are suffering (SN 56:13) and with them what is not the self (an-atman). 

The second noble truth is about the cause of suffering which is clinging to these suffering aggregates or the same clinging to what is not the atman.  Putting a stop to clinging to these aggregates is the third noble truth.

Finally the fourth noble truth is yoking with the atman thus fully abandoning desire for what is not the self (SN 22:68).  Here one is free from clinging.  Yes, illusions still remain but there is no clinging to them because one has gone well beyond clinging where suffering is not possible.

Our very temporal thoughts are the sentient beings that we must save by being fully enlightened like Siddhartha when he became a Buddha.

Unlike with Christianity, there will be no savior who will save us from ourselves.  We must do that on our own because the truth is always present but we refuse to give up clinging to what causes us our suffering.

Coming to the end of conscious thought

Buddhism basically teaches that we cannot realize the absolute by using conscious thought or in Sanskrit vijñāna.  The Sanskrit term is very interesting.  It is really saying that knowing can only be in two parts (vi).  For example, the perceiver and the perceived; the observer and the observed; or the thinker and the thought.

This implies that Buddhism is also saying that consciousness must be transcended in order to realize the absolute.  We could even add a Pythagorean twist to this:  that we cannot reach the monad by way of the dyad.

The various schools of Zen reveal that they were built, more or less, upon the tradition of how to make a transition from conscious thought to direct intuition.  Even a superficial appraisal of Zen reveals that it is not mediated by reason but instead by intuition. 

I can personally attest to this and looking back over the years know, without a shadow of a doubt, that we live in an age in which intuition is being ignored.

Intuition only begins when conscious thought, like a driver, is forced to get out of their car because there is no more road.  Now the driver has to walk in a mysterious land that is perpendicular to the previous roads.  But in this example the perpendicular is not just roadlessness.  There is the mysterious vertical to it which will lead to greater and greater heights.  Only the unexpected and the new come out of this.  The only way to test this out is drive until you can go no more.  You’ve reached your wits’ end.  And that is only the beginning for Zen.

Traditionally, a good student of Zen is always on the verge of going to their wits' end.  They are about to run out of road (which is why they have come to Zen).  They are ripe for intuition.  But just because the sign on the temple suggests that Zen is to be found here, it is not.  It defies all expectations.