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. 

Transcending misidentification

Fundamentally, what Buddhism is trying to tell us is that who we really are cannot be found within the psychophysical being, that is, the five aggregates (P., pañcakkhandha).  Our search in other words will be in vain.  It is only with the transcendence of the psychophysical being that one returns home, so to speak, and finds their true identity.  All the rest is misidentification.

Transcending misidentification, however, is no easy task.  It cannot be accomplished through the intellect or by the imagination.  These are the only tools we have or are aware of.  Delusion is our world.  Who we are is who we are not.  We are constantly deceiving ourselves.  It is like we have the sense of making forward progress but we're only going around in a circle.

All this is implicit in the literature of Buddhism although at first it doesn't seem like it.  In our eagerness to understand Buddhism we often misread it.  The Buddha’s message gets mixed up with our own expectations of what we imagine Buddhism to be.  In other words, we don’t read Buddhism with an open mind.

For Buddhism, a human being is illusory or void in the sense that it is comprised of the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness).  These aggregates can be characterized as impermanent, suffering, and without a self.  In this light, nirvana is the transcendence of these aggregates; logically, the awakening to our true nature or self. 

One must consider also that this transcendence includes the transcendence of subject and object or the same the experiencer and the experienced.  Enlightenment or awakening is not a matter of me experiencing the absolute.  It is really a matter of me transcending myself and its journey to experience what it imagines the absolute is.  You in the absolute become single for about 1/10th of a second!  

Caught in the trap of this consciousness

It seems paradoxical to say this but desire for conditioned things and desire for enlightenment (the unconditioned) are virtually the same.  How is this so?  Suffice it to say that according to Buddhism we operate in a world of duality that is subject-object consciousness or vijñāna.

The average seeker is really seeking, if you can picture this, with a butterfly net trying to catch air.  This seeker is having no success because the seeker’s imagination holds onto the belief that air is something the butterfly net can trap.

Buddhism will say that we cannot seek the unconditioned with subject-object consciousness.  Enlightenment is not an experience for the experiencer or knowledge for a knower.  We are still stuck in a dualizing  mode.  Still stuck in Samsara.  Without the transcendence of this dualizing consciousness we cannot hope for an escape.

A brief aside, most of us recall the the Ten Oxherding Pictures (十牛圖) that were first popularized in China during the Song Dynasty.  What is significant here is that one of the stages is a circle in which oxherder and the ox have both disappeared.  In other words, the Zennist has converged with the primordial one so that there is no duality left.  The other term for this convergence is samādhi.

Returning to the one (P., ekatta) is always possible but the chances are zero if we go by way of our dualistic consciousness or vijñāna.  At some point in our spiritual career we must confront this duality which is in Zen called the great doubt 大疑.

Of course, it almost goes without saying, but our passion/desire for life is our greatest obstacle.  Facing this, we modern people always try to meet the challenge by serving God and mammon at the same time (appearing outwardly moral but craving wealth and power on the inside). 

This dualistic consciousness is also diabolical.  It always betrays us.  Even our immature hope that death will clear our sins away betrays us.  Even when we think to our self, well, I will just let go of this dualistic consciousness.  We are caught in the trap of this consciousness.  Paradoxically, we cannot grab the object or fully let go of the subject.  A path of intuition is the only answer by which we transcends both subject and object suddenly.

A book, The Secret Of Zen

Back in the early 60s, if I went into a bookstore in Berkeley or San Francisco and bought a D.T. Suzuki book about Zen I might pay close to $3 for the paperback book.  In today's money the same book would be $26!  For all that money whether in the 60s or 2021 Zen still remains incomprehensible for the vast majority of people who buy books about Zen.  Even the translations, no matter how accurate they are and close to the original, most remain incomprehensible for the majority of the curious.

Since 2007 I have endeavored to write about Zen in The Zennist blog from my own awakening back in 1969.  Notice, that I used the word “about” which means for me an approach through language to the exactness of my intuition.  My endeavor has not be an educated guess or a probe into the unknown to find Zen’s truth.  Far from it.  My word-arrows always hit the target.  It is just that the target remains invisible and incomprehensible for the many!  Yes, my arrows are clearly visible for all to see except for the target.

For the last three years or so I've been working on a book.  I had amassed a considerable amount of quotes from the Buddha’s discourses including  quotes from Zen masters.  But these quotes were not intended so much for a book as they were proof that what I was saying about Buddhism and Zen from my own awakening were in fact true. 

When I wrote the book I found it unnecessary to do much quoting.  I already understood where Zen and for that matter Buddhism was coming from.  The book in a way expresses what I would want to be told by a great teacher where the second part of the book is about my personal journey into the mysterious land of Zen where lies its secret.

With the help of Otomo, an old student of some 17 years, the book, The Secret of Zen was recently put on the Amazon's Kindle and Books.  There might be a few errors here and there but the bulk of the book stands ready to read and enjoy.   I really hope that the reader will one day be able to see the target that I look at every day and find no problem hitting the bullseye.

The transition from the exoteric to the esoteric

It may be true that Zen Buddhism is something that we can teach ourself but that doesn't mean it is easy to learn.  It's like teaching oneself mountain climbing.  The transition from reading about mountain climbing to actually climbing a mountain can be very dangerous.  In fact, the odds are that our big climb will only be a foothill.

The greatest risk that a person encounters in Zen Buddhism is their innate capacity to delude themselves about its meaning.  This can be accomplished in a number of different ways from going to a bad teacher, to listening to bad advice or misreading Zen literature recontextualizing it to meet with our expectations.  But with any learning curve there is difficulty, this means failure is always more likely than less likely.

Add to this the fact that many of us don't have the ability to rise up from our failures.  Instead, we hunker down and try to make the best of our failures.  But at the back of our mind we know that we haven't got what it takes to overcome our setback.  We want sympathy from others knowing full well that we cannot sympathize even with our own reasons for the setback. 

Most of us hope that with a minimum of effort we can accomplish the goal of Zen being satisfied that we have completed its path.  But this is little more than wishful thinking — enlightenment on the cheap.  Zen requires much more of us if we are going to overcome the barriers which keep us from enlightenment.  The real problem then becomes not so much from the outside (exoteric) but our own ability to take a profound look at the inside (esoteric).  It is really on the inside that the path of Zen begins.  This is not to say that the path is only subjective but rather it is to say to the Zen student, Zen is intuitive.      

Not a dualistic realization

Without consciousness (vijñāna) appearance (māyā, nāmarūpa) cannot exist.  In other words, the price of admission into our world of appearances or fantasyland is consciousness.  Without consciousness our universe and the earth on which we live and die cannot exist.  Consciousness preexists all appearance and yet it is bound down to it, unable to escape. 

In previous blogs I have gone over the fact that consciousness is always dual; it is not a universal essence or something like spirit, far from it.  If anything, it can roughly be described as the one divided within itself—a non-intrinsic illusory division.  Said again, this division is never other than unreal—an imaginary opposition.  Still it cannot be bridged even though it is illusory.  Even thinker and thought are opposed.  So here we get a taste of what Zen Buddhism is really about.

The barrier we face which prevents us from seeing what is beyond appearance is the duality inherent within consciousness.  Even the duality of realizer and realized must be transcended.  In most profound words there is only the transcendence of realizer and realized when the seeming duality contained within consciousness disappears into the original one.  The one, it turns out, has only realized itself as absolute.  But this is not a dualistic realization.  This is awakening (buddhatā).

Those who desire to awaken but cannot awaken are constantly caught within the trickery of consciousness.  This might explain why it is so difficult to explain the awakening of Siddhartha because he attained nothing determinant from it.  Nevertheless, Siddhartha transcended the illusion of non-enlightenment that consciousness produced.

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.

Ordinary person Zen

The transcendent is beyond the road of thought and the road of words.  Such roads eventually run out of road.  This is where the road of Zen or the same, the road of intuition begins, but it's not an ordinary dirt road.  In fact, it is not a road of at all in the usual sense.  It begins when all of the roads have come to their end.

Upon reading these words, the average Zen student will still take the road of thought and the road of words.  But the end of these roads leads to a dead end with no more signs or directions.  Wandering around aimlessly is no way either.  On such a trek one can say they are exploring.  But what does that mean?  The Zen student is really lost with no sense of fulfillment.  He or she is running out of ideas:  There are no real options left. 

This is what comes from the practice of ordinary person Zen 凡夫禪 (bompu Zen).  These are people who have very little spiritual depth; who lack intuition (dhyāna).  Such people have no idea what it means to arrive at direct knowledge without reasoning or inferring, which in the case of Zen is direct knowledge of Buddha-nature.

Still, it must be said that there are different types of Zen because there are different kinds of people with differing abilities.  In fact, this is a typical beginner’s mistake:  to think that Zen is Zen and that when you visit a temple you're talking to enlightened people.  Nevertheless, it could be a situation in which you are a fool amongst educated fools.  One should never underestimate one's stupidity or overestimate one's abilities. 

When the student of Zen knows he or she has run out of road, or comes to a dead end, that is the time when Zen really begins (because they are engaging with themselves intrapersonally).  In their heart of hearts they still love Zen Buddhism but they realize that they are getting no place in this particular tradition.

Removing a brick from the wall

From a Buddhist perspective the human being is over-preoccupied with their imagination which Buddhists regard as the 6th sense or manas.  This also includes the intellect which creates a world of ideas and concepts which fundamentally depend upon the thinking/generation of thought. 

All this acts as something like a prison in which the human being is located within.  Psychedelic drugs might help us face this wall which is more illusory than we imagine.  But ultimately we face the thought-made-wall with our thought.  We cannot pass through.  We are forever born and re-born inside this prison.  For Buddhists this is called samsara.

But most of us have heard of the word nirvana.  But what is nirvana?  Is it a kind of passive nihilism?  Could nirvana be like a hole in the thought-made-wall:  the disappearance of a single brick?  But what happens when a brick is no longer there?  What the wall hides is now revealed.  What comes pouring in through that hole, where a brick once was, is the pure light of spirit.

Many today are seeking while confined in ignorance (lost in error).  After all, this wall of thought is a kind of limiting ignorance.  All may even wish to understand.  Still, they only have the eyes of fish who can see everything in their watery world with the exception of the water they are in.  For the one who truly sees (a Buddha), those who are unawakened have eyes not fully open yet they appear open. 

We should not underestimate the power of the imagination or the manas.   The absolute or pure unformed spirit is contained (thoroughly hidden and must be uncovered) in the imagination while, at the same time, from the perspective of the sage, imagination is included within the absolute.

Going beyond thought

Intelligence plus intuition does not account for the intellect but it works for the Zen mind/wisdom.  The intellect lacks intuition.  It can only deal in ideas and concepts (it tends to be analytical in that regards).  While an intellectual may be brilliant he or she still has not managed to get beyond Mumon's barrier, that is, Mu.  Mu represents thought where thought is the great barrier that all Zen practitioners must face. 

Foremost, thought is a barrier to spirit.  It is what the Zen adepts must confront on the path.  During this confrontation, for intuition to be successful, thought must spontaneously dissolve on its own returning back to unconditioned absolute spirit or the same, pure Mind.  In Zen this is our original face (本來面目) where thought has not yet been formed.

Throughout the literature of Zen Buddhism there is a constant reference to this spirit in which there is no thought.  Interestingly, spirit can become congealed into thought but thought is never spirit.  Thought is never other than an illusion created from spirit. 

In the study of Zen we must break the habit of looking for this spirit by means of thought.  But most all Zen students haven't even come to this milestone.  They are still trying to put Zen's mystery into a particular thought.  But such an endeavor is always doomed to failure.

Zen has a history of being clever when it comes to bringing the student to spirit where thought is spontaneously dissolved; where only spirit remains.  But this assumes certain things the most fundamental being that the Zen teacher must be awakened.  Lacking an awakened teacher one must go into solitude cutting off their ties with the outer interpersonal world, transcending the overarching dyad of subject and object through intuition.