The Zennist

Buddha did not preach against an ātman

Most of what is written about the so-called doctrine of not [the] self or in Pali and Sanskrit, respectively, anattā and anātman amounts to people writing in a trance; people who can’t seem to wake up from this dogmatic trance and think anew. 

The Buddha, it may come as a shock to many Buddhists, didn’t preach against an ātman.  He neither taught against such a category nor even implied it was bad.  He only taught people not to regard or view what is conditioned to be their real self or ātman. Nothing conditioned is the ātman—all conditioned things are, in fact, not the ātman including this perishable, corporeal body which we are thrown into. 

This might explain why in a Sanskrit dictionary anātman (अनात्मन्) can mean 1 destitute of spirit or mind, 2 corporeal, 3 not self, different from ātman, 4 the perishable body. 

Taking this definition to Buddhism, anātman is fungible with the five aggregates of 1 physical being, 2 feeling, 3 perception, 4 volition and 5 consciousness, which are transmuted into what we moderns would call the psychophysical individual.  This is the person who we think we are, who is reading this blog. But all this is not the self or who we really are.

In fact, the Buddha says:

"Monks, physical being is impermanent ... Feeling is impermanent ... Perception is impermanent ...Volitional formations are impermanent ... Consciousness is impermanent.  What is impermanent is suffering.  What is suffering is not the self.  What is not the self should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus: This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self [na meso attā’ti]" (S. iii. 45).

Now just imagine someone believing that the clothes they wear about daily is who they really are.  They might believe this hat is my head, this shirt is my torso, the gloves are my hands, these pants are my legs and the shoes are my feet.  We might say to this odd fellow, “Sir, this hat is not your real body nor are the rest of your clothes.”  But because he is strongly attached to his clothes he can’t seem to let go of his belief that his body are these clothes.

Are you beginning to get the picture of what the Buddha is really saying?  Don’t take anything which is conditioned to be your real self.  And if you asked the Buddha his reason, he would tell you that conditioned things, such as your corporeal body, are impermanent and liable to suffering and will eventually succumb to death. 

In light of the Nikayas, it is fake Buddhism that teaches that the Buddha, categorically, taught against a self when he really taught his followers not to identify with that which is not [the] self or anātman which, for example, are the five aggregates.  It is only when we dis-identify or abandon all that which is not [the] self that the self is finally revealed in its own light.  Such people "with self as protection [attadīpā] wander in the world, own nothing, are completely freed in every way" (Sutta-Nipāta, 501).

We are afraid of the light

The Buddha in the Pali Nikayas said that whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha (A. iv. 164).  Although found not to be the words of Plato, these following words are well spoken:

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

The context seems to be “spiritual light” or just spirit.  Spiritual light is known in both Buddhism and Christianity but certainly ignored in many contemporary forms of Buddhism and Christianity (Christianity acquired much of its spiritual knowledge from Buddhism thanks to Buddhist missionaries that came from India, at the command of the Buddhist king Ashoka [262–239 BCE] to places like Alexandria, Egypt).

Tragically, mankind seems to be afraid of the spiritual light these days which falls under the category of mysticism—a term not respected at all in the modern world which has taken a turn for the worse with respect to religious knowledge. 

Certainly, in my spiritual growth and development, spiritual light became central.  My first encounter with it was in 1969 then in 1976 in which I underwent what is called light of Mahayana, a term found in the Lankavatara Sutra.  This is nothing subjective.  It is a transfiguration of a spiritually blind person into one who sees and understands the spiritual world in its various contexts.

I see nothing unusual about a child being afraid of the dark and welcoming, each morning, the light of the sun.  But for an adult who practices Zen to set out and deliberately attack something like spiritual light, because the notion makes them feel uneasy, is a bit strange.  Here is something that makes them uneasy.  It’s from Zen master Yuan-hsien:

"The spiritual light of living beings originally has no obstruction, yet deluded feelings arise in confusion.  From this there are six sense organs within and objects of the six senses outside:  with the opposition of organs and objects, false consciousness arises uncontrolled, producing good and bad, initiating virtuous and evil actions”(Cleary, The Teachings of Zen, p. 185).

And what about these words from Zen master Yunmen?

“Every person originally has the radiant light—yet when it is looked at, it is not seen: dark and obscure!”

There is much more I could present, especially, from the Avatamsaka Sutra, but suffice it to say without the ‘light’, this being the Buddha Mind which is beyond time and space (i.e., our limited human perception), we have a dead religion in front of us.

American Theosophist, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, in his book, The Lost Light, gave future generations a way to measure their religious/spiritual progress or the lack thereof.  He wrote:

“Every religion apparently has begun at a high level and become corrupted until it stood in need of reformation and purification. Religions decay through atrophy of spiritual vision. Their course is marked by a blurring of the original light.”

Not only has modern religion, taken as a whole, blurred the original light but the blur has turned into blindness and with it contempt and hatred for this light—if not fear.  What has replaced this light is the cult of personality.  But the godman is like brass which is hidden by a thin film of gold.  

Refusing to see the mystical in Buddhism

It doesn’t matter if it is Zen or Dzogchen or Buddhism, itself, from scholars to the beginner the emphasis is always to dumb the subject down to where there is almost nothing left in the way of the mystical, that is, direct gnosis of ultimate reality which, I hasten to add, is not to be confused with emptiness which only pertains to the insubstantiality of dependently originated things. 

As a matter of fact, ultimate reality is not insubstantial or empty.  It is unemptiable precisely because it is substantial.  It is the really real.  This is what the serious adept tries to realize.  Coming to the realization of ultimate reality is a removal or a abandoning process (abandoning the insubstantial) at which point the adept comes to realize ultimate reality which, all along, has been hidden beneath layer upon layer of adventitious defilements.  

My dissatisfaction in all this is with those who try to secularize the spiritual element that is at the core of Buddhism.  They act as if they are doing us a favor by trying to reveal the true teaching of the Buddha when they are only helping to destroy Buddhism!  You’d swear that there exists a secret order of demons on this planet whose sole purpose is to ruin Buddhism or for that matter fuck over any authentic spiritual system!

Of course the big question is, why!  It almost seems like a psychopath’s dream come true, a person who enjoys destruction.  “Wow, this is working fine—I think I will fuck it up!” “Gosh, that’s a nice barn you just built my friend.” A week later the barn is burnt to the ground.  “You are such a pretty little girl.” In a few weeks the little girl is molested (it happened to Louise Brooks the famous silent screen actress).  Most of us remember the 1984 film, Amadeus, which was more about the Italian composer Antonio Salieri's rivalry with Mozart.  In the film, Salieri is drawn to Mozart because of his genius. Finally, Salieri has to murder Mozart.

I am always astonished by those professed Buddhists who stubbornly refuse to see the mystical in Buddhism; who have dumbed it all down to a life dedicated to just sitting meditation and living in the here and the now. They don't even accept the tenet of rebirth.  But this person by acting this way has told me that they are spiritually incompetent.  Still, they are smart enough to argue like some self-willed teenager with his parent, but not smart enough to remotely understand Buddhism other than superficially.

You cannot conceive the unconditioned through what it is not

Two very important and major terms in Buddhism are the conditioned (saṃskṛta) and the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta) or, the same, the composed and the uncomposed.  For us, they stand in a kind of odd relationship. 

Since nirvana is unconditioned, our attempt to bring it into our conditioned world (samsara), together with our conditioned thoughts and concepts, as if to lay hold of it and examine it, ain’t working for us.  It’s not working because we are always attempting to conceive of the unconditioned through the conditioned then wonder why it all seems so asymmetrical—nothing fits or corresponds.  We repeat this pattern many, many times.  Yes, this is a most difficult habit to break.  But it must be broken.

To have any success, we have to be, personally, put into a position where the unconditioned speaks solely for itself.  It would be a moment when we have suddenly stopped our terrible habit of always trying to conceive the unconditioned by way of the conditioned.  This is as much as saying, you cannot conceive the unconditioned through what it is not. 

This reminds me of the Buddhist story about the turtle and the fish used illustrate nirvana. 

There was once a turtle who lived in a lake with a group of fish. One day the turtle went for a walk on dry land. He was away from the lake for a few weeks. When he returned he met some of the fish.

The fish greeted him, "Mister Turtle, hello! How are you? We have not seen you for a few weeks. Where have you been?”

Mr. Turtle said, "I was up on the land, I have been spending some time on dry land."

The fish were a little puzzled and said, "Up on dry land? What are you talking about Mr. Turtle? What is this dry land? Is it wet?"

Mr. Turtle said, "No, it is not.”

The fish continued, ”Is it cool and refreshing?"

"No, it is not,” said Mr. Turtle.

"Does it have waves and ripples?"

"No, it does not have waves and ripples,” said Mr. Turtle.

"Can you swim in it? asked the fish.”

"No you can’t,” replied Mr. Turtle.

Frustrated with Mr. Turtle's answers, the fish then said, "It is not wet, it is not cool, there are no waves, you can’t swim in it. So this dry land of yours must be completely non-existent, just an imaginary thing, nothing real at all."

Mr. Turtle said, “Well for you, that might be.” He left the fish and went for another walk on dry land.

This is somewhat like asking what concepts are required in order to have the proper concept of the unconditioned.  Do you see how absurd this demand is? Here “concept” is the world of the fish while the unconditioned is like the dry land. The simple fact is that we cannot really know the absolute through what the absolute is not.  To know the unconditioned is to give up the conditioned.

Zen at the crossroads

Chan or Zen Buddhism we have to regard in two basic forms: specific spiritual exercises taught by Buddhist monks since the time of the Buddha, and Zen (禪) the lineal institution (宗) which bears the marks of having been finally mythologized during the Song dynasty, what most of us recognize as the Golden Age of Zen, which is more fiction than historical fact and helped to further the fortunes of the Zen lineage (禪宗). 

What both have in common is the belief that the primogenitor was Gautama the Buddha; and that any spiritually competent person could realize what Gautama realized whereby he became awakened or Buddha.  This belief is the root of all Buddhist traditions from Theravada to Tibetan Dzogchen.

Buddhism, in this respect, is not without genuine awakened individuals insofar as Buddhism is not just about holding on to various beliefs but, more importantly, whether or not such beliefs actually obtain through certain mystical experiences.  In Zen, this experience would be kenshō, that is, intuitively seeing one’s true nature.  During the time of the Buddha this would be nirvāṇa, or in Pali, nibbāna.  This is not any kind of intellectual knowledge, i.e., any kind of conceptual or linguistic knowledge.  It is instead, intuitive knowledge which is the immediate apprehension of ultimate reality which is unconditioned.  Nor can it, in anyway, be visited by the senses.  It falls under the general category of mysticism.

How this all rests with modern thought and the modern individual depends a great deal upon how encumbered the individual is by the various modern dogmas which depend on a kind of  loyalty to ideological materialism, if not ‘scientism’ which has been socially engineered into the individual since their birth. 

If this is the kind of person that Zen Buddhism has to teach, it will likely not be successful without, itself, being revised to tally with the demands of materialism and its various forms.  In other words, the modern individual wants his or her Zen Buddhism to deny the personal realization of true reality whether it be Buddha-nature, or an unconditioned, non-empty reality called the One Mind.

Buddhism, but more so Zen, is standing at a crossroad.  If Buddhism, in general, and with it Zen, is to survive outside of the Asian community it will have to get stronger in its polemics against a culture of materialism and also stronger in its apologetics, making a much stronger case for rebirth and karma than it has in the past.  You don't adapt to a culture by giving up your core principles and tenets—by ignoring the Buddha's enlightenment.

Don't bring your resentment to Zen Buddhism

Let’s be honest, some of us will eventually go through a phase of being incredibly disillusioned with life when our hopeful assumptions are shown to be false, or life as we hoped it would be took an unexpected turn for the worse which we cannot handle right now.  Any number of events can lead to eventual disillusionment, from the death of a parent or friend to betrayal.   

With disillusionment there is always the risk that it can eventually manifest in resentment.  This could happen during the transformation of our youth into adulthood, if there is no positive and helpful rite of passage which is a personal test but more, the development of authentic selfhood which is less vexed by disillusion and almost immune to resentment.

Establishing an authentic self usually involves putting our still youthful immaturity into sort of a crucible in which the gold is separated from the dross.  This self is still one of outward act and encounter with culture and society until it reaches a state of spiritual maturity, having gone well beyond the superficiality, crudity and awkwardness of youth.

But what if in the West those still in the process of being disillusioned, undergoing one let down or disappointment after another, enter Buddhism or Zen showing signs of resentment which might be a dissatisfaction with the way their life is going right now, or even dissatisfaction with the way the world is in terms of justice and injustice?

But how is Buddhism supposed to heal the festering wound of resentment in which one feels angry much of the time or frustrated with his or her present life; whose dreams are not coming true as expected; whose self-esteem is also not doing so well; who sees injustice all around them which they believe is the cause of their misfortune? 

How would a Buddhist monk, for example, have healed the festering wound of resentment that found its way into a young Karl Marx who eventually developed an ideology of resentment we know as Communism? 

Resentment contained in Communism can also become a complex emotional strategy serving, mainly, to make actions, even violent and cruel actions, more excusable as in the end justifies the means. 

These days I see too many of today’s youth suffering from resentment perhaps caused by their sudden exposure to the real world coupled with being victims of poor to bad parenting.  I see it gaining traction in Buddhism in the form of social activism.  An entire new ethics has been built upon the emotion of resentment.  We only see resentment’s raw forms, for example, in the idea of ‘hate speech’ (i.e., don’t say things that displease me). 

As we can see, resentment can turn into an “x vs y” antagonism that serves to reify resentment and with it a kind of false fatalism.  This antagonism is only a way of reinforcing my resentment such that I don’t have to change—real change being another way of allowing myself to see and to solve the problems at hand without having to be resentful.

In Robert C. Solomon's book, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great "Immoralist" Has to Teach Us, besides being one of the great books on “resentment” he has something interesting to say which touches, directly, on those full of resentment who come to Zen.

“But it then becomes clear that objective strength or success cannot be the issue; the poison of resentment works only on those who have frustrated ambitions and desires, whose self-esteem depends on their social status and other measures of personal worth and accomplishment. But then it is easy to see the wisdom of the Zen master and the Talmudic scholar who are never poisoned by resentment because they never allow themselves those desires and expectations which can be frustrated and lead to resentment.”

This all ties in with tricycle’s recent article by Lama Jampa Thaye, The Dangers of Diluted Buddhism. 

Modern Zen is more of a farce

Zen, that is, modern Zen has turned into almost a farce.  It’s like obese people writing books about how to diet and stay thin. 

Carrying this one step further, dieting is actually easy if you know the mechanics, so to speak.  Basically, you have to eat fats to lose fat, that is, you have to go into ketosis.  This is where your body turns fat into ketones for use as energy.  It you want to put on weight just keep yourself in a state of glycolysis in which blood glucose provides energy.  The dieter always fails because they never get off of the glycolysis addiction.  End of story.

Zen explained or taught by the common person, that is, a person who has never achieved kenshō, is almost as absurd as reading books on dieting authored by people who are obese; who say they speak from experience having dieted hundreds of times!  In Zen any experience is almost useless if one fails to achieve kenshō.  Kenshō occurs when we have transcended this mortal coil we call our body including the metal activity that buzzes around in our skull.  Said again, suddenly,  in kenshō plurality returns to the point of origin this being One Mind. 

From this most sublime vantage point, over time, what we once took to be real, namely, our body and this world, turns into an illusion.  What was transcended during our awakening was actually the illusion, and what this illusion was composed from, kenshō showed us clearly.  Using the ancient Indian allegory of a rope in the dark being mistaken for a deadly snake, we can understand that the rope could easily be mistaken for a deadly snake in the dark.  But when the light is upon it, there is only a length of rope—no deadly snake.  The One Mind being universal shines like a light upon the universe—to even the most distant galaxies—so that what appears is illusory.  Only Mind is real which is not an appearance. 

The heaven soaring imagination of Dōgen

There is in Dōgen’s understanding of Zen an air of indifference to the singleminded quest for enlightenment (J., kenshō); to see what Siddhartha realized under the Bodhi tree. 

Dōgen’s emphasis is, instead, placed on faith rather than gnosis, but not faith as we think we understand it in which, eventually, faith turns into reality.  Dōgen’s faith is, instead, faith that enlightenment is already attained, which takes the form of passive zazen; which if we look deeper, has been impeded by Dōgen’s own imagination, an imagination unconsciously raised above Siddhartha’s actual awakening through the four dhyānas (contemplations).

Turning to the typical Sōtō 曹洞 practitioner, the raising of one’s imagination above Siddhartha’s awakening is not difficult to do.  In fact, it is very easy if one believes as Dōgen believed, that enlightenment is in the phenomenal world which includes the temporal body and not beyond it as a matter of transcendence which is the teaching of Indian Buddhism.

Thus, the impermanence of grass, trees, and forest for Dōgen is buddhata, that is, the state of being Buddha.  This includes the impermanence of our physical body and mental activity.  Here is where imagination over actual enlightenment or kenshō kicks in.  Once the practitioner drops anchor here there is no chance of them leaving the safe harbor to sail to the shore of nirvana. 

Sōtō Zen is a kind of half-way house for those still caught up in materialism who imagine they have found the elegant solution to their problem which is, just sit in zazen which they believe is an affirmation of buddhata.  But this is an inversion of Buddhism, itself, which teaches the transcendence of all conditioned reality, including even the physical body of birth and death and the phenomenal world it depends upon to survive.

This kind of Zen which goes no further than faith in the practice of zazen is not engaged with the Buddha’s teaching but only ends up undermining it.  There is still that looming, almost unconscious indifference to enlightenment—satori—that cannot be reconciled.

Buddhism's turn towards annihilationism?

If there is any real difference between primitive Buddhism and Brahmanism it is how each approached the absolute.  I hasten to add that the differences may not be all that great.  I would argue that Brahmanism may have approached the absolute by a cataphatic method (posit what the absolute is), but this is not entirely true since, for example, the Brahma Sutras state: Whenever we deny something unreal, it is in reference to something real.  This is certainly not completely cataphatic. 

Primitive Buddhism approached the absolute by the apophatic method (non-identification with conditioned things so as to reveal the unconditioned).  This is evident with regard to the conditioned psychophysical person which is a transmutation of material shape, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness, none of these constituents being my real self or ātman.  The Buddha taught his followers to reject what was not their self or ātman in order to be free from the perils of conditioned reality.

After the pari-nrivana of the Buddha and the subsequent rise of Buddhist sectarianism there came to be Anātmavāda this being the doctrine that there is no Ātman or the same, the doctrine that there is no absolute.  This seemed to be hardly different from ucchedavādā, the doctrine of annihilation, which was opposed by the Buddha.  By this, later Buddhism tried to differentiate itself from Brahmanism but at the risk of turning towards annihilationism.  

The dogma of Anātmavāda led to another problem, that of the doctrine of the empty or śūnyavāda which was supposed to mean that appearances are svabhāva-śūnya, that is, devoid of true or ultimate reality, being only configurations of true or ultimate reality.  By the same token, true or ultimate reality was prapañcha-śūnya, empty or devoid of pluralization meaning that true or ultimate reality was one and increate.

On the one hand, postmortem Buddhism masks ucchedavādā with Anātmavāda then later disguises a negative absolute in the form of emptiness doctrine or śūnyavāda.  However, after the Buddha's enlightenment he made no mention of either Anātmavāda or śūnyavāda.  In simplest words, the Buddha's awakening was the realization of the unconditioned, afterwards teaching the path leading to it (S. iv. 368).  It was also synonymous with the far shore, the deathless, the sublime, the amazing, nirvana, purity, the island, the shelter and the refuge (S. iv. 370–372).  Truth be told, Buddhism is very positive—a remarkable spiritual religion that would later send its missionaries to Alexandria Egypt and farther.  All this before the birth of Christ. (Later I hope to get into why much of Christianity stems from primitive Buddhism.)

Real Buddhism and real Zen are supposed to be upsetting!

To practice Zen such as doing zazen, unfortunately, can act to conceal what is, exactly, the authentic teaching of Zen, namely, to intuit one’s true nature.  This caution also applies to those who read Zen books and get involved with the romanticism of the so-called “golden age of Zen” narrative.  This can have the unintended consequence of turning Zen into a kind of literary idolatry.  This makes any future experience of transcendence in Zen impossible.

Can these problems turn Zen into something that eventually makes Zen nihilistic as in, how to cope with nihilism and enjoy it?  But maybe these people are not aware that this is happening right now to Zen including Buddhism.  I don’t know who these people are, personally, who come to Zen this way, with this attitude; who are already suffering from nihilism.  Yet, they are there on Reddit and other chat forums who will have nothing to do with intuiting one’s true nature. They are at war with it.

These people practice Zen by just sitting on a zafu, and read koans without the slightest idea what they are about (literary idolatry).  The Buddhists, equally and stupid, submit pictures of their home shrine (idolatry), read a few discourses (literary idolatry), sit in what they believe to be meditation and seem not to really care about what the Buddha actually taught (it was nirvana).  Their mind, by the way, is not open but firmly shut as tight as a steel safe.

It seems to me that “generation y” as become closer to de-generation y!  While being adept with digital and electronic technology many of this generation are not only moral relativists but they are spiritual dunces in almost every imaginable way including being almost, fanatically, anti-religious. This is not meant to condemn all in this generation but certainly I have met plenty of them at the coffee shop across the street from the university and on chat forums—call it my informal, unscientific survey.

This is not an easy trajectory to change—and likely cannot be changed—and at my age I tend not to care all that much about people who say or suggest that facts or truth no longer matter. I already know what they are thinking: What matters is how I feel about Buddhism and Zen.  I expect it to be like this. It is upsetting to me when it is not.  It makes me angry.

But I dare say real Buddhism and real Zen are supposed to be upsetting!  Just as it is upsetting when anyone has to kick a habit they are not too happy about kicking.  To begin, you have to be wise enough to see how unwise you really are.  Only then will you make great effort and see the final truth.