The Zennist

Taking vows to Māra the Buddhist devil

If all we’ve managed to do in our brief life upon the earth is to lie and deceive ourselves, including others, how can our lives, eventually, not end up sad and unfulfilled? 

Of course, the biggest personal lie is to believe that we have not lied and deceived ourselves; that we are basically honest and wouldn’t hurt a fly!

But if we cling to the five aggregates of physical form, feelings, perception, volitional formations (or choices) and, lastly, consciousness, all of which are the bait of Māra who is the Buddhist devil, how does this indubitable fact not make us deceivers and liars?  Of course, to protect our fragile ego from this horrible verdict we deploy what is called “motivated reasoning” to prove that we are, underneath, basically honest and good.  But hardly anyone is free from this bias.  

Taking ourselves to a good teacher of Buddhism or a Zen master who knows their stuff, these teachers know that we are, profoundly, corrupt; that we do not even realize this despite evidence to the contrary.  Teaching us, therefore, would be a waste of time without first getting us to see, for ourselves, what we really are, namely, liars and deceivers—bound to Māra.  Didn’t the Buddha say to the monks that by clinging to the five aggregates one is bound by Māra (SN 22:63)?  The purpose of monastic training, in one respect, is to first learn not to lie and deceive ourselves; to unbind ourselves from Māra.

Does this sound harsh and unfair?  Well it’s not when what is at stake for us is either a downward sloping next rebirth or one much higher that will afford us badly needed wisdom about how the universe really works and what it is in essence.  What this further implies, is that we are in no position to evaluate ourselves since we are bound down to these five aggregates; in fact, our entire social order rests upon them—not upon the truth.  Thus far, we have only taken vows to Māra!

Does Zen meditation rely on auto-suggestion?

How much of Zen master Dōgen’s zazen relies on a special kind of auto-suggestion, the kind developed by Emile Coué ( 1857-1926) and others?

For Dōgen, Buddhism, that is, the Buddha’s enlightenment, relies on zazen.  It does not transcend zazen.  Dõgen believed that the Buddha transmitted zazen.  What is passed on from person to person then is no other than just sitting or, in other words, the transmission of sitting Buddha.  Zazen and the state of being a Buddha (S., buddhatā) are the same.

But this is all Dōgen’s own interpretation.  It is not even exegesis but much more eisegesis where Dōgen reads into Buddhism his own ideas.  Not any of it can be found in the oldest discourses of the Buddha or even in the later Mahayana canon. 

Zen as the practice of jhāna (Pali) and dhyāna (Sanskrit) only makes awakening to the unconditioned more likely.  The odds are in one’s favor so to speak.  Zen is thus limited and conditioned.  Zen is only a practice of de-conditioning, to the point where direct gnosis can take place within us, this being religious intuition or kenshō.

Turning to auto-suggestion, all of it is the work, mainly, of our imagination, not so much the will which imagination easily dominates.  According to Emile Coué auto-suggestion relies, first of all, on imagination and, secondly, the results to be expected which fall within physical possibility.  Thus, according to Coué one is the slave of suggestion and if we don’t take command of it, we then become the victim of it.  Our conscious mind is thus limited and in a dangerous position.  What lies below it is larger and more powerful. 

Look at the power of a frenzied mob where imagination and physical aggression link.  Think about the seductive power of pornography, or a harlequin romance novel.  Both rely on the link between our imagination and the sexuality of our physical bodies.  Or just imagine sucking on a lemon.  Your mouth will almost instantly start to water.

People are drawn to zazen because they imagine it will help them with life’s problems — and they are Buddhas when they physically meditate according to Dōgen!  They expect the positive to happen to them, and will tell you so after they do zazen for twenty or forty minutes.  But this is just auto-suggestion.  It can become a very powerful form of it also.

Real Zen meditation—not Dōgen’s—involves a process of deconditioning us from bodily enchantment and attachment; seeing the body as a mere lump of foam (pheṇapiṇḍa).  In light of this, sitting with our body ramrod straight on a zafu doesn’t make us a Buddha.  Becoming a Buddha is about seeing our true nature or kenshō.  What really counts is our detachment from our body; not being over-involved with it.  This means also being dispassionate towards its pleasurable and painful feelings.

More about anitya or change

Anitya in Buddhism refers to impermanence or change.  The word “change” in English simply means to make different.  The Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that everything in the universe changes.  This relates somewhat to Buddhism but not entirely.  For a Buddhist, everything is anitya but with the proviso that only what is composed or conditioned is anitya.  The unconditioned does not change, in other words. 

Logically, this means that change is relative to the unchanging or nitya.  This further means that it is by the unchanging that we come to know the changing or anitya including its limitations, for example, anitya had no effect on nirvana. 

Turning to Zen, we could even say that whereas our thoughts are always changing the essence or substance of thought is nitya — it does not change.  This is like the ocean with its ever changing waves and wave patterns—but it’s all H2O which doesn’t change otherwise water would not be water as we know it.

If, like the Buddha, we awakened to the absolute declaring, “This universe is an illusory appearance, being only thought,” we have verified this from the standpoint of having personally realized nitya, this being the same essence or substance that makes up thought.  We are not guessing but see everything, including our thoughts, as compositions of absolute essence.  A truly marvelous unified field theory you could say!

Western science has not the slightest idea what the essence of the universe is, and certainly no idea what thoughts are made of.  Their world is bound to spacetime.  That’s it.  It is a world that is limited to the senses and mind/thought (manas). 

Some scientists are also like wardens who take enormous pride in studying and understanding the sensory prison, but also making it more secure.  But the wardens are also in the same prison as the prisoners.  Neither can escape in which even death is not an escape.

For those like the Buddhas who have escaped from the prison by intuiting the essence  of thought; looking back, it turned out to be an illusory prison, a composition of essence or tathatā which is nitya and everlasting.

Siddhartha's quest for true identity versus Identity v. role confusion

A book some of us found helpful during the 1960s, during the formation of our social and personal identities was Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha.  Like Siddhartha we wanted to solve the riddle of self, that is, “Who am I, intrinsically?” the answer of which might help us to realize who we actually are and aid us, positively, throughout our adult life with its many changes, eventually, facing our death in some hospital bed or in a chair.

The who-am-I-intrinsically question, is about identity formation—finding out who we truly are; having looked deeper within, going beyond ordinary personal identity. 

I can remember as a teenager going through high school with identity formation at the back of my mind.  I came to learn much later that it was the psychoanalytic writer Erik H. Erikson who seriously delved into the subject of identity formation during adolescence where we stand between childhood and adulthood.  Biologically, we change and become sexual entering into the world of Darwinian fitness with all its responsibilities, but we also come to have an intellectual process which can be productive or counterproductive.  We realize, in addition, that in a very short period of time we have to meet societal expectations displaying adult behavior.  This period of tremendous change was Erikson’s fifth stage, Identity vs. Role Confusion (ages 12 to 20).

A lot has been said about this stage.  It has also been used as a launching point for “identity politics” adding more confusion to Erikson’s thought—even altering its context, dramatically. 

But going back to Hesse’s novel and with it also Buddhism, both Siddhartha’s were in a quest for true identity which is beyond doctrines and teachings, none of which contains the direct mystical experience of enlightenment.  Minus this kind of identity, we are left with a life of role confusion which is an insecure, somewhat unstable identity.  It might consist of confusion as to sexual orientation or reliance on various kinds of political/ideological oriented groups or even reliance on religious groups which.  All this leaves behind a path of personal discovery seeking authentic identity which concerned both Siddharthas.

For Buddhism, the matter of identity goes much deeper than anything in Erikson’s world of thought.  I tend to think that Identity vs. Role Confusion is an ever present burden that many in later years still carry in which it is difficult to distinguish between identity and role. The latter is more of a persona, i.e., a kind of social mask that the wearer projects and may even forget to take off after many years.

For those in the ages between 12 to 20, reading Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha, is not a bad idea.  But no book or teaching contains the secret of Zen which Siddhartha experienced under the Bodhi Tree.

 

 

 

 

The big hoax in Buddhism

A hoax is usually defined as some kind of deliberately created  ploy or trick to get people to believe something that is actually false.  In other words, a hoax plays upon the credulity of people so as to bring about belief in what is, essentially, untrue. 

In light of this, we hardly ever imagine that a publicly accepted “as if truth" that occupies public consciousness is, actually, a kind of hoax in the example of affirmative action which is a euphemism for counter measures directed against certain kinds of people who supposedly initiated discriminatory practices in universities.  This relies on a fictional narrative, which is the justification for affirmative action. (this is taken up by Steven Farron in his book, The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character and Other Lies).  By the way, I wanted to use affirmative action, as an example, so as to bring the reader into a zone of emotions where facts are in short supply but our many feelings towards this subject are not.  I could have used the hoax of the big bang but that is too lengthy and complex to present.

For the purposes of this blog I use the label of hoax to describe the perpetuation of the belief that the Buddha denied the soul or in Sanskrit and Pali, ātman and attā, when there is no actual evidence in any discourse that he made such a claim.  In other words, there is no preponderance of the evidence that the Buddha denied the soul.  Johannes Bornkhorst in his book, The Two Traditions of Meditation inAncient India, writes:

“A firm tradition maintained that the Buddha did not want to talk about the soul, or even denied its existence. Instead they adopted what they considered most essential to the Buddhist doctrine as liberating insight” (p. 99).

But the Buddha certainly denied that he sided with the annihilationists (ucchedavādā) in the Ānanda Sutta (SN IV.400) who said that there is no soul which in Pali is natthattā which is saying, literally, there is no soul.  So where is the rest of the evidence that the Buddha denied the soul?  It certainly can’t be found in the popular Dhammapada in which there is an entire chapter dedicated to the soul or in Pali, attā.

Then what about those like Saccaka (Cūḷasaccaka Sutta) who believed that the five aggregates such as bodily form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness are the soul?  The Buddha simply said that these aggregates are not my soul (na meso attā).  This is not a categorical denial, which only the annihilationists make.

To reiterate, the Buddha, clearly, denied the main tenant of the annihilationists that there is no soul or natthattā.  In addition, it stands to reason, that we are taking refuge in the Three Jewels, namely, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, with our soul.  It cannot be the five aggregates, which we cling to, that takes refuge for the aggregates are, in every way, corrupt and evil, belonging to Māra the killer (SN III.189).

There is also someone who attains nirvana.  This is the very self or soul or in Pali, paccatta.  We see it in this passage that is repeated serval times: “he attains utter nibbana in his very self (paccattamyeva parinibbāyati)” (Cūḷataṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta).

Suffice it to say that arguing with Buddhists who hold that the Buddha denied the soul or ātman becomes, eventually, an emotional battle.  You might as well argue against affirmative action in a major university which now extends affirmative action to LGBT types in the belief that certain kinds of people initiated discriminatory practices against LGBTs in our universities—and it needs to be corrected

Over the many years, Buddhists I have encountered who believe the Buddha was a soul-denier—almost without exception—become emotionally disturbed when I argue with them, throwing verses and logic at them that they can’t refute. 

It boils down to the fact that they have no evidence for their position.  They just assumed when they began their study of Buddhism that the Buddha denied the soul, something that I never did when I began my study of Buddhism back in 1965.  I kept an open mind—I came to learn.  For several years, I have been warned and kicked off more chat rooms than I can count in my old age.  The people who attack my position are living in a dream and refuse to awaken from it.  I don't feel sorry for them.  They are willfully inhibiting their own intelligence.

Zen's intuition of the absolute comes suddenly

As I have mentioned before, Zen is really about a special kind of intuition that cannot be pinned down by our intellect or rational mind no matter how hard we try.  Zen asks us to look within and intuit ultimate reality, sometimes referring to it as our true nature or true essence.  In fact, it comes in many different names from pure Mind to the One mind or just Suchness. 

When we look at this picture below it seems confusing — like something from a modern art museum or is it a reconnaissance photo of land taken of the Earth from 60,000 feet?  I mean what the heck is it? 

 

To see what it really is requires intuition.  It comes suddenly.  To help us in that direction we might need a few clues.  Zen is a lot like this but far more difficult even with the clues.  Zen is about intuiting our true nature or essence which is completely devoid of mental activity.  So look into your mind and try to intuit this nature.  Any luck?  No sudden intuition? 

Back to our picture.  It’s much easier to see what this is if I tell you that it is a cow’s face looking right at you.  It will take only a few seconds to see it or a few minutes — maybe longer.  But don’t worry, you’ll see the cow’s face.  Notice that when I said it was a cow’s face looking at you how that helped?  Zen literature (and this includes Buddhist literature also) is supposed to do that.  Let me give you an example from Zen master Ta-chu.

“The essence of mind is formless, this itself is the subtle body of reality.  The essence of mind is inherently empty; this itself is the infinite body of space.  Demonstrating arrays of practices is the body of reality of virtues.  The body of reality is the root of myriad emanations, which are named according to the situation.  Its knowledge and function are endless; this is the inexhaustible treasury.”

Did this help?  Next, how is this quote from the Samadhiraja Sutra?

“The true nature of all phenomena is non-arisen, signless, markless, unmanifest, not disappearing, inexpressible by letters, empty, quiescent from the outset, pure by its very nature.”

No sudden intuition?  Well, there is an intuition.  It is quite real.  Don't listen to the doubters.  It comes as fast has seeing the cow's face emerge in the time of a finger snap.

The failure of Zen to thrive in western culture

Let’s be honest with ourselves, modern Zen is a vestigial practice: the small remains of a once greater devotion and practice of Buddhism where the adept had full faith that enlightenment was real and could be achieved in this lifetime.

While western culture is being deconstructed and undermined by a most degenerating force as if to destroy all of what culture stands for, Zen has also been affected along with Buddhism.  Neither are free of this degenerating force.  This only hastens the breakdown and the passage of the Buddhist religion into the dustbin of history as Buddhism is marketed to the wrong types of people.

Historically, in strong, religiously tolerant cultures Buddhism thrived.  Surplus wealth could afford homeless monks and nuns.  Buddhism grew and expanded as a result especially under the Mauryan emperor, Ashoka.  Many monks were healers in the sense of being physicians and veterinarians who came to help sentient beings as much as they could.  Buddhist missionaries under Ashoka came into Greek and Aramaic-speaking cultures Hebrew, I hasten to add, being a close relative of Aramaic.  They even came into Egypt, particularly at Alexandria where much of Christian religious thought began.

Buddhism in America, and I include Zen, came to a prosperous middle-class culture but one that was being challenged and even changed by the new left which is never other than irreligious unlike traditional Indian culture.

As with traditional Buddhism it was not meant for the bāla (i.e., the puerile and immature).  In other words, it didn’t come to save fools (bāla) from themselves but to awaken those who might have the capacity to see beyond the obstructing convolutions of their senses, the most powerful sense being mental activity (manas). 

Zen in the 1950s and 1960s was something middle-class culture could support and help to grow.  But it was not to last long with the growing power of the new left — and that is about the time that I came into Zen.  Living with an abbot of a Zen temple and having read most of the books in the temple’s meagre library, I had enough good karma to realize that the Zen I was studying with the abbot was not Zen but a remnant of Zen if not a degenerate practice of it which was solely dedicated to sitting meditation. 

Eventually on my own in a retreat, I saw that Zen, which in Sanskrit is dhyāna or in Pali, jhāna, had its limit.  Doing seated meditation was not a road that might take the serious adept to enlightenment but only made direct intuition more likely — walking, too, was important.  In fact, the Buddha says of the highest meditation:

“This fourth jhāna is constructed and produced by volition. But whatever is constructed and produced by volition is impermanent, subject to cessation” (AN V.344).

As the reader might guess (and be right) Zen can only take its students to the point where their intuition can receive the mysterious vision of the absolute which occurs suddenly.  This point is only arrived at when the student goes to their wits’ end.  But this is too much for modern Zen to understand let alone practice which has become a victim of the new left with its bizarre agenda.  I don’t care if the teacher is a great Lama or Zen master — they will fail.  It is that bad.  Nothing spiritual can grow in the soil of the new left.

What if Galileo had decided to go one step further?

Galileo wrote, "I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated” (The Assayer, 1623).  I find Galileo’s words rather profound if not also beyond his time. 

From my Buddhist perspective, Galileo’s words cause me to think that consciousness could be far more fundamental than the biological body.  It may even be the case that consciousness comes first before the world of physicality (nāmarūpa). 

If we remove the body (let’s say it dies) we don’t necessarily also remove consciousness (this is verified by NDEs in my opinion).  As we Buddhists understand, it is consciousness or in Sanskrit, vijñāna, that is the samsaric transmigrant from one life to the next. It doesn't die with the carnal body.

The only way this samsaric consciousness ends is by being absorbed into the original One whereupon it becomes the One’s reflection into itself.  This is a higher consciousness, nirvana.

Where consciousness is signless, boundless, all luminous. (DN I.223).

This is also the Buddha’s Mind which is beyond transmigration/rebirth which for us is inconceivable in our unawakened state.

So, what if Galileo had decided to go one step further and postulate that all things reside in consciousness, even human bodies with their brains, including spacetime.  Where would we be as a culture?   I speculate that the West would be far more advanced than it is today.  It would be closer to Buddhism in this regard.  Back to our time, we haven’t been successful at proving consciousness comes from our brain.  Frankly, it's been a failure.

What Zen boils down to

What the main practice of Zen boils down to concerns the development of the intuitive mind.  This mind is not to be confused with our everyday, rational mind upon which we depend to sustain our physical life and well-being; which pop Zen as made a religion of in recent years.  To be blunt, the rational mind has no hope of gaining access to the intuitive mind which takes us to ultimate reality.

Something we need to understand, it is the intuitive mind that shows us the limits of the rational mind. Only the intuitive mind has access to authentic meaning.  In the end, the rational mind must either serve the intuitive mind or lose itself in itself.

To lose oneself in oneself (a kind of autism/dereism) is always to end up facing meaninglessness and having to fill it in with something absurd.  In Zen, this can lead to a kind of fake understanding — a quasi satori—in which one stubbornly believes that Zen is just Zen.  It’s all about living in the moment which is little more than a bare minimum of meaning!

Zen’s development of the intuitive mind serves a single purpose which is to penetrate the rind of thought and realize what it is made of.  If anything, thought can be fashioned into dreams and fantasies.  Thought can also appear as our everyday world or the cosmos and the star of our solar system.  But we have never, personally, experienced the very substance of thought; what thought is, actually, composed from.  Only the Buddhas managed to do that and some Zen masters.

What is most fundamental in our universe with all of its galaxies and worlds, which are nothing more than thought, is the very substance of thought.  And it is the job of a developed intuition to take us to that epiphany.  This is why the practice of Zen is so important, now more than ever.

Why we use koans in Zen

I came across this passage from the Nirvana Sutra which is from a translation by Kosho Yamamoto.

"Moreover, emancipation is termed that which severs all conditioned phenomena [saṃskṛta-dharmas], gives rise to all untainted [anāśrava], wholseome qualities /phenomena and eliminates the various paths/ approaches, that is to say, Self, non-Self, not-Self and not non-Self. It merely severs attachment and does not sever the view of the Self/ the seeing of the Self/ the vision of the Self [atma-dṛsti] . The view of the Self is termed the 'Buddha-dhātu' [Buddha-Nature]. The Buddha-dhātu is true emancipation, and true emancipation is the Tathagata.”

What underlies this is, actually, quite simple.  But the more words and concepts that are added, the more difficult it all seems.

Emancipation or enlightenment means, instantaneously, severing our dependence on conditioned phenomena.  Most, importantly, in Zen this is thought, i.e., the process of thinking which is always conditioned. Thinking as we know it belongs to the manas, which is not the same as Mind, Mind being the very substance or essence of thought.  This is why we use koans in Zen. 

Koans are designed to, first of all, bait and trap our thinking; then to frustrate our thinking until we enter into what Zen master Dahui calls “great doubt 大疑” — which I call “going to your wits’ end.” 

I mean, eventually, you see your insane pattern: think, think, think and get nowhere.  You’re now caught between a rock and a hard place, so to speak.  So what do you do? The right answer is get caught between a rock and a hard place!  Then maybe one night you will hear the churring of a cricket and awaken or walk by a pond in the early morning and become startled by the splash of a frog and awaken.  Yeah, severing one’s dependence on conditioned phenomena comes that fast — a sword cut.

And what did Mumon say? Oh, it’s so priceless!  Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked.  Only then do you find your true Self —this Self or Buddha-nature is the very essence of our conditioned, illusory cosmos.  It is most fundamental.  It’s each of us further down if we’ve bothered to really look, profoundly, going beyond thought.