The Zennist

Following in the Buddha's Footsteps

Enlightenment for Siddhartha came by way of the complete sublation of the unreal or error (avidya) and with it the end of his samsara.  It wasn't that illusion or appearance just disappeared.  There is more to it. 

Error was assimilated into absolute spirit such that spirit dominated and naturally overshadowed it.  Siddhartha was a ‘seer’ of this new reality while the many were still caught up in the spiritless illusion who could only relate to Siddhartha’s insight, abstractly.

Such metaphysical abstractness always remains imaginal despite the possessor’s attempts to reify the abstraction.  The path of Zen is no exception.  The Zennist can fall prey to his or her own delusions just like any other seeker of the truth and often does. 

It is not that difficult to follow the demise of any religion.  The otherworldly or transcendent is eventually set aside or banned from the religion in which it once prevailed being at its core.  Over time, it gradually becomes more this–worldly and secular as it adapts to its secular culture.  In Zen, it is the veneration of sitting (zazen), a practice that is fundamentally external to the teaching.

Even Buddhism, over time, develops into an anti–spiritual teaching this being anātman which in sanskrit means, destitute of spirit or mind (Monier-Williams, Sir M. [1988]).  In original Buddhism, the Buddha’s followers were more like unlit candles that he could light.  With his passing they were just unlit with little or no chance of becoming self–enlightened.

The Unconditioned Light is Reality

Vidyamāna can mean what is actual or real vs. not being real or actual (avidyamāna).  From this we get a better sense of vidya and avidya.  The real is the unconditioned while the unreal is the cosmic illusion (māyā).  The illusion is always conditioned.  It is something constructed, i.e., an appearance that attracts us to it; to become conscious of it and thereby become embodied and bound to it.

"Avidya has vanished, vidya arises.  Gone is the darkness, arisen is the light, as it does for one who dwells serious, ardent and composed in the self” (Itivuttaka 99).

The newly awakened Buddha doesn’t see a total absence of external things including his thoughts.  The illusion doesn’t vanish in other words.  As the reader might guess, light has arisen but not light as we know it but, instead, āloka, a spiritual, transcendent light beyond the conditioned world.  That is what is missing in the all-too-human natural experience.  It is what Siddhartha awakened to.  It alone is real, unchanging, and unconditioned.

Although we should seek the unconditioned, if our life is to have any meaning, we always try to grasp it with the conditioned, that is, with darkness.  We seem to forever fail at trying to become enlightened.  We are still under the power of the cosmic illusion going from one existence to another without stopping.

The narrative must be let go of, replaced by 'great doubt' (大疑)

Today, the narrative often precedes the reality it is supposed to represent.  The narrative, in other words, has superimposed itself over reality.  It is like the longitudinal and latitudinal lines on a map or on a world globe.  They are useful but not real.  Many things help to illustrate and solidify the narrative even ceremonies and rituals, or even a documentary about the big bang.  We seem to always fall for the deception.  

So where does true reality begin?  With a CNN news flash?  With unverified claims (opinions); with an event like 9-11?  But truth or true reality is almost always silent.  No narrative can pretend to speak for it.  No Zen teacher can hand it to us unmodified, the way it really is.  Even Zen master Dōgen used deception (the shisho document supposedly given to Dōgen by Rujing and now designated a national treasure by the Japanese government most certainly is a medieval forgery).

Still, we remain too easily persuaded by the narrative.  This can be more of a hindrance than a help.  We seem to have time for the narrative but not for the truth which is more difficult to attain.  It seems like you have to dig for the truth, which can be difficult, whereas the narrative is just handed to you.  You can learn all about Zen by reading books by Alan Watts — or can you?  But even Watts is skeptical of the "trickster guru" and may very well be such a person.  

In the matter of Zen, its own narrative prevents actual transcendence (kenshō) from manifesting itself and thus represents a dangerous form of idolatry.  In the study of Zen it conceals the most holy by claiming to practice it.  But how do you practice that which transcends all humanly efforts to reach it?  In other words, how do you practice hitting a target that neither you can see nor anyone else?  The narrative must be let go of, replaced by 'great doubt' (大疑).  This is a process of emptying-out not retaining.  Only then will clear light come which is the very substance of our ordinary thoughts.

 

Generating Bodhicitta

Our transformation from an ordinary human to a Bodhisattva involves two steps.  The first is the aspiration for enlightenment which seeks to generate (utpāda) bodhicitta (the enlightened mind) which is the pure, radiant spirit.  The first is bodhicitta only in its relative aspect. 

The second step is the generation of actual bodhicitta which is absolute bodhicitta.  The life of a Bodhisattva only commences with absolute bodhicitta.  This bodhicitta is like an embryo of the Buddha (buddhagarbha) growing towards full Buddhahood.

Interestingly, we find that when one first arouses (utpāda) bodhicitta, one already obtains complete and utter enlightenment.  This is according to the Avatamsaka Sutra.  Without the second step one is not a realized Bodhisattva. 

In today’s Dharma centers many Buddhists imagine they are a Bodhisattva; a kind and gentle, beneficent person who goes around doing good deeds for everyone; trying to save them.  Still, this is not what a Bodhisattva is.  First of all, a Bodhisattva has no human features.  According to the Śūraṅgamasamādhi Sūtra his body is hard, diamond-like, real, infallible and indestructible.  It does not contain either a belly, or stomach, or excrement, or urine, or bad odors or impurity.”

Few if any make it to the second step.  They are still very much attached to their carnal bodies, trying to reform them instead of transcend them.  They cannot understand that the body is unclean; that it is transient and unsubstantial; that it is the source of sinful passions.  According to the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, “this body is a combination of aggregates, elements, and sense-media, which are comparable to murderers, poisonous snakes, and an empty town, respectively.”

We imagine that our thoughts come from the body

With our materialistic mindset it is easy to imagine that our thoughts come from the body; that somehow, mysteriously, the body has managed to make all these thoughts.  We could even say our thoughts are electro-chemical reactions that emerge from neural processes which depend upon the body.  At this point, our understanding of how thought is formed before it emerges is not known.  We only have hypotheses. 

Also, what Zen’s no-thought (無念) really means finds no answer.  It certainly does not come from daily blocking our thoughts; trying to smother them.  Only when there is just pure spirit, that is, Mind-only, is one released from the powerful seduction of thoughts.  Here lies the Buddha’s liberation.

Most everyone who is interested in Zen equate it with seated meditation.  I imagine that if you suffer from a light case of “akathisia” which is characterized by a feeling of inner restlessness and the inability to sit still, seated meditation might be helpful.  Seated meditation tends to produce a general feeling of quietude. 

But what does it mean to have the noble insight of revulsion…having arrived at the door to the deathless?  This is not some relaxed state of being.  With the deathless as its final goal Buddhism understands the deathless to be also unconditioned.  But our thoughts are not other than conditioned.  Now we can begin to see what Zen is aiming at by “no-thought”.  No-thought goes beyond the mortality of our body which is conditioned.

But we moderns will have none of this mumbo-jumbo (postmortem survival).  When our body dies along with our thoughts which we believe are electro-chemical we believe there is nothing beyond—certainly no such state as no-thought.  But Bodhidharma once said: “No-thought is nothing other than practice; there is no other practice. Thus you'll realize that no-thought is everything, and that extinction of the conditioned (nirvana) is nothing other than no-thought.”

Against the Stream

Desire pertains to the conditioned world of samsara not the unconditioned absolute Siddhartha realized.  From the moment of our conception in our mother’s womb desire has taken hold of us, that is, a powerful passion for what is external to our true nature.  We are confused, immersed and enclosed by this antithesis which is prison-like.  In the end, even death will not save us. 

The synthesis between the innate ignorance of our true nature and the world of appearance neither this life nor the next life (after death) can overcome through the force of desire.  The direction itself is all wrong.  Nothing truly will be gained by taking it.  What is gained is an accumulation of delusions which leads to a false authority that can never amount to truth. 

On the other hand, going in the opposite direction of desire is the most difficult way of all.  It goes against our natural inclination to seek and grasp at the conditioned—an important and key part of Darwinian fitness.  The Buddha was right to say:  “The way which goes against the stream is a profound one, very difficult to see.  Those who are afflicted with passion will not see it; they are enveloped by a heavy darkness” (Catuṣpariṣat Sūtra).

We were born into heavy darkness by our desire for the conditioned. We cannot see it as dreamlike or māyā like a Buddha does.  The pain which comes with living in a human form seems very real making the illusion that much more intense and serious.  The way the Buddha has given us is very difficult.  For Buddhism is all about transcending the conditioned world which includes birth and death.

The Unborn Plenum of the Deathless

Looking at the world from the standpoint of the conditioned there is no real unconditioned or so one might imagine (an absolute unconditioned medium from which conditioned things arise).  This is further to imply, there is no evidence of the unconditioned in terms of the conditioned which might prove to those who are skeptical there, indeed, is the unconditioned.

From Zen’s perspective, the unconditioned can only be arrived at by the complete cessation of the conditioned this being thoughts which make up the conditioned microcosm (mano/manas), i.e., mentation.  The world of Zen is an antidote for overcoming the conditioned from a microcosmic perspective; having a sudden and profound glimpse of the unconditioned which is the essence of thought.

From this, the fundamental problem Zen faces which confronts each student is to wean them off off of using thought, almost exclusively, to gain access to Zen’s crown jewel.  Instead, they must leap beyond the conditioned to gain access to the unconditioned.  How this is accomplished for each individual depends on how much they identify with the conditioned, in this case their mental world.  They must accept the fact that Zen demands of us a special cognition free from appearance and beyond mentation.

But even this insistence can be easily misunderstood.  It is difficult to grasp that thoughts as concepts represent something standing in place of the actual.  Our thoughts about enlightenment actually hide it.  Even the time we spend trying to see what Siddhartha realized by many hours of seated meditation only serves to obfuscate and confuse our quest.

From the Buddha's Perspective

As a thought exercise think of water translucently clear that has the potential to recognize itself but so far cannot see anything distinctive of itself.  There is nothing there or so it would seem.  However, in a state of agitation it sees something.  But these wave forms it sees are different from itself.  In fact they act to hide the water’s translucently clear presence.  This is implying that wherein there is no distinction there can be no kind of knowledge.

But this further implies that there has to be a separation between the knower and the known; that if there is no such division there can be no knowledge.  But in Buddhism absolute knowledge is different.  Such knowledge consists in getting rid of the illusion of separation.  But how does one do this?

Sub specie aeternitatis, there is not the slightest difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned.  But if we cling to the conditioned which is illusory, failing to realize the unconditioned nature, we are lost.  Making matters worse, our intellect bound up with the imagination will always lead us astray such that we can only imagine the unconditioned believing we have realized it.  But the truth is we have failed to liberate our self even with metaphysics not to mention all of its captivating thought forms.

The core of Buddhism is about awakening to the fundamental essence of thought, thought being the smallest building block of the conditioned.  No amount of thinking or speculation will liberate us.  The Buddha’s awakening went beyond this.  We are not there yet.  Yes, we have the potential to become enlightened but we must still actualize that potential.

A Finger Pointing to the Moon

Teachers of traditional Zen redeploy words and concepts to point beyond themselves to true reality that ultimately transcends composition (samskrita), that is, composed everyday reality.  When the word or concept is suddenly canceled out by direct intuition what remains is true reality before it is formed or composed into thought.

With today’s Zen, its various meanings are expected to precede the uncomposed reality its words are supposed to represent.  This is the mess contemporary Zen faces.  It is under a fictional “narrative” which is supposed to be Zen’s truth or ultimate fact.  No longer does one have to search within for this reality beyond words and concepts.  It even goes as far as to suggest ‘just sitting’ is enlightenment.

This is a huge barrier to understanding Zen.  It is a distorted Zen because it either sticks with sitting and/or sinks into an imitation of Zen: to copy it by words and actions.  Neither way calls upon us to abandon, thoroughly, reliance on the world of thoughts; to intuit what they are actually composed of.
This is why Zen teaches no-thought (無念).  To come to the abode of no-thought is like seeing the unformed clay before it becomes a brick.  Suddenly, the invisible light or formless spirit is intuited.  With this the sixth sense is transcended including all that which comprises it.

Teachers of traditional Zen use the Buddhist Sutras and Zen words to bring us to a specific intuition.  Those who have to rely on words to transcend words cannot hope to attain the fruit of Zen.  In their ignorance they make Zen into a celebration of ignorance.  One modern Zen master said,  “Wisdom is to see that there is nothing to search for.”

The Spirit is Inconceivable but Knowable

The ideologists who dominate present day culture, whose knowledge is mainly derived from their sensations and feelings, are not at all concerned with what really exists much less the path of spirit.  They only seek to change what already exists such that it conforms with their feelings.  This means they suppress everything which might shake their ideology.  How far will their wishful fantasies take them?  We do not yet know.  Maybe this is new territory for humankind.

Although ideology shouldn’t be in Buddhism, it is not immune to it.  We see it in the aesthetically portrayed world of Zen which is sensuous knowledge whose goal is the beautiful experience which could be characterized as reaching a pure aesthetic moment without traces of agitation, trouble, tension, or instability.  But Zen is not entirely aesthetical so much as it is a path of inner purification and solitude where spirit is one day met with which transcends all concepts.

The outer practice of seated meditation which serves to buttress Zen aesthetically is only intended to reduce the body’s influence over the mind so that mind or thought can be stilled and stress reduced.  But Zen doesn’t end here.  This is not its goal.  One still has to reach the core or foundation of thought which is transcendent and unthinkable (無念) this being absolute spirit from which thought is composed (saṃskṛta).

The real world of Zen is not within the grasp of today’s culture with the exception that it has been altered for ideological consumption, that is, realized as the aesthetic moment of pure feeling, this being the emptying out of anxiety which is quiet sitting (宴坐).