The Zennist

The wave is not the water?

Unexpectedly you wake up in the morning before the alarm goes off.  You stare at the ceiling and realize that you will one day die.  So what do you do?  Go back to sleep or lie awake worrying about it?  Unfortunately, neither dreamland nor worry can̍t solve the problem, it goes much deeper. 

That evening after work you manage to find some degree of solace by going on the Internet.  You take comfort in the fact that many like you share the same problem.

Eventually your life of small, accumulated pleasures and sensual excitement begins to turn into anger and becomes more frustrating.  One day you happen to be in Moe’s Bookstore and have to go to the restroom.  While sitting there you read on the wall, the wave is not the water.  It doesn't make any sense to you but still you can't get it out of your mind.

Much of the greater story of Buddhism has to do with overcoming the allure of an imaginal world observing it with a mind under the domination of imagination.  Buddhism really consists of intuiting reality the way it really is before it becomes imagined.  No imaginary construct will suffice from the simplest thought to an elaborate and vivid world of great beauty.

How does this connect with the wave is not the water?  It is the same as, the ring or bracelet is not gold and the brick is not clay.  On the same score, your thoughts are in no way the pure Mind or absolute spirit which Siddhartha awaken to.  Still having a problem?

So what is the problem?  Buddhism says it's consciousness or in Sanskrit vijñāna, literally, in two parts knowing.  This is more at the division of the one (spirit) or the splitting of the one in which appearance is born which, nevertheless, remains intrinsically empty (śūnyatā).

Abiding in the world of appearance or the same, conditionality, we cannot reify any of this.  It always remains empty.  To do so is a fool’s errand.  The intention of Buddhism is to break us of this habit.  Nevertheless, Buddhism has its fools who then want to say that emptiness itself is the absolute just as Judaism and Christianity have their fools who try to imagine the divine through the flesh.

The stone age (1960s)

The point at which our imagination is free to roam is when it is stoned (being under the influence of a drug). Back in those days (the 60s) we shared a collective stoneness.  It transported us to the altar of the diamonic.  We chose sex and eros.  This was eventually followed by anger and rage—you could even say a desire for power (control). 

This was not the end of our journey.  Without really knowing it we have entered a hell.

There is one more lesson we must learn which we haven't learned yet.  You cannot attach and then let go — you must learn to transcend.  This is what the Buddha really taught us.  When Siddhartha began his quest for enlightenment it was to put an end to suffering but also the disturbed mind which allowed itself to get entangled in illusion.

But transcendence is not so easy, one must first intuit the transcendent.  The idea of a worldly, conditioned refuge is absurd.  Only the transcendent is the refuge. 

When the transcendent is intuited then one can begin the Bodhisattva’s path of transcendence.  The Bodhisattva can distinguish the atman from what is not the atman (anātman).  (Anātman can mean what is not spiritual, that is, something different from spirit like the corporeal which is not transcendent.)  In light of this but his words ring clear:  “Abandon desire for whatever is anātman” (SN 22:68).

But to speak frankly, Buddhists today whether in Asia or the West fail to understand this simple message.  The Buddha is asking us to abandon the unreal, what is not spiritual, the false, appearances, etc.

Our inability to distinguish the conditioned from the unconditioned

Desire begins with our inability to distinguish the conditioned from the unconditioned which is the state of avidyā (P., avijjā)—a kind of unwisdom.  With desire one is in an unbroken continuous state of being attracted to avidyā.  This is also the repeated cycles of birth and death or samsara which hasn't been broken by enlightenment, that is, seeing the unconditioned.

But there is more.  Both birth and death occur within the conditioned world (they are not unconditioned).  Even death cannot escape it.  From death we reenter the conditioned world.  It might even be a beautiful imaginary world with its gods, or a hell, or rebirth into another womb. 

Interestingly, today's nihilist after they die will just return to the womb.  (I am sure many nihilists will object to this.)  But this is what their strong belief in nihilism is all about, this being a return to the womb-like condition of avidyā. 

The point to be made is that we do not escape the conditioned world.  Birth and death are always within it even the worlds of the gods.  Like all things conditioned they are fundamentally imaginary but, nevertheless, more real than even our world.

The breakout from the conditioned is what the Buddhist journey is all about.  It is a difficult journey in the sense that to arrive at the unconditioned is to have given up all expectations and assumptions as to what the unconditioned is.  (Over the years I have encountered people who tell me they did just that but they never became enlightened!  Obviously they had some hidden expectations that they were not yet aware of.)

Transcending the world of thought

The human world with its unconscious dependence on mental images can easily lead to the worship of the ‘golden calf’ of thought—a worship that is almost unconscious.  The world of Zen, however, transcends the world of thought.  It is about pure spirit, spirit before it is cast into form, or before thought.

Especially, in the work of solving kōans, those unusual mysteries of Zen, kōans are inscrutable short of direct intuition of the absolute.  Try as the typical modern does by reading a book or two on kōans, no entry is gained in the mystery Zen hides.

The modern person is still trapped within the box of thought and with it all forms of semiotics.  One cannot think out of the box — one must first transcend the box and directly behold the truth face to face.  Then thinking can resume even the generation of thought.  But now, the awakened adept knows the true self.

What has one learned?  With the overreliance on thought there's always a dead end so that one is unable to leave the world of illusion by taking up thought.

Hope and a great miracle but no intuition

History is a kind of biased hindsight that can be used for a variety of purposes from a warning about our likely future to criticism of the present, or help make possible a utopia.  History is also so much dross with very little gold if any.  History can be very persuasive with its collection of selected facts, hearsay, and documents.  But when we find the gold we toss the dross away.  But sometimes not knowing what gold is we toss away the gold and keep the dross. 

In religion we have done this, I suspect, many times.  We have kept the words but not the spirit.  It gets tossed out first.  Too soon our teachers become, at best, well intentioned charlatans who are far away from wisdom and not even close to awakening to their true nature.  The end of religion comes when the blind lead the blind.

In a world that is still infatuated with materialism the intrinsic worth of religion is not well appreciated, in fact, it is for the most part rejected.  Unfortunately, the modern mind does not see much value in intuition which is at the heart of Buddhism and Indian religions like Vedanta.  (Only through intuition is transcendence possible; short of this one stays within the confines of the great illusion, that is, samsara.)

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are still very much dependent on history.  At the same time, their followers are open to the miraculous which only serves to suppress intuition which transcends the imagination.  What is left is only hope in the great miracle to come which never comes.

Overcoming desire

The notion of desire is difficult to put in to meaningful words.  It can only be understood in a kind of haphazard way.  In Buddhism it is a mistake to understand desire as anything more than a preference for the conditioned.  One ,for example, cannot desire enlightenment because enlightenment is unconditioned.  It is beyond all expectations.

Overcoming desire by the sheer force of will is next to impossible. The very human body is constructed for the purpose of desire and to consummate that desire through procreation.  But from a Buddhist perspective desire can be transcended.  But this radically entails awakening to what is beyond desire, this being nirvana, or the same, the absolute which is unconditioned.

To pause and think about this, desire cannot be stopped except through transcendence.  The path of transcendence is to be found in Buddhism.  Here one must first awaken to their true nature or essence which transcends all conditionality (enlightenment is beyond all expectations, all things human, and conditioned).

None of this is meant to suggest that resisting desire or going along with desire are the same as transcendence.  We can only transcend desire when we see through it.  And what makes us able to see through it is the fact that we see, directly, the unconditioned which is desireless.

Those who have been taking the path of Zen (dhyāna) for a long time come to realize that the path is one of learning to let go of expectations about what the unconditioned is.  The adept goes to the end of their wits.  A desirelessness overtakes them.  But woe unto those who have put all of Zen's path into their imagination.  They will never come to illumination.

A paradoxical path

The words of the Buddha are not sufficiently explanatory to bring one to enlightenment (nirvana).  The reason for this is easy.  It is because enlightenment goes beyond language and, for that matter, human thought.  It is truly unthinkable and inconceivable.

In one sense enlightenment exists for humans but in another it does not exist in the way it humanly appears when, through 'subject-object dualizing’, it seemingly appears yet remains nevertheless empty of true reality when at the same time true reality transcends it.

Is this extremely difficult to wrap our heads around?  Yes it is, because the simple fact of language is that it can, for example, describe a mountain but it cannot bring us to its summit.  The Buddha, for that matter, is more like a mountaineer than a scholar who reads and studies many books.

What is called the Buddha’s path is the path of summiting where we, all at once, converge with the unthinkable and the inconceivable.  It needs to be said that with this convergence there begins also the work of transcendence which is the bodhisattva’s path, that is, undoing what our desires have acquired and sought refuge in—saving our sentiency from future rebirth.

Zen’s intrapersonal path can be very difficult

Depending on where you live in these troubled times you might need a certificate of vaccination ID which some have called COVID.  However, with Zen, a paper certification of enlightenment is not required.

What is required is kenshō which means direct insight into our true nature.  It is a special kind of intuition.  I hasten to add that much of the literature of Zen, which includes koans, makes it almost impossible to understand Zen without kenshō.

Still, all of us believe in the beginning that a study of Zen's literature will take us to kenshō.  But how does Zen dissuade such people?  The short answer is it doesn’t.  Such people have to find out the hard way. 

There is no easy path to Zen because the person on its path is usually a wily and deceptive creature!  Much of Zen is designed to thwart their ambitions (in old China Chan/Zen was very popular, it was the literati who claimed to understand Chan).

Today, a typical Zen Center is more like a gathering of victims and other dysfunctional types—a tad short of Marx’s lumpenproletariat.  They attend because it is the appearance of Zen that attracts them; not the reality of Zen which demands a deep journey into one's psyche.

If one is lucky, more and more they will find that Zen’s intrapersonal path can be very difficult to stay on.  To resurrect our lost intuition, which is what Zen is really about, as far as training goes it aims to rid us of our dependency on letters and words going to the very heart of Zen.  Here spirit transcends letters and words.  Giving up his dependency is no easy task, few accomplish it.

Falling into the imagination and with it the flesh

The Bible is not one book but a compilation of many books so that trying to find the red thread of Christianity is next to impossible.  Buddhism has not lost its red thread.  It's still very much alive and well.  But finding this red thread involves intuition and not one's mastery over words. 

What Siddhartha awakened to can only be found by direct intuition (Zen = dhyāna). It transcends words and the six senses; all conditioned things including even thought.  Still, it serves as the basis of all his discourses: they invariably hinge on that intuition.

Unfortunately, our secular age depends upon the flesh or in Buddhist terms, leading a conditioned life which guarantees continuation in samsara.  Most of us are aware of how the modern mind prioritizes things. Its first duty is to having a good time, followed by sex, then marriage and finally the baby!  Dharma is last.

With Christians it is about the same. God and prayer are there to get them out of jams due to their love of the flesh.  They hope to be constantly forgiven having yielded to the temptations of flesh.

Those who believe in the afterlife will only return to a world of imagination, the sixth sense.  While those who believe in absolute death or annihilation will go back to the womb from whence they came.  But Siddhartha taught us the transcendent which is the true antidote to desire by which we fall into the imagination and with it the flesh.

The conditioned is suffering not the unconditioned

I have no problem with a simplified view of Buddhism but let's be honest it's not Buddhism but it's rather a simplified version of something like Buddhism. 

Let us look at the first Noble truth from the teaching itself.  "And what, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering?  It should be said: the five aggregates subject to clinging.... This is called the noble truth of suffering" (S.v.425). 

Breaking this down for the modern mind what is suffering is invariably all of conditioned existence.  Our attachment or clinging to conditioned existence which includes this corporeal body is the cause of suffering.  This is the Noble truth of the cause of suffering. 

Stopping clinging or attachment to the conditioned is the cessation of suffering.  The eightfold path that leads to the gnosis of the unconditioned (nirvana) is this stopping of suffering.  In the Pali Nikāyas, the only thing explicitly said to be unconditioned is nirvana. All other things, mental and material, are conditioned. 

In the Nirvana Sutra it says, "If the Buddha-Nature is seen, there will be no seeing of a [Buddha] nature in anything."  In other words, if one is caught up in conditioned phenomena one will not be able to see their Buddha-nature.

From here we can say that real Zen training involves learning to differentiate the conditioned from the unconditioned and then break our addiction to the conditioned which is no easy matter.