The Zennist

A different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotions

According to Buddhism, our consciousness (vijñāna) is deeply engaged with the flesh where, as a result, we have become emotionalized (for want of a better term) suffering under the precarious conditions of the body together with its unfulfilled drives. 

This suffering that we sense in the body which we have identified with becomes, automatically, an emotionalized burden for us.  And we have become the bearer of this emotionalized burden.  With a little bit of self-reflection we know what it means to bear this burden.  Moments of frustration, anger, passion, resentment, etc., arise from this burden.  We want to pin the blame on somebody else or some other kind of misfortune that has befallen us.  But for the recluse it is a different picture.

At some point the recluse understands that consciousness free of the body is a different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotional travails of the body. 

“Where consciousness is unmanifest, eternal, luminous all around, that's where earth, water, fire, and air does not exist.  Here long and short, fine and coarse, beautiful and ugly, name and form, cease with nothing remaining.  With the transcendence of [manifest] consciousness this is all ended” (DN 11).

This unmanifest consciousness, however, even for the recluse remains as yet unrealized (a Buddha has realized it).  In fact, manifest consciousness is always polarizing.  This condition makes the intuition of unmanifest consciousness that much more difficult because of the subtlety of this polarizing process.  We keep deceiving ourselves at ever finer levels.       

The Power of Intuition

Truth is never realized when it is always a product of our imagination including our linguistic imagination (the intellect).  Direct intuition of the truth (kenshō) is more important than an intellectual grasp which comes through the imagination.  We could even say that direct intuition bypasses our intellectual imagination and its attempt to reify what is only imaginal.  

Zen (dhyāna) is only a path to direct intuition.  While it includes all the literature found in Buddhism it fundamentally understands that Siddhartha's revelation can only be achieved by intuition, a sudden direct seeing of the absolute, which certainly surpasses the imagination and all that comes from it.

Scarcely is the subject of intuition taken up in today's Zen Center and very seldom written about in the academic literature if at all.  This fact suggests that intuition is being ignored as the royal road to enlightenment having been replaced by just sitting which becomes more of a therapy for relaxing the body, somewhat like a massage.  Does such a practice reveal our true nature or the same our Buddha nature?       

The mystical tradition is also ancient in origin.  The oral teachings recorded in the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, and similar records go back thousands of years and provide evidence that mystical teachers of widely different cultures say remarkably similar things.  Also concerned with human suffering, they propose that human beings are ignorant of their true nature and that ignorance leads to the lives of pain and futility.  The sages describe a Way that leads to a higher level of existence, one infinitely more desirable than the level on which most people conduct their lives.  The mystical tradition does not offer therapy in the usual sense of the word, but achieving the goal of mysticism — experiencing the Real Self — is said to cure human suffering because its very basis is thereby removed (Dr. Arthur Deikman, The Observing Self, p. 3 ).

 Intuition is the mystical tradition and the mystical tradition is intuition. The problem we face is how to keep ourselves open to intuition and not close it off by overuse of intellect.  There is no reason to believe that Siddhartha found a way other than by direct intuition.  Such intuition is independent of just sitting or any physical effort for that matter. 

Existential Angst Arises From Embodiment

Suffering (duhkha) in Buddhism is not so much about pain, itself, as it is about an underlying sense of foreboding.  A few examples include worrying about one's death or worrying that one may have a fatal illness, or that one may die in combat.  Suffering casts a foreboding shadow over our entire life; there is no escaping it as we grow older.   

This foreboding is only related to the corporeal body (rūpa).  Under the spell of ignorance each individual identifies mainly with their corporeal body.  They know of no higher state of being which transcends the corporeal body. They only know how to follow the fate of the corporeal body.  They cannot understand words like these:

“This body is inert, like the earth; selfless, like water; lifeless, like fire; impersonal, like the wind; and non-substantial, like space. This body is unreal, being a collocation of the four main elements. It is void, not existing as self or as self-possessed. It is inanimate, being like grass, trees, walls, clods of earth, and hallucinations. It is insensate, being driven like a windmill. It is filthy, being an agglomeration of pus and excrement. It is false, being fated to be broken and destroyed, in spite of being anointed and massaged” (Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra).

In contrast with this negative view of our corporeal body we have more or less set our sights on finding pleasures for this body of ours.  Those who study Buddhism expect to learn how to have bodily happiness or at least make it through life without much suffering.  But being dependent upon our corporeal body makes us always subject to a feeling of forebodingness.   

Our culture is not all that open to a conversation about postmortem survival.  We tend to rely more on the interpersonal than the intrapersonal where we look within to see what is immortal or finite within us.  Siddhartha's revelation came intrapersonally:  we are fundamentally a transcendent, spiritual body that is free of suffering unlike our corporeal body. 

Two Sides of the Same Coin

The transcendent unseparatedness between subject and object or, the same, observer and observed is neither addressed nor realized in the forum of public thought.  It is only theorized at best by academics.  Few intuit this transcendent unseparatedness, directly, except to imagine it.

Is there another name for this transcendent unseparatedness between subject and object?  In Buddhism it is called the light, or the clear light, or the radiant light, or luminosity and many other names.  Zen master Danxia丹霞 said: “This abundant light, wherever you are, in every situation, is itself the great way.”  In the older canon we run across it in the Itivuttaka and elsewhere.

Light-bringers, dhamma-speakers, open the door off the deathless, set free the many folk from bondage.

It should go without saying that this light is absent in our world.  Yes, we can imagine it but this is not the same as the light the Buddhas talks about whereby the dualizing nature of sensory consciousness (vijñāna) is overcome.  

The hard reality of our dualistic world is maintained by the seeming difference between subject and object.  This difference can either be great or small but still a difference exists or seems too.  From this division or gap grows fear and mistrust, even alienation and a host of other negative things. 

Social Justice and Zen

Today, the typical materialist denies that there are any innate ideas, self-knowledge or intuitional knowledge.  All these terms are pointing beyond the spatiotemporal world which is the only world the materialist believes in.  

On the other hand, Zen wants to take us beyond the spatiotemporal world to ultimate reality or absolute spirit where the discordant asymmetry of the mind (vijñāna: knowing in two parts) is overcome.  

This is a return to the original one before mind split into two parts, subject and object (vijñāna).  All differences are transcended.  In the embrace of this clear light all resentment or claim of requital also disappears.  There is neither the need for justice nor injustice.  In a single flash of this clear light conditioning and spiritual blindness have been suddenly erased.

This return however does not depend upon the written word or concepts created through words which arise in our imagination.  The second slogan of Zen says, “[Zen does] not depend on written words.”  Making matters worse, we live in an ideological age where the triumph of the words over reality has taken place.  In this age, special terms are saturated with feelings or emotion, for example, the word racism.  

Now the word enlightenment signifies how we feel.  Aren't we all Buddhas deep down?  Nirvana has long ceased being an attainable but transcendent reality.  The word has triumphed backed by how intensely each of us feels about the word.  We are lost. 

Awakening to the Unborn

It is much easier to alter history than it is to alter the works of Plato or the Buddha although, in the example of Buddhism, the interpretation of what the Buddha meant or was trying to teach can be altered.  

What we know as the history of World War II can radically change based on newly discovered documents.  This is unlikely to happen with Buddhism.  Also, it would be wrong on our part to believe that Buddhist scholars know what the Buddha taught.  Some I am sure have it more right than others.  

In our search for authentic Buddhism we are always looking for an easy path to the summit of Buddhism:  a path, more or less, based on our own preconceptions and values which can be quite shallow.  In fact, we never reach the summit or get to the dangerous ice that guards the summit.  We are still in base camp getting ready to climb.

 

Every generation has their problems which make reaching the summit of Buddhism next to impossible.  But still it can be done despite all the difficulties each generation faces.  We have to understand that the path is for the purpose of intuiting the absolute.  It is not a way like haṭha yoga, trying to make the body supple by force.  

To rightly grasp what intuition is about is to understand what Zen is about.  It doesn’t mean we are awakened just that we know where our spiritual efforts are to be directed

We are supposed to transcend this spatiotemporal body since it is not a true refuge.  If we succeed we, suddenly, intuit the primary essence of everything even our thoughts.  That is the refuge.  It is our guide too.  It is the real Buddha. 

 

 

 

 

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The Key to Infinite Consciousness

There is a tension between the subjective standpoint and the objective standpoint.  A kind of unceasing asymmetry yet still an unseparatedness between subject and object.  Buddhists know this as empirical consciousness or in Sanskrit vijñāna meaning, literally, in two parts knowing.  It is also spacetime where space represents the objective standpoint and time the subjective standpoint.  

Here also does our consciousness go from one birth and death to another birth and death, endlessly.  Without our empirical consciousness there is no rebirth.  But how do we put an end to this empirical consciousness?

It appears in Buddhism that consciousness can also reach a state of symmetry where subject and object perfectly converge (ekatva); where there is neither subject nor object but, instead, Mind or spirit is revealed which I hasten to add is non-spatiotemporal.  This appears to be “consciousness (viññāṇaṃ) [that] is non-manifesting, infinite and luminous.”  And “With the transcendence (nirodhena) of [empirical] consciousness that’s where this ends” (DN 11).

This transcendence is a sudden overcoming of asymmetry inherent in our every day consciousness.  Now consciousness is non-manifesting, infinite, and luminous.  Subject and object are indistinguishable.  Our many attempts at seated meditation (zazen) has only been an attempt to reach symmetry by use of our our will but it ultimately fails.  Intuition opens the door. 

The Right Attitude for Awakening

Siddhartha discovered within himself, intuitively, the mysterious origin or source from which to raise himself above his own finite self (asmimāna) together with its corresponding temporal world.  

Siddhartha’s transcendent perspective sees that order does inhere in the seeming randomness and chaos of the temporal world and its psychophysical man.  But to reach this vision certainly requires faith in transcendence.  One must go beyond or outside of what is perceived or presented in one’s sensory experience.

Accepting the world as it is does not carry with it the need to have faith in its eventual transcendence.  This is Dōgen’s Sōtō school of Zen which believes that just sitting in meditation accomplishes the natural unfolding of one's a Buddha nature.  Intuition (dhyāna)) does not play any significant role.  

Yet so much of Zen bears witness to a sudden awakening (頓悟) by means of intuition.  Without realizing the primordial essence of one's thoughts, memorizing countless passages of Zen passages is useless.  Study never gets beyond thinking about Zen, that is, the generation of thoughts about Zen.  

Ordinary beings only experience thoughts which are impure; which make up the deluded mind as their normal state.  On the other hand, the luminous essence of one's thoughts is a state in which the adept’s true nature transcends conditions or samskrita and the suffering associated with conditions. This is the enlightened state of a Buddha. 

Surviving the End Times Unperturbed

Important in the Judeo-Christian belief is the understanding of history as, implicitly, salvation history which falls within the sphere of eschatology (i.e., concern with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind).  

This eschatology alludes to the eventual salvation of the flesh—the carnal man.  There is no transcendence of the temporal here:  seeing beyond samsara which is the repeated birth and death cycles that are always conditioned.

When Marx wrote, “The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world.”  Marx couldn't help but see that truth is always this worldly.  What lies beyond us cannot be our world.  Maybe one day the flesh can be genetically modified into an undying flesh by science!  

Marx’s words, I must say, are not lost on any generation in the first stages of physiological adulthood.  None today really believe the words of the Buddha who taught that “rejecting the other world (paraloko), there is no evil that could not be done.”

This naive rejection leads, inevitably, to activism or at least a call for activism that first falls on immature ears.  This can only be accomplished by indoctrination which transforms nascent sensations and feelings into a political perspective that can be scaled up at some future point into rebelliousness.  

But salvation never comes.  Eschatology does not include the fleshy man who is always mired in the senses.  He must be transcended.  This includes even his thoughts which are the biggest problem Zen faces.  The transcending attitude is difficult to inculcate in the student’s mind.  Yet, while seemingly impossible it can be accomplished.  This is what Zen’s history teaches us. 

The Folly of Saccaka the Jain

Throughout his teachings the Buddha said that we must not regard as our self or atman that which is not our self (anātman).  To do so is a case of misidentification.  It is only by ignorance that we misidentify what is not our self with our our self in the example of Saccaka. Saccaka believed:  “Form is my self, feeling is my self, perception is my self, choices are my self, consciousness is my self” (rūpaṃ me attā, vedanā me attā, saññā me attā, saṅkhārā me attā, viññāṇaṃ me attā).

Yet modern day Buddhists attribute the denial of self to the Buddha when it is really a nihilist proposition.  There is not a single statement made by the Buddha where he says, categorically, there is no self (in Pali, natthattā).  The problem is misidentification not denial.  

Just like Saccaka we think of our earthly, human body that we were born with as being our self.  To this the Buddha said that physical form 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.  This holds true for feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.

But we moderns go one step farther, we also believe that our personal mind is somehow the product of our anatomical parts so that when our body dies so do we.  There is no postmortem survival, in other words.  We became interested in Buddhism because we believed that the Buddha taught there is no self or postmortem survival.  In this we are completely wrong.  Again, the problem is misidentification not denial.

Who we truly are is more fundamental than this body could ever be which, in our ignorance, we cling to like a drowning person grabbing at water.  But our human body is no refuge and neither is its death.  As long as we fail to see our unconditioned true nature rebirth in samsara is certain.