The Zennist

Escapism can be good

Sometime in our life, hopefully sooner than later, we get the impression that we are gradually having to adapt to life in a well disguised madhouse, this being modern culture that is made to look like a funhouse.  At some point the funhouse is not fun anymore.  Personally, we find ourself doing the same things over and over again so that each time we do them, the fun becomes less.

At some time down the road it may dawn on us that it’s time to escape from our culture.  It is starting to look more like a madhouse than a funhouse.  In this madhouse, most people are too far gone to recognize what has happened to them or to do anything about it even if they did recognize what was happening. 

At some point, we conclude, and rightly so, it’s time to maybe think about escaping, to get as far away from the madhouse and the crazy people who inhabit it.  This maybe is the time when we read books about Zen and the life of various Zen masters.  But then we wonder if this is not another form of escapism.  But is escapism all that bad?

So what is escapism?  As simple as it gets, the idea of escape, from a Buddhist point of view, means to avoid future or imminent pain or misfortune.  For example, if you see a flashing warning sign as you drive warning you to take the detour on the right side of the road, this can be thought of as a timely warning, helping you to avoid an accident.  The detour on the right side of the road is the escape.   

We live in a world with many kinds of warning signs, not all flashing but warning us nevertheless.  There are many things we should avoid lest we bring harm to ourselves or to others in the near future or many years down the road of life.  In this regard, a sane culture should be escapist.  People should try, as much as possible, to avoid future suffering.  Here are a few examples.  Don’t drop out of school.  We’d better leave now a storm is brewing.  Cigarettes can be hazardous to your health.  Avoid unprotected sex.  Get your teeth checked and cleaned.  Don’t travel to this country there is a civil war going on.  Don’t drink the water.  There are many more examples.

There is nothing wrong with a Buddhist kind of escapism of becoming a monk or a nun for a few years so as to better know your self.  Far worse is to become a solid member of the funhouse that is actually a madhouse whereby we throw caution to the wind living the life of a cultural zombie or profligate.  Such a way of living does not bode well for our karma or our next life. 

The conceit of I am

I read somewhere that the narcissist is someone who has lost their sense of self in which this loss is filled by a false self.  This reminds me of Hollywood types who spend great sums of money trying to keep their false self from suffering any injury such as aging.  The false self also has an ego who makes sure the false self is well taken care of.  Keep in mind that Freud’s ego stands for reason and circumspection.  It’s not to be confused with the “id” which it often is.

As we can see, there is no hope for the false self or even the ego who takes care of the false self—its servant.  The sense of self (our true self) is hidden under a mountain of obstructions as if it were non-existent.  The future for this kind of narcissist is not good insofar as what they are trying to maintain is a complete fiction while at the same time need fans, that is, people who look up to them being almost codependent.

In Buddhism, the narcissist is tied to the conceit of I am (asmimāna) this being the psychophysical aggregates made up of corporeality, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.  In the Majjhima-Nikaya we read:

“As they do so, they give up the conceit ‘I am’ (asmimāno) regarding the five grasping aggregates. In that case, they understand: ‘I have given up the conceit “I am” regarding the five grasping aggregates.’ In this way they are aware of the situation.” (M. iii. 115).

What leads to this powerful conceit and wrong identification?  It is attachment to what is false and illusory out of ignorance (avidya).  Since our birth, we have been deceived by appearances, especially, by the very body that we presently inhabit which we believe to be ours (in Near Death Experiences [NDEs] people leave the corporeal body.  They notice no difference except the lack of a dense corporeal body which they might see on the floor or on a surgical table.  They feel quite normal, in fact.  Some don’t even know that they’ve died).

Normal, everyday narcissism is really more about wearing a persona, a socially constructed “mask” through which one interacts with others.  The sense of self is not lost.  In fact, an individual may seek out a religious path such a Buddhism believing that the self or Buddha-nature is greater than the sum of the mask and its temporal life.  This person is not a narcissist like our Hollywood actors where the mask is far more elaborate and the sense of an authentic self is almost lost.

It is with the building up of the mask and the subsequent loss of the sense of self that nihilism comes to be and much, also, that is deceptive and immoral due to a lack of empathy.  By another name, this is malignant narcissism.  Such individuals have been participating in a long process of destroying the higher self (nātha) by living only for the mask and its benefits.  For what it means to be human is to be in Nietzsche’s words , “a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.”  The malignant narcissist rejects the overman for the life of the beast.

The usurpers of traditional Zen

Just recently I have been reading Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and His Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world.  It is a captivating book for the reason that it hints at what could possibly be the problem with our inability to understand where the Zen koan and much of Zen is coming from.  I include kenshō which is certainly a mystical realization closer to the notion of intuition.  As for the author’s thesis, who is a psychiatrist, he writes:

“My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain.  It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture” (p. 3).

For many years (too many to remember!) I have suspected that both Buddhism and, in particular, Zen have been hijacked by people who lack the spiritual intelligence necessary to understand Buddhism and  Zen. 

By reading McGilchrist’s book my suspicions had at last found some scientific basis.  While it is true that we are bihemispheric it is not true that both the left and right hemisphere are in constant harmony.  If anything, Western culture favors the left hemisphere of the brain rather than the right.  This lateralizing to the left hemisphere is not without its problems for both Buddhism and Zen.  In fact, I would argue that having a strong bias for the left hemisphere makes it next to impossible to understand where Buddhism and Zen are coming from.  This bias towards the left also invites countless heated arguments (and much hatred, hatred being an emotion of the left hemisphere). 

The title of the book really boils down to a special kind of coup.  The master who represents the right hemisphere is going to be eventually betrayed by the emissary who represents the left hemisphere.  McGilchrist observes:

“He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on his master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own — the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins” (p. 14).

This book proves to be a treasure trove for me as I examine the left and the right hemispheres.  The left has little or no regard for the right hemisphere which is certainly mystical and intuitive; who also has the vision and leads the way.  The left hemisphere sees,

“the workings of the right hemisphere as purely incompatible, antagonistic, as a threat to its dominion — the emissary perceiving the Master to be a tyrant. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the left hemisphere can support only a mechanistic view of the world. . .” (p. 206).

The left hemisphere is tied to and limited by language.  It can’t see the big picture.  While it has focused attention, it prefers to examine bits and pieces so that it has a problem with context.  The right hemisphere, on the other hand, sees the forest for the trees including context whereas the left deconstructs.  The left hemisphere breaks the context down into parts then it reconstructs the parts into something different from the original.

“It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language, of which more later. This is why the left hemisphere is not good at understanding the higher level meaning of utterances such as ‘it’s a bit hot in here today’ (while the right hemisphere understands ‘please open the window’,  the left hemisphere assumes that is just helpful supply of meteorological data)” (p. 49).

In both Buddhism and Zen those who lean to the left hemisphere have little or no idea of the real context, much less how to realize their Buddha-nature.  They are constantly trying to dislodge the teaching from its original context and re-present it in a way they want it to be; that fits with the modern left hemisphere education.

A sense of self in Buddhism

The sense of others which evokes empathy and altruism in us depends upon our sense of self as if to think, “This  person is just like me.”  Somewhat related, the infant’s social development takes place independently of language development.  This social development is the development of a sense of self when, for example, the infant plays with their parents or siblings or some other person.

So, is a sense of self important in Buddhism?  Yes it is.  There would be no compassion without a sense of self in which the other of us (this person over there) is empathized with.  This takes me to an argument that I often make. 

The Buddha never denied the self or even the sense of self.  He was mainly concerned with misidentification.  What do I mean by this?  He was concerned that we mistake as our self something that is not our self, this being the five skandhas or in Pali, the five khandhas, namely, corporeality, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness, which are illusory.  Let me say it again.  The Buddha didn’t want us to identify with the corporeal body as being our true self.  Why? Because it is impermanent.  Why would our self or sense of self be something that is so fragile being always subject to change, sickness and destruction?  The same goes with the rest of the skandhas.

The world of compassion can only arise from our own sense of self in which we see others to be like us evoking our empathy.  At a deeper level, the Buddha’s compassion is directed to the higher self which we cannot yet see, which transcends birth and death, but more importantly, transcends the skandhas which ordinary beings mistake to be their primary self.

The Buddha knows that our higher self has to be saved.  It is mixed up with the false self that is associated with the skandhas.  The Buddha wants us to abandon our identification with this false self.  Only then will the true self be recognized which is the Buddha, i.e., the awakened self whose compassion extends to all, teaching the higher self which in Pali and Sanskrit is nātha meaning the protector or lord.  This term comes from the Dhammapada.

"The self is protector [nātha] of the self—who else might be the protector? With the self well subdued a man finds a protector who is difficult to obtain" (160).

Stuck in the house of mirrors: a world gone dark

I found myself this morning humming a Beatles’ song, “Eleanor Rigby” trying to recall the lyrics. For me is like stepping into a time machine.  This period in my life was before I set off on my enlightenment quest to eventually sit in meditation in an abounded copper mine searching for pure Mind, which at the time I believed was possible to attain.

This is only a guess on my part based on what I have seen on social media and elsewhere, but this age has gone dark.  It seems to have lost or sold its soul having exchanged it for a maze-like house of mirrors in which images of the false self dominate but not a single image in this house is who any of us really is.

These images are, in fact, obstacles which make up the house of mirrors not unlike the one found in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin movie, The Circus, when Chaplin is chased into the ‘Mirror Maze’ by a thief then a policeman.

Looking at our self in a mirror is the first loss of one’s path to the authentic self which, by the way, is imageless.  Next, add to this the house of mirrors where now our image can be stored electronically—a fixed mirror at a particular time.  I am the young teenager. I am now the aspiring college student. Now I am married.  Here is our first child.  So many images and not one is our true self.  But who is the real self?

This reminds me somewhat of Mumon’s comment to the koan, Zuigan Calls His Own Master.

Old Zuigan sells out and buys himself. He is opening a puppet show. He uses one mask to call "Master" and another that answers the master. Another mask says "Sober up" and another, "Do not be cheated by others." If anyone clings to any of his masks, he is mistaken, yet if he imitates Zuigan, he will make himself fox-like.

Mumon could also be saying, “If anyone clings to any of these images, he is mistaken.”  There is, of course, a right answer to this koan.  It is eternal and invariant and most certainly unconditioned.  But it never appears the way an image does in the example of this corporeal body from birth to old-age and death.  Fa-Yung  Niutou Farong (594-657) said: 

“The Ultimate Essence of things is what is most important. But in the realm of illusion it becomes different from what it is. The nature of Reality is invisible and cannot be understood by our conscious mind.”

Zen is a barrier—only pure Mind can pass

At sometime in our brief life, in our study of Zen, we have to pass through the world of the conditioned to apprehend the transcendent (the unconditioned).  Metaphorically, in Zen it is like a gate or a checkpoint that acts as a barrier.  It will not permit us to go through to the other side which is unconditioned called the “no-gate”.

In Zen we come to face this gate with a special word of phrase like “Mu” or “One has it, the other hasn’t.”  It could even be Jōshū’s, “Go wash your bowl.”  We could repeat Mu for a lifetime and never would we be able to pass through the barrier gate to the no-gate.  Likewise with the various mysterious other phrases and gestures.

In working with these mysterious words and phrases that come from the Zen masters it’s like we are butting our heads against an invisible barrier.  No matter how hard we try—no success.  It’s also like we are approaching the edge of a dark and terrifying abyss, fearing to fall into it.  At this point, no one can help us.  We have become our own obstacle. 

The next phase is to further delude ourselves and imagine that we’ve solved a koan or at least can understand the sense of it.  Ironically, this is where most beginners are stuck making no advance whatsoever.  No matter how many koan books they've read even with good translations they are no closer to the no-gate.

We cannot gain access to the no-gate by words and concepts.  This means our ordinary understanding cannot enter.  This includes our intellect, too.  Not even a single thought can enter or silence and stillness.  If this is disheartening it is meant to be.  In Zen we are supposed to give up our presuppositions not cling to them.  You can have nowhere to run and no place to hide.  In truth, there is only one koan: See pure mind.

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. 

A huge part of us is a demon

We are inhabiting a system of conditioned being called the five skandhas or in Pali the five khandhas. (They consist of physical form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.)  As presented in the cannon, they belong to the demon Māra which the Bodhisattva (Siddhartha) fought and defeated and later became enlightened after going through the four meditations (dhyānas). 

As a matter of spiritual discovery, this really boils down to overcoming the powerful influence of our conditioned organism that we took birth in which is called ‘former karma’ (we made the bed, now we can lie in it). The pressing work before us, is to escape our predicament so we don't end up reborn in another body under the same conditions or something even worse.

A huge part of us is a demon—yes, it’s true.  Let’s put it this way: we are immediate with Māra.  The Tibetan Lamas say this demon is rooted in our primordial ignorance (avidya) which I hasten to add is always conditioned—never unconditioned.  Because of avidya we live in a world of confusion.  We can’t distinguish the conditioned (samsara) from the unconditioned (nirvana) which is our goal.

And who is helping us to stay confused and remain a demon?  Why it’s our close buddy Māra who is very good at overriding our conscience, so that lying and hypocrisy seems like a natural way of life, even though it is not natural, and needs to be corrected—which is what Buddhist training is all about!

Very good Buddhist teachers are good at showing us our demon nature; who make it obvious to us that we are not the good and holy person we imagined that we were.  And this is troubling for a lot of beginners who don't like to be admonished, who are frankly too immature at this point in their lives to be serious Buddhists.  About all they can do is seated meditation, take their meds to calm the demon down, and maybe join a Buddhist chat room.

 

Real meditation, the kind the Buddha taught

There is nothing unique about meditation in Zen Buddhism (P., jhāna; S., dhāyna).  In fact, it is taught in all Buddhist traditions and has been that way for a very long time.  Perhaps the only new twist, it is being taught to lay people who haven’t a clue as to what it really entails.  The meditation they practice has only a remedial purpose.  It’s deeper purpose, seldom taught to lay people, is simply to discover who the “breather is” (this would be the practice of breath meditation) or to discover the source and substance of mentation (this can only occur with the sudden cessation of mentation or 無念).

This is where meditation usually ends up these days—not advanced at all.  A kind of lay person’s Zen practice that goes no further.  It even applies these days to monks and nuns who are more serious than a lay person.   

For those who wish to venture deeper into the heart of Zen Buddhism—certainly not with a lay person’s shallowness—without the requisite awakening or kenshō, they are entering a world which cannot be fully unpacked by the intellect which can extend all the way to a philosophical understanding of Zen diving, intellectually, into the world of metaphysics. 

This is good for a while.  Hopefully, not too long.  At some point, the adept realizes that ‘talking the talk’ is not enough.  It’s too superficial.  One also has to ‘walk the walk’ which means actually having kenshō (we westerners love to ‘talk the talk’—entering into the world of metaphysics without ever awakening). 

At some point we have to discover that Buddhism, as far as meditation goes, demands of us that we achieve gnosis of the absolute, i.e., asaṃskṛta (the unconditioned) which is the very substance of things (dharmā) which are mere constructs of the absolute, itself.  This is what Zen is demanding too, but through the world of Chinese culture.

It is here that the lay person’s idea of meditation proves awkward and inadequate.  Real meditation, the kind the Buddha taught consists of setting aside all conditionality (saṃskṛta) so that only the unconditioned remains—which is what we really are.  All along, the conditioned world was never other than antithetical to us, i.e., marked by direct opposition to us in the form of suffering and disharmony.  Even our human body proved antithetical (old age and death).  To overcome this is where the real meditation is required—not the zendo type.

 

Facing our passions

The somatic side of us is in a constant state of breakdown and reconstruction whereas the deepest part of us, which is psychical and extra-somatic, seems unchanging and constant.  It is also invisible to the senses.  This is the part we can’t get at.  It defies observation.  We only observe conditioned arisings such as our thoughts and feelings or the inner voice.

With the arising of the existential question of, who am I? we are only aware of the question, try as we might to see its source.  It always ends up that we have no direct perception of the actual source (wherein lies the answer).  Still, something deep within us tells us that we know this as yet unobserved source.

In the meantime, we have to face our passions which stem, it appears, from the somatic part of us.  As every human soon realizes as they mature, nature has made sexual desire the strongest and most exciting of our feelings, which is difficult to control.  By comparison, sexual non-gratification, while we are young adults, seems to be the most dismal and depressing part of our life. 

But if we were to take away the sexual side which, by the way, being in your 70s or 80s manages to do, our psychical and extra-somatic being—the inner person—becomes much more apparent and pronounced.  But then we have only a few years left in the flesh by which to take advantage of this situation.  And that is not going to work in most cases very well.  Starting Buddhism at this time is like digging a well when you are thirsty.

If we are going to get involved in Buddhism when we are young adults (which we should do), we have to focus on controlling our sexual passions and especially the urgent need for sexual gratification.  This is not easy.  It is just one more obstacle in our way but no doubt one of the biggest since it can divert us from the path.  It also needs to be kept in mind that the ways of the world in which our sexual passions can come to fruition runs contrary to Buddhism's path so that when we enter this world we have to be on guard so to speak.