The Zennist

Living with the inner idiot

It is not an easy matter having to deal with the external world.  What makes it so difficult, from a Buddhist perspective, is being embodied in our former karma (this is what our body is according to the Buddha) in addition to not understanding our will/desire which is going in the wrong direction, apprehending and coveting what is truly not ours; setting up future conditions for a rough life.  Our counter to this inconvenient message is to either ignore it or insist that it is not grounded in science.  Both solutions are born from the mindset of a Homer Simpson idiot attitude (“idiot” is a word of Greek origin that is very close to the Pali Buddhist term “puthujjana” meaning a common, ignorant person).  Regrettably, we have come to love this funny American idiot as if there were actually something redeeming in being such an idiot in real life.

But just how does the average “idiot” in real life cancel out the detrimental effect of living the unexamined life of a typical idiot represented by the likes of Homer Simpson in a humorous way?  This is the hard question because the answer required is not a trivial one.  As we might expect there is a learning curve if we wish to escape from the life of an idiot.  Being on this curve means dumping lots of bad behaviors and assumptions (Homer has many).  And given that the K thru 12 educational system in the U.S. is designed to create consumer idiots, the task of being on the learning curve is perhaps possible but not probable.   

Bearing all of this in mind, I am beginning to believe that Zen is being thought of as a religion for idiots something which Homer Simpson might find redemption in if only learning that living in the moment is all that it takes.  Of course, there is no kensho here, that is, seeing our true nature which is transcendent and deathless.  It is just about going from one thing to the next; living impulsively you could say: going with the flow.  How Zen got stuck with this is anyone’s guess.  But this attitude is not in the canonical literature.  This kind of frivolous behavior is almost antithetical to the purpose of Zen when, for example, Homer eats 64 slices of American cheese.

Proper Zen is, at first, always a search: a deep, personal look into one’s being.  One cannot be a full-time or even a partial idiot and hope to get anywhere in Zen.  A special kind of intelligence is required not to mention good karma which has all along suspected that there is something deep in side of of us that doesn’t share the same fate as the physical body.  Still, for some reason, modern culture needs Homer Simpson with his IQ of 55 (once his brain walked out on him).  We chuckle.  Still we find something admirable about him—perhaps only for the reason that he is a natural idiot whereas we are not.  We struggle in the bardo between being an idiot and sensing there is more to life than drinking Duff beer.  So we take up Zen.

Troubled ghosts

I have been watching the television series The Haunted which appears on cable's Animalplanet.  While the description of the series says it explores the "connection between animals and the supernatural realm" it really explores how humans, who don't believe in the paranormal, are suddenly faced with strange encounters that Western scientific models can't explain.  The animals, as we might expect, are not prejudiced like their human masters.  They react, mainly out of extreme fear to the unseen.

This all reminded me of the Peta-Vatthu (S., Preta Vastu), The Stories of the Departed, which appears in the Khuddhaka-Nikaya of the Pali canon.  These are stories about spirits who are more like wraiths which might be described as troubled ghosts, although not, strictly speaking, hell beings who are confined to the torments of the hells.  This is to suggest that the peta can be saved by the devotion of friends and the transfer of merit.

By and large, Western Buddhists are uncomfortable with the ideas of rebirth and karma.  This might explain why works in the Khuddhaka-Nikaya like the Peta-Vatthu and the Vimana-Vatthu, which are stories about the departed who live in relative bliss, have been off the Western Buddhist radar.  This tells us something about Western Buddhism and the direction it wants to go which mainly is in the direction of Western scientific materialism.

This is not a good thing for Buddhism, in general.  The spiritual world is real and it was real for the Buddha and his disciples.  Just because Western Buddhists want to believe there is no immaterial, spiritual world, even one with petas, doesn't mean they have  the truth on their side.  It only means that they have elected to be radical skeptics that no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to convince them to change their attitude, or at least keep an open mind.

 

The calling

I just got done watching the four-hour PBS documentry, The Calling.  The documentry follows Muslims, Catholics, Evangelical Christians and Jews.  (Where are the Asian religions?  Oops!).  

I guess one can describe all of them as having been called by God to do his work.  The calling for each, however, appears to be subjective this calling going no further than the religious culture each elects to follow which is hardly ‘spiritual’.

Let’s face it, the followers of the major religions of today generally use religion for other than its intended purpose, its intended purposed being to realize one’s true nature which is absolute spirit.   A historical case in point.  The Christian Paul said that the New Covenant is one of spirit (pneuma); not one based upon letters.  Paul even says that the Lord is spirit ((O de kyrios to pneuma estin).  It is safe to say from Paul’s letters that those who take Christianity at a literal level belong to the Old Covenant which keeps the spiritual covenant veiled.    

But the obvious references to spirit or “pneuma” in Paul’s letters, as we know, did not stop the followers of Christianity from making a counterfeit Christianity which is arguably, anti-spiritual; which has been used primarily as a means of social control—mainly to keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor.  As a result of many years of being despiritualized, the Christian ministry, itself, has been transformed into a “ministry of condemnation” (II. Corinthians 3:9).  Does all this sound familiar dear Buddhists?  It should.

The same mind that made a counterfeit Christianity is busy destroying Buddhism; turing it into something which is spiritually dead.  It always seems to be the case that what emerges after the flowering of true religion, over time, paradoxically turns into a system which destroys true religion, making the soil for its growth and development, barren.  Thus religion eventually becomes its own hangman.  What is originally spirit, over time, becomes veiled.  The clergy not only become the guardians of the veil, they also become overseers and guardians of herd values, values which insure the veil will never be lifted!

Buddhism is the last stronghold of true religion which is still growing in the soil of mysticism which includes shamanism.  But its destruction is likely given the fact that it is being rapidly “westernized” which is to say, it is being turned into a religion that celebrates herd values; that, in addition, makes the profane man (prithagjana) the great hero despite the fact that this man’s history in recent memory has been one of genocide and the destruction of earth’s biosphere.

 

Buddhism: the final religion

 What Buddhism has to offer a future world is nothing short of astonishing.  Of course, speculation about a Star Trek like futuristic Buddhism will certainly generate skepticism and ridicule, especially from those who are strongly attached to theology and materialism.  But if these critics have bothered to read the canon of Buddhism with an esoteric eye, as it should be read, the basis of their skepticism lies outside of Buddhism so as to be unworthy of a serious response.

In the world of tomorrow in which Buddhism will, more than likely, be the world’s main religion, we will be able to decouple and re-couple, at will, with artificially engineered biological bodies.  Death, and the fear of sickness, as we know it, will be a thing of the past.  We will all primarily exist in thought-made bodies (manomaya-kaya); the form of which, according to the Buddha, is not deficient in any sense organ (M. ii. 17).

If, as these super beings, we desire to travel to other worlds to propagate the teachings of the Buddha out of compassion, we can either interface with artificial bodies, by which we will be able to fly our faster than light space craft, or we can directly enter the bodies of those we deem fit to teach.  In this way, we will empower them so they may eventually alter the suffering matrix of their world. (We would also be able to transfer advanced technology to such people through our thought-made bodies.)

Being such an advanced race of beings who are in nirvana, which means we can couple with and decouple from artificially created bodies at will, our main mission will be to alleviate suffering where ever it exists in any star system, in any galaxy.  Nothing would stop us from removing the dark veil of oppression and spiritual blindness that dominates the minds of primitive creatures throughout the universe.  We would be very much like Plato’s Guardians described in the Republic.

Maybe five thousand years from now our technological advances should be so well along so as to make our present technology seen primitive.  Along with this—and this is where Buddhism comes in—our ability to break our immediate interface with our biological body of birth and death, at will as a technique, will be significantly advanced which now seems almost impossible.

Such a world or worlds, I believe, already exist which we would find towards the center of our galaxy.  These civilizations we can think of as being so spiritually advanced that being a Buddha is common place.  From this we might consider Shakyamuni Buddha and other such humans as highly evolved Earth beings much like the appearance of modern man who eventually surpassed Neanderthals.

Well, does this sound crazy?  Considering what has happened to me over these last forty years, which was the inspiration for this blog—some of it would make great science fiction, although it isn’t fiction.  Among other things, I saw with my own eyes that being bound down to a body of flesh and bones by strong desire dummyfies us such that we close off what we can actually become in the way of compassionate super-beings (i.e., Bodhisattvas) who are cognizant of the luminous power of Mind.  

If you’ve guessed that each of us has what it takes to make such a Star Trek like world a reality, you’re not wrong.  What needs now to be done is to have great faith that we can transform our present almost-troglodyte-world into a Sukhavati (i.e., the pure land).