The Zennist

Time 2020-12-07 12:03:33

Web Name: The Zennist

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When we die our body (now a corpse) is no longer animated. It has become incapable of producing any of its former activities which we called “life”. This lifeless body has no blood circulation, respiration, digestion, speech or thought. Some will say that the soul has separated itself from the body but none of us know what this soul is. We cannot see it now even when our body is fully animated. According to the Buddha this body is empty, there is nothing real about it. It is a soulless thing. A person who is greatly attached to this body is sunk in delusion; they are far from complete detachment where the unconditioned is revealed. But since we are not detached we are still tied to the senses and their respective fields being subject to rebirth as a consequence of this attachment. The road to our eventual freedom is one that is transcendent that can only be accomplished by the refinement of intuition which leaps beyond the six senses, the sixth being the most difficult which is our bondage to thoughts (manas) and all this implies (yes, even imaginary thoughts). You could even say we have two souls. One is conditioned, for example, the five aggregates (skandha). The other is spiritual which transcends all things including the five aggregates. It is unconditioned. This soul is also the Buddha-nature 佛性. 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. We could say that the intellectual is more interested in words themselves than the actual reality these words are pointing to. Building a real barn, for example, is much different than thinking about building a barn or fantasizing what it might look like through the imagination.It is fairly obvious that intellectuals can easily be changed into ideologists and fall prey to their very own ideological fantasies. Marxists and sort-of-Marxists fall in to this category. I forgot to mention that when one mixes their feelings with their intellect they become ideologists or ideologues. The entire communist revolution was a dangerous fantasy that didn t want to wake up to the horrific consequences of its delusional thinking. The intellectual and worse, the ideologues, never want to wake up to the consequences of their ideations. Buddhism could not care less about an intellectual path or a particular ideology. Buddhism is concerned with the exercise of intuiting ultimate reality which is a religious act (praxis) rather than a cerebral occupation. You cannot look to the intellectual West and expect to find too many great minds that have directly intuited their knowledge. The West is not the India of the Buddha or the China of Huineng 惠能. We live in a nihilist age where even the word “meaning” has lost its real meaning (the thing that is meant or intended). Nevertheless, the drive for power and control in such a nihilist age is everywhere. In speech, especially, where the discourse is controlled by hidden powers. Yes, even in Buddhism it is there with its ridiculous theory of a kind of anti-self. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 directedWe 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. 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. If pop music from the 1960s deserves high marks for its sophistication then today s pop music gets a flunk. It lacks tempo variation. Too many repetitive sounds. Cords from the same key. Very little dynamic variation. The list goes on. What does this say about the minds that enjoy today s pop music? There is very little depth to them; certainly not enough to enter the mystical world of Zen Buddhism, and for that matter Buddhism in general.It is only when we couple such shallowness with the religious endeavor to see ultimate reality that we have a problem. This opens up a path to the anti-epiphany, a kind of reverse transcendence; of mistaking illusion for enlightenment but more, it is the acceptance of the false self as the real self or the belief there is no self at all.This thought goes even further when it falsely believes the mundane world is the Buddha-nature. In fact Dōgen Zenji held that impermanence is in itself Buddha-nature”. “Therefore, the very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are the Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature.”This is like seeing a mirage in the desert with a pool of water. Although there is no water there it still looks like there is water. But let s call it what it is, it s fake water. Likewise, the mundane world is a fake reality and just as much this Buddha-nature also is fake. It is not the authentic Buddha-nature.Can our enjoyment of today s pop music be likened to being taken in by a musical mirage of sorts? In that regard it is fake music although we believe otherwise that it is very good music. And so it goes with today s Zen in which people believe that the mundane world is the true world. These same people will say, but I like it, and keep on following mirages.

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