De-'woo'-ifying 'The Absolute'...

Someone over on Brad's blog comments section (where discussions on enlightenment/realisation are ongoing) asked me what I considered to be a 'genuine insight into the absolute' from the perspective of my own (limited) experience. I think it's good to give honest and direct answers to this sort of question, so I said this:

Speaking for myself, and as mentioned some time earlier, a ‘genuine insight into the absolute’ can be gleaned quite quickly when I, or anyone, sits zazen and lets thoughts and feelings just come and go as they do. After a while this stabilizes into a clear and unhindered state where can be starkly seen the coming-and-going nature of the various functions and sensations which usually give rise to a mistaken sense of separate identity, including the thinking facility which likes to, for example, carve the flow of things up into designations like ‘the mundane’ as opposed ‘the absolute’, or ‘inside’ as opposed ‘outside’, or ‘me’ and ‘the world’, or ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘here and there’ etc etc etc...

When I stop that thinking activity then it is quite clear to see that those habitual designations don’t hold up and that the nature of our existence is rather more inclusive, and also quite inscrutable in terms of a ‘source’. Some times the person observing this will just sort of seemingly stop happening, and things like the usual perception of time might be effected. There are various experiences that can arise from the practice of it, but I think the whole gist of it can be appreciated pretty much from the start when that bit of stability has been established. So the practice of it is actually very accesible, and, while I think it’s a great thing for anyone to do, it’s also no big remote accomplishment or obscure metaphysical realm.

BTW, here’s one of the old koan that I was thinking of that contextualises the teaching on ‘shunyata’ in a particularly zennish way (i.e. with dubious, or old school, morality!):

Sekkyo said to one of his monks, “Can you get hold of emptiness?”

“I’ll try,” said the monk, and he cupped his hands in the air.

“That’s not very good,” said Sekkyo. “You have nothing there!”

“Well, master,” said the monk, “please show me a better way.”

Thereupon, Sekkyo seized the monk’s nose and gave it a hard yank.

“Ouch!” yelled the monk. “You hurt me!”

“That’s the way to get hold of emptiness!” said Sekkyo.

Regards,
Harry.

Further Ruminations on Realisation/Enlightenment and the Zen of Assholiness.

A response to a very good point made by Andy over on Brad Warner's enlightening train wreck of a blog comments section:



I have to wonder if things like ‘MY realisation’ (versus your crappy realisation) and ‘MY compassion’ (versus your sub-Buddhist efforts) are the works of my dear old asshole. If I don’t get to know, love even, the many tactics of my inner asshole, then how would he know? Without directly knowing the only asshole I can really know directly, I might just be replacing my very own asshole (which, at least, is my own) with a Buddhist asshole.

Zen (or a cherry-picked version of it) does seem to lend itself to a sort of (for want of a better word) ‘spiritually’ and morally selfish libertarianism. However, Zen is and always has been Mahayana Buddhism whose range and aspiration is quite a bit broader than that.

Regards,

H.

Enlightenment, THE Enlightenment, Reason, and the Religion of Being Human...

"The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not." J. G. Ballard

Stumbled across this today.

Ballard is there talking about the Age of Enlightenment, the intellectual movement of the 18th and 19th centuries that advocated reason, scientific method, challenged the irrationality of religion etc etc... which informed modern thought and worldviews so much.

But I think the point can be taken on-board in the Buddhist/practice sense. I wouldn't wholly agree that the Enlightenment view of humankind is a 'complete myth', but maybe it is incomplete or imbalanced as it does underemphasise our 'irrational'/unthinking side which contributes so much to a lot of what we do, particularly imaginatively and creatively (a hard rationalist might denounce me as a Romantic, as in the Romantic era... ha ha, made you hard!)

There is a distinct difference between me acknowledging, using, celebrating the 'irrational' aspects of myself and me irresistibly acting them all out like an automaton however.

And, however much I can understand it as being 'irrational', there is an underlying, seemingly intrinsic yearning for resolution that runs very deep and which recognition and naming alone can't resolve; a subtle form of underlying dukkha that is a 'characteristic of existence' (in more Buddhisty terms), besides all the other normal stuff that we have to filter. The rational mind might like to think that the solution is to just make it go away, to negate it, and to feel it can get a handle on it in those terms... but I'm not at all sure that that approach is consistent with it's nature.

There are certain things about the human condition that diehard rationalists don't seem to address in a way that is consistent with the nature of their existence, as much as I admire aspects of the Enlightenment and much that flowed from it. And as much as I'm not a fan of organised religion, it seems that denouncing it as hogwash (which I'm inclined to do) dishonours a very deep rooted aspect of our humanity that is trying to resolve itself in so many convoluted and precarious ways.

Regards,

Harry.

Broken Bodhisattvas Shoot the Sheeit on Zen...

Recently I've been dipping my toe back into the discussions with my fellow faltering bodhisattvas over on the heady soup that is the Brad Warner blog comments section.

Here's a couple of questions I posed regarding the seemingly indistinct cloud called 'Zen' that we seem to like to think we have exclusive purchase on:

What is the point of Zen?

Actually, here’s another one:

What is Zen?

It’s just that people have all sorts of ideas about ‘Zen’ so that we often don’t seem to be talking about the same thing, or things.

Regards,

Harry.

The Big E!

The Venerable Brad is fielding the BIG QUESTION over on his blog: Just what is Enlightenment? (capital 'E' for full effect... DAH, DAAAAH!)

Very good question IMO. The whole smoke-and-mirrors idealism and mythology around this topic has clearly contributed to some very messy religious blunders involving people drooling over other people who present themselves as the best thing since Jesus' sandals.

Anyway, here's a little bit of Dogen Zenji on the matter (he tried to clarify this a lot in his writing) that I contributed to the comments section of the Bradman's blog:

Master Dogen busted his enlightened peas contextualizing what enlightenment is (and is not). His in not a simple ‘yes/no’ answer (of the sort that might instantly gratify the peculiarities of certain latter day sects), and his take on realisation/enlightenment is certainly not confined to, nor excludes, sudden realization events (he uses some of the traditional koan accounts of sudden realisations to help contextualise his view on it).
For example, in Shobogenzo ‘Daigo’ (‘Great Enlightenment’ or, as Nishijima/Cross translate it… questionably so… ‘Great Realisation’ – so read ‘realisation’ as ‘enlightenment’, if you wish or, preferably maybe, try both fits) he says:

‘The present words ‘do we rely on realisation or not?’ neither say that realisation does not exist, nor says that it exists, nor say that it comes: they say “Do we rely on it; or not?” They are akin to asserting that the realisation of a person of the present moment, somehow, has already been realised. If we speak, for example, of attaining realisation, it sounds as if [realisation] did not used to exist. If we speak of realisation having come, it sounds as if that realisation used to exist elsewhere. If we speak of having become realisation, it sounds as if realisation has a beginning. We do not discuss it like this and it is not like this; even so, when we discuss what realisation is like, we ask if we need to rely on realisation….’ [Nishijima/Cross trans.]

He’s here discussing a case that he included in his koan collection Shinji-Shobogenzo:

Master Keicho Beiko has a monk ask Kyozan, “Does even a person of the present moment rely upon realisation, or not?” 

Kyozan says, “Realisation is not nonexistent, but how can it help falling into second consciousness? [or 'divided consciousness'] 

The monk reports this back to Beiko. Beiko profoundly affirms it.

...which all leads me to conclude that maybe the best basis on which to approach understanding enlightenment/realisation might be Dogen's own stated standard, i.e. to rely on doing it ourselves (with the help of a good teacher)... does this then mean that I irreversibly become a Fully Realised Buddha every time I drop my buns on a cushion (another common fallacy arising from a rather narrow interpretation of some comments made by Dogen and others)? ...Hardly, but at least such effort will likely constitute a more substantial and sincere inquiry into the nature of enlightenment than swallowing somebody else's jive talk about it.

Regards,

Harry.

New Early Irish Buddhism Website.

A new website has been created as a resource for information on the history of Irish Buddhism, early Western Buddhism and the fascinating character of U Dhammaloka (pictured above), a Dublin-born Buddhist convert and anti-colonialist agitator who was active in Asia in the early Twentieth Century.

You can access the site HERE.

There is now a Wikipedia article on U Dhammaloka HERE.

U Dhammaloka (c. 1856 – c. 1914) was an Irish-born hobo (migrant worker) turned Buddhist monk, atheist critic of Christian missionaries, and temperance campaigner who took an active role in the Asian Buddhist revival around the turn of the twentieth century.

Dhammaloka was ordained in Burma prior to 1900, making him one of the earliest attested western Buddhist monks. He was a celebrity preacher, vigorous polemicist and prolific editor in Burma and Singapore between 1900 and his conviction for sedition and appeal in 1910–1911. Drawing on western atheist writings, he publicly challenged the role of Christian missionaries and by implication the British empire.

Love
By Czeslaw Milosz
(1911 - 2004)
English version by Robert Hass
 

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.