Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree for seven years struggling to find a release from trishna or clinging to life through yoga penance, ascesis and contemplation, but all his efforts seemed to be in vain. The mystery of life could not be penetrated. Tired and fed up with his seeking he let go of it. One day he had given up his family, his kingdom, his samsara to find the ‘other’ world. One day he had become indifferent to the material. A day came, he became indifferent to the spiritual also. As there was nothing left to seek he relaxed his ascetic diet and ate some nourishing food. He rested under the Bodhi tree and slept well. There was no seeking; there was no dreaming; there was no thought. The whole night was just a peaceful rhythm. The material world had gone earlier. Now the spiritual world, too, went. There was complete rest into oneself. The Zen legend says that as his eyes opened, he saw the last morning star setting. He caught a glimpse of it disappearing and he came enlightened. It was the moment of utter emptiness even in the sky. The last start had set and the sun had not yet arisen. There was utter ‘emptiness’ in the sky and there was utter emptiness in Buddha. The glimpse of the setting morning star must have aroused some concentration. There was years of practice; but the disappearance took away even that. There was total release, total freedom. There was no content because for the first time nothing was to be sought. There was for the first time, no ‘I’ in this sense of ego. For the first time there was “no mind”. Buddha was there and not there – a pure consciousness – in a state of perfect clarity and understanding. Yet the actual content of the experience could never be put into words because “words are frames of maya, the meshes of its net and the experience is of water which slips through”. The real message has remained and will always remain unspoken.
According to Zen, Buddha transmitted this awakening to his disciple Mahakashyap. Throngs gathered to hear Buddha as usual. Thousands of people and Buddha sat silent holding a flower in his hand. There was utter silence, then unease as people waited for him to speak but still there was silence; when Mahakashyap, who had been a serious monk up to this time, suddenly started laughing and in that moment he attained his enlightenment. Thus the experience of enlightenment cannot be taught in words. It is a mind seal that can only be imprinted.
These stories point to certain basic ideas of Zen that came about as a result of the cross-fertilization between Buddhism and Taoism, which together with Confucianism, were the philosophies prevalent in China. While Confucianism was concerned with societal norms, the basic principle of Tao was spontaneity. This did not mean blind caprice. It was the idea of evolution and growth as opposed to that of making and control. Taoism rejects the ratiocinative logical mind, the conscious intellect frantically trying to clutch the world in its net of abstractions. Tao or the creative source of the universe is only accessible to the mind that has attained the state of wu-wei or ‘non-making’ ‘non-doing’ ‘non striving’. Both Taoism and Confucianism have there source in I-Ching or the Book of Changes dating back to anywhere between 3000 to 1200 B.C. which talks of arriving at decisions spontaneously. Decisions are effective only to the degree that one knows how to let one’s mind along, trusting it to work by itself. It is not just a “calmness” of the mind but “non-graspingness”. In Chuang-tzu’s worlds:” The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep”. This is not to reduce the mind to a moronic vacuity but to bring into play its innate and spontaneous intelligence by using it without forcing it. This ingenuity and creative power of man’s spontaneous and natural functions is called “te”. It gets blocked when one tries to master it in terms of formal methods and techniques. As an old poem says :
The centipede was happy, quite
Until a toad in fun
Said, ‘pray, which leg goes after which’?
This worked his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run.
These ideas of Tao are basic to Zen as are the essential concepts of Buddhism like the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.
Buddha always kept silent when questioned about the nature of nirvana, the origin of the world, the reality of the self, the existence of God because such questions were irrelevant and did not lead to the actual experience. It is as if a man, struck with an arrow and bleeding to death, refused to allow anyone to remove it unless he found out the person who shot it, the nature of the arrow, the direction from which it came and other such irrelevant questions. It has often been said that the later development of Buddhism in India was because of the inability of the Indian mind to rest content with silence and not get overwhelmed with the urge for “abstract metaphysical speculation”.
Buddha’s first noble truth is concerned “dukha” which has been translated as “suffering” but what is actually means is not that Life in itself in suffering but that life as we live it is suffering. In another formulation, there was three characteristics of ‘being’ or “becoming” – dukha, anitya and anatman. Anitya is not really impermanence but the idea that the more one graps the world, the more it changes. Reality is neither permanent nor impermanent, it just’is’. Hence the Zen belief in the ‘is-ness’ or ‘suchness’ of things. Reality only becomes impermanent when we run after it – it is like running after one’s own shadow – the more we try to grasp it, the more it recedes. The, “anatman” does not really mean that “non-self” is the basis of consciousness. It simply means that any Self that we grasp through our mental perceptions cannot be the true Self but simply another formulation of maya or the world of perception. To conceive of Self and to seek it is to thrust it away as the mind or ego can only perceive the idea of the ‘self’ and not the ‘self’ itself. A man can only see the reflection of his face in the mirror but not the face itself. Hence, “the true self is nonself” which can only be experienced by the “no mind”. The line taken by the bird in flight can be traced but in reality there is no line because the bird leaves no trace behind.
The Second Noble Truth says that the cause of suffering is the clinging to life or ‘trishna’ based on ‘avidya’. ‘Avidya’ is lack of realisation that all grasping is futile, that the mind presents justifications for it because it is spellbound by ‘maya’. ‘Maya’ is not that all existence is illusory but the clinging to it is an illusion because the ego or the perception of identity as separate from creation is an illusion. This brings us to another Zen concept of the interconnectedness of being. Thich Nhat Hanh takes something as mundane as a table to explain it. What we believe to be a table is actually only our concept of it. Notions like wood, brown, three feet high etc. give rise to the concept of the table in us. A nuclear physicist, on the other hand, would say that it is a multitude of atoms whose electrons are in constant motion. It these atoms could be packed tightly against one another the mass of matter would be smaller than that of a finger. The table in reality is always in the process of transformation. In time and space it is made of only ‘non-table elements – the forest, the tree, the saw, the hammer, the carpenter, the parents of the carpenter and so on. The list is endless. If we look at the table deeply, we can see the presence of all the non-table elements in it, that is, in fact of the entire universe (Avatamsaka system of Buddhism).
Thich Nhat Hauh, a Vietnamese Zen Master, poet and Chairman of the Buddhist Peace Delegation during the American was, used this concept of interrelatedness of beings in his work in the Peace Movement. For example, one day he learnt that a twelve year old Vietnamese girl in a boat who had been raped by a Thai pirate. She had then jumped overboard and committed suicide. After a deep meditation on the incident, he wrote a poem entitled “Please Call Me By My True Names”.
Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
Learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the
surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the
clear water of pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who,
approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchants selling deadly
weapons to Uganda
I am the 12 year-old girl, refugee
on a small boat,
who throws by a sea pirate,
being raped by a sea pirate,
And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with
plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it
fills up the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughs
at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
The third noble truth is concerned with the ending of the frustration grasping that sets up; the whole vicious circular pattern of karma the wheel of samsara or of life and death. The concept of ‘karma” is not an ethical one. Hence, there cannot be any “good karma” or “bad karma” in the conventional sense. “Bad karma” is produced when action is motivated or directed to an end. In higher stages of Buddhism, man has to disentangle himself from both good and bad karma and action has to be uncontrived, spontaneous and free. Hence, cessation of grasping or motivated action ensues when clutching at life comes to an end. It should not be misunderstood as an end of all action because Zen insists on action, on remaining in the world because there is nothing that is not a part of this world. As the Zen poet P’ant-yun writes: “Miraculous power & marvelous activity /Drawing water and hewing word!”. It is an ‘un-self’ and ‘un-grasped’ state of mind, an awakening in which there is no sense of acquisition or motivation. It can only arise spontaneously because even the attempt or the desire to attain it is an attempt to grasp it. This sudden realization or awakening is called satori or enlightenment.
Chikan Zenji of Kyogen who live around 800 A.D. went to learn Buddhism from I-sau of Tanshu where he lived among the monks. The Master I-sau felt that he had the potential for enlightenment and so asked him : “I am not questioning you about your everyday learning or about your knowledge of the scriptures. But tell me, in a word, what were you when you were still in your mother’s bosom and were ignorant of any direction, east or west, north or south? If you can answer this I shall bestow upon you my seal fo acknowledgement as a token of the genuineness of your attainment “.
Chikan Zenji of Kyogen who live around 800 A.D. went to learn Buddhism from I-sau of Tanshu where he lived among the monks. The Master I-sau felt that he had the potential for enlightenment and so asked him: “ I am not questioning you about your everyday learning or about your knowledge of the scriptures. But tell me, in a word, what were you when you were still in your mother’s bosom and were ignorant of any direction, east or west, north or south? If you can answer this I shall bestow upon you my seal of acknowledgement as a token of the genuineness of your attainment”. The question was the first cause of Chikan’s later enlightenment although at that moment he was completely disconcerted. He came up with several answers but the Master rejected all of them. At last he asked his master for the answer who refused to give it to him because if he told him that would be his understanding not Chikan’s . A Zen Master’s teaching is like indicating the moon by pointing the finger but the finger cannot replace the moon. Chikan retreated into his room, read several books to find the answer, searched all the sutras, and the five thousand and forty eight volumes of Buddhist canonical scriptures but did not succeed. He realised that the scriptures were merely pictures of food and not the real food. Who could the pictured food satisfy? He set fire to all his books, vowing to be only a monk who meditated all his life. Sobbing the went down the mountain, crossed the Yangtze River and came to Nanyo at the ruins of Chu Kokushi’s memorial pagoda and temple. Chu Kokushi, one of the disciples of the Sixth Patriarch had attained enlightenment without a teacher. Chikan decided to say alone in the ruined temple cutting weeds and sweeping the floor . While working, he took out a broken tile and threw it. It hit a bamboo with a clatter and Chikan was enlightened. Chikan did not just sit in meditation but continued a perform his day to day tasks. This is the Zen way. On attaining enlightenment he spontaneously recited a poem.
Upon the clatter of a broken tile
All I had learned was at once forgotten
Amending my nature is needless
Pursuing the tasks of everyday life
I walk along the ancient path.
Wheresoever I go I leave no footprint
For I am not within color or sound
Enlightened ones everywhere have said
Such as this is the Attainment.
Once Chikan attained realization, all his previously learned knowledge became unimportant just as the boat the takes us to the opposite shore becomes useless once the shore is reached. The scriptures can only be vehicles. Neither one’s nature nor anything else needs changing. There, all the stages of dhyana described in the sutras are only criteria for attainment not attainment itself because essentially the mind cannot be changed. Reality is not to be found elsewhere. It is present in the immediate now in the most ordinary of our tasks. We think we are full of activity but our actions do not leave even a tree behind because all things manifest from the sunya into which they return. As another old poem says;
The shadow of the bamboo sweeps the stair a
All night long
Yet not a mote of dust is stirred
The moonbeams penetrate
To the bottom of the pool
Yet in the water not a trace is left
The fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of which the first and the eighth are of great importance for Zen. The first two samyag-drishti (complete view) and samyak sankalp (complete understanding) are concerned with the proper understanding of the human situation. Zen is clear awareness or mindfulness or seeing the world `yathabhutam’ just as it is. It implies an attention, or awareness or mindfulness to one’s direct experience, to the world as it is immediately experienced by the senses so as not to be misled by labels and names. It is this mindfulness that leads to `no-mind’ and then satori or enlightenment.
The last two, samyak smriti (complete recollectendness) and samyak samadhi (complete contemplation) deal with the life of meditation. Complete Recollectedness is constant awareness or watching of one’s sensations, feelings and thoughts without purpose or desire. It is a total clarity and presence of mind that is actively passive, in which events come and go as reflected in a mirror. Nothing is reflected except what is. Through such awareness, the separation of the knower from the known, the subject from the object, of the thinker from the thought become purely abstract. The non-duality of mind, when the mind is no longer divided against itself is samadhi or satori. This is not the stillness of total inactivity because even when the mind returns to its natural state, samadhi persists of all times in “walking, standing, sitting and lying” that are also known as the four dignities or the four primary positions of the body. It manifests itself in the way we perform our daily tasks. However, from the earliest times. Recollectedness and contemplation while sitting has been emphasized.
Sitting meditation or dhyana traveled to China as Cha’an and then to Japan as Zazen. It is of central importance to Zen Buddhism. Bodhidharma, the first Patriarch of Zen went to China shen scholastic Buddhism was at its height. The Chinese Emperor in the South, Liang Wu-ti had built many temples and monasteries and was supporting thousands of monks and nuns. Bodhidharma met the Emperor who asked him what merit he had gained by doing this. Bodhidharma replied, nothing .’ This so undermined the Emperor’s idea of Buddhism that he asked, “What then is the sacred doctrine’s first principle.” Bodhidharma replied, “It’s just empty; there’s nothing sacred.” “Who, the, are you to stand before us” asked the Emperor. “I don’t know” was the answer. After this unsatisfactory encounter, Bodhidharma retired to the temple of Shorin situated on Mount Shyu or Sung Shan. He realized that scholastic and philosophical Buddhism had become so dominant in China that the reality of Buddhism had been lost. Opposite the Shorin Temple he meditated in a cave gazing at a wall of the cliff, speaking not a word to the visitors who came. The Chinese called him the “Wall gazing Brahmin”. Unlike the monks of the capital who were translating sutras and debating hairsplitting points of doctrine, his mind was not intoxicated with the brew of human thought. A famous scholar of Taoism and Confucianisn Eka came to meetin him, but Bodhidharma did not speak a word so he went back. Three yars later he came again to find Bodhidharma still meditating in his cave in mid-winter. Again Bodhidharma did not speak so Eka stood all night outside and got buried waist deep in the snow by morning. At last Bodhidharma asked him in compassion what he wanted, to which Eka replied, “true dharma”. Bodhidharma said that from ancient times monks had given their lives for it but had not succeeded whereupon Eka cut off his left arm and presented it as a proof of his sincerity. This is symbolic of casting off all traditional methods to arrive at the final truth. Eka sought repose of the mind, which he had not found in spite all kinds of study. “Lay your mind before me. I will repose your mind for you.” This is the realist speaking. Do not speak about it, but show me. Eka replied, “It is impossible for one to lay hold of one”s mind.” The master said, “I have already reposed your mind for you.” This is a mondo, or a `question-answer’ between a maste and a disciple the answer to which is not written in any book and a Zen Maste will speak no more than this.
Monda and Koans are devices used especially by the Rinzai school of Zen to free the mind of dualities and its limitations. Literally the word “koan” mans a public document or an authoritative statute. It now denotes some anecdote of an ancient of an ancient master, or a dialogue between the master and the monks, or a statement or a question asked by a teacher. There are about 1700 koans. In the beginning there were no koans but later Zen masters devised these as means to help the evolution of Zen consciousness in the minds of the students. Here are some examples.
When a monk called Myo asked the sixth Patriarch what was Zen, he said, “When your mind is not dwelling on the dualism of good and evil, what is your original face before you were born.” “The monk attained enlightenment because his mind was ready. Hakuin used to produce one of his hands and demand of his disciples to hear the sound of the clap of one hand. Ordinarily a sound can only be produced by two hands but Hakuin wanted to strike at the root of everyday experience and to free the mind buried in the relativity of things and hence their superficiality. Joshu was asked by his disciple about the significance of Bodhidharma’s coming to East. He replied, “The cypress tree in the courtyard.” You are talking of an objective symbol,” said the monk. “No, I am not talking of an objective symbol.” “Then, what is the ultimate principle of Buddhism.” “The cypress tree in the courtyard.” Riko, an official asked the Zen master Nansen, “If a man puts a gosling into a bottle and feeds him until he is full grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?” Nansen gave a great clap and shouted, “Riko!” “Yes Master” said the startled official. “See.” Said Nansen, “the goose is out!”
One of the oldest Zen poems Says:
The perfect Way is without difficulty
Save that it avoids picking and choosing
Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood
A split hair’s difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart!
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong .
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
The point is not to make the effort to silence the feelings and cultivate bland indifference. It is to see that good without evil is like up with down; that to make the pursuit of only the good the ideal is like trying to get rid of the left by constantly turning right and thus to go constantly round in circles. It is an illusion to think that everything can be made better and better because if that could not be done there would be no alternative to static and dead. The mind is bound in a dualistic pattern. Zen is liberation from this pattern. It points to the absurdity of choosing, of the feeling that constant selection of the `good’ can be done. It is important to understand relativity to know that life is not a situation from which anything can be grasped or gained because life cannot be approached from outside. We are within it, or rather are Life ourselves. To succeed is always to fail. To eat is to survive to be hungry. Hence there is no question of choice. This does not mean fatalism only awareness because fatalism implies someone who submits to something from outside but for Zen there is no such duality. It is just as true to say that the sun is light because of the eyes as to say that the eyes see light because of the sun. The viewpoint is unfamiliar because it upsets our settled convictions. There is a favorite Zen image of ‘The moon in the water.” When there is no water there is no moon in the water. Also, when there is no moon there is no moon in the water. When the moon rises the water does not wait to receive its image. Similarly the moon too does not wait to cast its reflection in water. There is because neither the moon intends to received its. The event is caused as much by the waters the moon. The water manifests the brightness of the moon and the moon manifests the clarity of the water. Thus, human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.
Mind with its power of thought makes us construct symbols of things apart from the things themselves. This includes the ability to construct as idea of ourselves apart from ourselves. Since the idea is so much more comprehensible than the real self is we learn to identity ourselves with the idea of ourselves. Hence the subjective feeling of a ‘self’ that ‘has’ a mind, of an invariably isolated subject to whom experiences involuntarily happen. Zen points out that our ‘self’ is just an idea useful for a limited purpose but disastrous if we identify our real nature with it. The more a person identifies himself with this idea the more he feels as if life is flowing past him. When we no longer identify ourselves with it. The more a person identifies himself with this idea the more he feels as if life is flowing past him. When we no longer identify ourselves with the idea of ourselves the entire relationship between the subject and the object, the knower and the known undergoes a sudden revolutionary change. It becomes a relationship of mutually in which the subject creates the object as much as the object creates the subject. The knower no longer feels independent from the known, the experience independent from experience.
Young Buddhist workers in the Vietnamese peace movement tried to do a kind of meditation to break the dualistic habit of mind. For example, a monk would be asked to express himself as a Swimmer. Then after breathing mediation for absent 15 minutes, he would be asked to express himself as the river. The effort was to understand both sides. It was dangerous because the Americans killed them perceiving them to be anti-Communists. However, they worked in the conviction that lasting peace does not come through victory but by reconciliation and reconciliation can only come through understanding both point of view. Which Nhat Hanh wrote a poem called “Recommendation” to reach his companions how to die nonviolently, without hatred.
Promise me,
promise me that day
while the sun is just overhead
even as they strike you down
with a mountain of hate and violence
remember, brother
man is not our enemy.
Just you pity,
just your hate
invincible, limitless,
hatred will never let you face
the beast in man.
And one day, when you face this
beast alone, your courage intact,
your eyes kind,
out of your smile
will bloom a flower
and those who love you
will behold you
across 10,000 worlds of birth and dying
Alone again
I’ll go on with bent head
but knowing the immtality of love.
And on the long, rough road
both sun and moon will shine,
lightning my way
Time and motion too are only relative. Buddhism compares time to the apparent motion of a wave where the water actually only moves up and down creating the illusion of a piece of water moving over the surface. Similarly there is the illusion of the ‘self’ moving through successive experiences constituting a link in such a way that a child becomes a youth who becomes a man and a man gets old. We are unhappy unless we perceive that we have a promising future’. Since we constantly look to the future we think that it is ‘good’ to prolong life. We forget time is relative. As a Zen poem says:
The morning glory which blooms for an hour
Differs not at hear from the giant pine
Which lives for a thousand years.
In fact the measuring of worth and success in terms of time and the insistent demand for assurances of a promising future make it impossible to live freely both in the present and in the promising future when it arrives; for there is nothing but the present and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. As Dogen the great Zen teacher of Japan, sys in Shobagenzo:
When the fish swims, he swims on and on and there is no end to the water. When a bird flies, he flies on and on and there is no end to the sky. Form the most ancient times there was never a fish who swam out of the water, nor a bird who flew out of the sky. Yet when the fish needs just a little water, he uses just a little; and when he needs lots, he uses lots. Thus the tips of their heads are always at the outer edge (of their space). If ever a bird flies beyond that edge, he dies and so also with the fish. From the water the fish makes his life and from the sky the bird. But this life is made by the bird and the fish. At the same time, the bird and fish are made by life. Thus there are the fish, the water and life, and all three create each other.
Yet if there were a bird who firs wanted to examine the size of the sky, or a fish who wanted to examine the extent of the water – and then try to fly or to swim, they will never find their own ways in the sky or water.
This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going but of not making where one is going more important than where one is. Thus Zen begins at a point where there is nothing further to seek or gain. It is not a self-improvement but of awareness, of a mindfulness that comes from a no-mind or to put it differently of the vision that comes from the illumined mind. As Rinzai says, “if a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha.”