Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series

“Therefore, O monks, whatever of matter (or body, rūpaṁ) there is, whether of the past, of the future, or of the present time, whether internal or external, whether coarse or fine, mean or exalted, far or near, all matter (or body) is to be regarded as it really is, in the light of perfect knowledge (sammāpaññā), thus: ‘This is not of me,’ ‘This am I not,’ ‘This is not my Self.’ So with the rest of the five aggregates (khaṇḍa): vedanā (sensations), saññā (concepts), sankhāra (formative principle), and viññānaṁ (consciousness). One who thus seeing the world turns away from the world is truly freed from evil passions and has the consciousness of freedom. Such is called one who has the obstacles removed, trenches filled, one who has destroyed, is free, one whose fight is over, who has laid down his burden, and is detached.”f71

Ignorance is departure from home and Enlightenment is returning. While wandering we lead a life full of pain and suffering and the world wherein we find ourselves is not a very desirable habitat. This is however put a stop to by Enlightenment as thus we are enabled once more to get settled at home where reign freedom and peace. The will negates itself in its attempt to get an insight into its own life, and dualism follows. Consciousness cannot transcend its own principle. The will struggles and grows despondent over its work. “Why?”—the intellect asks, but it is the question no human intellect can ever hope to solve; for it is a mystery deeply inherent in the will. Why did the Heavenly Father have to send his only child to redeem the creation which was his own handiwork and yet went further astray from its home? Why had Christ to be so dejected over the destiny of the erring children of God? This is an eternal mystery, and no relative understanding is made to grapple with these questions. But the very fact that such questions are raised and constantly threaten one’s spiritual peace shows that they are not idle metaphysical problems to be solved by professional philosophers, but that they are addressed directly to one’s inmost soul, which must struggle and make effort to subdue them by a higher and deeper power native to itself—far higher and deeper than mere dialectic of cognition.

The story of the prodigal sonf72 is such a favourite theme both for Buddhists and Christians, and in this do we not discover something eternally true, though tragic and unfathomable, which lies so deep in every human heart? Whatever this may be, the will finally succeeds in recognising itself, in getting back to its original abode. The sense of peace one finds in Enlightenment is indeed that of a wanderer getting safely home. The wandering seems to have altogether been unnecessary from the logical point of view. What is the use of losing oneself if one has to find oneself again? What boots it after all—this going over from one to ten and from ten to one? Mathematically, all this is nonsensical. But the spiritual mystery is that returning is not merely counting backwards so many figures that were counted before in a reverse way. There is an immense difference here between physics and psychology. After returning one is no longer the same person as before. The will, back from his excursion through time-consciousness, is God himself.

In the Vajrasamādhi Sūtra,[3.4] Bodhisattva Apratisthita[3.5] asks the Buddha why the father was so unkind as not to recall his wandering son before fifty years expired, to which the Buddha answers, “Fifty years is not to be understood as indicating time-relation here; it means the awakening of a thought.” As I would interpret, this means the awakening of consciousness—a split in the will, which now, besides being actor, is knower. The knower, however, gradually grows to be the spectator and critic, and even aspires to be the director and ruler. With this arises the tragedy of life, which the Buddha makes the basis of the Fourfold Noble Truth. That pain (duḥkha) is life itself as it is lived by most of us, is the plain, undisguised statement of facts. This all comes from Ignorance, from our consciousness not being fully enlightened as to its nature, mission, and function in relation to the will. Consciousness must first be reduced to the will when it begins to work out its “original vows” (pūrvapraṇidhāna) in obedience to its true master. “The awakening of a thought” marks the beginning of Ignorance and is its condition. When this is vanquished, “a thought” is reduced to the will, which is Enlightenment. Enlightenment is therefore returning.

In this respect Christianity is more symbolic than Buddhism. The story of Creation, the Fall from the Garden of Eden, God’s sending Christ to compensate for the ancestral sins, his Crucifixion, and Resurrection—they are all symbolic. To be more explicit, Creation is the awakening of consciousness, or the “awakening of a thought”; the Fall is consciousness going astray from the original path; God’s idea of sending his own son among us is the desire of the will to see itself through its own offspring, consciousness; Crucifixion is transcending the dualism of acting and knowing, which comes from the awakening of the intellect; and finally Resurrection means the will’s triumph over the intellect, in other words, the will seeing itself in and through consciousness. After Resurrection the will is no more blind striving, nor is the intellect mere observing the dancer dance. In real Buddhist life these two are not separated, seeing and acting, they are synthesised in one whole spiritual life, and this synthesis is called by Buddhists Enlightenment, the dispelling of Ignorance, the loosening of the Fetters, the wiping-off of the Defilements, etc. Buddhism is thus free from the historical symbolism of Christianity; transcending the category of time. Buddhism attempts to achieve salvation in one act of the will; for returning effaces all the traces of time.

The Buddha himself gave utterance to the feeling of return when his eye first opened to the Dharma unheard of before at the realisation of Enlightenment. He said: “I am like a wanderer who, after going astray in a desolate wilderness, finally discovers an old highway, an old track beaten by his predecessors, and who finds, as he goes along the road, the villages, palaces, gardens, woods, lotus-ponds, walls, and many other things where his predecessors used to have their dwellings.”f73 Superficially, this feeling of returning to an old familiar abode seems to contradict the statement made concerning “an insight to things never before presented to one’s mind”; but the contradiction is logical and not spiritual. As long as the Buddha was going over the Chain of Origination from the epistemological point of view, that is, as long as he attempted to get back to his native will through the channel of empirical consciousness, he could not accomplish his end. It was only when he broke through the wall of Ignorance by the sheer force of his will that he could tread the ancient path. The path was altogether unrecognisable by his intelligent eye which was one of the best of the kind; even the Buddha could not ignore the law governing its usage; the Chain was not to be cut asunder by merely reckoning its links of cause and effect backward and forward.

Knowledge, that is, Ignorance drove Adam from the Garden of Eden to the world of pain and patience (sahaloka), but it was not knowledge that would reconcile him to his Father, it was the Will dispelling Ignorance and ushering Enlightenment.

The sense of return or that of recognising old acquaintances one experiences at the time of Enlightenment is a familiar fact to students of Zen Buddhism. To cite one instance, Chih-I (530–597)[3.6] who is generally known by his honorary title as Chih-chê Tai-shih,[3.7] was the founder of the T‘ien-tai school of Buddhist philosophy in China. He was also trained in meditation by his teacher Hui-szŭ (513–577)[3.8] and though not belonging to the orthodox lineage of the Zen masters, he is reckoned as one. When he came to the master, he was set to exercise himself in a Samadhi known as “Fa-hua San-mei” (saddharma-puṇḍarkīa-samādhi).[3.9] While exercising himself in it, he came across a certain passage in the Sutra, and his mind was opened, and he at once realised the statement referred to by his master, which was this—that he with the master personally attended the Buddha’s congregation at the Vulture Peak where the Buddha discoursed on the Sutra. Then said the master, “If not for you no one could see the truth: and if not for me no one could testify it.” It is often remarked by Zen masters that the holy congregation at the Vulture Peak is still in session. This however ought not to be confounded with the remembering of the past which is one of the miraculous gifts of the Buddhist saints. It has nothing to do with such memory, for in Enlightenment there are more things than are implied in mere time-relations.

Even when the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras expressly refer to one’s previous presence at the discourse on the subject, this is not a form of mere recollection; the understanding is not a psychological phenomenon, the prajñā goes much penetratingly into the depths of one’s personality. The sense of return to something familiar, to the one thoroughly acquainted with, really means the will getting settled once more in its old abode, after many a venturesome wandering, with an immense treasure of experience now and full of wisdom that will light up its unending career.

It may not be altogether out of place here to make a few remarks concerning the popular view which identifies the philosophy of Schopenhauer with Buddhism. According to this view, the Buddha is supposed to have taught the negation of the will to live, which was insisted upon by the German pessimist, but nothing is further from the correct understanding of Buddhism than this negativism. The Buddha does not consider the will blind, irrational, and therefore to be denied; what he really denies is the notion of ego-entity due to Ignorance, from which notion come craving, attachment to things impermanent, and the giving way to the egotistic impulses. The object the Buddha always has in view and never forgets to set forth whenever he thinks opportune, is the Enlightenment of the will and not its negation. His teaching is based upon affirmative propositions. The reason why he does not countenance life as it is lived by most of us is because it is the product of Ignorance and egoism, which never fail to throw us into the abyss of pain and misery. The Buddha pointed the way to escape this by Enlightenment and not by annihilation.

The will as it is in itself is pure act, and no taint of egotism is there; this is awakened only when the intellect through its own error grows blind as to the true working of the will and falsely recognises here the principle of individuation. The Buddha thus wants an illumined will and not the negation of it. When the will is illumined, and thereby when the intellect is properly directed to follow its original course, we are liberated from the fetters which are put upon us by wrong understanding, and purified of all the defilements which ooze from the will not being correctly interpreted. Enlightenment and emancipation are the two central ideas of Buddhism.

The argument Aśvaghosha puts into the mouth of the Buddha against Arada (or Ālāra Kālāma), the Samkhya philosopher, is illuminating in this respect. When Arada told the Buddha to liberate the soul from the body as when the bird flies from the cage or the reed’s stalk is loosened from its sheath, which will result in the abandonment of egoism, the Buddha reasons in the following way: “As long as the soul continues there is no abandonment of egoism. The soul does not become free from qualities as long as it is not released from number and the rest; therefore, as long as there is no freedom from qualities, there is no liberation declared for it. There is no real separation of the qualities and their subject; for fire cannot be conceived apart from its form and heat. Before the body there will be nothing embodied, so before the qualities there will be no subject; how, if it was originally free, could the soul ever become bound? The body-knower (the soul) which is unembodied, must be either knowing or unknowing; if it is knowing, there must be some object to be known, and if there is this object, it is not liberated. Or if the soul be declared to be unknowing, then what use to you is this imagined soul? Even without such a soul, the existence of the absence of knowledge is notorious as, for instance, in a log of wood or a wall. And since each successive abandonment is held to be still accompanied by qualities, I maintain that the absolute attainment of our end can only be found in the abandonment of everything.”f74

As long as the dualistic conception is maintained in regard to the liberation of the soul, there will be no real freedom as is truly declared by the Buddha. “The abandonment of everything” means the transcending of the dualism of soul and body, of subject and object, of that which knows and that which is known, of “it is” and “it is not,” of soul and soul-lessness; and this transcending is not attained by merely negating the soul or the will, but by throwing light upon its nature, by realising it as it is in itself. This is the act of the will. An intellectual contemplation which is advocated by the Samkhya philosophers does not lead one to spiritual freedom, but to the realm of passivity which is their “realm of nothingness.” Buddhism teaches freedom and not annihilation, it advocates spiritual discipline and not mental torpor or emptiness. There must be a certain turning away in one’s ordinary course of life, there must be a certain opening up of a new vista in one’s spiritual outlook if one wants to be the true follower of the Buddha. His aversion to asceticism and nihilism as well as to hedonism becomes intelligible when seen in this light.

The Majjhima-Nikāya’s account of the Buddha’s interview with the Samkhya thinkers somewhat differs from the Mahayana poet’s, but in a way gives a better support to my argument as regards the Buddha’s Enlightenment. The reason why he was not satisfied with the teaching and discipline of Ālāra Kālāma and Uddaka is stated to be this: “This doctrine does not lead to turning away, to dispassion, to cessation, to quietude, to perfect penetration, to supreme awakening, to Nirvana, but only to attainment to the Realm of Nothingness.” What did then the Buddha understand by Nirvana which literally means annihilation or cessation, but which is grouped here with such terms as awakening, turning away (that is, revaluation), and penetration, and contrasted to nothingness? There is no doubt, as far as we can judge from these qualifications, that Nirvana is a positive conception pointing to a certain determinable experience. When he came up to the bank of the Nairañjanā and took his seat of soft grass on a shady, peaceful spot, he made up his mind not to leave the place until he realised in himself what he had been after ever since his wandering away from home. According to the Lalita-vistara, he at that moment made this vow (praṇidhāna):

“Then, disciples, myself subject to birth, but perceiving the wretchedness of things subject to birth and seeking after the incomparable security of Nirvana which is birthless, to that incomparable security I attained, even to Nirvana which is birthless.

“Myself subject to growth and decay, but perceiving the wretchedness of things subject to growth and decay and seeking after the incomparable security of Nirvana which is free from growth and decay, to that incomparable security I attained, even to Nirvana which is free from growth and decay.

“Myself subject to disease, but perceiving the wretchedness of things subject to disease and seeking after the incomparable security of Nirvana which is free from disease, to that incomparable security I attained, even to Nirvana which is free from disease.

“Myself subject to sorrow, but perceiving the wretchedness of things subject to sorrow and seeking after the incomparable security of Nirvana which is sorrowless, to that incomparable security I attained, even to Nirvana which is sorrowless.

When Nirvana is qualified as birthless, deathless, stainless, sorrowless, and free from growth and decay and disease, it looks negativistic enough. But if there were nothing affirmed even in these negations, the Buddha could not rest in “the incomparable security” (anuttaraṁ yogakkhemaṁ) of Nirvana and been assured of final emancipation. What thus the Buddha denied, we can see, was Ignorance as to the true cause of birth and death, and this Ignorance was dispelled by the supreme effort of the will and not by mere dialectic reasoning and contemplation. The will was asserted and the intellect was awakened to its true significance. All the desires, feelings, thoughts, and strivings thus illuminated cease to be egotistic and are no more the cause of defilements and fetters and many other hindrances, of which so many are referred to in all Buddhist literature, Mahayana and Hinayana. In this sense the Buddha is the Jina, Conqueror, not an empty conqueror over nothingness, but the conqueror of confusion, darkness, and Ignorance.