by Tom
I’ve been having quite regular conversations about Zen with a philosophically-orientated friend of mine who often poses questions that challenge me and help me clarify my practice. A few weeks ago, after a discussion about ‘Buddha Nature’, he sent me a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on that topic. As I started to read it, my eyes glazed over, and I quickly gave up in frustration. It was not that it was wrong, but just unnecessary.
This experience reminded me of the ambiguous relationship between Zen tradition and words. We learn that Zen is a teaching ‘outside of words’, and yet how many millions of words relating to Zen have been recorded in the past and continue to flow from our contemporary teachers? And how many words are encoded into thinking, both within the received tradition and our own minds, as we waste our energy on logical thought rather than just settling into the unvarnished present experience? ‘Life as it is’.
Language about Zen of course is necessary, but at best it’s only an approximation of an underlying truth. Perhaps at best it can be understood as a finger pointing to the moon – not the moon itself. At worse, it can lead us down the garden path of delusion. I spent half a century of my professional Iife focused on words and thinking – reading, writing, lecturing. And yet, though I have learned a lot about some things, I don’t think I am any wiser for it.
I recently came across a discussion of how western thinking differs from much of ‘eastern’ thinking. Western thinking can be seen as shaped by two principles: the Principle of the Excluded Middle and the Principle of Non-contradiction. The first posits that every statement is either true or false, and the second that no statement is both true and false. This kind of thinking has had enormous benefits in the development of various fields of human endeavour, though in some contemporary scientific disciplines, it may have reached its limits, such as in quantum physics.
Zen, it seems to me, revels in defying both principles. In other words, in understanding the underlying nature of reality a statement may be neither true nor false, and it can both true and false. A good illustration can be found in the various kōans in which the teacher threatens to punish a student for answering either yes or no. Rather, the knowledge that is sought is the product of direct experience unmediated by our senses or our thinking. The Heart Sutra tells us that practice does not draw upon our senses (‘no eye, ear, nose …’) or our minds, which are empty of ‘feelings, perceptions ..’ Dōgen tells us to us to ‘think non-thinking’.
So, what is Zen practice? Cultivating some sort of spiritual equanimity through the personal discipline of zazen is undoubtedly crucial to navigating what life throws up to us, but it is only part of the practice. Importantly, practice involves the simple acts of kindness – the reduction of suffering.
The Buddha had been shielded by his privileged upbringing and was introduced to suffering only when he went beyond the palace walls and encountered old age, illness and death. This experience led to his formulation of the Four Noble Truths, which recognise the universality of suffering, diagnose its causes and chart a path to overcoming it. Thus, we vow to ‘end the suffering’ of the ‘many beings’. We acknowledge our own ‘greed, hatred and ignorance’, and recognise that reality is distorted by our self-centred minds’, or as Iris Murdoch puts it, our ‘fat relentless egos’ .
So, practice is not about concepts or disengaging from the world of suffering in ourselves or others. It about pure experience unfiltered by concepts, thinking, words of wisdom.
Just this experience.
Nothing added.