(Non)Split Topic: Enlightenment's Real (Batchelor Foolish) but forget "Enlightenment"

[Sekiyuu]

My thought is that even if all this Buddhist, Zen, shikantaza stuff turns out to be a sham there is still real benefits to sitting quietly each day and following a handful of common sense guidance on how to conduct oneself.

Enlightenment is a sham, but I have to say, I may have never opened the cereal box of Zen if it weren't for the promise of a prize inside.

I am also seconding Kokuu's recommendation for "Circle of The Way" for anyone interested in the details of who exactly started shikantaza or shikantaza-like practices, and when.

Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

[Juki]

Enlightenment is a sham, but I have to say, I may have never opened the cereal box of Zen if it weren't for the promise of a prize inside.


Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

Don't be disappointed when you find that the box is empty. The box is always empty. The emptiness is the prize.

Gassho,
Juki
Sat today and lah

[Michael Joseph]

Enlightenment is a sham, but I have to say, I may have never opened the cereal box of Zen if it weren't for the promise of a prize inside.

I am also seconding Kokuu's recommendation for "Circle of The Way" for anyone interested in the details of who exactly started shikantaza or shikantaza-like practices, and when.

Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

From what perspective could we judge enlightenment to be "a sham?" Where is the "high ground" where we can look down upon reality and draw such absolute conclusions?

Gassho,

Hobun

STLAH

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

[Kyōsen]

From what perspective could we judge enlightenment to be "a sham?" Where is the "high ground" where we can look down upon reality and draw such absolute conclusions?

I think it would be wise to defer to the Buddha's words in the Diamond Sutra:

“Subhuti, do not say that the Tathagata has the idea, ‘I will bring living beings to the shore of liberation.’ Do not think that way, Subhuti. Why? In truth there is not one single being for the Tathagata to bring to the other shore. If the Tathagata were to think there was, he would be caught in the idea of a self, a person, a living being, or a life span. Subhuti, what the Tathagata calls a self essentially has no self in the way that ordinary persons think there is a self. Subhuti, the Tathagata does not regard anyone as an ordinary person. That is why he can call them ordinary persons.

Here it's the idea of "living beings" that's being specifically negated, but I think there's also a more subtle negation to be found: That of liberation. Other sections of the Sutra speak of abandoning concepts and enlightenment is a concept. Whatever we think enlightenment is, it's not that. Liberation seems to require that we give up the search for liberation. Although I'm not sure what the Sōtō view on this is, so I would sooner defer to Jundo and/or the Tree Leaf unsui.

Gassho
Kyōsen
Sat|LAH

[Bion]

From what perspective could we judge enlightenment to be "a sham?" Where is the "high ground" where we can look down upon reality and draw such absolute conclusions?

Gassho,

Hobun

STLAH

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

It’s safe to say it’s a “sham” in the sense that many have looked at enlightenment as something to be pursued, attained, gained, something bestowed upon them based on merit and virtue and something that would add to themselves as a whole once firmly grasped. But enlightenment is already present and within us, just underneath delusion, lurking, ready to be exposed, working underneath all the layers of the mind. Enlightenment doesn’t come from outside of us so chasing something that we just forget we already have is a big deceit.

[emoji1374] sattoday lah

[Jundo]

Enlightenment is a sham

Hmmm, is that so? Then why are we here in this Zendo?

As the Diamond Sutra preaches, part of "enlightenment" is to get beyond the word and idea "enlightenment" as something outside to find ...

... thus our emphasis in Zazen on radical "non-seeking" thus to find what cannot be found.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

It’s safe to say it’s a “sham” in the sense that many have looked at enlightenment as something to be pursued, attained, gained, something bestowed upon them based on merit and virtue and something that would add to themselves as a whole once firmly grasped. But enlightenment is already present and within us, just underneath delusion, lurking, ready to be exposed, working underneath all the layers of the mind. Enlightenment doesn’t come from outside of us so chasing something that we just forget we already have is a big deceit.

[emoji1374] sattoday lah

Lovely.

And for Master Dogen, "enlightenment" is also continuous "practice-enlightenment," manifesting in how we put this inner wisdom into practice, and bring it to life, in our daily words, thoughts and acts free of excess desire, anger and violence, jealousy and other divided thinking etc. .... manifesting in one moment, perhaps back to delusion in the next moment when we slip up and fall in the mud ...

Gassho, J

STLah

[Bion]

Lovely.

And for Master Dogen, "enlightenment" is also continuous "practice-enlightenment," manifesting in how we put this inner wisdom into practice, and bring it to life, in our daily words, thoughts and acts free of excess desire, anger and violence, jealousy and other divided thinking etc. .... manifesting in one moment, perhaps back to delusion in the next moment when we slip up and fall in the mud ...

Gassho, J

STLah

Yes! As master Dogen said, practice IS realization. One doesn’t practice as in “training” to be enlightened... One practices enlightenment the same way one practices law or medicine: the second you do, you become.

[emoji1374] sattoday lah

[Sekiyuu]

It’s safe to say it’s a “sham” in the sense that many have looked at enlightenment as something to be pursued, attained, gained, something bestowed upon them based on merit and virtue and something that would add to themselves as a whole once firmly grasped. But enlightenment is already present and within us, just underneath delusion, lurking, ready to be exposed, working underneath all the layers of the mind. Enlightenment doesn’t come from outside of us so chasing something that we just forget we already have is a big deceit.

This is pretty much what I meant. It is a bait-and-switch at best. Honestly, I am borrowing ideas from Gesshin Greenwood:

I would sit in the zendo for hours, trying and trying to attain great realization, and maybe some things happened and I saw reality bend apart and open up, but this never solved the problem of my life.

...

After I transferred to the women’s monastery, I heard Aoyama Roshi, the abbess, give zazen instructions for the first time. She said, “Put your right foot on your left thigh, and your left foot on your right thigh. Straighten your back. Throw out any idea of Buddha or enlightenment.”

For the nuns, there was no time to pursue enlightenment. We threw it away, and what was left was the whole world in front of us.

From this article, which she paraphrases in her book: https://www.lionsroar.com/enlightenm...-male-fantasy/

Furthermore,

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.

There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

I am finding more and more truth in these statements, while sitting around trying to "attain" enlightenment seems like a joke.

Sorry for going over the limit, when I say "Enlightenment is a sham" I think I am just repeating things other people have said better.

Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

[Jundo]

This is pretty much what I meant. It is a bait-and-switch at best. Honestly, I am borrowing ideas from Gesshin Greenwood:

Don't think that some people ... even respected Buddhist teachers ... don't miss the boat on some aspects of this practice. I just read the most incredibly silly essay by Steven Batchelor in which he is up to his usual game of recent years (I used to be a tremendous fan in the past when he was simply a spokesperson for being a bit skeptical of rebirth, which I am too) in which he tends to throw out anything in Buddhism that escapes him. He admits that he never experienced the wholeness that is the fruit of this practice, so just tosses it out as unreal and somehow mystical nonsense. How foolish!

Some years ago I spent a couple of days in Nagi Gompa, a nunnery up in the hills above Kathmandu in Nepal, where I went to study Dzogchen with a teacher called Urgyen Tulku. From him I received the “pointing-out instruction” in which the teacher points out to you the nature of your mind, or—even more than that—the nature of rigpa, a primordial, pristine awareness that is more than your ordinary, everyday mind. But the problem was that no matter how much Urgyen Tulku tried to point this out to me, what I found myself actually aware of was a physical sensation somewhere in my body.

When I told him this, he said, “No! Look! It is without form, without shape, without color, without sensation,” and so on. But however much I was told what rigpa was, I could not get beyond a physical sensation somewhere in my body. Before I could think of mind or consciousness or awareness I felt this strange, indefinable sensation—like William James’ funny sensations in the back of the throat. I wasn’t cut out to be a Dzogchen practitioner. I experience exactly the same thing when doing mindfulness or any meditative practice that supposedly brings one into a greater understanding of one’s mind or mental states. In my Seon training in Korea, my teacher Kusan Sunim was very keen on what he called shin (or maum in colloquial Korean), which is the Chinese/Korean/Japanese word for the Pali word citta—“mind,” or “heart–mind” if you wish—but in his teaching it was really not very different from the rigpa of Dzogchen. When Kusan Sunim taught us to ask “What is this?” for him the “this” meant shin.

He made it very clear that shin was not our ordinary, everyday consciousness or awareness. Shin, like rigpa, was somehow far more. It lay behind the scenes, hidden from view, and the purpose of meditative inquiry was to break through to it, to experience it directly. And such would be—in my teacher’s understanding—the experience of enlightenment. But from the beginning of my training I found myself highly skeptical of this language. I was resistant to the idea of there being something more, something beyond what we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and know with our ordinary mind.

There is a tension in the Seon tradition between an emphasis on the everyday specificity of experience—all the talk about cypress trees in the courtyard, pounds of flax, and so on—and a rather mystical teaching about a transcendent or universal mind or consciousness, similar to what you might find in Advaita Vedanta: the notion of some nondual awareness. As much as I’ve tried to figure out what my teacher meant by shin, I’m still just as confused about it as I was on day one. I’m not at all persuaded that it is a useful way of presenting this practice.
https://www.lionsroar.com/what-if-ou...-that-matters/

Oh my. What in fact happened here is that the Dzogchen teacher and Kusan Sunim, his Korean Zen teacher, knew the flowing wholeness, and poor Steve for all his years of practice can't get it, like someone who is tone deaf to music so just cannot hear the harmonies of the piano (wondering why others in the audience applaud), or someone color blind and only seeing the world as brown (thus denying that the rainbow exists)! So, what Steven turns around to do in the essay is completely discount the view of wholeness beyond thoughts of separate things as some "otherworldly" awareness (it is anything but "otherworldly"), while keeping only the part of Zen he likes where individual aspects of reality ... individual people, things, moments ... are seen as shining jewels. He is right in the latter part (yes, we Zen folks come back to honor each of the separate things of reality), but just foolish in rejecting the first aspect (the transcendent wholeness) ... like someone who has no taste buds for sweetness so insists that sugar is a myth.

What a shame. His Tibetan and Son Zen teachers were not deceiving him, but now Steven leads folks astray.

Sorry if my rant ran long.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

After I transferred to the women’s monastery, I heard Aoyama Roshi, the abbess, give zazen instructions for the first time. She said, “Put your right foot on your left thigh, and your left foot on your right thigh. Straighten your back. Throw out any idea of Buddha or enlightenment.”

For the nuns, there was no time to pursue enlightenment. We threw it away, and what was left was the whole world in front of us.

There are two ways to understand this, one good and one not so good.

The good way is the practitioner who just gives up the hungry thirst and search for enlightenment, drops it away and simply pours herself into the activity in front of her ... be it Zazen or work or any activity ... thus to find the flowing wholeness present when we stop hunting for this.

The not so good way (maybe the Steven Batchelor way?) is the person who never gets a taste of flowing wholeness, so simply engages in various activities as the booby prize, a compromise, all that remains.

I hope Aoyama Roshi meant the first (in fact, I am sure that she did) and not the second (although it may sadly be true even for some of the nuns in the monastery), and maybe some folks just cannot taste the sweetness of the sugar, see all the colors, hear the music because they are tone deaf.

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.

This simply means that we drop the idea of a separate "small self" and of separate "myriad things" to find the wholeness of the greater sweeping in.

There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

This is just saying that there are no "enlightened people" as a stagnant state, but rather, the dropping away of the idea of separate "people" in some frozen "enlightenment," and instead the realization of the wholeness in our living activity.

Sorry, more rant.

Gassho, J

STLah

PS - I am going to split this off into its own topic.

[Sekiyuu]

Thank you, Jundo, for sharing those words.

I get a similar sense of frustration reading them, and it reminds me of the story of Alan Watts failing the first case of the Mumonkan and immediately giving up on serious Zen practice.

I am distinctly reminded of my upbringing as a "gifted" child who was unintentionally taught that having to work hard to understand a new concept was something only dumb people do, and certainly not something I would ever need to do; are Batchelor and Watts unknowingly falling into the same trap?

Sorry for going a few sentences over, but: I should really add a winking emoji more often, because I will sometimes summarize nuanced topics in short, coarse statements. Perhaps coming from a background of being a "gifted" child, I find it is often more helpful to be pushed away from the stories of profound wisdom enlightenment and into everyday life. Please do not see my words as me thinking I've made up my mind about what "enlightenment" is or isn't, and certainly not what it is for other people.

Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

[Jundo]

Sounds like a good attitude.

PS - Off topic footnote: What I meant about Mr. Batchelor throwing out the Baby Buddha with the Bathwater in recent years is his strange insistence in recent books of rejecting most aspects of Buddhism (far beyond rebirth) if they happen to be shared with Brahman/Hinduism, Jainism or any other Indian school, thus asserting that the only important aspects of Buddhism are those parts 100% unique to Buddhism. That is just silly, like writing a book about "how American Democracy works" but leaving out any mention of the Supreme Court & Legislature because the UK and France also happen to have those. It is a silly formula for determining the essence of something.

[Sekiyuu]

maybe some things happened and I saw reality bend apart and open up, but this never solved the problem of my life.

For the nuns, there was no time to pursue enlightenment. We threw it away, and what was left was the whole world in front of us.

These two sentences make me think that Gesshin (and likely Aoyama) indeed experienced some kind of transcendental wholeness or egoless non-existence that has evaded Batchelor, then discovered that it is not the endpoint of practice, and arguably not even the focus of practice. I have had a few experiences that sound similar, but I always come out of them thinking "Okay... well... Buddha still has to file their taxes...".

Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

[Jundo]

These two sentences make me think that Gesshin (and likely Aoyama) indeed experienced some kind of transcendental wholeness or egoless non-existence that has evaded Batchelor, then discovered that it is not the endpoint of practice, and arguably not even the focus of practice. I have had a few experiences that sound similar, but I always come out of them thinking "Okay... well... Buddha still has to file their taxes...".

Gassho,
Kenny
Sat Today

Yes. Such insight into the "person of no rank coming in and out of one's face" is vital to this path (although some never get to know so, and that is okay too if need be), but such knowing alone is no way enough too ...

... for it is how we live from that point, making the realization real in this life, living to avoid excess desire, anger and violence, jealousy and other divided thinking as best we can (this is Master Dogen's vision of ongoing "Practice-Enlightenment," but really is a view shared by all flavors of Zen and Buddhism). It is not just a "knowing," but also a graceful "living."

Gassho, J

STLah