"Were we trading bondage to desire for bondage to self-absorption?"
Zen and the Art of Not Knowing God by Stephen H. ShortPT1
from the Christian Research Journal, Winter/Spring 1990, page 20. The Editor-in-Chief of the Christian Research Journal is Elliot Miller.
The alarm clock read midnight. I groggily swung my feet onto the knot-holed floor; it creaked as I felt my way through the darkness. Outside the window, the faint stars barely illuminated the encroaching forest. I lit a candle stuck to a plank of wood -- my altar -- and bowed deeply to the unsmiling Buddha next to it.
My knees ached as I positioned myself on a black cushion, legs folded beneath me, palms up, back straight. Before lowering my gaze to a spot on the floor, I caught the baleful stare of Bodhidharma, an early Zen Master whose fierce, bulging eyes screwed into me from a poster on the opposite wall.
The candle dripped and the night clung to its mysteries. The darkness seemed to close in on the small circle of light, buffeting it back and forth as if to squash it.
Suddenly, something passed over my head. I thought I was alone in this cabin deep in the Maine woods. Fear gripped my insides like a strongman's hand. It happened again. I could hear it coming closer with each pass.
Here was a chance to truly practice Zen. Despite my fear, I focused all my attention on the spot on the floor. I kept my mind clear and devoid of thought. I remained unmoved by any emotion. The passing thing came closer, like a whisper in my ear. Then something scaly brushed against my forehead. Unable to stand it any longer, the next time it passed I raised my eyes and found myself staring into the glinty eyes of a foot-long bat as it swept across my face.
How did I get here, I wondered? Where am I going? And can I get there from here?
I first began reading about Zen the day before I graduated from college. I wandered into a campus bookstore and asked for a good introduction to this curious, mystical philosophy I'd heard so much about. I was given Alan Watts's The Way of Zen.
The attraction was immediate. I was drawn to the mystery of it all. Watts claimed there was a knowing beyond knowing. But, no one could tell you about it; you had to discover it yourself. You did this by becoming still.
But it was the promised fruit of this discovery that was most fascinating to me. It seemed that this knowing -- called enlightenment -- released one from pain, suffering, and death. My attraction to Zen is perhaps best illustrated in a letter I wrote to the man who later became my Zen Master:
One day, when I was very young, some friends and I decided to climb the roof of a large barn nearby. It was very steep and high, and we went out from the inside through a second story window. When my turn came, without really thinking about what I was doing, I climbed out the window and started up the roof. There was no problem; it was easy and fun. But when I got about halfway up, I suddenly looked down, realized where I was, and was filled with fear. I stopped. I couldn't move. I laid there and just tried to hold on. I couldn't go up and I couldn't go back down. I stayed that way for a long time. Finally, with my father offering words of encouragement from the ground, I fearfully inched my way back down to the window and safety.
My life since then has been one of confusion. I don't know what's ahead, and I don't understand what's behind. I don't believe in anything, and I don't know what to believe in.
I feel like I'm still halfway up the roof, unable to move, just trying to hold on.
Zen promised a way out of this dilemma. It promised freedom: freedom from confusion and freedom from fear, particularly that fear that seems to lurk behind all others -- the fear of death. Those who attain enlightenment, I read, are beyond life and death. They are beyond every opposite, even "me" and "not me." This transcendence seems to give the enlightened almost godlike power and understanding.
After years of reading about Zen and its claims, I was driven to test them when my marriage broke up and I sank into a state of crushing despair. I stopped by a Zen center in my area and, by coincidence, a famous Zen Master was visiting that night. Compelled by my pain, I insisted on an audience.
Ushered into a muted, incense-laden room, I was confronted by the stare of a shaven-head Korean man, about 50, dressed in long, gray robes. His expression was completely impassive, as though he weren't really there. And his eyes looked straight through me, as though I weren't there, either. He seemed to know everything I intended to say, so I dared not conceal anything. All I could blurt out was, "Why am I so unhappy?"
"Because you don't understand your true nature!", he shot back without a pause. "Don't ask 'why.' 'Why' is a very bad word. You come to the Zen center, do hard training, and then you will understand your true nature."
I didn't know what he meant by my "true nature," but here was someone confidently offering a way to happiness. That was all I needed: I was ready to walk the path of Zen.
I began attending lectures at the Zen center. It quickly appeared that my chief obstacle to perfect freedom was my thinking. The solution is to have a nonthinking mind. The Master called this a "don't know" mind.
This "don't know" mind, he explained, is totally empty and clear. It holds no beliefs or ideas. In fact, it holds no sense of a "me" that might have any ideas. "You must put it all down," the Master would say. "Put down "I," "my," "me." Don't hold anything, don't make anything, don't attach to anything. Only go straight -- don't know!"
But, I wondered, if I put down "I," "my," and "me," what's left? How do I function if I don't think?
The Master explained that stripping our minds bare in this way reveals our true nature. This nature is like a perfectly clean mirror. It accurately reflects the things around it. A mind with ideas, on the other hand, is like a dirty mirror, distorting our perceptions.
With a clean mind-mirror, we are at last able to act "correctly." With a clear perception of each new situation, and no thought of self, we can respond according to our true nature. For example, if we encounter a man who is starving, and our mind-mirror is perfectly clear, our response will also be perfectly clear -- we will give him food. This is the unthinking and hence correctresponse. The "don't know" mind-mirror only reflects hunger and is not obscured by preconceptions, evaluations, or selfish motives. It is as if the observer himself is starving, for his mind is holding no idea of separation between "me" and "other."
I questioned, though, whether it is possible to have a truly "don't know" mind. Aren't we always holding something? If we feed the hungry man, for example, aren't we holding a value for human life? To a truly "don't know" mind -- not attached to anything -- whether the hungry man lives or dies shouldn't matter.
It made me wonder where the value for human life -- or any impulse toward good -- comes from. But I stopped wondering. If I'm to be a Zen student, I told myself, I must get rid of such thoughts and always keep a "don't know" mind -- even when listening to the Zen Master extol the "value" of letting go of all values.
The vehicle for thinking is language, and the Zen Master dismissed this, too. "The sun never said, 'I am sun,' and the moon never said, 'I am moon.'" He wanted us to see that our names for things -- and our thinking about them -- get in the way of a pure experience of them, of their clear reflection in our mind-mirrors. But, I thought to myself, is language really so bad? I wondered if without language the correct response of the "don't know" mind is always possible. In the case of the starving man, would we always know what his needs were if he didn't tell us, "I haven't eaten in days. Please help me."? Isn't language a more precise and reliable way to transmit information than mere impressions?
But the Zen Master wanted us to experience life, not think about it. I became paralyzed on the barn roof as a child, he explained, because I stopped to think. He illustrated the importance of not thinking by recounting a childhood experience of his own:
When I was eight years old, I went to the mountains with my friends. We used a sickle to cut the grass...to make compost. I liked that job, so I cut a lot of grass, gathered it all in a bag, and went together with the other students cutting grass to go to school. At that time, one of my friends said to me, "You cut your leg!" Then I looked at my leg and saw the blood. I was bleeding very badly and the blood was making squishing sounds in my rubber shoe as I walked. As soon as I saw this, I fell to the ground in great pain and couldn't move.
I had already walked half a mile with no feeling -- only very happy. Then I saw my leg. So I had a problem because I checked something. Before checking is called "go-straight" mind. [Then] there is no problem. After checking [came] the feelings, "I," "my," "me," and problems appear. I couldn't move. It [was] the same as [with] you. When you went out onto the roof, you had "go-straight" mind. Then you checked something and couldn't move and were afraid -- "How can I get down?"
But, I pondered, if we only go straight ahead and don't think about such dangers to our survival as falling off a roof or bleeding to death, why bother to feed ourselves or the starving man? I asked myself if there were some trustworthy values we should hold onto, perhaps preserved somewhere in language. But I decided not to continue asking such questions.
Instead, in the true spirit of a "don't know" mind, I chose to "go straight" to the next step on the Zen path: living in a temple. Because I was also interested in writing popular songs, I decided to move to my Master's branch center in the Korean section of Los Angeles, a city well-known as a center for commercial music.
My pursuit of a worldly career like songwriting didn't seem to bother the Zen Master. What I did, he said, wasn't important -- it was how I did it. "Whatever you do, do it completely. If you're drinking coffee, only drink coffee 100 percent. If you're playing tennis, only play tennis 100 percent. If you're sitting on the toilet, only do that 100 percent. Don't think about it -- only do it!"
Any occupation was acceptable, it seemed, so long as I kept a "don't know" mind. Did this mean I could be a professional assassin? Presumably not, because the "don't know" mind allows only "correct" behavior. But, since a "don't know" mind assumes the absence of any values, what's to check my actions?
The Master, in fact, had fought against the communist North Koreans. His "don't know" mind told him this was "correct" because the enemy was antireligious and bent on destroying Buddhism. How was he different from the North Korean soldier who fought for his own equally idealistic and selfless reasons?
As I boarded the plane in Boston for Los Angeles, I knew I had to banish such idle speculations. I was about to begin committed Zen practice.
The midnight flight descended into the thick smog, which hazed over what light existed in the blackness. After a long drive over the enshrouded freeways, we arrived at the Zen Center just in time for "morning practice."
Morning practice began every day with a 4:30 a.m. wake-up, followed by 108 deep prostrations (starting in a standing position and ending on the knees with face to the floor), chanting, and meditation. This took about two hours. Evening practice was about the same. We went through this routine every day, and for one three-day weekend per month, we were "on retreat" within the walls of the center -- sitting in meditation for about ten hours a day.
The residents, made up mostly of Americans of both sexes, ate all their meals together in silence, and maintained the building and grounds. Some commuted to outside jobs during the day; everyone was responsible for his or her own modest rent and board.
Zen Center life was designed so the students would be forced to see how bound they were to their opinions and ideas. As the Master explained, "Zen Center is like washing potatoes. In Korea, we wash potatoes by throwing them all in a pot of water and stirring them with a stick. As they rub against each other, they soon become clean." The idea was that through intimate interaction, the ideas and values to which we clung would be forced to the surface as they rubbed up against and conflicted with those of the others. Once we saw them, each of us would know what we had to let go of.
This was difficult for me. I had always sought out tranquil, isolated environments. Now I was sharing a room with a man who spent his days trying to sweat out many years' accumulation of antipsychotic drugs, and listening all night to the roar of Los Angeles County's second busiest intersection, only thirty feet from our window.
In my misery, I quickly saw my attachment to refined companionship, quiet, and fresh air. These, and all other desires, I would have to let go. But I wondered if some desires aren't valuable, such as the desire to resolve confusion and uncertainty with peace and truth. Don't we need such a desire to motivate us? Zen teaches that if we let go of all desires, peace and truth will stand revealed. I considered whether there might be truth beyond Zen that I would never find because through Zen I had lost all desire to look for it.
Watching my desires and attachments appear and trying not to hold on to them, I also watched my attention becoming more and more focused on myself. Though we students bowed, chanted, meditated, ate, and slept together, we might just as well have been alone on a mountain top. Everything outside of us was to serve only as devices for monitoring our internal reactions. Zen is the ultimate religion of self-reliance; the road to enlightenment must be walked alone. "If the Buddha himself were to reappear and sit down beside you for eternity," the Master would tell us, "he couldn't help you."
The irony of becoming wrapped up in the self in order to lose the self was not lost on me. We were told that bringing our attachments to awareness was a prerequisite to letting them go. Might not increased awareness subtly lead to increased attachment? Were we trading bondage to desire for bondage to self-absorption?
What about the needs of others? What about the world's suffering? "I've already saved all beings from suffering," the Master would answer. He meant that the experience of enlightenment is somehow beyond all suffering, one's own and others'. Still, I mused, what about that starving man we would feed if we had a "don't know" mind? Would we ever really encounter him, spending our days and years sitting in the Zen Center, turning inward, observing our own likes and dislikes? But such speculation, I reminded myself, was all thinking. "I must cut it off if I am to ever find relief from my own suffering."
Every morning we prostrated ourselves before the Zen Master. And on retreat weekends and other times, we went to him for personal interviews. These interviews were both guidance sessions and tests where we were challenged with the infamous Zen koans (questions): "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" "What did your face look like before your parents were born?", and so forth. Because they were impossible to answer by thinking about them such questions were supposed to help us stop thinking.
By our answers, the Master gauged the progress of our "don't know" minds. The validity of our answers was subject to his judgment alone. In fact, the whole of our efforts in our practice depended on his direction. He represented the only returned traveler we knew from a place we desperately wanted to go ourselves.
But I began to question if we should ever put such faith in another person. He was a Master only because his Master said he was; his Master had been approved by his Master, and so on, supposedly back to the Buddha. But what if there were a weak link in this chain, compromising every successor? One Los Angeles Zen Master was known to be an alcoholic, and another to be having sexual relations with young female students. When did a Zen Master's human fallibility end and his perfect enlightenment begin? It made me wonder if there were someone somewhere I could truly depend on. But the Master said that ultimately you can depend only on your own "don't know" mind, so I stopped wondering.
Over time, the rigorous training began to chip away at my sense of self. I learned to ignore the demands of my body. To sit for long periods in one position without moving is unnatural for the human organism, even in sleep. The long hours of seated meditation, often brutally painful, taught me how to disengage myself from the needs of my physical being.
Moreover, many tangible signs of individuality were eliminated. We were encouraged to cut our hair short or completely off, and we wore identical robes during practice. Many of us took Buddhist names which were impersonal references to Zen practice; mine was "Path to Enlightenment." Ritualistically performing all actions together further minimized the self, as selfbecame absorbed into the group.
We seized every opportunity to deny our self-wills. Our model was an elderly Zen Master who came to live at the center for a while. He had just spent five years in a small cell that, by his own directive, had been bricked up from the outside.
Zen involved as much surrender as denial. Conditions were designed to help us relax our self- wills. The meditation hall was quiet inside, the lighting subdued, the air heavy with incense. During the hours we spent there we were isolated from stimuli, from the world of conflicting ideas -- including those that might challenge the underlying presuppositions of Zen. Even our meditative posture seemed to symbolize surrender: the arms encircled and exposed the vitals, while the palms and soles of the feet -- the most sensitive parts of the body -- lay open and upward.
Meditation always was practiced before a black and gold Buddha statue. As I would bow before it, I wondered if I were merely trading my self-will for another's will. In emptying myself, was I moving toward neutrality and freedom, or was another value system rushing in to fill the void? |
