TO READ

TO READ

          Some people read everything they can find on Zen. I’m one of them.

Is this good, or is it bad? Well, like everything in Zen it can be good or it can be bad. It can be both good and bad. And it can be neither.

          You may remember an ad campaign that featured two photographs. The first shot showed a nicely fried egg with the caption, “This is your brain.” The second shot showed a messily scrambled egg, and its caption read, “This is your brain on drugs.”

Reading Suzuki’s essays, or Aitken’s Dharma talks, or the old masters’ koans won’t mess up your brain as long as you don’t take these things as gospel or as spiritual revelations. They may even help you, if you take them as words and ideas that were created by other humans, not by omnipotent beings.

          Still, if you limit your reading to only Zen or Buddhist literature you may allow yourself to be led down a garden path. When it comes to misguiding their readers—innocently or purposely—Zen writers can be as culpable as any other sort of writer whether they be philosophers, medical doctors, self-help artists, or financial advisors.

          So who else might be read without damage to one’s psyche? For starters there is Krishnamurti, who as a fourteen-year-old Indian boy, was designated by the Theosophical Society “World Teacher” and was trained to become a Western Messiah. That didn’t sit well with him, and in later years he denounced his elevated position by stating, “I desire those who seek to understand me to be free, not to follow me, not to make of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect.” 

There’s Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who was constantly being called on the carpet by his superiors because of his ever-growing interest in Eastern philosophies, especially in the tradition of Zen.

There’s Meister Eckhart, a German Catholic theologian who was excommunicated because of his radical ideas and his thought that rejected authority and dogma.

There’s Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher who developed his then-controversial ethics from a belief that the whole of reality stems from nature. He denounced the supernatural and metaphysics and subscribed to the notion that the ultimate is beyond discovery. In other words, there is no meaning to life.

Then there’s the Scottish thinker David Hume who also was denounced by the Church as a flaming heretic. He stated that reason and rational judgments are merely habitual associations of experiences. This notion comes very close to what Zen individuals want to rid themselves of in order to see their face before they were born.

And so on, and so on.

Krishnamurti repudiated his unwanted blind followers, those people who can’t think for themselves but depend on others to tell them how to behave.

Merton, Eckhart, Hobbes, and Hume were four freethinkers who showed healthy tendencies toward skepticism and for that had their ass busted by organized religion.

I’m fascinated by words and their interpretations, so just for the fun of it I went to a thesaurus and looked up the word freethinker. Here are some synonyms for an individual who uses his or her own mind instead of following someone else’s dictates. Brace yourself.

Heretic, radical, atheist, fanatic, revolutionary, nonbeliever, leftist.

I digress, but I’d like to believe you see my point.

Anyway, by reading Zen material you can certainly be helped to grasp the mechanics of practice, you can be caught up in the fascinating history of the tradition, you can be beguiled by the stories and the koans.

But all the booklearning in the world, Zen or other, will probably not bring you to an awareness of your own true being. That must come from you.

Enlightenment is not an end but a beginning. No worthwhile master or teacher would ever say, “You are enlightened.” A master or a teacher might point out one’s keen-sightedness as a step on a path, but that would be all.

That’s why there is no answer to the direct question of “Are you enlightened?”

A typical Zen answer to “Are you enlightened?” would be, “Not yes, not no.”

An even better response would be no answer at all.

Does one gain or lose from Zen practice?

Earnest Zen practice may, and probably will, help you to cut lose from the nasty habit of Western reasoning. That’s a loss, but it’s a worthy loss. Unless you’re a diehard pragmatist or scientist, shucking off analytical thinking and slanted judgements is a gain to your perception of the human condition.

An American Zen scholar who trained in Japan (Bernard Philips, mentioned in Philip Kapleau’s Awakening to Zen) said that Zen, basically, is three things.

1.     Zen is a sect of Buddhism that has its own history and forms.

2.    Zen is the heart and essence of Buddhism that has no doctrine or scripture of its own but points to the absolute source of all Buddhist teaching. This absolute source is the awakening experience of the Buddha. In this regard Zen is a discipline aimed at illumination of mind and freedom of action.

3.    Zen rises above—transcends, to use a favorite Buddhism word—the particulars of Buddhism in that Zen is a life of authentic being in which the self has overcome its alienation from itself and from all other things.