Firstly I wish to thank everyone for the reads and questions so far. I appreciate the retweets and likes, even the small amount right now since they all help in getting what I see as valuable information to the general sub section of people I wish to see thrive. And I am particularly impressed that some have taken some themes that I wrote about in my previous article and expounded upon them in their own way.
Immediately, the title of my article is misleading. The use of the verb “to be” is almost always the wrong way to describe anything in a high-resolution and scientific manner, even matters that are empirical or philosophical. Thus the verb ‘to be’ is almost the worst possible way to describe Zen.
I have found over many years the word “is” or the verb “to be” to become increasingly important in shaping my own experience of reality; and syntactically when constructing sentences to describe Zen I had some trouble in qualifying the ultimate futility in describing this practice.
This is a view of the world I first came across in the thinking of Alfred Korzybski in his idea of E-Prime in which he tried to use language to account for discoveries in quantum mechanics and the apparent contradictions and philosophical shortcomings in descriptions of reality provided by the prevailing Aristotelian world views that had dominated Western thinking for so long.
Difficulty arises because in my experiences of Zen and Zen states it has become apparent that any meaningful description is impossible, because it isn’t, in some sense it is negation. One finds they, like the great masters, can typically only disqualify or use seemingly eccentric and weird tricks to get any semblance of a point across, whatsoever.
It is with these facts in mind the I shall make somewhat of a disclaimer. Concepts are fallible, and by no means to I have any intention of claiming to have the whole truth of the matter. rather, I present my own interpretation that should possess some utility for those whom wish to utilise these physiological methodologies.
In poast 1 I provided a brief overview on the history and perspectives of Zen the I personally find useful, as well as providing a roundabout description of what it involves. Today we’re going to focus on some of the core “operational tenets” of Zen looking through a traditional lens with one addition of my own. I do feel all these remain extremely valid and assist with the mind-sets and maps that Zen practice requires and how they can enhance your meditative practice through correct understanding. Initially of course, since ultimately there can be no real concepts here. I am in a way, providing a flawed map. And by necessity I admit it is merely a map and is drawn up and designed to allow you intellectual and existential freedom.
It remains one of the prime arrogances of the modern world that the ancients were entirely superstitious and completely ignorant. They weren’t. They were just as capable (if not more) of perceiving the world around them. They merely lacked an entirely mechanistic and materialistic scientific language in which to describe what they knew worked or what they experienced. It is unfortunate that modern science does not subject itself to skepticism in terms of its own ultimate limitations.
So, we will respectfully look at Zen through its own ideas and vocabulary and with one of my own additions, something I feel to be completely relevant to our discussions and something I will outline in the next paragraph.
- The Problem of Criterion or the ‘Problem of Induction
Interestingly, the same issue the historical Buddha apparently wrangled with are the same issues the western philosophy had also been wrangling with for the past 200 years. It will be the subject of an upcoming essay and video series, where I wish to expound upon a little known connection between the modern and western philosophies of antiquity and this Ancient Central Asian tradition. Thus, since undoubtedly most of my readers are Westerners I wish to expound upon
These issues were famously presented to the popular Western imagination by David Hume in several of his works, but particularly the work know has “A Treatise of Human Nature”, in which Hume questions the ability of the human being to know anything absolute, through two cognitive processes which he refers to with the umbrella term “induction”, hence what has come to be known in more broadly in philosophical circles as the “Problem of Induction”.
Hume divides the inductive processes into two main categories (categorisation is what Hume argues we are – categorising animools) being ‘Rationalism’ or the ability of humans to reason and ‘Empiricism’, that is to say the ability to derive facts for the senses and experiences. Rationalism of course referring to philosophical discourse and the scientific method, mathematics etc. Hume makes the argument therefore that these categories represent the methods in which humans make sense of the world around them.
Hume the goes on to expound the boundaries of human animool knowing thusly:
“If Reason determin’d us, it would proceed upon that principle that instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.
Treatise on Human Nature (T. 1.3.6.4) – David Hume
This is an interesting statement, particularly in the context of Zen buddhist philosophy. He is referring to the limitations of human cognitive ability and ultimately the potential to grasp with certainty the world around us with complete accuracy.
To further refine his section on induction in the context of above, Hume implies that if we cannot predict future events with 100% certainty, using the methodologies of reason or empirical experience then certainly there are bounds to human knowledge and thus and absolute nexus of understanding is certainly not within the knowing of human existence or knowledge. We are effectively bound by categorisation and even though Hume did not explicitly say so, our nervous system and genetic perceptual proclivities.
Hume says in his book that there are always exceptions, probably due to the impermanent nature of human existence and the flux in which the universe exists precludes and absolutist interpretation and ability to predict.
Whether through empirical experience or rational deduction and the tools thereof, absolute knowledge is not available to us and by default we simply cannot help but end up in a circular reasoning since induction is of the body and senses and since we cannot predict everything all the time our ability to categorise must always be changed or refined to account for the impermanent flux of the interconnected conditions of the universe of perception around us. Does this sound familiar yet?
This issue was not new to Western philosophers however, and had been wrangled with in ancient Greece for example. This narrative goes beyond the confines of this particular essay, however I will elaborate my own take in upcoming videos and essays. I posit it is from the ancient tradition of Pyrrhonism and it’s uptake by French and Anglo-Scot enlightenment philosophers that the actual philosophical paradigms that the Buddha wrestled with trace a direct lineage to the Buddha himself.
Pierre Bailey, the French philosopher whom authored the extraordinarily influential text the ‘Dictionaire historique et critique’. In this text Bailey wrote extensively on Buddhism, albeit a flawed and jesuit interpretation since that’s indeed where his accounts came from. Likewise Hume consistently references Pyrrho in his works. Without going into detail here which goes beyond the reaches of this present essay, I posit therefore that Hume, being influenced by Pyrrho and Bailey when he was penning treatise was during his time in France explicitly and undeniably influenced by them. And both these thinkers are in my opinion directly influenced by Buddhist ascetics, in the case of Pyrrho and his school, and of course Bailey through his interaction with the jesuit orders.
When you consider the influence of Hume on all Western philosophy, post modernist, enlightenment, Nietzsche (whom considered Hume influential on himself) we can therefore start to conceive of the profound and all-encompassing influence this central asian throughout has had on the modern world.
And perhaps it is very suitable, since philosophy such as this becomes appealing when some degree of decadence sets in.
The problem of induction was in ancient times known as the problem of Criterion; something we and Bailey and Hume knew from the philosopher and physician Sextus Empiricus in his work “Outlines of Pyrrhonism” which aside from the alleged poetry of Pyyrho, remains the only insight we have into this philosophy.
This debate has been raging for a long time; that is between the absolutist philosophers, this of the Aristotelean world view, and those of the limitationist Pyrrhonic world view.
So you may ask how is this relevant to Zen? I came across the connections to these issues through my own philosophical investigation a bit later on in the show; that is through my engagement and essential adherence to the Sophia Perrenias or ‘Traditionalist school’ and Zen; and my attempt to reconcile what I initially saw to be irreconcilable differences, and something that I still struggle with to some degree but something I will be articulating further in an upcoming articles and video content.
Firstly the reason I share this is to show that you are definitely not so far disconnected from these challenges and problems, it is all encompassing and exists to the very heart of our modern experience in the West. The buddhist conception and practice is therefore useful to us, since it wrangles with these existential problems directly in the same way modern philosophy attempts to.
Secondly, the resolution to the empirical states you reach in Zen through your experience and the rational or as Hume calls it the ‘relations of ideas or matters of fact’ and how this relates to ones own experience of reality and the apparent difficulties this presents to the practitioner is looked at in buddhist practice in depth.
Interestingly, the famous Tibetan monk Nargaguna also famously wrangled with such issues. He made and essential statement which I would echo:
“Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that which is explained to be emptiness, that, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way. Something that is not dependently arisen, such a thing does not exist, therefore a non-empty thing”
‘Mulamadhyamakakarika, Dependent origination’ – Nagarjuna
Effectively Nagarjuna explains that things in any absolute since are empty, they co-arise due to categorisation, and that emptiness itself is empty. Zen is like this. I reiterate from Nishitani of the Kyoto school, a man pre-eminently regarded by my own self in wrangling with Nietszchean nihilism:
“The point at which emptiness is emptied to become true emptiness is the point at which each and every thing becomes manifest in possession of its own suchness”
Religion and Nothingness – Nishitani Keiji
As I’ve said, Zen is not nihilism. It is a useful perceptual practice and a way of dealing with reality in a forthright manner. Nishitani goes on in the same book:
The double negation of things and self results in a restoration of both things and self on the field of emptiness, which could be called “the field of ‘be-ification’ or, in Nietzschean terms, the field of the Great Affirmation, where we can say Yes to all things.” (Religion and Nothingness, 124)
Religion and Nothingness – Nishitani Keiji
For me this eloquently gets the the crux of the matter and in a general way how we should approach Zen in the modern west, how we should centre out philosophy and practice in the degenerating and decadent modern world that has presented us with so many misconstrued and self-abasing ways of confronting these same issues. This is a positive outlook that while realising the limitations of ourselves and the emptiness, in no way negates living and as Nishitani says, ‘saying yes to all things’ though our own ‘great affirmation’.
Hume himself also states that while all this inability to know Aristotelian absolutism and the limits to our knowledge, man nevertheless should live in conformity mostly with his own customs and culture, this should not be taken, as many later philosophers took it and we can see from the post-post-modernist schools to take a hammer to tradition and culture in a fit of biologically sick and sadistic nihilistic rage; I asset quite the opposite.
And here I present my own take on the first dictum on the practice of Zen and something you do not find in the mainstream literature. The one element that has probably not been explicitly considered and explicitly expounded on (although it clearly has implicitly been) in the context of nihilism, Zen and Hume and yet remains central to buddhistic philosophy is that of the BODY.
In my opinion we can clarify many such of these issues in this way since we cannot be outside of our bodies, our bodies necessarily shape our perceptions and that is why buddhism works on reshaping many of the energies and though processes of the body. Zen offer the middle way, a way therefore that Academics, investigating solutions to this problem, tend to miss while self-defeatingly clinging to mental constructs to try to ‘reason‘ their way of of the problems of induction.
In essence. We are wandering gene matrices, interacting with physical environments and pressures that are in a consistent state of flux. We are a product of physical forces, that through limitations of the complex interconnections of genes and experiences, categorise classes of experience to facilitate survival in a universe that in itself is constantly in a state of flux. While there may be some “reality” hidden behind these forces, we, through our limitations of the material of which are comprised only have access to categorisation as a means of understanding.
And since this is a product of our genes interacting with environment we are by definition limited by these same constraints in terms of what we are able to perceive. Comprehension beyond what there is on a conceptual level, cannot therefore be within in our grasp; that is to say I remain highly sceptical of any ability to perceive some sort of eternal principle beyond the context of our own bodies. But this is nihilism in some way and I reject philosophers stopping here.
And yet this rejection is not all there is since within us lies a great becoming that lies within the material of which we’re comprised, something the lies well beyond the scope of mere mechanism and scientism.
What I say is that the body, albeit it removed from the absolute and in a constant ever-changing state encapsulates within it drives, wills – that are in and of themselves a kind of encapsulation of the absoloute. Some forms of being encapsulate this more than others and while one may describe this lot as tragic in the way that an ancient greek would understand tragedy; that these noble drives are inherent in you as a result of an unending chain of ancestors whom interacted with the world in this way and therefore far beyond the materialistic and belittling scope of mere survival. There is a drive that is as old as the universe itself to express in itself a kind of power of which the spirit, contained within this flux has been imbibed.
And it those of this spirit whom which I concern myself. I wish in my own inevitable circumstance to assist them to shake off the shackles of the domesticated primate; and zen offers a perfect method for rising above the problems of Nihilism, category and inductions. The buddha taught this in his virile detachment form preference. Pyyrho also, as we have seen taught this also.
The mental lightness that arises from such a view leads to a kind of haughty embrace of the flaws of character and reality and yet at the same time a whole-hearted embrace of this world. Zen is practice that can effectively foster awareness beyond category. There is much more TO be said about this, however for the purpose of this essay, I have penned enough.
Think on this – if you now the outcome, why bother playing the game? An indeed, we are engaged in play of sorts. In my view meditational practices are integral for the modern person to maintain this playful, non-sticky frame of mind.
Now on to the accepted core tenants…
- Emptiness
And important distinction of the Zen concept of emptiness must be made clear from the outset: Emptiness in Buddhism and Zen is definitely not the same as a Nietzschean-type Nihilism. Nihilism is a life-negative or life-denying value and is commonly associated with the word emptiness in the Western-mind and language. The Zen conception of “Emptiness” or “Sunyata”, a concept I discussed in previous poast simply refers to the fact that all things including human beings are transitory and unfixed. Zen philosophy utilises the word “absoloute” interchangeably (to some degree at least) with emptiness. Objects and phenomena are seen to have no real enduring existence are are treated with a kind of ‘humane’ scepticism. In some sense the concept of emptiness regards all things as merely transitory ‘appearances’. While this in some way sounds hopeless there is great power to be found in such a concept. The flip side is that emptiness makes all phenomena possible as well; that all things that come into and leave existence in all their varieties are only possible because of emptiness. I mark an important personal distinction; there is no distinction between the physical and the spiritual in my view, you cannot simply wish yourself something like many degenerates do in the modern age, this would be considered wrong-perception. It is clear from the historic texts that the historical Buddha knew male and female, since he precluded female monks initially.
- No Mind / No self
I some sense all concepts and experience come out of the experience and emptiness, if we must consider all things intellectually initially to be of of emptiness. In the same way the all things are considered temporary and unfixed, so to must ourselves and minds be viewed and experienced in the same manner. No-mind in the Zen literature typically refers to an experience of the moment in its totality and fullness and thus is in some sense and experience without thought or self-perception. Thought and conceptualisation appears to bind us to time and place, it binds us in a sort of conceptual daze. For survival, this is useful. Yet mind or thought cannot experience anything beyond itself or have the experience of no-mind. No-mind obviously is the experience of experience without mind.
No-self is conceptually very similar. It is in Zen (there we go using “is” yet again…that’s English for you) a philosophy that describes an experience that there is no-self within a person. Note that I use the word experience rather than idea. A zen monk would probably say something like “i have a tendency to posit that I have a mind’; a powerful statement that I will investigate further in an upcoming series on the maha-satipatthana sutta and associated practices.
There is no “id” to borrow from the German and Freudian vernacular. Id in our view being a more succinct description than the English word “ego” which in our view holds too many other connotations to be a valid descriptor for this concept. This concept is extremely important for framing meditative practice. In essence no-self is “saying” that insight comprises of the recognition that while meditating we recognise experientially and perhaps empirically that existence is almost like a set of impersonal and interconnected phenomena and experiences that pass us by and that there is no consistent ‘soul’ ‘individual self’ or ‘id’ in the Aristotelian objective sense.
- Cause and effect
Yes yes I can hear you all cringe. I myself even cringed writing that term. We all have that friend or co-worker that often employs karma as some sort of vehicle of cosmic justice; while always looking around themselves exasperated at how sociopath a or sociopath b in the office seems to have risen on the planes to become impervious to the universal karmic justice squads rebalancing weapons. Ultimately that may or may not be true – I do not know such things. In Zen it certainly isn’t the idea of right action = good consequence or wrong action = retribution, guaranteed. It is not a moral concept like it may be in some sects of a religion like Hinduism.
What I do know is the Zen conception of Cause and effect and how it remains an integral part of this philosophy. On a mundane level we all know what this means. If I place my hand on a hot stove element I will burn my hand. Pretty simple I would think. In Zen the macro-view is held that cause and effect refers to an extremely detailed and intricate interconnection and this is as all-encompassing as the universe itself. In this way we could view karma as a very scientific perspective and in Zen an inherently psychological concept.
It is integral for meditation for it describes karma as one mental state and mental moment, one placement within the universe or placement of a set of gene matrices interacting with the transitory flux of environment automatically leading to the next set of thoughts or experiences by that organism and so on ad infinitum. This is an important concept since we all know the way we react the a certain moment will determine the outcomes of life and the future experiences we have really subjected ourselves to. Furthermore we recognise that the we think, the way we are programmed by our culture and circumstances and the way our mind reacts to the flux of events determines inevitable consequences and our future experiences. Words and actions will continue to influence our fate of an individual. We could therefore encourage that right-action and right-word are effective way of reshaping cause and effect and what is experienced in someone’s life. Don’t you think?
- Conditioned Arising
I personally did not become aware of this concept until quite recently. The Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda, also known as “Dependent Arising”. One of my teachers described it as that all phenomena that make up individuals experiences of the world and their relative existences are interdependent or co-dependent on one another to exist. They all affect one another and thus we are all entangled in a web, a matrix of sorts or a massive tangle of cause and effects that are all mutually dependent on one another. This should be meditated upon and is a core principle of all the schools of Buddhism. Not that I consider the Zen to be Buddhism in any traditional sense, as I have previously stated.
- Compassion
This was my ‘least favourite’ of all the concepts of Buddhism that I experimented with. I had trouble with it.
Thus, it forced me to look into myself and the issues I have with hostility towards other people. I still struggle with that to this day; but hostility is in some sense a negative concept and thus was shaping my cause and effect in ways that were not ideal for good living.
It is also related to interdependence. In fact, I some way all the concepts above or almost different faces of the same overweening concept of no-self and no-mind.
How could it be any other way? Compassion is considered a virtue in Zen and is this required by monks and nuns to be cultivated as such. Where I got it wrong is that it doesn’t merely refer to sappy feelings of love and saccharine sentimentalities that are so common in the West today. We’re saturated with sickly sweet messaging constantly. What it does in fact refer to is that the experience of no-self naturally lends itself to the experience of the oneness of all things and beings in the universe. This sounds cliché but please stick with me. It extends to all things be those enemies, animals or peoples of other races and cultures for example. It is not a turn the other cheek mentality. Rather, the way I frame it is almost like a Nietzschean life-positive principle and outlook although this isn’t quite enough to conceptualise it. One should not exist in a state of ressentiment, rather a life-affirming and life-loving state in which we recognise the eternal struggle and transitory nature of all things and cultivate compassion to all things recognising these inherent truths while valuing strength and the state of flux in which all things come and go and which many beings have very little control. I am open to having my interpretation challenged of course….this is something I continue to contemplate.
Final thoughts:
I’ve always liked Evola’s work “Meditations On the Peaks”. Zen is very much like the outlook he gives in that text. It is like climbing a mountain (as are many other spiritual disciplines). You may choose to climb to a certain altitude by a certain route up and rest there on arrival. Or you may want to keep going and climb higher and higher to reveal a greater view of all things. This is your choice.
One more word on dualism. We all know about good and evil and other dualisms in the mind, culture and languages we use. Keep this in mind as you practice Zen. I will keep this deliberately short however Zen is not a framework to describe anything. Therefore dualism and morality will breakdown in absolute terms. This is not the same as most religions. Zen is therefore not a religious outlook as it cannot make absoloute statements about anything. It is outside of mind therefore it is not possible.
As we keep these concepts in mind and begin our practice of Zazen, the practice itself will begin to reveal many hard truths regarding our character. Simple practice will produce big changes in the way we interact with situations and in our attitudes to life. Things that used to matter will no longer stand as important to us. Petty grasping behaviour will be replaced by life-affirming noble and aristocratic behaviour. Particularly when you develop and cultivate your own virtues.
We will focus on the moment and thus we will live less and less in fantasies of language and culture that bind us to the past and present. I challenge you to commence you own practice.