A Life of Bankei by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

In her famous book, Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill wrote : “Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by that ’spiritual spark’, that transcendental faculty which, though the life of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary men. Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life…Under [its spur] the whole personality rises in the acts of contemplation…to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception.”

So what is the Path of Nirvanoception? How does it differ from other paths?

It is essentially the path of the Jnani (as Vedantists would say); the path of analytical meditation, or the wisdom stream (as the Dalai Lama puts it); the path of Discrimination (Merrell-Wolff); the path of Knowledge (Gnosis), and the path of Direct Seeing. All these “names” could apply equally as well.

Put bluntly, if you want twenty years of psychotherapy, see a Freudian analyst. If you want arthritic knees, try the usual paths of meditation. If you want “nice feelings”, try charismatic Christianity.

The Path of Nirvanoception is a direct assault on the summit of Nirvana by attempting to break through to a higher mode of being, thus releasing the clear light of Nirvanoception.

Bankei knew all this very well …

It has not always been like this, Bankei contemplates as he heads towards his quarters. When he had first started to explain the Unborn to small audiences in the old days, he was accused of preaching heresy, even of being a Christian — whatever next!. So different was his message from that of the rather distant Zen masters of the day, who insisted on speaking Chinese to a Japanese assembly, that people were afraid to come near him. When they realised at last that he was declaring the true Dharma, his life changed dramatically.

Nowadays he was often besieged by supplicants and followers. He never had a moment to himself. As many as six thousand souls could turn up at one of his meetings, and each would want a personal interview.

Yet even now, at the height of his popularity, when he preached the Unborn, many folk thought he was making the whole thing up. It was necessary to direct them to the sutras where the Unborn is mentioned as part of a description of the Buddha-nature: “unborn, undying”, or “unborn, unconditioned, unoriginated”. These were only words, however, despite falling from the golden lips of the Buddha himself.

Bankei tried to do it differently. He pointed directly to the Unborn as a living reality in the consciousness of every person, enlightened or unenlightened. Here it is, he said, again and again. Look at it, feel it, accept it, and use it in your life NOW.

But Bankei was getting old, and his much-abused physical frame was nearing its final dispersal. Not that he minded, he lived constantly in the Unborn, beyond birth and death. His one hope is that the people who listen to him and hang on his words, understand what he is trying to say and incorporate it into their day-to-day lives.

So what constitutes the teaching of Bankei and makes it different from other “brands” of Zen? The quintessence of his Zen is that our self-partiality, the tendency to favour ourselves above others or the common weal, causes a distortion of the unborn Buddha-mind, which thereby loses its illuminative wisdom by being “born” as thoughts into the realm of birth and death. It is as if we hijack the Buddha-mind for our own selfish purposes and distort it in the process. The result is the overweaning ego-I, our personality.

It is only by de-self-partialising, or reversing the process, that we can realise the Buddha-mind we were born with, and become a man (or woman) of the Unborn. It is as simple, and as profound, as that.

Self-Partiality
As an example of self-partiality, even among monks, Bankei related an incident that occurred at one of his retreats. There had been a rumour that one of the monks had lost some money while practising in the zendo, or meditation hall. When Bankei appeared to give a talk to the assembled gathering, a student came forward and introduced himself. He was the monk who had been sitting next to the unfortunate victim at the time of the robbery. He was naturally upset and bemoaned the fact that the finger of suspicion would always be pointed at him wherever he went. Unless the crime was cleared up he would not be able to gain admission to any religious meeting in the country. His life would become intolerable. The monk asked Bankei to conduct a full investigation of the matter so that he might be exonerated.

Bankei looked closely at the student and asked him if he had done it. The monk was horrified. What, he cried, at such an auspicious gathering as this! How could I commit this shameless act? Bankei accepted his word. But of course, someone had committed this “shameless act”, and the master’s attention now turned to the thief. If we did decide to look into the matter, he said, I am confident we can discover the culprit. Then turning to the distressed monk, he asked if that was what he wanted. The student immediately realised what Bankei was saying and answered that he was ashamed of his self-partiality while in the presence of so great a master. The matter was dropped.

From the start, Bankei’s own enlightenment was a harrowing affair. It came to fruition at the height of a near-fatal illness after many years of physical and mental sacrifice. Later he would always say that these terrible years of austerity were not necessary, and he would go to great lengths to ensure that his own monks avoided the same fate which had left him a near-invalid for the rest of his life.

At that time Bankei lived for a while among down-and-outs in a 17th Century Japanese version of slum city. It was during these years that he acquired the common touch and the universal sympathy with the down-trodden that he was later known for. Thereafter his message was always directed at ordinary folk, farm labourers, housewives and servants, and was couched in the living vernacular.

As an adjunct to this, he expressly forbade his followers to record his words, living up to the “special transmission outside the scriptures” of Bodhidharma. Thankfully, some of his talks and dialogues have come down to us, courtesy of the occasional “literary” disciple who risked his master’s wrath and gained the gratitude of posterity.

The central principle of Bankei’s message was that we each have the Buddha-mind, and that this mind is unborn. That is to say, it does not come within the purview of normal thought in its pure state. However, because of self-partiality (egotistical thoughts) we twist out of shape this endowment of ours and become ignorant and unhappy. This is how Bankei expresses it:

By now you will all have realized that I teach nothing
but the unborn Buddha-mind of great wisdom. We all have
it, but most of us don’t know it. The most important
thing for you all is to clarify it for yourselves. Just
look at you! There’s nothing at all wrong with you,
except that you will allow small mistakes to transform
the Buddha-mind into thoughts. As you grow older, this
becomes a deep-seated habit. So, cherishing yourselves
and your ideas, the great primordial mind becomes
invisible to you.

The unborn Buddha-mind is taken-up by our false sense of individuality and used to promote our own selfish interests at the expense of the whole. This “partialising” of the absolute, turns us against all that we see as not-I — the world at large — and we become competing animals intent on grabbing what we can ahead of anyone else, rather than the divine beings we really are.

It is rather like the multiple personalities created by a psychotic person. Each of these personalities acts as a self-contained individual who is usually not aware of the others, and yet they all live and exist within the body and brain of one person. Part of the whole mind is fragmented off into a complex, which exists by and for itself.

We are generally unhappy, because this aspect of ourselves is short-term only: it is born and it dies. The original Buddha-mind, however, is “unborn” and is not subject to birth and death. It behoves us, therefore, to clarify this mind of ours and return to our pristine nature in the Unborn.

Bankei’s thought, though metaphysical in origin, is actually pitched at the psychological level for his ordinary listeners. Its translucent simplicity appealed to many lay followers in his own time, and has reached down the centuries, thanks to careful scribes, to a new audience in the present day.

Now Read Part 3