A Life of Bodhidharma by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

Zen being what it is, certain Buddhist scriptures are held in high esteem and few masters are less than well versed in the sutras. As skilful means for the novice, they are taken as introductory measures, and as a way of keeping the intrusive intellect busy while the process of weakening the ego carries on apace.

The student’s dominating ego sees the world as concept, derived from perceptions, based on sensory data. His master is aware that the ego cannot go beyond sense. But that is precisely where he must lead his pupil, or at least point the way for him. This “going beyond” requires an instrument that goes beyond words and the senses — prajna, or divine insight — what I’ve called nirvanoception.

When Bodhidharma arrived in China from India he is said to have been the 28th Patriarch of the Dhyana (Zen) School of Buddhism, which derived its doctrine from an incident, pregnant with meaning, during the Buddha’s lifetime.

The Buddha was instructing a large congregation of monks on the Vulture Peak in northern India when he was asked the question, “What is the essence of the Dharma?” In response, he picked a small flower and held it up to the view of the monks who looked at it uncomprehendingly. Except, that is, for Mahakasyapa, who smiled with understanding. He became the first Patriarch of the “meditation school” of Buddhism which relied on a wordless transmission of the light.

The wordless doctrine, dependent only on direct perceptions and a higher intuition, is not of necessity tied to any particular religious, or cultural outlook. It can at times be thought of as a universal, wordless scripture, and in its best moments, this is certainly true.

Bodhidharma was subsequently to become the first Patriarch of Chinese Ch’an, as well as the legendary founder of the martial art known as Kung Fu. At first, however, he had to confront a number of obstacles. Primary among them was that the Buddhism of his time, already established in China, had a distinctly intellectual and philosophical bias. It was based on three aspects of enlightened behaviour: morality, meditation and insight (the Triple Discipline - sila, dhyana and prajna), which were given expression through three types of document: the monastic rules or precepts (vinaya), the sutras, and the psychological/philosophical tracts (abhidharma and others). Within this structure came the great statements of Buddhist truth, with perhaps the greatest of them: the Four Noble Truths.

1. The omnipresence of suffering.
2. The cause of suffering is selfish desire, the craving for forms.
3. The end of suffering is by the elimination of craving.
4. The method is by the Noble Eightfold Path :

1 Pure (or Right) understanding.
2 Pure motives.
3 Pure speech.
4 Pure action.
5 Pure livelihood.
6 Pure effort.
7 Pure stillness.
8 Pure mindfulness.

The first, pure understanding, contains the essence of them all, while the other seven steps emphasise different aspects of the path on which to meditate and practise. Pure stillness refers to the concentration exercise known as samatha leading to samadhi: a blissful state which is distinct from Nirvana. Many Zen masters, including Hui Neng, have argued that this stage is not necessary to enlightenment. Pure mindfulness is the essence of zazen (sitting meditation) in that it leads to insight, or Nirvana.

A kind of metaphysical ignorance was seen as the separative factor between suffering and Nirvana, and was analysed into the Three Fires, or poisonous elements: hatred/anger, avarice/lust, and illusion. By eliminating these fires from one’s nature, we step back from the abyss of ignorance which clouds our vision of the world. Stuck as we normally are in this fog of basic ignorance, the ego arises moment by moment from the intrinsically pure Buddha-mind, underpinned by five elements, or skandhas:

1. Form/body.
2. Sensation.
3. Perception.
4. Concept/intellect.
5. Cognition.

These, in turn, conspire to create the world-edifice of the ego, seen as either a house of cards or as an invincible personal infrastructure, depending on the spiritual development of the individual concerned.

The ego arises from Buddha-mind when the natural flux of life is hardened in a vain attempt to create a degree of permanence out of the continuous “becoming” of life. This is the first skandha, form/body, and here the ego is born.

The second skandha, sensation, is our craving to feel the reality of this “frozen” flux in order to sense our own solidity, the reality of the not-separately-existent lower self.

Perception is our way of discerning a difference in things — good, bad or neutral. This could be called the report, or judgmental, stage.

Now we need a classification procedure for all the fragments we have brought into being. So arises conceptualisation, or the intellect, whereby we name the bits and pieces we have summoned up.

Finally, we create some software to co-ordinate these functions and remain conscious of them. Thoughts and emotions, which are more thoughts, constitute this skandha.

Go to Part Three.

A Life of Bodhidharma by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

When Bodhidharma “came like an arrow from the West”, his gruff, not to say abrasive, manner offended polite Chinese society brought up on the filial and civil mores of Confucius. However, despite the seed falling on stony ground, it grew into a remarkably sturdy plant. The Chinese, accustomed to the non-dual way of thinking of Taoism, soon recognised the power inherent in the message of the silent sage. Their Buddhism had become top-heavy with theory and self-praising disputation. Being a practical people, they wanted results, and they wanted them without frills.

Zen grew out of this revolt against the cosiness of scriptural empire-building. Its “lean, mean” approach could be likened to a wild bird of prey as against a fat parrot preening itself in a gilded cage. The great T’ang masters, especially Hui Neng, Huang Po and Lin Chi (Rinzai), who have come down to us in written form, developed the most outrageously direct spiritual path yet conceived, and arguably the most effective.

From our perspective in the West, Zen is almost a new religion. It has the sting of fresh mountain air and the patina of a newly-minted coin. Its terse psychological realism strikes a chord in our weary brains burdened by the hysteria of an acquisitive society. If we take Zen at its best, represented by the T’ang masters and more modern figures like Bankei, we begin to perceive the bones and marrow of life itself.

When Bodhidharma came from the West (ie southern India) into China in the 6th Century, he baffled his hosts with his bluff, ruthlessly non-dual approach to reality. His famous encounter with the Chinese Emperor introduced that characteristic Zen style of dialogue, the mondo, which has sparked and sizzled against centuries of self-serving religiosity ever since.

Emperor: I have built many temples and widely propagated
the Dharma. What, according to Buddhism, is my merit?
Bodhidharma: None whatsoever.
Emperor (somewhat startled): Who is this who stands before me?
Bodhidharma: Who knows.

The great man (Bodhidharma) is plainly attaching no importance to personality, either his own or the Emperor’s. He is fully in step with the teachings of the Buddha, a version of which, (the Dhyana or Meditation school) he has just brought to China from India.

The question of “self” is raised in the Four Great Seals of Existence (Signs of Being) of Buddhism. These are:

1. The impermanence of all things.
2. The suffering (unsatisfactoriness) inherent in all things of this world.
3. The emptiness of all conditioned things, including the self. That is, no individual self-nature exists.
4. The peace found in Nirvana alone.

According to the teaching, to obtain freedom from suffering we should contemplate the first two seals. To attain enlightenment one then contemplates the third seal, while peace and true serenity, cessation, is realized in Nirvana.

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

Read Part 1

Of the three disciplines of Buddhism, sila (precepts), dhyana (meditation) and prajna (wisdom), the Zen schools were said to give greater emphasis to meditation. While it is certainly true that meditation, or methods of awakening, assumed priority over doctrinal matters, masters like Hui Neng and Dogen were aware that a balanced approach was necessary. Hui Neng believed that dhyana and prajna arose together and were not to be separated. Dogen frequently stressed the precepts to his students, and many of his homilies are variations on the ethical side of Buddhism, though given a practical edge through the belief that morality brings one into alignment with satori, since true moral behaviour is without self.

In the Buddha’s time, there were no sutras and sastras. Most scriptural material was held in the memory of monks. The Buddhist canon had not yet been established. Mind to mind transmission was the order of the day. Zen aimed to come closer to that situation and thus move closer to the Buddha’s intention. When Dogen returned from China he was intent on making zazen the principal means of practice within the Soto school. And since each one of his students was already the Buddha, it was only necessary to act like it; that is to say, to assume the true nature during sitting, standing, walking and lying down. Thus all aspects of life are given a sacramental significance.

Towards the end of his short life (he died of cancer at fifty-three) he became more and more attracted to the life of retreat, away from the turmoil of “the world of dust”. He turned down offers from the Emperor, who granted him an honorific title and ceremonial robe. He died in Kyoto, where he was receiving medical care in the house of a disciple, in 1253.

Master Dogen provides the literary, contemplative side of Zen. Thus he complements the contributions of Hui Neng and Rinzai, and fleshes out the Zen corpus into a coherent whole. His amazingly quirky, but astonishingly insightful writings are one of the glories of spiritual literature. Only now are they beginning to be fully understood by modern-day thinkers, religious and philosophical, who are taking a great interest in this 13th Century Japanese sage.

The work, however, was never meant to be set in concrete, or to form the basis for a “system” of thought. Dogen’s purpose was to use words interactively, directly in the consciousness of his readers. His lines are movement, not stasis; life, not theology. His bequest is enlightenment, not scripture.

A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

The Einsteinian notion of space-time, a continuum in which time represents the fourth dimension, was apparently anticipated by Dogen, for whom time was inseparable from “being”. Time, of course, can only exist within a context of space, since it is a function of movement. But since being, or put another way, consciousness, is self-identical with space, time itself is inseparable from being.

Dogen said: “So-called time of being means time is already being; all being is time…Self is arrayed as the whole world. You should perceive that each point, each thing of this whole world is an individual time.”

Shunryu Suzuki elaborates this point: “Moment after moment each one of us repeats this activity (of breathing). Here there is no idea of time and space. Time and space are one. We do things one after the other, that is all. At one o’clock you will eat your lunch. To eat lunch is itself one o’clock. You will be somewhere, but that place cannot be separated from one o’clock.” To create an idea of a place separate from one o’clock, as when we say “I wish I had gone somewhere else for lunch,” is playing mind-games, weaving illusion.

Dogen’s ideas on being and time, which have aroused a lot of interest among modern thinkers, arise from his basic theme of the non-dual suchness of the world, the unity of being. All dimensions and systems of measurement, therefore, are just mentally-created facets of the one central reality, and ultimately are indistinguishable from each other and the underlying reality realm.

The ramifications of this temporal system include the concept of all things existing in their own “being-time” for all time. Thus at this instant you and this time are identical. But you also participate in the whole structure of being-time, which is timeless. This means that you have always existed, and past moments are still in existence, but exclusively within their own being-times. The notion resembles a roll of movie film, where individual frames can be observed and put into motion as being-time. However, the whole drama exists timelessly as the reel of film.

Dogen also points out that time can seem to be moving in various ways, from past to present to future, or the reverse, depending on the standpoint of the observer. In this he seems to be looking forward to Quantum Theory and other developments of mathematical relativity.

A number of current writers are making the connection between modern science and ancient Eastern philosophies, for example, Fritjof Capra in his interesting account, The Tao of Physics. Despite such ideas, Dogen was never diverted by mind-games and always remained firmly in the Buddhistic realm of direct experience. Words to him were only fingers pointing to the moon. Never the moon itself.

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