We occasionally reprint Andrew Cohen’s weekly email quote if it touches on a matter that particularly interests us. This week’s excerpt is titled, “The Evolution of Gender”.

The question posed concerns gender in the postmodern age — which may now have passed — and especially in the state of consciousness beyond ego, which we term “enlightenment”.

If you would like to receive Andrew’s weekly emails, click on the link below the quote.

The Evolution of Gender
If enlightenment is the experience of consciousness beyond ego, then what does that consciousness look like, expressed through postmodern men and women? What happens to our identity, to fundamental self-structures like gender, when we take that leap beyond ego? This has always been a confusing matter, but it is even more so in a time and cultural context when so many of us are unclear about what the contours of a male or female identity should be. As both men and women evolve from traditional to post-traditional roles in culture, religion, and society, the roadmap for what it means to be a man or a woman, beyond some very basic distinctions, has become less and less clearly defined. And for those of us who are endeavoring to pioneer new stages in the evolution of consciousness and culture, this uncharted terrain is the very place in which we choose to live. So what does it mean to be a man or a woman as we develop beyond conventional structures and post-conventional confusion to post-postconventional clarity?

Andrew Cohen

Dr. D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), who introduced Zen to the West. He was often accused by his Japanese countrymen of over-stressing the intellect in a distinctly western way. Of course, he was writing for the West so found it easier to slip into Western ways. His dialogue with C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who was covering the same ground is informative.

Suzuki has this to say on the matter of the Buddhist Enlightenment, “The idea is to express the unconscious working of the mind, but this unconscious is not to be interpreted psychologically, but on the spiritual plane where all ‘traces’ of discursive or analytical understanding vanish.”

Jung’s view, was “One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

The difference here is no-difference. Suzuki uses “psychological” to describe objects of rational thinking — all else, by implication, is metaphysical. Jung, however, takes a western approach and calls anything capable of being experienced, psychological. Of course, anything which cannot be experienced is of no concern to man, since he could not possibly ever know of its existence. This is not the case with the Buddhist “unborn mind” which is clearly experienced from moment to moment by those attuned to it.

Jung uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental. Suzuki draws a line at the limits of the intellect, thus creating an enormous “spiritual” domain. Here the divisive nature of words manufactures an East/West chasm that does not really exist. Both are constantly aware of the non-dual totality of things — its “suchness”.

Suzuki’s gave us a graphic description of his own enlightenment. After a period of intense concentration and “samadhi”, Suzuki attains satori: “…this Samadhi alone is not enough. You must come out of that state, be awakened from it, and that awakening is Prajna. That moment of coming out of Samadhi, and seeing it for what it is, that is satori. When I came out of that state of Samadhi I said, ‘I see. This is it.’”

The next day, after the enlightenment was approved by his master, he walked home from the monastery and saw the trees in the moonlight. “They looked transparent, and I was transparent too.” From that moment he was able to answer the apparently nonsensical questions of his master out of a profound insight.

He later wrote that at that point he was not fully conscious of his experience. There was still an element of dream clinging to his consciousness. While working in America a greater depth of realization dawned when contemplating the Zen phrase “the elbow does not bend outwards.” He suddenly saw that the restriction itself was the true freedom.

Later still, and back in Japan working on the records of Bankei, he felt a huge mass of stones “that I had piled up through many years fall away in a moment. I found myself in the unconditionally restful state of mind of…as-it-is-ness (suchness).”

Suzuki compares man with a geometrical point where three dimensions intersect: physical-natural, intellectual-moral and spiritual. Very roughly, the outer world, the inner personal world, and the world where concepts like “outer” and “inner” have vanished.

We may be conscious of all these lines, but usually not to the same extent. Normally, the intellectual-moral is given emphasis over the spiritual. This results in an inability fully to grasp the spiritual side of life — “Doubting” Thomas arises here, as does the “God is dead” tendency of 19th Century materialism.

The intellectual-moral line delivers a dualistic view of life. It carves its way into the soft substance of existence, setting up categories and divisions in the way a sharp stone shatters a car windscreen — the whole view disappears and one is only aware of a spidery network of frosty fragments. However, despite this, there is a “persistent urge impelling the intellect to transcend itself.”

For the intellect to leave its own line and transfer to the spiritual is a kind of suicide, a “losing of life in order to gain it.” Suzuki stresses that there is no gradation here. It is a leap, a letting go as Jung discovered — for the moment one gives up the intellectual, one finds oneself on the spiritual.

This is the point at which one becomes aware that, “what is before you is it!” For western man, the jump has to be made from his intellect instantly to the spiritual; that is the moment of enlightenment. From then on the spiritual world lights up the physical-natural with a numinous glow that transforms everything, as Jung himself found when he let himself go on the 12th of December 1913. However, there is only one world, and when the faculties lose their distinctiveness they are seen to be illusory.

I’ve told this story before on other sites, but it always bears repeating.

Here is an ancient Taoist story which emphasizes that this world is Nirvana if we could only see it with the eye of Nirvanoception. The tale also illustrates the view of Shunryu Suzuki that, “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity. What we are speaking about is moment-to-moment enlightenment, one enlightenment after another.”

The Truth in the White Mist concerns a scholar called Fan who, despite an excess of worldly honours, finds the evils of the society he lives in hard to bear. On the death of his father, he decides to retreat to the solitude of the mountains and become an Immortal. He finds himself a small hermitage and furnishes it as best he can with the few possessions he has brought with him and whatever he can gather from the forest. Day after day, year after year, he spends his time studying his books, meditating and, as befits a Taoist, communing with nature. He quickly becomes attuned to the pace and rhythm of the natural world and acquires a sort of peace. One thing eludes him however: Nirvana itself, the enlightenment he yearns for as the crowning glory of his life and efforts. Had he left the world of dust in vain? Were all his accomplishments as scholar and healer to no avail on the most important journey of all?

One day Fan had a visitor. He was a man of sagely bearing, but with a youthfulness that betrayed a successful cultivation of the Way. The man enquired generally after Fan’s health and well-being, then broached the topic that was always on his host’s mind. How was it that a scholar of such high attainments had not even found the entrance to the Path of the Immortals which, he added mischievously, was staring him right in the face? Noting Fan’s embarrassment, he warned him against looking for it in the beauties of nature: dawns and sunsets, the brilliance of fast-moving mountain streams, the high banks of snowy-white cloud formations. No, he insisted, look for it in the mists which creep and spread through the valleys like a shroud. And then he left.

Fan spent the next three years staring down the mountain sides at the swirling mists below. But of enlightenment there was none. Passing foresters thought him a true sage because of his stillness and complete absorption. Fan knew better.

Then one day he saw it. Racing down the mountain to the stream where his visitor lived, he burst in upon him, his face shining with delight.

“You have found the Way”, cried his friend, “I always knew you would!”

Fan explained: “I suddenly saw it : these clouds, the sun and moon, the passing seasons, the daily grind ~ they are all in the Way! Why should my thoughts separate me from what has always been mine. Just to live is to follow the Way, to be born as an Immortal! Not to resist life, to be part of it, swept along by it, that is the Way. To have faith in your own destiny, to trust life itself to deliver you where you are meant to be and want to go, that is Immortality!”

Ha ha ha! laughed Fan’s friend, “At last I have found my true master!”

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

It could not have been a very comfortable experience studying with the doughty Rinzai. Clearly Huang Po had summed him up very well: drop all explanation and never spare the rod.

Sometimes, however, Rinzai seems to have gone a shade too far. One can almost visualize parts of his audience, particularly the older ones, walking out en bloc when he tells them to seek enlightenment by committing the Five Heinous Crimes; or when he urges them not to take the Buddha for the supreme goal. “I myself see him as a privy hole!”

Once again, though, he is talking about names and phrases. “All (such things) are but expedient means, temporary remedies for curing diseases. There is no real Dharma; it is all but surface manifestations, like printed letters on a sign board to indicate the Way”.

The matter of the Five Heinous Crimes is an example of using shock tactics to shake his audience out of a well-established torpor. He blazes away at the assembled gathering of “bald heads”, and you may be sure that none is sleeping, and none is harbouring cosy fantasies about pure spiritual lands in the West. Here they are forced to face up to the enemy within, their own egos, by waging war on the mental tendencies which separate them from enlightenment.

Venerable ones, committing the Five Heinous Crimes,
deliverance can be won…(The Crimes are) to kill
the father, to harm the mother, to spill Buddha’s
blood, to break the peace of the sangha, and to burn
scriptures and statues …

The father, he explains is ignorance. When you have nothing further to seek, the father is killed.

The mother is desire. To see the emptiness of all forms and attain non-attachment is the harming of the mother.

Spilling the Buddha’s blood is when you have no urge to judge or interpret.

To understand that the passions are empty and without support is to break the peace of the sangha.

“To see that the causal relations are empty, that the heart is empty, and that the Dharma is empty — and in one stroke decisively to cut it all off in order to transcend all, and to have nothing further to seek, this is burning the scriptures and statues.”

Rinzai certainly lived up to these uncompromising sentiments in his relations with other masters. In the following anecdote one wonders who is the master and who the pupil:

One day the student monks, including Rinzai, were out gardening in the monastery fields. When he saw Huang Po approaching he stopped work and leant nonchalantly on his hoe. The master saw this and said:

“Now would this fellow be tired?”

To which Rinzai replied, “I have barely lifted my hoe. Why would I be tired?”

As usual Huang Po struck him. Rinzai grabbed his stick and hit him a mighty blow which knocked the master over. As a supervising monk helped Huang Po to his feet, he asked: “How can you put up with this madman?”

At this, the master hit the supervisor. Rinzai, who had started to hoe, remarked: “Cremation is a custom everywhere, but here, I bury alive with a single stroke.”

In a similar vein, this time with the hapless Tokusan: at one period of his training, Rinzai was an attendant to Master Tokusan. On one occasion the master said: “Today I am tired.”

Rinzai muttered, “What is this old fellow mumbling in his sleep?”

When Tokusan inevitably hit him, Rinzai tipped up the master’s cushion sending him sprawling onto the floor. Tokusan rose and immediately retired to his quarters.

For Rinzai’s view of Huang Po, we have this anecdote: on a visit to another master, Suiho, he was asked: “Where do you come from?”

“From Huang Po,” he answered.

“How does Huang Po instruct his monks?”

Rinzai replied: “Huang Po has nothing to say.” (A compliment in Zen).

“Why has he nothing to say?” asked Suiho.

“Even if he had something to say, there would be no place to say it.”

The master persisted: “Tell me and let me be the judge.”

Rinzai said: “An arrow flies into the Western sky.” Here Rinzai seems to be sending Bodhidharma back to India. Because of the obtuseness of the master, his mission having failed.

In these animated conversations, the masters are constantly probing Rinzai’s level of attainment. Not to be outdone, Rinzai also seems to be testing his masters. There is no doubt that he was a most precocious student. Huang Po was always well aware of the talents of his young charge as is borne out by the following story:

Huang Po was watching Rinzai planting pine trees in the monastery fields. “Why do you plant so many pine trees in this remote mountain monastery?” he enquired.

“Because they add to the view from the monastery gate, and they are for those who come after.”

At this Rinzai struck the ground three times with his hoe. Huang Po replied: “This may be so, but I’ll still give you thirty blows as a taster.”

Again Rinzai struck the ground three times with his hoe and sighed deeply.

Huang Po said: “Because of you, our school will flourish throughout the world.”

Rinzai was a general who laid siege to castles in the air. Nothing seems to have mattered to him except instilling the “genuine insight” into those who sought his advice. He had no apparent social graces and was a “democrat” in an Imperial age. I don’t care if you are Ministers of the Emperor himself, he would tell them; nor if you are well versed in the scriptures, nor if your eloquence is like a mountain torrent. “The great ocean does not retain corpses.” Just keep yourselves from doubting, he would urge. “Work diligently. And take good care of yourselves.”

He died in the year 866 AD. On his death-bed he said to his monks: “After my death do not allow my ‘true Dharma eye’ to perish.”

One of them said: “But how could it perish?”

Rinzai replied: “What then will you say when in future people put questions to you?”

The monk gave a katsu (a loud cry, or shout, characteristic of Rinzai).

“Who would have guessed” mused the dying Rinzai, true to form, “that my true Dharma eye would perish through this blind ass.