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

Thanks to the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, we are now more aware of the sensory situation of man than we were. In a recent book, The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake suggests that we are surrounded by what he calls morphic fields. These personal fields stretch out from our bodies as a kind of extended mind-stuff and are responsible for all the unexplained phenomena we pigeon-hole under the term ”psi” — ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and others. As Sheldrake asserts, there is a mass of scientific corroboration for these “powers” of the human and animal minds, and his own experiments dramatically confirm them.

Within the notion of morphic fields, Sheldrake also includes morphogenetic fields, which act as the blueprint and creative principle behind the formation of all creatures, like ghostly Platonic forms.

In Rupert Sheldrake’s own words: “Morphic fields also underlie our perceptions, thoughts and other mental processes. The morphic fields of mental activities are called mental fields. Through [these], the extended mind reaches out into the environment through attention and intention, and connects with other members of social groups. These fields help to explain telepathy, the sense of being stared at, clairvoyance and psychokinesis. They may also help in the understanding of premonitions and precognitions through intentions projecting into the future.”

Sheldrake’s ideas on morphogenetic fields explain many grey areas in conventional understanding, especially in the science of genes and DNA. For example: “My suggestion is that morphic fields help impose order and pattern in this sensitive chaos [in the brain], and interact with the brain through their ordering activity. They contain an inherent memory, through morphic resonance. They also project out far beyond the brain through attention and intention.”

These hypotheses are so compelling that it surely cannot be long before the rest of science catches up, despite the earthquake that would follow in the scientific establishment.

But Zen Master Bankei was aware of all this more than three hundred years ago but under a different name : the Unborn Buddha-mind.

Bankei Yotaku, birth name Muchi, came from a family which had been doctors with the rank of samurai for many generations. As a child he was extremely independent and wilful, but with a sensitive intelligence that partly mitigated his faults. He was also extremely brave. At an annual stone-throwing contest, it was always Bankei who refused to give ground and took his side to victory.

His schooling was something of a problem, despite his natural aptitude. Calligraphy was not a favourite subject, especially the endless copying of the hundreds of Chinese characters, which is a fundamental part of a Japanese education, even today. He was often observed cutting classes early in order to avoid this tedious task. Another wearisome lesson involved reciting passages from the four great Confucian classics until the student knew them by heart.

It was during one of the Confucian classes, while reading a text from The Great Learning, that Bankei had a powerful insight. As the teacher spoke the words, “The way of great learning is to clarify bright virtue,” Bankei’s attention was riveted. On asking what “bright virtue” was, he received only stock answers which did not satisfy his curiosity. It was as if he was being prompted by old memories or very deep insights. His overriding desire was that this bright virtue should apply to him personally and not just be expressed in empty words, no matter how high-sounding. He wanted enlightenment, not definitions, and the search would occupy him totally for the next fourteen years.

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

What I call “nirvanoception” is the third, usually latent, mode of knowledge. I say “usually latent” because we’re mostly unaware of it. We freely use body-mind modes of “perception” (senses) and “conception” (mind) to navigate around our world, while remaining completely in the dark about “space consciousness”, which is working in the background.

Normal consciousness is narrowly focused in our heads. Nirvanoception is wide, space consciousness, which takes no heed of trivial daily concerns. It clarifies during nirvanic experiences because perception and conception are “left behind” with the body-mind.

The aim of any spiritual path is to clean up the doors of perception and conception so that nirvanoception shines brightly in our consciousness. To be precise, it’s how Nirvana experiences itself.

Seventeenth-century Japanese Zen Master, Bankei, made nirvanoception the whole basis of his method. The following is a serialization of his life:

A layman approached Bankei and said: “Master, it is said that you can read people’s minds. If this is the case what am I thinking right now?”

Bankei replied: “You are thinking that.”

Like most Zen masters, Bankei had a droll sense of humour which he often displayed in a self-effacing manner. At other times he would use it remorselessly against an arrogant interlocutor, or as a sharp pointer to the truth when he judged that an intellectual bubble had to be burst. Humour is a natural accompaniment to Zen because it feeds on hubris and paradoxical situations. The following mondo (Zen conversation) is typical:

A monk asked T’ou Tzu, a Chinese master of the T’ang period: “I have heard that all sounds are the voice of the Buddha.”

“Yes, you are right,” said T’ou Tzu.

“Am I also right that all assertions, no matter how derogatory, are reflections of absolute truth?”

“Yes, you are right,” replied the master.

“May I then call you a donkey?”

In many ways Bankei (1622-1693) resembled the old Zen masters of the T’ang Dynasty, whose teachings were vibrant with austere insights expressed in a direct and simple style. Though he lived more than a thousand years after the time of Bodhidharma, and over eight hundred since Hui Neng, Huang Po and Rinzai, Bankei was out of Zen’s top drawer. He was also a highly original interpreter of Buddhism.

Dr. D.T. Suzuki, who rescued his work from obscurity, said of him: “His ‘Unborn Zen’ espoused a fresh departure for the first time since…Bodhidharma. Unborn Zen is truly one of the most original developments in the entire history of Zen thought. Bankei, indeed, must be considered one of the greatest masters that Japan has ever produced.”

The scene is the Winter Retreat of 1690 at the Ryumon-ji temple, which was founded by Bankei himself. In the assembly hall are gathered 1,683 people: priests, masters, novices and laity. They come from all the major Buddhist sects in Japan, Soto and Rinzai Zen, Shingon, Nichiren, Tendai, Jodo and Jodo Shin. The atmosphere, though calm befitting a Buddhist gathering, is expectant, for Bankei is the greatest preacher of his age, likened by his scribe to the Buddha himself.

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Although D.H. Lawrence is known as a very physical writer — to put it mildly — he was also spiritual in his finer moments. Look at this passage from Chapter 15 of Women in Love:

“Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.”

Take away the novelist’s sentiment and there are some interesting points made here.

For example, “the inhuman transcendent death” recognizes that while consciousness persists at death, our human traits do not. We transcend ourselves at death.

Lawrence realizes that our humanity is the least of us : “the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity”. We know he often celebrated “the sordidness of humanity”, but here, using a different mouthpiece, he raises his game considerably.

In fact, those who reach out most to the concreteness of life, are often touched by the spiritual. It’s as if in glorifying the world they pass through the thin veil that separates us from the ineffable.

“In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know.” This passage echoes the 14th-century English spiritual text, The Cloud of Unknowing in which the aspirant meets the transcendent “and it is unlike anything we could possibly imagine here on Earth”.

“The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.” Not everyone does, of course, but a touch of poetic licence is well earned.

Novelists often get closer to the meaning of things than scientists and philosophers. Here we see that most physical of men demonstrating a profound knowledge of “the other side”.

Quotation taken from Hemingway Serial.

This post is going to be a bit contentious, but I believe it to be worth it.

I’m going to suggest that an updated version of Buddhism — and other spiritual paths — is urgently needed if they are to be accessible to 21st-century people. As a start, I suggest that “bodhisattvas” are renamed “Nirvaneans”, and “Living Buddhas”, “Posthumans”.

“Nirvanic experience” should also be regarded as accessible to the many and as a normal part of “growing up”, not some fabled Pure Land only visible to the ancients. Until we change our terminology and show that Nirvana is as true for us today as it was for Gautama Siddhartha 2500 years ago, living spirituality will remain the preserve of fossilized religions and charlatans.

With this in mind let’s take a look at one of the great Buddhist scriptures :

The Flower Garland (Avatamsaka) Sutra of Hua Yen Buddhism has had a great influence on the development of Zen. It brims with stunning insights into the nature of reality and is known for its magical, cascading descriptions which numb the senses and tumble us into Enlightenment by the sheer exuberance of it all. Buddha Lands without end, reflecting in jewels without end, come flashing out from the pages of these exotic volumes. No scriptural work comes closer to the wild dance of life itself than the immense, final volume of the Avatamsaka Sutra.

“Avatamsaka” refers to the garland of flowers around the neck of the Universal Buddha, whose concentration is said to summon up the spectre of the world.

The sutra presents the flowing patterns of life as the immoveable concentration of the Buddha, or Awakened Mind. There is thus a completely unhindered interpenetration between the Absolute principle, call it what you will, and the normal life that we lead from day to day.

These nirvanically-realized principles are not readily accessible to materialistic moderns who rely heavily on intellectual solutions to daily problems and challenges. Hua Yen Buddhism can be difficult at times but, like all of Buddhism, the doctrine dissolves into “seeing”, a concentrated, continuous awareness of the ocean of being, or Buddha-nature. In the final book of the Flower Garland Sutra, the monk Sagaramegha explains his doctrine of the universal eye by which he maintains his awareness at all times of the unborn Buddha-mind, represented by consciousness within and space without, here depicted as the ocean:

“Son, I have been living here in Sagaramukha (Ocean-
Door) for twelve years, having focused my mind on the
ocean and kept it present in my awareness, reflecting
on the measureless vastness of the great ocean, its
pure clarity, its unfathomable depth, its gradual
deepening, its variety of deposits of precious
substances, the measurelessness of its body of water,
its infinity, its being the dwelling place of various
immense creatures … and how it neither increases nor
decreases. I think: is there anything else in the
world as vast as the great ocean, as broad, as
measureless, as deep, as various?”

The book expounds the Hua Yen vision of the world as the vast state of concentration of the Buddha. All objects and happenings in the world are his teachings for sentient beings, and their lives are their means of practice. The Buddha is raised to the status of an all-embracing cosmic principle, the one consciousness behind all things. Gautama, the historical Buddha, participates as Vairocana Buddha, reality itself.

Despite his constant presence before all beings, however, he is only recognized by Posthumans. Ordinary mortals fail to identify his “body” which is the functioning of the world, their everday reality realm. As it’s put in the “Great Treatise” of the Taoist I Ching, “The kind man discovers it and calls it kind. The wise man discovers it and calls it wise. The people use it day by day and are not aware of it, for the way of the superior man is rare.” Again, “It possesses everything in complete abundance : this is its great field of action. It renews everything daily : this is its glorious power.”

The Flower Garland sutra is concerned with “clarifying the eye of unobstructed knowledge” in ordinary people. The means for this are twofold : the great guiding principle of the Buddha himself, fully revealed in his world — this is the path of the quick-witted, and the way of “enlightening beings”, the bodhisattvas (Nirvaneans), who return to the world of birth and death to bring all creatures to enlightened Posthumanity. The imperative for human beings is to develop the “ocean reflection” through nirvanic experiences, whereby reality can be seen directly at all times.

“The universally good always fills the universe
With various bodies flowing everywhere,
With concentration, psychic powers, skill and strength,
In a universal voice teaching extensively without hindrance.”

All our ancient religions have been distorted out of all recognition with time. Until we reassess them with an authentic “nirvanic eye”, they will become increasingly inaccessible to the majority, and the playground of fanatics.