Nirvana is difficult to write about because it is only ever experienced by individuals. It is not a public performance, or a moment that can be shared socially. It doesn’t make news. No one understands someone else’s Nirvanic experience. At the same time, Nirvana is the field of gold we all share — the very ground and basis of our existence.

As if that weren’t enough, many people think of Nirvana as a rock band. Even those who have some inkling that it has vaguely to do with spirituality believe it to be a kind of spaced-out condominium in the sky, an Eldorado or Pure Land for the mystical. Few understand its central position in the lives of all of us.

It is certainly true that Nirvana has not been explained with any precision in the West: the terms “extinction” and “blown out” do little justice to the reality. It has also been regarded as a protected realm by a small clique of initiates, and by the high priests of the ancient mystery religions who regarded it as a proof of life after death.

Despite too the dismissive attitudes of orthodox science, “Nirvanic” experience is part of our empirical knowledge. It is not, however, observed by the five familiar physical senses, or by the mind, but by another means of knowing which I once called Nirvanoception.

Currently, this is a dark region for science, though near-death experiences and the theory of morphogenic fields are opening up this whole area to fresh inquiry.

The notion of a single “substance”, or ground, underlying all things is not new. The presocratic Greek philosopher, Thales, thought that all matter was composed of water. His later colleague, Anaximenes, suggested that air was a more likely candidate. In a purely material reality this seems absurd. But if we were able to see the world in the manner of extended still-frame photography, one picture every ten years, say, over a period of several million, even the most solid mountain range would appear to move and flow. In fact it would be indistinguishable from the sea.

Any being living at that frequency of thought would see rocks as water. It is a sobering idea that such beings would drink mountains. Water itself would be too volatile to register in such a slow-coach consciousness.

Next : The three modes of knowing.

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.

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

Rinzai, like all Zen masters, spent much time cautioning his students against the trap inherent in words. In the above anecdote, the Governor compares the scriptures and meditative practices with gold dust in the eyes: valuable certainly, but clouding to the vision. This meets with Rinzai’s approval, “And to think I took you for a common fellow!”

In a lecture to the monks, the master states that he expounds nothing but the Buddha-mind (or heart-ground). “This pervades everything; it is in the worldly and in the sacred, in the pure and impure, the fine and the coarse.”

The essential thing is not to make labels such as fine and pure and then to imagine that, because of the labelling, you now know the truth, “for these are like pen-names, only creating mystery.” The Dharma he is expounding is different from all others.

“My seeing is different,” he says. “In the outside world I do not lay hold on either the worldly or the sacred; and inside, I do not stick to rock bottom (this would seem to mean false dreams, the lowest common denominator).”

Then he enjoins his audience to be their ordinary selves with no pretensions, nothing further to seek. Simply to have faith in the one who is functioning at this moment is enough, for that one is the unborn, the heart-ground, the Buddha-nature.

The question of words has always been uppermost in Zen literature — not surprising perhaps since Zen is not supposed to have any literature at all. However, it has, and the way Zen has got round this paradoxical situation is by using words rather differently. An interesting anecdote, which throws some light on Zen word usage, concerns Zen master Baso Doitsu who often used the phrase, “Mind is Buddha”. One day he was asked why he always used these words.

“To stop the child crying,” he responded.

“But what if the child has stopped crying? (perhaps confronting a more advanced student).”

Baso said: “I would say that it is neither mind nor Buddha.”

The monk pursued the point: ”And what if you were speaking to someone without an interest in religion, who was neither crying nor had stopped crying?”

“Then I would say that it is not the mind.”

At the first level Baso labels the mind as Buddha. Then he says it is not the Buddha, nor for that matter is it the mind. This is not a nihilistic stripping away of essentials, leaving the questioner with nothing. It is in fact a positive rejection of words and labels, leaving the hearer with exactly what there is in reality — we might say, Buddha-nature, but these are only words too.

Zen uses words to destroy words; to peel away the superfluities of the intellect (the skandhas and samskaras: more words), and to undermine our faith in this labelling process, precisely so that we can see things as they are and not how we are conditioned to see them by past learning and structuring. The latter is dead, life now is alive; the difference is Zen.

Modern students, said Rinzai, speaking in the 9th Century, are always grasping at names and terms. This obstructs them and obscures the clarity of the eye. The teachings themselves are only surface explanations. Unfortunately, students take to these superficial notions “of words and letters and deliver interpretations of them…So they search heaven and earth, run around asking others and keep themselves busily occupied.”

Those who have nothing more to find do not waste time in disputing points or splitting hairs about “this and that, is and is not, form and essence, and other vain propositions.”

As for me, if anyone comes with a question, I know
him to the bottom, whether he be monk or layman.
Whatever position he may come with, all are only
words and names, dreams and phantoms. The aim of
the profound teachings of all the Buddhas is rather
to see the man who can ride all circumstances (the
man of buji; the Buddha; yourself)…Freely roaming
about, you see everywhere that there are only empty
names.

This is the height of Mahayana thought: the emptiness of names. For beyond names and description, there is no thought and nothing more to be said. And what is more, Rinzai perseveres, the Buddha is only a name and as empty as the rest. If he were not, then, “how does it come that at the age of eighty he died…at the town of Kushinagara? The Buddha, where is he now?”

It is obvious that he is not different from us. And he quotes an old master: “The (three) bodies of the Tathagata (similar to the Christian Trinity), are but adaptations to the sentiments of the world, fearing that otherwise men might fall into nihilism. Empty names are only expedient means.”

Here we have the ultimate assault on the citadel of words. Even the name “Buddha” is put to the sword. Nothing survives on the plane of description, and then, says the master, everything is revealed. These passages remind us of the Diamond Sutra with its, “Words cannot explain the real nature of a cosmos.” And then, “‘Cosmos’ is merely a figure of speech.”

Master Rinzai was not a man for soft-soaping his followers. Not for him the honeyed weasel words and a kinder, gentler leading by the hand. Master Rinzai was a warrior of enlightenment.

You bald idiots! What is the frantic hurry to deck
yourselves in a lion’s skin when all the while you
are yapping like wild foxes? A real man has no need
to give himself the airs of a real man.

You do not believe in yourselves, he tells them, so chase about outside falling for the clever words of the old masters; of yin and yang and all the rest. The fact is you cannot arrive at any real understanding of your own. “So, encountering circumstances, you enter into relationship with them. Encountering the dusts, you cling to them. Everything you touch leads you astray, for you have no standard of judgement of your own.”

Go to Part 4.