Watchers, Watching, Passing By…

             During our Living Chan event today, a question seemed to nag at me. We often talk about using the philosophies of Chan/Buddhism to handle the problems of daily life. But the question that came to my mind today was, is there such a thing as a problem if I treat each phenomenon as part of mind, and don’t connect it with the previous phenomena? Can we say that anything is a problem then? Would that lead to a disengaged or perhaps too apathetic attitude toward life?

                I watched a video tonight about the ‘bystander effect’, and I am thinking it would be a great video to show to practitioners. The video is a kind of news story which depicts people passing by a  person pretending to be sick or distressed. Not too many step in to help the person. Then the camera shows a professor in a back room with footage, explaining the bystander effect as the result of social pressures to conform in certain acceptable ways, even when a particular person is in need of help. Of course, one missing element in the experiment is what happens when the sick person is in isolation. But the point is, it suggests a kind of inhumanity that people show when they are in groups. It also suggests that people become easily susceptible to ‘blindness’ toward people who are not of the same class as themselves.

From a Chan perspective, if I treat the experience as a phenomenon of the mind, would such a problem as this arise? The Venerable was mentioning the example of a tiger and an enlightened person. Because the enlightened person does not take her body to be hers, she will not see it as ‘bad’ that the tiger were to chase and eat her. Therefore, she does not resist the tiger. Why? From the enlightened perspective, there is no body that is ‘me’. Knowing that the mind is not bound to the body changes one’s views of the body. But does this mean that the Chan practitioner would then cultivate an indifference toward other bodies? How would the practitioner view those bodies?

I think the important point in all this is quite interesting, because Chan reverses the classic psychological explanations. From a psychology point of view, the bystander effect comes from having conflicting social norms about what to do and what not to do.  According to this view, I have two thoughts: one says, “Help the person!”, and the other says “Don’t stray from the social code”. The two conflicting thoughts cancel each other out, or replace each other.  But according to Chan, the more fundamental mistake is that I take the current and previous thought as related. The habit of connecting the thoughts creates a subject and an object (someone who sees and something that is seen), not realizing that the object is created in mind through the joining of the previous and the current thought.  Another way of putting this is: I take the image arising as a real person.  Actually, I am not interacting with a separate being. I am only interacting with thoughts of the mind. So the bystander thinks “I am this body, and there is another body lying on the ground”. As a result, the bystander tries to use her body to survive. The whole society upholds that tendency by deciding that there is a struggle between subject and object, and therefore the subject must protect itself. An outside ‘other self’ is created from this illusion of separateness. And then we react to the other with craving (pro-survival/self), hatred (anti-survival/anti-self) and ignorance (no relation to self).

According to Chan, the ‘solution’ to the bystander problem is not to replace one set of thoughts with another. Rather, it is to go deeply into how we create the bystander and the observed ‘other’ in the first place. In this way, we stop seeing that the phenomena is a threat to our self. It is only when I can practice this principle that I can start to engage the phenomenal world without a sense of fear, craving or anxiety to defend the illusory self. This goes beyond simply creating a moral standard and upholding it. It means seeing deeply into the illusion that there is a ‘watcher’ and ‘watched’ that are separate. The paradox, then, is that the problem arises precisely because we think there is a bystander and a person being watched. In fact, this separation of phenomena into distinct ‘selves’ is precisely the illusion that perpetuates the bystander phenomena.