Since Time Without Beginning

I’d like to share the following quote from Master Sheng Yen’s Chan and Enlightenment:

 “Western religions talk about the time when the world was first created, and Western philosophy and science speculate on the beginning of the universe. But it is not very easy to answer the question: “When did it all really begin? For this reason, Buddhism speaks of time without beginning—it is like a circle where there may be a beginning but you cannot locate it because every point on the circle can be the place of origin. So, Buddhism says that suffering has existed since time without beginning, and its origin is ignorance in the minds of sentient beings” (p.206)

           I have been thinking a lot about this theme, ever since I started reading about Rudolph Steiner’s concept of speaking through the ‘holes’ in education’s fabric. The metaphor that Master Sheng Yen uses is every point being a place of origin. I asked the discussion group members the other day: does this mean that one might become overwhelmed by ignorance, and not try to look for the causes of ignorance? I also recall a meditation practitioner had asked me the same question. Does the view of ignorance without beginning mean that we don’t try to look for causes of things? One of the participants even shared with me through email that perhaps it would not be such a bad idea to be overwhelmed after all, since this basic ignorance is what pushes people to try to know their true minds and true origins.

I had this reflection during my walk at lunch hour. I reflected: is there anything in life that is so certain that people have fixed a single absolute cause to it? Even if I declare something simple, like,“ rain causes grass to grow”, is this a simple statement of cause and effect? In fact, it depends on a great many things. The rain could be tainted with acid, or there may be too much rain in a single week (thus killing the grass). In another sense, other conditions need to be present for the rain to sustain life in the grass, such as sunlight and soil quality. It is never just the rain that sustains life for the grass. But it is easy to think that science can create these solid, monolithic answers, or is getting closer to doing so. I have read recently about the attempt to find the equation that establishes the existence of all the natural laws in the universe, a kind of God particle. But I wonder, if scientists do succeed in finding the ultimate cause of all things, will that satisfy the sentient beings? My answer is: perhaps it will certainly satisfy scientists, particularly those working on the project itself. But I doubt that the scientists will ever fully understand where that satisfaction or even dissatisfaction arises. They will focus only on the formula, and not on the process they go through to assign meaning to those numbers and letters. What underlies their belief is the understanding that the universe is shaped by fixed laws that can be observed or measured. But the miracle is that no matter how many measurements I make, no physical law in the universe takes hold unless there is a mind willing to attend to it and observe it. Do scientists ever stop to ask, who is observing these laws? Is the who subject to strict cause and effect?

The other reflection I had today relates to what Rudolph Steiner is getting at in his writings. Steiner was writing at a time when many educators are trying to get at the reason why children are given so many intellectual ideas, but are not able to fully absorb those ideas or use them to transform their character and emotions. He describes the realms of Will, Intellect and Feeling as the three areas that need to be concurrently developed in children before they have the maturity to learn and take in ideas. This he calls the Threefold Social Organism (p.7). But Steiner notes that most people can only pay lip-service to developing feeling and will, as long as they think that all action comes from intellectual concepts or ideas. Steiner notes that the ‘supremacy’ of ideas and intellect is one-sided, and it is based on an idealistic model that has been around in education circles for many years.

Many philosophers I have read, in fact, seem to share the assumption that human beings are shaped in some way by their ideas. It is as though ideas were these commands that collide with people’s minds and then forces people to act in some way or another. But I have found from my own experience that ideas don’t necessary change me at all. An idea may have lots of evidence for its ‘truth’ but I may simply have no way of accessing the idea  to find an inspiration to change. I might look at it, shrug and say ‘that’s nice’, before moving on to another idea! Without an inspiration to practice toward change, the idea has not much causal effect on my behavior or thinking. It is one of many conditions happening in mind.

To go back to this analogy of a circle having origins at every point: people’s explanations for why things are a certain way depends on where they sit in the circle, not on a proximity to an original cause. It means that one may need to give up trying to find an absolute cause to things, as well as trying to cleave to ‘absolute’ ideas that bring about ‘absolute’ effects. Everything is always in a state of potential, and it cannot be controlled by set ways of thinking or ideas. One can only keep learning to see what becomes valuable in the future, but there is a certain despair in trying to educate with the aims of controlling, predicting or expecting outcomes given specific conditions. It doesn’t mean that one stops learning. Rather, it is perhaps best (and most humbling) to continually contextualize what one has learned in terms of a mind that is not conditioned, does not have a formula and can’t be ‘learned’ any more than water can be ‘learned’. In this way, learning is rightly seen in terms of a principle that has no boundary or limit. Mind contains all conditions and causes without being limited by these causes and conditions. This notion can give rise to a healthy humility toward learning, as well as a bigger space to learn from a variety of contexts and perspectives. Mind accommodates them all, and it is simply a matter of knowing the mind is not the same as its ideas, that gives breathing room for people to play on different ideas to find ways to transform their social and personal lives.

 

Sheng Yen, (2014) Chan and Enlightenment. New York, NY: Dharma Drum Publishing

Steiner,Rudolph (1995), The Spiritof the Waldorf School. Hudson,NY: Anthroposophic Press

 

Waldorf's Holes

       I was reading a book on the subway today, called The Spirit of the Waldorf School. It talks in the beginning about how the Waldorf Academy was founded in the early twentieth century by Rudolph Steiner, after Germany had suffered from war, recession and a collective broken heart. I say this is so because the nation had gone from being highly ambitious to being disillusioned by the First World War. Steiner’s school started out of a need to integrate principles of mind, spirit and emotion into schools. In his lecture, “The Intent of  the Waldorf School”, Steiner remarks, “Naturally, the Waldorf School will have to reconcile itself with current institutions and public opinion concerning education and teaching.  We will not immediately be able to achieve all that we wish to achieve—quite understandably we will, on the whole, find it necessary to comply with the present requirements of public education…In a manner of speaking, we will be able to use only the holes that will remain in the tightly woven web that spreads over the education system.” (p.9-10)

              Steiner introduces a beautiful analogy in this piece, and that is learning to see ‘holes’ in a tightly woven system. I think this is an interesting way of describing an experience that goes even deeper than education. It is the tension I can relate to, between the tendency to create a system and the tendency to lose the sense of one’s being in too many systems. It’s possible to say, we are never the sum of our systems.

            Steiner’s analogy also made me realize how much we speak through holes, not through the threads previously created. The world is now covered with every possible network of communication and transportation, to the point where I can communicate to someone thousands of miles away in less than a second. Someone recently was remarking to me that they could not live without Skype or the technologies that keep people close and in contact. Yet still, there is a need for spaces and gaps, for holes, and for mysteries. With Facebook, I see that our contact with people seems closer and easier than it ever was before. But we often don’t engage the person at all, only passive images on facebook. The mind works in this way. I see the image of my friend or colleague on facebook, and then I think that I must be connecting with that friend. From the image, I can tell where this friend has gone, but can I tell where they are now?

Facebook is an example of a network that builds images, but it’s still not alive. It doesn’t breathe or live. It doesn’t have awareness. But it looks to be aware, because we populate it with mind’s artifacts: laughter, desire, the traces of happiness, a good meal, an already eaten meal, a controversy, a petition, a snag, a bad day, a happy face icon. It can confuse me to know, who am I interfacing with? Do these images and emoticons have an ability to be aware, as much as I imagine they do?

Perhaps the good news is that social media can lead people to reflect on how salient images really are, if people are curious to go there. Has anybody thought to uncover what the images of facebook say about people’s motivations? For example, what motivates a person to state on Facebook that they are going to change their diet “Starting from today?” Why is there a need to declare this decision? What is behind it? What is powerful about images that it increases my resolve to do something or change my lifestyle? Steiner’s metaphors of the holes in the fabric reminds me of the need to keep questioning the fabric itself.

Steiner’s analogy also relates to the mind. In a sense, the mind does not get snared in any fabric. Even if fabrics of thought was so dense, it wouldn’t affect my basic ability to be aware. The Surangama Sutra mentions the analogy of seeing in the dark. If I cover my eyes, I may think I am seeing nothing, but what is it that allows me to conclude that I see darkness? The awareness hasn’t left, even if I cannot claim to see anything clearly.

 

References

 

Steiner,Rudolph (1995), The Spiritof the Waldorf School. Hudson,NY: Anthroposophic Press

Unconditioned

       It is very easy to see that conditioning undergirds most of what happens in life. If I really dig down to the core, most of what I do from day to day is based on conditioning, particularly through desires and fears. I don’t think that there is much possibility of eliminating those desires and fears right away. I am thinking now about what it says in the Surangama Sutra: “All that is needed is for you not to follow after the distinctions you make concerning the perpetuations—the world, beings, and retribution in accord with karma.” (p.161). This quote makes me think a lot on what ‘not following’ distinctions really means. If distinctions are being made every day between likes and dislikes, this and that, etc. then how does this ‘letting go’ of distinctions really work?

            I think what helps for me is to realize that the distinction- making mind is the same as the unconditioned mind. In fact, this is really the only way it could be. Otherwise,  I would have to say that the unconditioned mind has a condition to exist! If I go back to the story of Yajnadata: this story is in the Surangama Sutra, and it tells about this one man who thinks he has lost his own head, when he sees its reflection in the mirror. Chasing after his image, he doesn’t realize that the head has been with him all along. In the similar way, I am trying to look for the mind in a dream, as though I could locate it somewhere in these elements. I keep making distinctions between true and false, pure and impure, not realizing that mind is beyond conditioning and simply does not bind itself to any conditions. In order for the mind to even make dualities of self/other, black/white, good/bad, mind would have to be already unbounded by these mental categories.

            In terms of daily practice, I find it is perhaps helpful for me to reflect that if, at any moment, I am having vexation and suffer from the vexation, I haven’t yet found what is unconditional in the vexation. That unconditional element is  the way to see mind in the vexation. I have to keep going into the experience to see what is unconditional and unmoving about it. Once I find that unmoving stillness in the experience (which isn’t even bound by ‘stillness’) will I still have vexation? I can have whatever I want. The only difference is that I acknowledge that vexations don’t define the mind’s true nature. Whether I have a good dream or a bad dream does not determine the mind’s being. This is truly good news, because it means that we can stop trying to do an impossible thing, like replace one thought with another, or try to look for mind inside a thought.

          Another way to practice might be to simply see the power of conditioned responses in how I live. What I feel (fear, insecurity, envy, desire etc.) can usually be traced or seen as a condition, as in part of a larger system of being that involves perceived rewards and punishments. The conditioning is the commandment that tells me I  need to do X to get Y or avoid Z. Does this conditioning need to be abolished or thrown away? I believe that acknowledging what is conditioned as conditioned is one way to gain enough distance from the conditioning itself, to know that this conditioning doesn’t define me in any way. Going through that process could help me understand and get to what is essential and changeless. It is like…if a wave crashes onto the beach, does this affect the composition of the wave? Waves, no matter how big or small, are made from the same substance. But the key is t see how this applies to mind. It is not about getting rid of conditioning. It is about seeing conditioning for what it is, not seeing it as an essential ‘me’ and then letting go of the grip I have on these conditional ways of being.

The Surangama Sutra: With Excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable Master Hssuan Hua. A New Translation (2009) Buddhist Text Translation Society.

The Problem of Like

Near a coffee shop close to Bloor and St. George, the rain keeps falling. The rain pokes large bubbles into the growing pools below, as I edge across the street. When I am inside the store, I attempt to order an odd-sounding drink for my colleague, as per request. The name has “caramel” in it, followed by a string of ello’s. I am somehow confident that I can handle this complex order while my friend saves a spot for us in the crowded shop.

What was it again? Caramellellelo?

I scratch my head, as I ponder the vast menu of iced drinks, tea drinks, fruit drinks, and frothy drinks.

            The store clerk looks at me while leaning against the cash register. His eyes bulge through horn rimmed glasses which don’t appear to have lenses on them.

            “Sir, what can I get for you?”

            “Um..I’ll have the carmel—errere”

            “What? Can you say it again?” The clerk cups his hand to his ear, over the buzz and hum of  latte machines, blenders, and student hecklers.

            “Caram…that one,” I point to the second drink down a long list of long-sounding drinks, astride long pictures, featuring long faces in long lineups.

            “Oh…the caramel macchiato.” The clerk smiles slightly at my daft attempts to roll out r’s, in my plain-English, accidental accent. “What size?”

            “Um, medium.” I nod to myself, confident that medium would satisfy the sweetest tastebuds.

“Is that all you want?”

            “Um, no.” I finger the ten dollar bill crumpled in my pocket, and ponder the cost of a caramel macchiato and some other sweet concoction.

            The clerk glares.

            “I’ll have a mint tea,” I mumble. Funnily enough, I don’t even want a mint tea. So many sweet drinks line the menus, and yet I have to choose the one I am most familiar with.

            I wait for the crowd of teenagers to disperse from the cold drinks waiting aisle. Apparently, cold drinks with lots of fruit and chocolate are the fashionable thing, even when the weather starts to get cooler. The end of summer doesn’t faze the young ones. They smoothly grab their ice beverages and sidle out into the rain again, in droves.

            When I finally bring my order to the table, I start to share about the perils of language.  Learning a new language such as Mandarin or French, can have its perils. The biggest problem is motivation, or wanting to do something that might take quite a long time to master. And it isn’t quite so practical to learn either, when one may never really get to apply the language in a significant situation, such as work or professional life. I point out my idea that learning a new language can teach me how a good teacher guides. It can be a lesson in the actual dynamics of teaching and learning, or a kind of field research. I find it helpful to see language learning in this way, because that takes the pressure away from having to learn the language enough to be able to make conversation or write books.

            So much of what I am reading in education texts talks about like, or the role of liking in learning. For example, there are studies which show that liking one’s peers in a cooperative situation can accelerate the learning process. 

            Some studies point to extrinsic rewards such as points for each collaborative experience. People learn more when there is something to like about the process. This is likely true because people want to be around what they like. Sweetening education through amiable experiences or camaraderie can be a great motivator to the educational process.

            But what happens when like becomes attachment? What happens when the things I like to learn become so deeply engrained in me  that I don’t want to learn anything that creates discomfort, or is potentially unsettling? And I wonder, when it comes to working with others, how much of that is the result of dynamics of like? Doesn’t like also come with dislike? And can this create suffering, to like one thing and thus dislike others? 

             It’s possible that like may lead to addiction if one is not careful. But another point is that it creates an equation between like and learning. But some kinds of learning are not reinforcing, let alone rewarding. There are certain kinds of learning experiences that are extremely unsettling, yet they are forms of learning nonetheless. 

            If one is conditioned to think of learning as something that satisfies or fulfills, or promises finality, what happens to those other kinds of learning, where there is no outcome, no finality, no certainty, and no rewards? Maybe those latter get consigned to the useless. But are they not also forms of learning about ourselves and how we react to challenging or unrewarding experiences? Could one still learn something from that which bears no sweet fruit?

            The problem I see in like is that like is a kind of conditional acceptance. I wonder, if we can see all situations as equally of the same mind, would we keep craving the problematic like?

Knowing and Not Knowing

I was using huatou method of asking the question “What is Wu?” during the meditation session this morning. This practice is quite tricky at times because there is not much to hold onto while asking the question of what is ‘nothingness’. And there were times when I did experience frustration in the process, as I began to realize that there is no object of ‘knowing’  in this question. The question itself becomes an interrogation into the meaning of ‘knowing’ and ‘searching’ for what is to be known.

To know: what is there to know? Maybe I can begin by exploring this question a bit. Whenever I seek to know something, am I not creating a kind of object in my mind: something to be seen, felt, heard, etc.? This becomes hard to do when we start to talk about mind. First of all, there are not really any empirical qualities attached to mind, so the search for mind in this way can seem a bit strange. Second of all, mind seems to be the basis upon which all observations arise, so it seems odd to try to look for the mind, the way one does look for an object.

“Wu” is a method where I start to investigate that which cannot be known as an object, or that which is the basis for all knowledge of subject and object. But no sooner do I start to practice it, and I become frustrated by my inability to try to know that which has no object. But today, I started to realize that perhaps this question is more like a process than a result. The process is to let go of the search for mind in an object of mind, but it is also recognizing a subtle mystery. If knowing “What is Wu?” cannot entail finding an object that can be said to be mind, I wonder what kind of knowing we use to know what is wu? I think this is the direct awareness that only mind is capable of. But maybe it is a knowledge I am frightened of, because I am used to subject/object as the way of knowing.

Letting go of subject/object seems to be the only way to resolve the question, but what does this letting go look like? It may be a kind of process of unknowing, where the mind is no longer drawn in by dualism but keeps waiting to see its own process. But it is not easy to get out of this special kind of dualistic knowing that I engage in every day. I think part of the challenge is to relate that there is another way of knowing, and I can never know that way through the mindset of subject and object.

Every Thought Is Perfect

The One Day Chan meditation retreat lasted from 8 am to 5:30 pm. In the afternoon, I felt the usual symptoms of sitting for a long time: the aches here and there, which affected my concentration. Sometimes the discomfort of that pain did not feel at all bearable, in spite of my redoubled efforts to stay on my method of practice, no matter what. I found that the two effective ways of dealing with pain are questioning, “who is having pain?” and surrendering to compassionate love. I suppose these two approaches are reaching for the same thing. However, I find that in cases of extreme pain or discomfort, compassionate love feels more reassuring, at least in the short term.

What I also noticed this time was that, as I was using huatou, I felt the method becoming more and stranger to me, as though I lost any sense of how I could even pose such a question, much less even come up with a sound answer. After a while, the method had me feeling a bit lost as to how to ask it. It is as though all the ways I pepper that question with a kind of ‘significance’ start to fall away. Is it good or bad to feel a bit disoriented or even disengaged from this method? I suppose I can say both yes and no, from my own experiential perspective on this. It’s good in the sense that any kind of intensive sitting practice is going to throw off any theoretical approaches one tries to inject into it. Eventually, theories become somewhat irrelevant in the face of the raw experiences of discomfort, during intensive meditative sitting. But in another sense, the disengagement resulting from that dryness of huatou concerns me. I think that it might have been the result of the physical discomfort that this disengagement might have arisen.

One thing that helps is to understand that in meditation, what I do or don’t do has no bearing on what true mind is. Thoughts come out perfectly in meditation—not because they are connected to another thought, but the opposite. A thought is perfect insofar as it is part of the mind’s functioning. If I look at it from this analogy that the Venerable uses: the thoughts are the waves while the mind is the ocean. Judging the wave’s substance by its size and shape is not going to get us closer to what the waves is made from. In the practice, it means to try to see the totality of the mind in one emerging thought. It is not hard to do this (quite), because from that analogy, we can say that all waves in the ocean have the same nature of water. But normally, I only see the moving edge of the wave and not the inner substance. Another way of understanding it (on a crude level?) would be to say that thoughts are ‘perfect’ because they are impermanent, always yielding to new thoughts. “Imperfection” emerges as an illusory comparison of thoughts, as though one were to combine two bubbles together.

     

"The Man Who Died"

"I tried to compel them to live, so they compelled me to, die. It is always so, with compulsion. The recoil kills the advance. Now is my time to be alone."

Therefore he went no more to the garden, but lay still and saw the sun, or walked at dusk across the olive slopes, among the green wheat, that rose a palm-breadth higher every sunny day. And always he thought to himself

'How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and to be beyond it. Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich. My way is my own alone.'[1]

 This quote is from a short story by D.H. Lawrence, called “The Man Who Died”. It is a story about a kind of Christ figure who rises from the dead, only to turn away from his previous striving to compel others to believe in God or to accept a spiritual path. This story is, for me, an incredible allegory that explores the notion of giving, sacrifice and ultimate solitude. Perhaps I bring up this story to continue from my previous remarks about what giving means, and to whom one gives.

The first question I ask as I explore this story is, to whom does this man die? I read this story many years ago in my undergraduate student years. I think it meant a lot to me that a person can find solace in their original being. But it is also a story that warns people. If people give according to what is expected of them (through religion or a spiritual teaching), it’s often true that it ends up alienating the person from themselves. I become the servant to these commands, which are supposed to make me into a better person if I can follow those commands precisely.

But when one is alone, does it mean that one has nothing to give of her or himself? I think this is a crucial question. Many times, I have equated aloneness with being withdrawn from others. But solitude means something quite different in Lawrence’s story. He remarks, at one point,

 

I made a mistake. I understand that they executed me for preaching to them. Yet they could not finally execute me, for now I am risen in my own aloneness, and inherit the earth, since I lay no claim on it. And I will be alone in the seethe of all things; first and foremost, for ever, I shall be alone. But I must toss this bird into the seethe of phenomena, for he must ride his wave. How hot he is with life! Soon, in some place, I shall leave him among the hens. And perhaps one evening I shall meet a woman who can lure my risen body, yet leave me my aloneness. For the body of my desire has died, and I am not in touch anywhere. 

 

If I start to look at this from a Chan/Buddhist perspective, I understand it to mean: when I let go of desires, mind doesn’t abide anywhere, yet it is able to move everywhere (“inherit the earth, since I lay no claim on it”). The sense of aloneness that Lawrence describes is not a physical aloneness. It is not the aloneness of “This is my body”. It is, rather, the aloneness of not really having a body anywhere, and not having a fixed location to feed desires or to grasp things to ‘myself’. It is also a place where I am not compelled to draw people into my influence. If people don’t want me, it is okay. Shifu used to talk about being a kind of humble monk who walks through the snow. What does it mean? It expresses the aloneness of not abiding anywhere, yet being free to go anywhere. Even though Shifu abided in many places and had a profound influence, he laid no claims to those things. He simply reflected what had been taught to him by his teachers. So this being alone is really a kind of ability to walk the earth without taking a single piece of dirt with oneself.

            Another powerful point about this allegory is that it speaks to the compulsion to help others. Sometimes, wanting to help others becomes part of my identity. When I am caught up in that giving identity, I don’t realize how much it is tied into the wish to belong with others. When this happens, is the giving genuine? It is a giving that might be beneficial, but it is still caught up in self. Therefore, it leads to suffering. The man that Lawrence describes is no longer attached to his sacrificing role. He is free to walk away from it, even though his soul is rooted in divinity.

            This story is a compelling example of how cosmic being goes beyond the social. One need not be afraid to die to a social self that is causing suffering and crucifixion. The cosmic ‘catches’ the dying body and crucified soul, because cosmic things are not bound by specific arrangements that people create.

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[1] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700631h.html