seventh world of chan buddhism - Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

challenge. To live in the Six Worlds of Samsara is to live in constant conflict, winning some
battles and losing others, but never being able to secure the peace. The Wheel of desire turns
relentlessly, one possession after another, one relationship after another, one conquest after
another. Such is life under the ego's tyranny.
Pity the poor Chan master! He has literally vowed never to rest until he has freed all
who are in his charge from the bondage of Samsara. In addition, therefore, to leading his
bona fide disciples (7th and 8th World Chan) to Nirvanic realization, he must also guide all
the Six Worlds' monks and nuns in his monastery safely out of their ego-deluded existence.
This is not an easy task.
For so long as a person believes in himself, i.e., in the sufficiency of his own ego to
deliver him to an existence of peace, joy and freedom, he cannot be liberated. For so long as
a person thinks that his conscious ego is in total control of his life and that he can cope with
failure and success, he cannot be freed. The craving ego and the Spirit (Buddha Nature) are
mutually exclusive entities. Where there is one the other cannot be.
Of course, no conscious individual can function without a sense of identity. The ego
about which we speak is the one which values itself and judges itself as it values and judges
all the persons and things of its environment. The ego, then, is a fictitious creature. It has no
real existence. It is a ghost-general that must be relieved of its command by being demoted,
retired or killed. This process of ego elimination, which Christian monks and nuns call
`dying to self' and which Buddhists sometimes refer to as `killing the fool,' is long, tedious,
and, by definition, humiliating.
In Chan, ideally, the master confers privately every day with each person in his
charge. To those who practice Seventh World Chan he assigns exercises which are designed
to lead them to controlled states of concentration, meditation, and samadhi. To those who
practice Eighth World Chan, he usually assigns a thought-frustrating riddle (a koan) the
pondering of which will ultimately cause the ego briefly to annihilate itself (satori). But for
those who are in the six worlds, the master has to go back to basics. During audiences with
these persons, he begins the process of ego-elimination by determining which of the six
segments of Samsara the novice is in. He then helps the novice to confront the truth about
himself. Without this confrontation, there can be no progress. The novice must see for
himself how he resorts to a particular survival strategy to gain his objectives, and how the use
of this strategy is inimical to his spiritual development. The master usually hopes for a
miracle and to facilitate one assigns a meditation exercise, but it is essentially by his own
inspirational example and by his instructions and admonitions, both gentle and harsh, that the
master is able to prod the novice to increased self-awareness and change.
The difficulty of this task is illustrated in the Chan story of the master and the three
novices. The master greets his new charges and tells them that the first spiritual discipline he
will impose upon them, effective immediately, is the rule of absolute silence. As he nods and
turns away, the first novice calls, "Oh, Master. I can't tell you how happy I am to receive
CHAPTER 5 SIX WORLDS OF SAMSARA
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
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