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

CHAPTER 6
THE GAP BETWEEN THE SIX WORLDS AND THE SEVENTH
The stone which the builders rejected,
This became the chief cornerstone.
- Matthew 2l:42
In Buddhism we sometimes imagine that between the Wheel of Samsara and the
Mountain of Nirvana there lies a dark and deadly swamp, a kind of spiritual gap or bardo that
teems with suffering souls. These are the people who jumped, fell or were pushed off the
Wheel when their survival strategies stopped working.
As Samsara is reality as seen through the prejudicial eyes of the ego, and Nirvana is
reality apprehended directly, the gap or swamp is the place where transition from one mode
of awareness to the other is possible... not inevitable but merely possible.
The Gap, then, is the critical period of disillusionment a person enters whenever he
suddenly discovers that his ego is malfunctioning as an arbiter of reality. The moment it
dawns upon him that something is intrinsically wrong, that he is making terrible errors in
judgment, and that things or people upon whom he would have bet his life are not what he
thought them to be, he enters the swamp. He may previously have run his life with
confidence and efficiency; but in the gap he doubts his ability to cope with life at all.
A variety of causes can catapult an individual into the swamp. Sometimes he is
overwhelmed by an event which his ego views as a personal tragedy: the death of someone
loved; a betrayal; a serious illness or infirmity; a humiliating failure or rejection; or
perhaps even a seemingly insignificant difficulty which has brought to critical mass an
accumulation of small miseries. Sometimes he simply cannot accept the natural, changing
order of things as when he notices ageing's deleterious effects upon his face, physique and
virility or when his children grow up and exclude him from their private lives, relegating him
to lesser roles than he is accustomed to playing. Sometimes he invests himself too heavily in
a job, a creed or a way of life and experiences, upon discovery that his investment was
foolishly made, the mortifications of insolvency.
One other peculiar but common cause of troubled introspection is an individual's
abrupt awakening to the fact that the "becoming" phase of his life is over, that he already is
whatever he was destined to be, and that the answer to the question, "Is that all there is?" is
dismally affirmative.
CHAPTER 6 THE GAP BETWEEN THE SIX WORLDS AND THE SEVENTH
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
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