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

Regardless of the cause, whenever a person is sufficiently stunned by a revelation of
his ego's fallibility, he will find himself in disillusionment's waters.
It may not, however, be supposed that because all people encounter serious problems,
all will sooner or later find themselves in the swamp. Many egos can withstand any
adversity. Many men can bury their sons at dawn and work out the details of a business deal
by noon, or can survive the most brutalizing ordeal and before the blood is washed from their
bodies begin haggling over the rights to their story, or can even experience tragic accident
and be reduced to ponder no other questions but those which concern the merits of litigation.
Neither may it be assumed that people automatically relinquish their places in
Samsara during the simple course of growing old. While it is true that the majority of those
who confront the crimes and follies of their egos are of middle age, there are many
outstanding examples of persons much younger who have made the transition and, on the
other hand, persons much older who never leave Samsara at all. The Buddha walked out of
his samsaric life when he was twenty-nine. Shankara, of Vedanta fame, had already founded
many monasteries by the time he died at thirty-two. Sri Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian
saint who died in l954, reached spiritual maturity while in his teens.
As to those who cling to their ego-deluded lives and reach old age with their samsaric
carcasses still intact, we find many who are as willfully self-absorbed at sixty-five as they
were half a century before, when they were teenagers. Unlike their peers who have mellowed
with age - the unmistakable sign of ego diminution - many elderly people have egos that are
still as tough, mean, greedy, capricious and demanding of attention as ever. We do not speak
of sociopaths, derelicts or even of the ill or age-infirmed. A shocking number of perfectly
healthy and otherwise respectable people often resort to a variety of petty crimes to satisfy
egotistic whims. Managers of supermarkets located in prosperous retirement communities, to
mention one sad example, have had to take a hard line against shoplifting and stand up to the
negative publicity of having some `poor, hungry old lady' arrested ever since they determined
that what Grandma was boosting was pate de foie gras and caviar. (Grandma knows that you
might as well get hanged for a sheep as a lamb.) And any traffic court magistrate can confirm
the terrifying number of elderly drivers who are blind to objects more than ten feet distant
and have reflex response-times measurable in minutes, and who still insist upon their
inalienable right to operate a vehicle on a freeway. We are not all mandated to decline
gracefully.
But every man or woman who does suffer the Gap's crisis of disillusionment will
likely find his difficulty exacerbated by confusion and feelings of alienation. He will know
that his standard of values must itself be re-evaluated, but he will not know how to
accomplish the revision. (The subject cannot be its object just as the eye cannot see itself.)
Since his judgment has already proven unreliable, he does not know where he can dependably
turn or whom he can safely trust. His old strategies are ineffective, the rules of the game
having so drastically changed. So much will seem to be going wrong at once that he will see
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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