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

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CHAPTER 8 BUDDHA NATURE AND ARCHETYPAL DYNAMICS Happiness must never be thought to consist in anything exterior to ourselves: not in any person, not in any place, and not in any thing. Heaven and hell exist and they exist here and now and in our own minds. We can live in one locale or the other; and, unless we've been decapitated, we carry our heaven and our hell with us wherever we go. The problem is always in the mind. Religions are civilizing enterprises. At their base levels, they take disparate groups of xenophobic savages and impose union and order on us whether we like it or not. Precepts or Decalogue is imposed and our instinctual drives are steered by promises of reward or threats of punishment. At their higher levels, religions provide the so-called "mystical ladders" by which we can climb out of Samsara's snake-pit. The rungs are the ethics, the humility, the methodologies of mind management, and any of the other means by which we siphon-off energy from outwardly directed instinctive force and redirect it towards our interior life, in service to our Buddha Self. Though the terminology varies, the objective is everywhere identical: the individual soul's ecstatic union with the Divine Self. To be content with anything less is to settle for mere subsistence, to cultivate a tolerance for absurdity. To Buddhists, Hell is life in Samsara, the world we encounter in the Six Worlds of false Chan, the world of the ego. In Samsara, all things are constantly changing and always conditional. We need to be needed even by those we do not care to serve, to be loved even by those whom we reject, to be admired and respected even by those whose opinions we consider worthless, and all this while we grovel at the feet of heroes who care as little for us as we care for those whose allegiance we require. The Seventh World is the beginning, the place we are when we wake up and look upon ourselves objectively for the first time, when we are seized by the impulse to change, to transform ourselves and our environment. We want to be free of needing the people, places and things of this world. We have had them and they did not make us happy. We need to simplify existence and to find in that simplicity peace, joy, truth and freedom. The Eighth and Ninth worlds of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas constitute the Tushita Heaven's precincts, the worlds of Divine Marriage, the Mysterium Conjunctions or Union of Opposites, i.e., Spiritual androgyny, and the worlds in which the Divine Child is created. After our these worlds, we strive to achieve complete kenosis, the saintly empty-of-ego state CHAPTER 8 BUDDHA NATURE AND ARCHETYPAL DYNAMICS S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM 86
in which we simply live out the life of our Buddha Self - The Tenth World's Void. We enter what in modern parlance might be termed Cypherspace: Zen's Empty Circle. In Chan, the psychic matrix is called the Buddha Nature, the Original Face, Mind, or the Self. This Self is the core and essence of our being, at once its totality and that part of it which is divine. In Western societies people are used to referring to this divinity as God. Buddha Nature may therefore be referred to as God providing it is not regarded as a supreme being which exists external to the individual, except as it exists in all other living individuals. The facts of creation are simply outside our area of spiritual interest, at least in the beginning stages of spiritual life. Chan Buddhism is non-dualistic. We do not believe that there is God and man. We believe that there is God in man. The Self, then, may be seen as the difference between a sleeping man and a fresh corpse. The Self is present in the sleeping man. In the dead man, no matter how recently dead he is, there is no Self. A dead man is a stone. And as there is no lord of the stones there is no lord of the dead. (Rhapsodic claims about finding Buddha Nature in clouds, mosquitoes, dog feces, and atomic nuclei are pantheistic drivel.) Further, the Self never judges. The Self, if he be in the body of a murderer, sees no murderer, or if he be in the body of a saint, sees no saint. To our Self or Buddha Nature there is neither good nor evil, there are no praiseworthy beliefs or blameworthy beliefs, there are no meritorious actions or unmeritorious actions. These moral determinations are for humans to make in regard of social contracts, implied or expressed. Good and evil are necessary civil designations, but they have no spiritual applications. In Chan, the dead have no Buddha Nature (and most assuredly do not find their egos reborn in another body) and the living have no God who stalks the universe planning, creating, punishing, rewarding or ignoring as suits his inscrutable will. The Kingdom of God is truly within; and the Kingdom of God, in its sublime entirety, is for the living. Most of all, we think of our Buddha Self as a cord or artery or vine which connects us to each other so that we all live a single life. The Self is also the organizing principle which regulates our body and provides for our development. It contains the general genetic formula that determines that we are men and not carrots and the specific genetic information that determines our individual physical and mental characteristics or tendencies thereto. The Self is privy to all sensory data, including that which we consciously acknowledge and that which is received subliminally. Due to evolutionary preferences, consciousness has raised the human threshold of sensory awareness. We isolate an object or event for study and tune-out everything we deem extraneous. Whether we are subjecting something to rational analysis or are simply daydreaming about it, whenever our attention is thus engaged, many odors, tastes, sounds, visual and tactile stimuli pass unnoticed through CHAPTER 8 BUDDHA NATURE AND ARCHETYPAL DYNAMICS S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM 87
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THE SEVENTH WORLD OF CHAN BUDDHISM
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Table of Contents PART I: ORIGINS C
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As their population increased, so d
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from the womb of their Holy Mother
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fade quickly in early morning body-
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doctrine of Karma meant nothing les
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The other method of salvation, the
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As H.G. Wells reconstructs Siddarth
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CHAPTER 2 CHINA How wonderful! How
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in its concealed vitality, a new mo
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favor. (Unhappily, as we shall see,
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demand, or, perhaps, respectfully r
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demonstrated divine affection; and
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Believing that human nature was inh
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after a specific individual can, wh
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The Confucians also mocked the old
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Preferring to be absolutely certain
Page 35 and 36: male, earth and sky, dark and light
Page 37 and 38: As farmers, they of course studied
Page 39 and 40: emember. How much credence can we a
Page 41 and 42: Again, as there is no willful, exte
Page 43 and 44: CHAPTER 4 ORIGINS OF THE TWO MAIN S
Page 45 and 46: ecstatic beggars ambling through th
Page 47 and 48: As monasteries and shrines competed
Page 49 and 50: Though he could see Infinity in a s
Page 51 and 52: When, however, the fellow failed to
Page 53 and 54: was necessary, went back to South C
Page 55 and 56: intelligentsia sought refuge in Con
Page 57 and 58: She must have paid a fortune for it
Page 59 and 60: Even though Titans are noticeably h
Page 61 and 62: with the cosmos - encounters which
Page 63 and 64: The name Devil comes from the wretc
Page 65 and 66: challenge. To live in the Six World
Page 67 and 68: CHAPTER 6 THE GAP BETWEEN THE SIX W
Page 69 and 70: himself as being under siege from e
Page 71 and 72: advise him to seek sanctuary in a m
Page 73 and 74: CHAPTER 7 A WORKING MODEL OF THE PS
Page 75 and 76: that because something conforms to
Page 77 and 78: and protect them, they very likely
Page 79 and 80: follow a prescribed moral code that
Page 81 and 82: survival value. With this friend th
Page 83 and 84: Even today, a man will spend consid
Page 85: CROSS-SECTION: MODEL OF PSYCHE The
Page 89 and 90: pride, anger, security, jealousy, a
Page 91 and 92: honest, loving, witty, and good hum
Page 93 and 94: feel if we discover that our trust
Page 95 and 96: CHAPTER 9 HIGH PRICE OF DESIRE It s
Page 97 and 98: including veterans' organizations)
Page 99 and 100: the legend, "Even when you're baaaa
Page 101 and 102: Mr. Doe tells himself that he does
Page 103 and 104: Since his ex-wife and kids live in
Page 105 and 106: court press.) His new attachments w
Page 107 and 108: When evaluating dreams we must reca
Page 109 and 110: PART III: PRACTICE CHAPTER 10 FIRST
Page 111 and 112: Again, meditation requires that the
Page 113 and 114: Some people find it easier to count
Page 115 and 116: Zen is a branch of the Mahayana, an
Page 117 and 118: FIRST STEP ON THE EIGHTFOLD PATH CH
Page 119 and 120: Now, the question is this: Which ba
Page 121 and 122: It is necessary to appreciate the d
Page 123 and 124: punishment in the sense of physical
Page 125 and 126: through his troubles. It's another
Page 127 and 128: And if a single confession of past
Page 129 and 130: At the turn of the century, a famou
Page 131 and 132: and death' the moment we enter Nirv
Page 133 and 134: Insofar as these events concern our
Page 135 and 136: adiant, humble, compassionate, joyf
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Usually our love-affairs with thing
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The chronic annoyance of trivialiti
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After Dad has sympathized with Sonn
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conviction, "The friend of my frien
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Chan requires us not only to analyz
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Of all the projections one individu
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ego is so important." The layman, l
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Of greater importance to the person
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Buddhists because it is virtually i
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1. Non-killing 2. Non-stealing 3. N
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Salesmen frequently have difficulty
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would not be able to perform such g
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CHAPTER 15 RIGHT LIVELIHOOD "The pr
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killing of animals being unambiguou
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SIXTH STEP ON THE PATH CHAPTER 16 R
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What if we don't have a whole house
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When we finally decide to get in sh
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By Right Effort we mean that we cre
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sanitized in translation and appear
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men and women involved would have q
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the gentle monk came outside and sa
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There is another revolving sensatio
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length of time he'll require. He pe
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Eventually he realizes that he is b
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"Are there any teachings which go b
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The rules which govern eating defy
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CHAPTER 19 RIGHT MEDITATION EIGHTH
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cannot describe either the rush of
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The hands may either be held high a
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for as long as possible - the durat
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OTHER FORMS OF MEDITATION The word
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Pay attention to one clock only. As
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volume and harmony until it seemed
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Fasting, never a gentle exercise, c
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So far, so good. The characters and
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What type of prayer is permissible?
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CONCLUSION I remember once being ta
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