Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

On the Path of the Buddha 33
to have “attained enlightenment.” Subsequently he said to everyone he met, “Since
I received the kick from Ma Tsu I haven’t been able to stop laughing”. (Ross, 1981,
p. 170)
Zen can be seen as a deliberate reaction to both the scholarly Buddhism of
Southeast Asia and the “bells and whistles” of Tibetan Buddhism. Zazen, the
practice of Zen meditation is not seen as a route to some higher order of being,
a path to enlightenment strewn with golden lotus flowers – the practice of
zazen is understood as Enlightenment. As Shunryo Suzuki (1970) always
reminded his students, everything else is “extra” and must be gotten out of one’s
practice.
A person must sit in zazen with constant awareness [as befits a warrior] and with
faith that he is already a Buddha. The process is one of self-forgetting in which the
Buddha-nature gradually unfolds its infinite potential throughout one’s life. As an
aid to this, physical, mental, moral, and intellectual discipline provides a fitting
framework for the life of selfless action. (Harvey, 1990, p. 166)
Zen practice involves a wide range of disciplined activities including flower
arranging, calligraphy, writing haiku poetry, arrowless archery, ink painting,
drinking tea, solving mental puzzles, and above all – telling stories. Zen stories
are all about the destruction of ego, and the foolishness of hollow pride. They
generally focus on the wisdom of the body, and of the uselessness of the overeducated
intellectual rule keeper. In Zen monks die standing on their heads – just
to prove it can be done. They break all the rules, forget the sacred lines, and
deflate the pompous with the turn of a quick-witted phrase. Zen is the only form
of Buddhism where enlightenment can come on a person who is engulfed in
laughter, after a truly satisfying meal, while viewing cherry blossoms, or while
watching a cascade of autumn leaves falling from a thousand-year-old oak.
In summation, what can one finally say about Zen? It is not easy; in fact it may be
impossible. One can only try. First, perhaps, it should be reaffirmed that there is in
truth no goal to be attained. Even satori, enlightenment, is not to be imagined as
something achieved after arduous effort. Arduous effort may be involved, to be sure,
but it is not the real meaning. The real meaning, the real enlightenment, happens in
the way a ripe fruit falls from a tree. All the effort of the seed struggling up through
the soil, the tree putting down roots and putting out branches, leaves, blossoms, its
patient endurance of the many opposing natural forces – all in the end produce the
fruit which, when fully ripe, silently, easily falls. Yet, this whole process of fruition
was a process, not a goal and the seed itself was as much the goal, the reality as the
fruit itself. The seed as seed is eternal; an apple seed is eternally an apple seed, and
given the chance it will become an apple tree producing more apple seed. As Dogen
said, wood is wood and ashes are ashes. Enlightenment is, then, to live in accordance
with one’s true nature. That is what the Buddha did. That is how he was
“Enlightened”.(Ross, 1981, pp. 172–173)