Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

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might be induced by shocks to rational thought such as exposure to irresolvable
puzzles called koans (in the Rinzai school of Zen) or by sitting motionless for long
periods (in Soto Zen). Every person is already enlightened so it would be a
misunderstanding of Enlightenment to construe it as a future state to be attained.
Enlightenment is realized by detachment from desire and habitual means to end
thinking, and their eventual cessation. This cannot be done by will power, only as a
consequence of meditation or other Zen Buddhist practices. Trying to be
Enlightened, as well as construing Enlightenment as future, are obstacles to
Enlightenment, that is, being at one with one’s true Enlightened state. Once the
present has been polished clean like a mirror by meditation, Enlightenment is
disclosed as already all here now. Although Zen is intensely practical, experiential
and non-linguistic, and the medium of philosophy is language, in its insistence on the
ineffable Zen has an affinity with the later Aquinas and the early Wittgenstein who
each thought philosophy reaches a certain limit in what cannot be said.
Zen was founded in China by Bodhidharma, who brought the doctrines of the
Lanka-Vatara Sutra from India the late 5th century. The genesis of Zen arguably lies
in the fusion of Bodhidharma’s Buddhism with Chinese Tao. Bodhidharma was
succeeded as master by Hui-k'o (487—593). The Zen emphasis on practice rather
than doctrine is well shown by Hui-neng (638—713), the sixth patriarch of Chinese
Zen, who was both enlightened and illiterate. Ma-tsu, Nan-chuan, Huang-po, Lin-chi,
and Chao-chou were masters during the golden age of Zen in the 8th and 9th
centuries. Scripture and doctrine were regarded as unimportant, or even as
hinderances, to the realization of one’s Enlightenment. Instead, there was an
emphasis on self-discipline, oral instruction and testing dialogue. Sometimes a monk
might be suddenly hit with a cane, for example if their alert meditation shaded off
into doziness.
There was severe persecution of Buddhism in China in 845. However, Zen not
only survived due to its isolation in mountain monasteries, but was left as the most
practiced form of Buddhism in China. As a result of the persecution, Zen divided into
two principal schools: Lin-chi and Ts'ao-tung. These were brought to Japan in the
14 th century where they were known as Rinzai Zen and Soto Zen respectively.
In Soto Zen there is an emphasis on just sitting. As early as Bodhidharma there
had been the practice of looking at the wall. (The present author remembers long
periods sitting looking at a whitewashed wall in the 1970’s. I, and others, asked
‘Why are we looking at the wall?’ Our monk would only ever reply ‘Look at the
wall!’) Just sitting is the kind of meditation known as zazen. That there is no point, or
no overtly stated point, to zazen allows a measure of deconditioning, a falling away
of the repetitive ordinary mind. It would not be completely wrong to say zazen
therefore has a point after all: deconditioning, detachment, Enlightenment, but this
could be misleading. If zazen is done with this (or anything) as a goal in mind,
paradoxically, ‘the goal’ cannot be ‘reached’. Indeed, as we have seen,
Enlightenment is not a goal in the sense of a future state. The gate is a gateless gate.