150: Three Jewel Design part 2

SUBSCRIBE TO UNMIND:

RSS FEED | APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY

**Two Jewels**
Dharma is karma –
All causes and conditions
Conspiring to be.

In the last segment of UnMind, we took up the most social of the Three Treasures: Sangha, or community. In this segment, we will continue with our analysis of the design of Dharma study; and in the next, that of Buddha practice, Zen’s unique meditation, or zazen. These three constitute the highest values and manifestations of Buddhism in the real world, and the simplest model for the comprehensive nature of living a Zen life. They are regarded as three legs, without any one of which the stool of Zen is unstable. Design intent is reflected in their modus operandi, message, and method, respectively.

Dharma study consists in reviewing and contemplating the “compassionate teachings,” the message transmitted by Shakyamuni and the ancestors down to the present day. While they were all, in effect, “speaking with one voice,” nonetheless Dharma ranks second in importance and emphasis, as an adjunct to meditation, just as Sangha comes in third, in providing the harmonious community and conducive environment for Zen. As referenced in Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi:

Grass, trees and walls bring forth the teaching for all beings
Common people as well as sages

The “walls” are the infrastructure that was built around personal and communal practice in the form of our sitting space at home, grass hut hermitages, and meditation halls of temples, centers, or monasteries. This is the millennia-old design-build activity of the ancestors attested to by the stupas of India and the monasteries of China, Tibet, Japan, and the Far East, the legacy inherited by modern proponents of Zen in the West.

Dharma likewise has been codified, collected, and contained in tangible documents, originally in the form of rice paper scrolls, now in books distributed worldwide in hardbound and paperback format. My own two current volumes in print ‑ “The Original Frontier” and “The Razorblade of Zen” ‑ were actually printed and bound in India, the home country of Buddhism They are also, or will soon be, available in electronic form, as eBooks and audiobooks accessible to virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime.

It is as if Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion – s/he of the innumerable eyes and ears needed to see and hear the sights and sounds of dukkha in the world, with innumerable arms and hands bringing the tools necessary to help ‑ has come to be manifested globally, in the form of the worldwide network of mobile media. By means of which her ongoing witness to the suffering of the world is also recorded for posterity. Thus, the potential for Dharma to have an effect on the world at large has expanded exponentially, as in the vow: “I take refuge in Dharma, the compassionate teachings.”

Taking refuge in the Dharma means returning ‑ or “fleeing back” ‑ to the original truths or laws of existence, and our place in it. Consider what the first teachings of Buddha really had to say, and what was their intended effect upon the audience. The First Sermon lays out the essential logic of the Middle Way, and its avoidance of extremes of attitudes and approaches to the fundamental problem of existence as a sentient, human being.

The design intent of the Dharma as expounded by Shakyamuni Buddha, was, as far as we can determine from the written record, to correct the conventional wisdom of the time, which I take to have been primarily based on beliefs and doctrines of Hinduism. One well-known example is his teaching of anatta or anatman, a refutation of the Hindu belief in a self-existent soul, or atman. Not being a scholar, I am basing this on my scant study of the canon and the opinion of others more learned than I.

Considering how the Dharma was first shared gives us an insight more technically oriented to the intent of its design. In the beginning was the spoken word of Siddhartha Gautama, similar to the Bible’s creation story. Buddha never committed a single word to paper, or so we are told. It is also said that he “never spoke a word,” a comment I take to mean that while language can point at the truths of Buddhism, it cannot capture them. Buddhist truth is uniquely experiential. It has to go through a kind of translation into language that is beyond language itself, as in the last stanza of Hsinhsinming‑Trust in Mind:

Words! The Way is beyond language for in it
there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today

Later given the honorifics of “Buddha, ‑ fully awakened one” and “Shakyamuni ‑ sage of the Shakya clan,” and others, ten in total, Siddhartha’s First Sermon to the five ascetics with whom he had been practicing, begins with:

O monks, these two extremes ought not be followed by one
going forth from the household life. What are the two?
There is devotion to the indulgence of self-gratification
Which is low, common, the way of ordinary people
Unworthy and unprofitable
There is devotion to the indulgence of self-mortification
Which is painful unworthy and unprofitable
Avoiding both these extremes the Tathagata has realized the Middle Way
It gives vision it gives knowledge and it leads to calm to insight to awakening to Nirvana

The intent of the content was to dissuade these monks from continuing to follow the dictates of their method of asceticism, which Buddha had found to be ineffective, to say the least. And to hold out the hope that if they were able to relinquish their own opinions of the truth they were seeking, and the method for apprehending it, they would be able to accede to the insight that he had experienced directly in meditation, the “middle way.”

“Tathagata,” by the way, is also one of the ten honorifics accorded to Buddha later in the course of his teaching career, meaning something like the “thus-come one.” It was most likely appended to this narrative when finally committed to written form, some four centuries after-the-fact.

But our point is that the spoken language was the medium in which the teaching was first shared. Buddha was said to have spoken Pali, which is similar to, and perhaps a dialect of, Sanskrit. The theory I have heard explaining why they were not recorded in written form is that they were considered sacred, and writing them down would have made them vulnerable to accidental or intentional change. The oral tradition was more dependable in terms of preserving them with their original intent intact.

So the “design intent” of Buddha’s use of kind or loving speech was not the usual intent of language in general. It was intended to encourage others to apprehend the “Great Matter” of life-and-death in the most direct way, the only way, possible. Buddha recognized that there was no way of sharing his experience with others in the ordinary sense, so he resorted to parables and analogies, to allow his audience to see themselves in the pictures he painted, and to transcend ordinary understanding in words and phrases, or the pursuit of information, the usual application of language.

The later codifying and organization of the original spoken teachings into the Tripitaka or “three baskets” was designed to allow teachers and students to study the voluminous canon in an orderly way, and to prioritize their approach to it in digestible bites. It was most likely understood that the existing literature of the time ‑ which had to be scarce, compared to today’s glut of publications – was to be absorbed in concert with practicing the meditation that had led to Buddha’s insight to begin with. As Master Dogen reminds:

Now all ancestors and all buddhas who uphold buddha-dharma
            have made it the true path of enlightenment to sit upright
            practicing in the midst of self-fulfilling samadhi
Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way
It was done so because teachers and disciples
            personally transmitted this excellent method
            as the essence of the teaching
In the authentic tradition of our teaching
            it is said that this directly transmitted straightforward buddha- dharma is the unsurpassable of the unsurpassable

The design intent of the teachings has been, from the very beginning, the direct transmission of the buddha-dharma, what Matsuoka-roshi referred to as “living Zen.” In the daily lives of monks and nuns, frequent repetition of chanting selected teachings enabled the monastics to deeply assimilate them. Master Dogen was known for connecting each and every regular daily routine with brief recitations, such as the Meal Verse, in order to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane, the physical and the spiritual.

Codification of the koan collections of Rinzai Zen ‑ some 1700 strong according to tradition, later organized into five sets by Hakuin Ekaku Zenji, the 18th Century Rinzai master ‑ represent design efforts to structure the lore and legacy of Zen’s anecdotal history of exchanges between masters and students available in progressive levels of difficulty, enabling accessibility of the apparent dichotomies of Dharma. Soto Zen simplifies the approach even further by regarding zazen itself as representing the living koan, requiring nothing further to complement, or complicate, the process of insight.

All the various models of buddha-dharma developed by the ancients qualify as efforts in information design ‑ visualizing images and what is called “pattern-thinking” ‑ that allow us to grasp the form of the Dharma beyond what mere words can convey. The Four Noble Truths comprise the first historical example of these descriptive models, including the prescriptive Noble Eightfold Path. Tozan’s “Five Ranks” and Rinzai’s “Host and Guest” come later, but have the same design intent – to help their students get beyond the limitation of the linear nature of language. My semantic models of the teachings, published in “The Razorblade of Zen,” represent more contemporary cases in point.

Nowadays ‑ as testimonial evidence indicates, from one-on-one encounters in online and in-person dharma dialogs with modern students of the Way ‑ people are no longer studying buddha-dharma as they may have throughout history, when documents were rare. More often than not, they are reading more than one book at a time, in a nonlinear process I refer to as “cross-coupling”: simultaneously absorbing commentaries from one author or translator along with others; or perhaps comparing the teachings of more than one ancestor of Zen to those of a different ancestor.

This may be an artifact or anomaly of the ubiquitous presence and availability of Zen material in print form, as well as the encyclopedic scope of online resources on offer today. It seems that in every category, and every language, we have at our fingertips a greater textual resource than ever conceivable in history, dwarfing the great libraries of legend. We can “google” virtually anything – no pun - with a few strokes of a keyboard. In addition, Artificial Intelligence threatens to bring together summaries and concoctions of content at the whim of any researcher; documents are readily searchable for those who wish to quantify uses of words and phrases at any point in history, teasing out trends and making judgments as to the hidden patterns in historical evolution of ideas.

In this context it is difficult to ascertain the design intent of dharma as articulated today. It is not easy to discern the intent of the publish-or-perish, rush-into-print crowd, or to judge whether a given piece of contemporary writing is worth our effort and time to read.

Fortunately, Zen offers a wormhole out of this literary catch-22. Zazen provides recourse to an even greater inventory of databases, built into our immediate sensorium. We can always return to upright sitting, facing the wall. This is where we will find the nonverbal answers we are seeking so feverishly, and somewhat futilely, in “words and letters” as Master Dogen reminds us in his seminal tract on meditation, Fukanzazengi:

You should stop pursuing words and letters
and learn to withdraw and turn the light on yourself
when you do so your body and mind will naturally fall away
and your original buddha-nature will appear

This stanza is sometimes interpreted as a slam on the nature of contemporaneous Rinzai practice predominant in the Japan of Dogen’s time. But I think we should take a broader view of the great master’s intent. He is merely cluing us in to the fact of the futility of pursuing literal, linear understanding of the Dharma in its manifestation as verbal expression. We are to turn our attention, instead, to the immediate and intimate presence of the self of body-and-mind ‑ beyond, or before, words can interfere. Here is where, and now is when, we will witness the full force of the design intent of the Dharma.