UnMind 42. Surangama Sutra Sextet 2: What Is It That Sees?

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What is it that sees?
Is it the eye or the mind?
Or anything else?

Continuing with the introduction to the sutra, “The Reasons for the Teaching” explains the second:

2) The second is the danger of charlatans who pose as teachers and whose wrong views are a consequence of their own mental derangement.

It goes on to say that “The Sutra condemns self-described spiritual teachers who brag of advanced spiritual accomplishments and who violate the rules of moral behavior. The Buddha warns against such people in three places in the text…”

Ironically, Matsuoka Roshi felt the need to repeat this dire warning, over two millennia later, in the first chapter, “Dhyanayana, Zen Ways, A Practical Guide on the Ways of Zen” of his second collection of published talks, “Mokurai” (which means “silence is thunder”):

Even though in a little while I will discuss the various Dhyanayana or Zen vehicles as a guide to learning Zen, I warn you not to rely only on a particular human tradition, or a name alone, as an emblem of true transmission of wisdom. There are lazy, self-important and -indulgent priests who do possess the “right” credentials, not because they have penetrated to the core of life-and-death, but because they are clever in a worldly sense. Absolutely, you cannot trust them. It would be disastrous emotionally and mentally to do so.

Whoa. ‘Nuff said. Sensei, like Buddha, was not one to suffer fools gladly. Or to pull punches.

In this section of the sutra, “The Nature of Visual Awareness,” Buddha asserts that “It Is the Mind That Sees.” Using syllogisms and analogies, he repeatedly reduces Ananda to tears, following the same relentless logic used to establish the true Mind in the first section. The subheadings give an indication of the arc of his dissertation on seeing:

Visual Awareness Does Not Move; Visual Awareness Does Not Perish; The True Nature of Visual Awareness Is Not Lost; Visual Awareness Is Not Dependent upon Conditions; Visual Awareness Is Not a Perceived Object; Visual Awareness Has Neither Shape Nor Extension; Visual Awareness Is Both Separate and Not Separate from Objects; Visual Awareness Arises Neither on Its Own nor from Causes; True Visual Awareness; and finally, Distortions in Visual Awareness Based on Karma.

And I thought my dissertation on the visual sense in my chapter on “Deconstructing Your Senses in the Most Natural Way,” was a bit overwrought. (Plugging The Original Frontier.) I feel vindicated. We can touch on only a limited few of the points that Buddha drives home in this marvelous sutra. Look it up.

Buddha continues working on his too-smart-for-his-own-good cousin, continuing his exposition of Mind with an amazing display of tough love, circling his hand on the crown of Ananda’s head, while saying:

The Thus-Come One has often explained that all phenomena that come into being are nothing more than manifestations of the mind. All things that are subject to the principle of cause and effect — from the largest world to the smallest mote of dust — come into being because of the mind…Given that, how could the clear wondrous, pure mind — the mind that truly understands and is the basic nature of all mental states — itself lack reality?

In the West we have no trouble with mind arising out of matter, at least in the rationalist realm, objections from theism notwithstanding. But matter arising from mind? Buddha goes on to make this very personal:

Perceived objects are not permanent, and when that mind ceased to exist such that it had no more reality than a turtle with fur or a hare with horns, then your Dharma-body would cease to exist along with it. Then who would be left to practice and to perfect patience with the state of mind in which no mental objects arise?

This has the ring of familiarity. In Zen, practicing patience with the monkey mind on the cushion is stating the obvious. The theory is that it trains us to be more patient with others in the social sphere. But, along with Buddha’s comment on dealing with the stress of perception itself in the first section, this bit on having to practice patience even with an ostensibly advanced state of mind, is stunning. Even when it starts to work, it is stressful. The closer you get, the harder the slog. Like the last ten yards of the hundred-yard dash.

The crowd reaction illustrates the remote pass Buddha had gone to: “At that point Ānanda and the others in the great assembly were utterly dumbfounded. They had nothing to say.” Reducing that crowd to a loss for words had to be quite an accomplishment. But Buddha is not done:

I now will raise for all of you a great Dharma-banner so that all beings in all ten directions can gain access to what is wondrous, subtle, and hidden — the pure and luminous mind that understands — and so that they can open their clear-seeing eyes.

Buddha reveals his method of exposition, analogy:

Following the wise, who use analogies as aids to understanding… Let us use my fist as an analogy. Without a hand, I couldn’t make a fist. Without your eyes, would you be able to see? Are these two situations similar?”

Ānanda takes the bait, and asserts that they are comparable, only to be corrected with the following reasoning: “A person with no hands will never make a fist. But one whose eyes do not function will not be entirely unable to see,” reminding Ananda of prior points made: the blind see the dark, as do sighted people in a dark room, or with their eyes closed. If blind people recover their sight, it is the same as turning on a light in a dark room. But it is not the lamp, the source of the light, that sees. It is the mind. Contemporary experiments with the blind and brain science are confirming this. Buddha concludes:

Thus you should know that, in the analogy, the lamplight simply reveals visible objects; it is the eyes that see, not the lamp. In actuality, the eyes themselves simply reveal visible objects; it is the mind that sees, not the eyes.

Buddha shifts gears to call on other followers, such as the five ascetics:

After my awakening, I went to the Deer Park, where, for Ājñātakauṇḍinya’s sake and for the other four monks… I said that beings… have not become fully awake, because they are confused by afflictions that are like visitors and like dust. What in particular, at that time, caused the five of you to awaken and become sages?

Ājñā — I will call him — responds with analogies, including a visitor at an inn, “the visitor, the one who comes and goes, and the innkeeper, the one who remains, I understood what the visitor signifies. He represents transience.” This may be the source of Rinzai’s fourfold model of the “host and the guest.” Another analogy of the dust, as transient, and the air, as staying, follows. All dual things are like this.

Buddha goes on to demonstrate the relation of motion and stillness — another interpretation of Mokurai, “motion in stillness, and stillness in motion.” Again making a fist, opening, and again clinching it, asking Ananda, “What did you see just now?” and, “What moved and what was still?”

Ānanda said, “The Buddha's hand moved, but my awareness is beyond even stillness; how could it have moved?” The Buddha replied, “So it is.”

Finally, poor Ananda is coming up with some acceptable responses. Buddha explains:

All beings need to understand that whatever moves is like the dust and, like a visitor, does not remain. Just now you saw that it was Ānanda's head that moved, while his visual awareness did not move. It was my hand that opened and closed, while his awareness did not open or close. How can you take what moves to be your body and its environment, since they come into being and perish in every successive thought? You have lost track of your true nature, and instead you act out of delusion. Therefore, because you have lost touch with your mind’s true nature by identifying yourself with the objects you perceive, you keep on being bound to the cycle of death and rebirth.

Whether or not the point of the practice is to escape the bonds to the cycle or death and rebirth — which aspiration we usually attribute to Lesser Vehicle, or Hinayana Buddhism — or simply to be able to live a life liberated from all such conceptual constraints, is not our concern, in Zen. Zen is about living this life — not “to the fullest,” in the self-centered Western ideal, and certainly not focused on some imaginary afterlife, whether as the result of rebirth, reincarnation, ascension into heaven, or descent into hell. That the present “body and environment… come into being and perish with every successive thought,” however, is germane. Tick tock, tick tock — our opportunity to awaken is slipping away.

A king happens to be in the audience, we may assume in the front row. Buddha engages him in a dialog regarding his aging. He is in his sixties, which for those times was quite mature. Buddha asks him, “May I ask, is your body as indestructible as vajra, or is it subject to decay?” and the king responds, “World-Honored One, this body of mine will keep on changing till in the end it will perish.”

An extended exchange, with Buddha doing the interviewing for once, touches on the vagaries of aging, with which most of us are all-too-familiar. At one point the Buddha says, “Your Majesty, your body's appearance cannot have deteriorated suddenly.” The king replies, “World-Honored One, the change has in fact been so subtle that I have hardly been aware of it.” He continues:

…as I observe these subtle transformations, I realize now that the changes wrought by this descent toward death are evident not only from decade to decade; they can also be discerned in smaller increments. Considering more closely, one can see that changes happen year by year as well as by the decade. In fact, how could they happen merely year by year? Such changes happen every month. And how could they occur from month to month only? These changes happen day by day. And if one contemplates this deeply, one can see that there is ceaseless change from moment to moment, in each successive thought. Thus I can know that my body will keep on changing till it perishes.

In a kind of reductio ad tempo, the king relates that the moment of time, which for him, heretofore has been largely subliminal, becomes painfully apparent as including change of the sort that we do not want, such as deterioration in capacity and strength, decline in awareness, now labeled as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, along with an increasing sense of urgency that time is running out.

Speaking of which, once again we are going to have to stop short of commenting on the remaining important teachings in this section, but encourage you to follow up and study the text. One or two more things may be worthy of mention in passing, to whet your curiosity.

One has to do with the idea of “upside down,” which recalls the line from the Heart Sutra variously translated as Bodhisattvas going beyond all inverted, or “topsy-turvy” views, and dwelling in Nirvana. Buddha illustrates by holding his hand upside-down, pointing out that his arm has not changed, just the orientation. But the Buddha is said to be upright while ordinary people are “upside-down.” Again this gobsmacked the audience:

At this point Ānanda and the others in the great assembly were dazed. They stared unblinking at the Buddha. They did not know where, in their minds and bodies, the characteristic “upside-down” might be.

Let me suggest that we approach our meditation with a like attitude of awe and wonder, and close out this segment with a few more quotes that sum up Buddha’s message with more examples:

Light and darkness are mutually exclusive; still, regardless of which one is present, your visual awareness does not lapse for an instant. Therefore you should understand that in both cases there is seeing… understand that when you are able to use your true awareness to be aware of the essence of your visual awareness, you will know that your true awareness is not the same as the essence of your awareness. The two are quite separate from one another. Because you have not yet been able to break through to true reality in its purity, I will now instruct you further. Consider well what I say. Do not become weary and lose heart on the road to the wonder of full awakening.

Buddha is beginning to sound a lot like Matsuoka Roshi here: above all, “Don’t give up!” Then,

You have a keen memory, but it serves only to increase your erudition. You have not yet understood the practice of calming the mind from which subtle insight arises.

Let us not be too proud, or dependent upon, our intelligence and erudition, such as it is. Then a bit on the bilateral character of karma:

All beings are bound… due to the false distinctions made by two kinds of distorted awareness… What are these two kinds of distorted awareness? The first is the distorted awareness based on the karma of individual beings; the second is the distorted awareness based on the karma beings share.

After explaining that individual karma consists in such characteristics as defective vision, he goes on:

What is meant by the distorted awareness that is based on shared karma? On the various islands in the ocean there may be two or three hundred countries, or in some cases only one or two countries, or as many as thirty, forty, or fifty… Suppose, Ānanda, that among them is an island where there are two countries only, and that the people of one of these countries share the experience of unfortunate circumstances.

He could be speaking of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. However, the concept of karma is no excuse for not helping people in times of disaster, whether natural or caused, or made worse, by humans.

And finally Buddha pulls it all together:

When you remain entirely untouched by conditions, whether or not they are present in combination, you bring to an end all the causes of coming into being and ceasing to be. At that moment, you will awaken to perfect enlightenment, which is your true nature and which neither comes into being nor ceases to be. It is the pure, fundamental mind, the fundamental, everlasting enlightenment.

Again, I hear the monkey-mind chorus chattering that, “But wait a minute — how can anything be everlasting if the fundamental characteristic of everything is impermanence? How can our enlightenment be perfect if all is imperfection and insubstantiality? Where is dukkha, the bedrock change of suffering, in all this?” I will leave these questions to you. Answer them on the cushion.