Essays in Zen Buddhism

by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

Sunken in grief, oppressed with birth and age.

Arise, thou Hero! Conqueror in the battle!

Thou freed from debt! Lord of the pilgrim band!

Walk the world o’er, and sublime and blessed Teacher!

Teach us the Truth; there are who’ll understand.”

There is no doubt that it was this spiritual experience that converted the Bodhisattva into the Buddha, the Perfectly Wise, the Bhagavat, the Arhat, the King of the Dharma, the Tathagata, the All-knowing One, and the Conqueror. In this, all the records we have, Hinayana and Mahayana, agree.

Here then arises the most significant question in the history of Buddhism. What was it in this experience that made the Buddha conquer Ignorance (avijjā, avidyā) and freed him from the Defilements (āsava, āśrava)? What was the insight or vision he had into things, which had never before been presented to his mind? Was it his doctrine of universal suffering due to Thirst (taṇhā, tṛishṇā) and Grasping (upādāna)? Was it his causation theory by which he traced the source of pain and suffering to Ignorance?

It is quite evident that his intellectual activity was not the efficient cause of Enlightenment. “Not to be grasped by mere logic” (atakkāvacara) is the phrase we constantly encounter in Buddhist literature, Pali and Sanskrit. The satisfaction the Buddha experienced in this case was altogether too deep, too penetrating, and too far-reaching in result to be a matter of mere logic. The intellectual solution of a problem is satisfying enough as far as the blockage has been removed, but it is not sufficiently fundamental to enter into the depths of our soul-life. All scholars are not saints and all saints are by no means scholarly. The Buddha’s intellectual survey of the Law of Origination (paṭicca-samuppāda), however perfect and thoroughgoing, could not make him so completely sure of his conquest over Ignorance, Pain, Birth, and Defilements. Tracing things to their origin or subjecting them to a scheme of concatenation is one thing, but to subdue them, to bring them to subjection in the actuality of life, is quite another thing. In the one, the intellect alone is active, but in the other there is the operation of the will,—and the will is the man. The Buddha was not the mere discoverer of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation, he took hold of the chain itself in his hands and broke it into pieces so that it would never again bind him to slavery.

His insight reached the bottom of his being and saw it really as it was, and the seeing was like the seeing of your own hand with your own eyes—there was no reflection, no inference, no judgment, no comparison, no moving either backward or forward step by step, the thing was seen and that was the end of it, there was nothing to talk about, nothing to argue, or to explain. The seeing was something complete in itself—it did not lead on to anything inside or outside, within or beyond. And it was this completeness, this finality that was so entirely satisfying to the Buddha, who now knew that the chain was found broken and that he was a liberated man. The Buddha’s experience of Enlightenment therefore could not be understood by referring it to the intellect which tantalises but fails to fulfill and satisfy.

The Buddha’s psychological experience of life as pain and suffering was intensely real and moved him to the very depths of his being, and in consequence the emotional reaction he experienced at the time of Enlightenment was in proportion to this intensity of feeling. All the more evident therefore it is that he could not rest satisfied with an intellectual glancing or surveying of the facts of life. In order to bring a perfect state of tranquillity over the waves of turmoil surging in his heart, he had to have recourse to something more deeply and vitally concerned with his inmost being. For all we can say of it, the intellect is after all a spectator, and when it does some work it is as a hireling for better or for worse. Alone it cannot bring about the state of mind designated as enlightenment. The feeling of perfect freedom, the feeling that “ahaṁ hi arahā loke, ahaṁ satthā anuttaro,” could not issue from the consciousness of an intellectual superiority alone. There must have been in the mind of the Buddha a consciousness far more fundamental which could only accompany one’s deepest spiritual experience.