Essays in Zen Buddhism

by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

If thou wilt not grasp after what is in the middle,

Thou wilt wander calm.”[f65]

But the fact is, from the spiritual point of view, that it is only after the destruction of the Defilements and a release from every form of attachment that one’s inmost being gets purified and sees itself as it really is, not indeed as an ego standing in contrast to the not-ego, but as something transcending opposites and yet synthesising them in itself. What is destroyed is the dualism of things and not their oneness. And the release means going back to one’s original abode. The insight therefore is to see unity in multiplicity and to understand the opposition of the two ideas as not conditioning each other but as both issuing from a higher principle; and this is where perfect freedom abides. When the mind is trained enough, it sees that neither negation (niratta) nor affirmation (atta) applies to reality but that the truth lies in knowing things as they are or rather as they become. A mind really sincere and thoroughly purified is the necessary preliminary to the understanding of reality in its suchness. As the result we have “ti yathābhūtaṁ pajānāti,” and this came later to be formulated by the Mahayanists into the doctrine of Thatness or Suchness (bhūtatathatā). The trained mind that has gone through the four dhyana exercises as prescribed in the Nikāyas further develops into what is known among the Mahayanists as the Ādarśa-jñānam (mirror-insight), which corresponds to the Bhūta-ñāṇa in the Anguttara Nikāya. The last simile in the Buddha’s discourse on the fruits of the Sāmañña life, which sums up the spiritual attainment of the Buddhists, becomes now quite intelligible. It runs thus:

“Just, O king, as if in a mountain fastness there were a pool of water, clear, translucent, and serene; and a man, standing on the bank and with eyes to see, should perceive the oysters and the shells, the gravel and the pebbles and the shoals of fish, as they move about or lie within it: he would know: This pool is clear, transparent, and serene, and there within it are the oysters and the shells, and the sand and gravel, and the shoals of fish are moving about or lying still.”

The radical empiricism of the “Yathābhūtam” teaching of the Buddha is here graphically presented, which reminds us of the Buddha in the Itivuttaka, v. 109, describing himself as the spectator standing on the shore (cakkhumā puriso tīre ṭhito). To understand this simile intellectually will be sheer nonsense. The writer describes his mental attitude from a higher plane of thought which has been realised by him after a long training. Sambodhi or Enlightenment is the Buddhist term given to this realisation. The destruction of the four Defilements is the negative phase of the experience which is the insight to which the Buddha’s serene and translucent mind was directed and bent down. When the destructive activity alone is considered, Enlightenment is annihilating and negativistic, but when the insight opens to the suchness of truth, it is most emphatically affirmative. This is where lies that “matchless island possessing nothing and grasping after nothing, called Nirvana, the destruction of decay and death.” (Sutta-nipāta, v. 1094). Remember that what is here destroyed is decay and death and not life; for it is through Enlightenment that life is for the first time restored to its native freedom and creativeness.

The simile of mirror (ādarśa) may however suggest that the Buddhist attitude towards the world is merely passive and lacking in energising inspirations. This however betrays the ignorance on the part of the critic of the Buddha’s own life which was so unselfishly devoted for forty-nine long and peaceful years to the promotion of the general spiritual welfare of his people; not only this, but the critic has also forgotten to notice the extraordinary missionary enterprises of the Buddha’s disciples as well as their intellectual activities which developed into the Mahayanist school of Buddhism. Whatever this be, the charge of passivity against Buddhist weltanschauung is wrong even when it is considered apart from the historical facts of Buddhism. Passivity we notice in Enlightenment is merely apparent. As a general statement, a thing absolutely passive is unthinkable, unless it is a state of absolute nothingness without any kind of content in it. As long as Enlightenment is the outcome of a most strenuous spiritual effort, it is a positive state of mind in which lies hidden an inexhaustible reservoir of possibilities; it is a unity in which a world of multitudinosity is lodged. “Noisy go the small waters, silent goes the vast ocean.”[f66] In the vast ocean of Enlightenment there is the silence of unity. The Avataṁsaka philosophers too compare it to the immense expanse of an ocean, calm and translucent, which reflects all the shining bodies of heaven, but where at the same time possibilities of roaring and all-devouring waves lie innocently embosomed.

So asks the Buddha in the Mahāli Sutta: “When a monk knows thus and sees thus, would that make him ready to take up the question: Is the soul the same as the body, or is the soul one thing and the body another?” It is thus evident that the Buddha’s teaching always centered in the practical realisation of Enlightenment as “āsavem khata-ñāṇa,” insight that destroys the Defilements and releases one from every attachment (upādāna). He did not shun the discussion of the metaphysical problems merely because they were metaphysical, but because they were not conducive to the attainment of the ultimate end of Buddhist life which is the purification of spirit and not the display of epistemological subtlety. Ignorance was to be dispelled in our inner experience, and not by intellectually understanding the principle of dependent origination whether expressed as the Paṭicca-samuppāda or as the Ariya-sacca.

“Having insight into all the world,

In all the world as it really is,

He is detached from all the world,