Han Shan Pissing
This is an email Bob sent on February 8th of this past year, in which he announces, happily, that the religioblogathan had brought him some genuine insight as well as had gotten him mediating again. (Uh, were my conscious mind at work, I’d have said meditating, although watching us all interact, I’m more profoundly aware of his mediating presence, now absence)
Dear Don (he writes). Here is my most recent entry. I halfway believe I’ve touched on something significant:
Han Shan walked out from his hovel on the snow-scurfed mountainside to pee one morning and suddenly realized that flowing and stillness were non-distinct. This caused him to dance crazily in his splashed sandals and exclaim: “Dharmas do not come or go!” This means that they do not arrive or depart. Since they are incomprehensible in the first place, they are just such. That is the meaning of tathata. (Nothing to institute a Nuremburg rally over!) Jesus is Jesus, not because of his miracles, but because he was just such, the Tathagata. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn’t even be Mithra. But you say Jesus wants to be uniquely the Tathagata. Why would he want to be something like that? Baubles are for Vegas! Stop trying to make Jesus seem inferior to Buddha. Piggy-eyed Pat Robertson has never had a taste!
But it’s high time I turned around and corrected myself, too, for didn’t an ancient Buddha also say, “No mind. No Buddha”? I have a verbal mind. I see very few pictures. But if I listen closely to my thoughts, and do not sympathetically stir the physical tongue, they stand there somewhat like pictures, but they are perfectly invisible. (This is to think of “silence” as a kind of “transparency”.) But how can what is perfectly invisible present itself to mind? Is it possible that one “sees” the perfectly invisible? Before one makes any judgment about the palpable world, one continuously consults the invisible, and it is only in and through the invisible that the world is fabricated from the ghostly traces of things. Not that that stone won’t bruise your toe if you kick it barefooted! But where would “toe” be, or pain and distress, for that matter, without “world”? “The Triple World is nothing but Mind. The Chiliocosms of Time are nothing but Consciousness.” But what is “Mind”? “No Mind. No Buddha.”
In this sense the Paraclete is perfectly invisible and yet capable of bringing comfort and guidance. This Paraclete is something interior to one’s consciousness itself, of course, and not that which habitually poses in its light as if in front of a mirror. Hence: “No Mind. No Buddha.” This can be read to mean: without Mind, there is no Buddha. Or (more correctly, I think) it can be read to mean: Both Mind and Buddha disappear. But I’m a blind man choosing colors! What on earth could I possibly be talking about?
Things, when they “disappear” in the spiritual sense, don’t just become absent from a background. “Disappear” means “become seen as originally incomprehensible”. No more, “Oh yes, this, and Oh yes, that”! And then the very thing that finds incomprehensibility in the colorful phenomena of the dharmas finds even itself to be looped in an invisible incomprehension. Everywhere is void and no point looking “void” up in a dictionary if you don’t know its meaning. Not a place you’d want to spend a weekend! What next, though? Palaces of jasper?
How would the Liberated One contrive to create His Own Life? Put yourself in the Great One’s buskins and think about it. The World-Honored One must know everything—but what’s it like? Apart from the breathtakingly complicated mud-pie of external reality, which always seems a thing failed, in any case, if not Moloch’s own furnace, and very little bearing the stamp of “Intelligent Design”, what’s the point? Freud understood half of it, and Buddha understood the other. Freud understood the relativity of self in a constellation of psychic functions, most of which are unconscious. The Buddha saw things only as a clarified unconscious. “Thing” became the inscrutable objectifying the inscrutable. The Buddha shook free of this and simply sat.
The point is that the Buddha’s sunyata was the essence of what is at issue. We don’t know. God doesn’t know. The idea of “don’t know” doesn’t even know. So who knows? “God” obviously doesn’t know, because He embraces reactionary opinions, as if afraid He might have to crouch to a superior intelligence. (Jus’ some preacher thunk it up is projectin’ it!)
“Don’t-know Mind”. That is the light the Buddhas shine on everything, in their omniscience! Not that they shamble about like persons who are demented in the usual way. Perhaps it is God questioning within Himself as to just what to do with this Nothingness in order to be other than it. It is a lonely thing to be Nothingness and not other than it. But what if there were a certain spiritual liveliness to Nothingness? What if, after all, it could not quite even be Nothingness, since Nothingness is not exactly a candidate for Being! And therefore it is a miracle in itself—that Nothingness should so become lively. (Ding-dong but the mind has not yet gone beggar for surprises!)
I blither on, and behind my blithering is “thought”. But what is “thought”? Let me riffle through the Buddhist scriptures and see what they say. Ah, here we go: “One searches all around for thought. But what thought? For thought, Kasyapa*, cannot be apprehended, inside, outside or in between. For thought is immaterial, invisible, non-resisting, inconceivable, unsupported and homeless. Thought has never been seen by any of the Buddhas, nor do they see it, nor will they see it. And what the Buddhas never see, how can that be an observable reality, except that dharmas proceed by way of mistaken perception? By an imagination of what actually is (but is not) there is a taking hold of a variety of mental and emotional states…. But thought, though one searches for it all around, cannot be discerned. What cannot be discerned cannot be apprehended. What cannot be apprehended cannot be past, present or future. What is not past, present or future is altogether beyond. It neither is nor is not.”
But naturally one says, “Those are all words and those are all thoughts, too, however self-nullifying and dismissive!” You cannot get around the Buddha so easily, however; for his golden body fills the universe! One must realize that the Buddha is not taking anything away. Thought is just as he describes it, including the description. Nothing has changed, even though nothing does change, in the most impermanent and fickle way, at every instant! Han Shan pees in the snow. Steam rises up. Words are uttered. Is it possible to fathom these things in a way that is beyond “thought”?
Dogen speaks at length of “One Bright Pearl”. When thought vanishes it appears between your eyes; but like a dewdrop reflecting the moon, it contains the entire universe. It is each single hair of Fa Tsang’s “Golden Lion” in which the whole Lion yawns and purrs and curls up to sleep. The Lion is also called Alayavijnana, or Store Consciousness, which when projected and objectified is mistakenly worshipped as “Creator”. Scripture says: “The Great Compassion is creator while the Great Wisdom contemplates. As they are not two but one, contemplation is creation and creation is contemplation. (Rupa sunyata, sunyateva rupam.) Space is time and time is space, and they merge at one absolute point, “here-now” (uji). All things arise from this “here-now”. This is the One Bright Pearl of spiritual intuition, where there is neither one who intuits nor that which is intuited.”
*Kasyapa was first in the lineage of mind-to-mind transmission after Buddha. He was the one who “smiled” when Buddha held up a flower.
Bob”