Zen

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Zen

"If you meet the Buddha on the road to enlightenment, kill him’. So said Lin Chi, a teacher active in China in the ninth century AD. Despite the somewhat contrary attitude expressed in this statement, Lin Chi was himself a Buddhist, an exponent of a branch of the religion widely known in the West as Zen. Zen is a Japanese translation of Chan, the Chinese word for meditation. It developed in China in the sixth century AD, coming from sixth century BC, India, it emphasizes a monastic way of life, the practice of meditation, and the use of paradoxical riddles to help follow or sidestep rational thought and achieve a state of sudden enlightenment. It came to Japan in the Middle Ages, and its strong impact eventually spilled into the West, especially in America in the 20th century. The religion developed under particular historical circumstances and it's played a significant role in East Asian cultures and beyond...

‘One of the ideas associated with Chan is the doctrine of sudden enlightenment. Can you tell us about that?’

‘Sure. Yeah. I think perhaps the easiest way to say it would be that sudden enlightenment is a, an approach to the Buddhist path to liberation, the sequence of practices… path to liberation, things one has to do to achieve what we sometimes call enlightenment, but is more accurately thought of as liberation or awakening. It's an approach to that which assumes that in some profound way, this achievement is already innate, within people, within those who are seeking it and therefore, to conceive of this path and to practice it in a way, to conceive of it as sort of a gradual transformation from one state to another or a gradual path of progress from one place to another, that this is somehow fundamentally misguided.

And that because of the state of liberation is already innate within people, to achieve it is more like a sudden realization that one already has this thing and therefore, it must be sudden, in that sense. I should just also say if, if I can, that this is a sort of description of the idea of sudden enlightenment, in the context of the rise of Zen, it also has a certain polemical value as a slogan. So, when Zen speaks of sudden enlightenment, they're not just saying, well, this is how we approach the duration, but that other groups of Buddhists approach it in a gradual fashion, and that's not as good. So, it had, it has both a sort of descriptive value, but then also this kind of ideological value, which is extremely important within the Zen tradition’

‘And is connecting to the idea among certain sects of Buddhism zen, and that this kind of cannot be put into words. The doctrine cannot be be put into words’

‘Right. And that would be connected to this idea that precisely because the state of liberation is something that is already inherent in you, any attempt to explicate how one arrives at it is already a fundamentally misguided notion. So any spoken or really just consciously articulated sequence of steps, sequence of practices that one must do, this is already the wrong thing. In fact, not just the wrong thing, but is positively as an obstacle. And so that the path of liberation now becomes conceived of not as learning to do some thing, but in somehow refraining from trying to do anything’

‘So you sit, you wait for that to happen, which will happen if you wait for it to happen.’

‘Yeah, there's, I think, a valid perspective from which it doesn't quite work in the end as a totally unified system. In that if you tell people, someone comes to you and says, well, how do I reach enlightenment and you say, don't try to reach enlightenment. You know, you could say, well, that doesn't really work and you're not going to sell a lot of you know, Buddhism, if that's the only thing you have to say. So there's a context, an institutional religious context within which this teaching was promulgated. And you have to keep that in mind. Otherwise, it doesn't actually make any sense at the end of the day’...

If one tries to talk about the sort of the Zen approach, particularly this approach in which they're reluctant to explain what the approach is, just sit, you know, just by sitting you are the Buddha. If considered in the abstract, these statements, I think, often don't seem to make much sense. But when we again, remember that these are statements which are being articulated in a particular context.

So when the Zen Master says, don't try to attain enlightenment, right, he's presuming that he's speaking to someone who is already committed to attaining enlightenment, right, in a context of people who have devoted their entire lives to, an institution that has set up all of these rituals and practices and things precisely for this purpose, so there's a sort of disconnect between what Zen masters say, and what from the outside, they look like they're doing and the point of it all, if you want to put it that way, in some ways, lies precisely in that contrast. Don't try to attain enlightenment is a way to articulate the attitude you should have while trying to attain enlightenment.

Now, the Zen masters wouldn't say that, because they, they're only going to say the part of it: don't try to attain enlightenment, but when they're saying this, they're surrounded by people who are in an institution devoted to the attainment of enlightenment. So when you put those two together, it makes a bit more sense… We don't always know the difference between when such things are said as a kind of ideology versus when they reflect what people have actually done.

So in the case of Zen, for example, yes, you have many statements to the effect that enlightenment should be something that can appear in every aspect of your life. But did the Zen monks leave their monasteries and stop performing their elaborate rituals and stop devoting 40 years of their life to doing these things? No, they kept doing that...

[The idea that] a Zen master is as good as a Buddha had actually been quite important in giving East Asia, China in the first instance, a sense that they didn't need India. And there was a big shift in Chinese culture about a millennium ago, towards a, a more independent culture that didn't look outside China. What this meant was that you had created a new Buddhist culture that was distinctively Chinese, that used Chinese poetry, also painting and calligraphy. And it was this package that was exported to Japan…

‘One of the things that accounts for a Zen success in Japan is the strong connections established between the government and the Japanese, the Zen institutions’

‘Why did they, why were they attracted to each other, Zen and the government?’

‘Well, Buddhism is power. I mean, in addition to being enlightened and all those other things, you know, one of the things that Buddhism promises is worldly power. If you perform good Buddhist deeds, if you patronize enlightened Buddhist masters, you get a return in this life which can help you do all sorts of things. So this is, this is not unique to Japan by any means. And this goes back to the beginnings of Buddhism in India really.’

‘But in Japan Buddhism really established itself as a state religion that legitimized the government. And the Zen schools as that sort of newly arrived schools could legitimize the emerging ruling elites, which are the warrior elites. So the reason is not really the kind of stern discipline that monastics, Zen monasticism was proposing, but was in the fact that Zen monks coming from China, were bringing Chinese civilization, they were bringing, they were kind of a new players in the acculturation of the emerging military classes’…

‘In Japan, for instance, when we really see films about the samurai, several times we're looking at a man using Zen to the perfect Archer. Now, can you give us the connection there, because archery and zen has gone through it.’

‘I'm afraid that that was not a connection that was made historically. Martial Arts had their own, their own kind of development. And in fact, you can say that they were as much linked to Zen as to tantric Buddhism. All the swords that for instance, are used by, swordsmens are, not all but many of them are inscribed with esoteric deities, with tantric deities rather than with Zen sayings. But the connection between Zen and martial arts is, I think, a much more modern connection. Now that started really at the end of the 19th century, and was part of a broader movement of modernizing Zen and associating it to all sort of, well, art and non religious elements, spiritual elements. And it's connected to the emphasis on Bushido as one of the ident-, kind of characteristic that identifies Japan. So we are not talking really of medieval positions here.’...

[On the claiming of Zen by the Beach by Kerouac and Ginsberg and by Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance etc] I think they were getting something that was seriously there. But they were, of course, also extracting it from its historical, institutional, religious context. So, but on the other hand, that's what Buddhists have always done. When the Chinese got Buddhism from India. They also extracted it from that context and made something new. So from that point of view, it's all well and good, but from a historical point of view it's a bit novel


Sidestepping rational thought is a good description of Eastern philosophy - non-rational, or even mystical mumbo jumbo