The Book of Serenity Case 62: Beiko’s No Enlightenment
Preface: The primary meaning of Bodhidharma’s principle muddled Emperor Wu’s head. The nondual Dharma gate of Vimalakirti made Manjushri’s speech go wrong. Is there anything here of enlightenment to enter and use?
Main Case: Master Beiko sent a monk to ask Kyozan, “Do people these days have to attain enlightenment?” Kyozan replied,”It’s not that there’s no enlightenment, but how can one not fall down into the second level?” The monk related this to Beiko, who wholeheartedly approved it.
The Verse:
The second level divides enlightenment and rends delusion.
Better to promptly let go and discard traps and snares.
Merit, if not yet extinguished, becomes an extra appendage.
It is as difficult to know wisdom as to bite one’s navel.
The waning moon’s icy disk; autumn dew weeps.
Benumbed birds, jeweled trees, dawn’s breeze chills.
Bringing it out, great Kyozan discerns true and false.
Completely without flaw the splendid jewel is priceless.
Now it may be that we’ve gotten so accustomed to a psychologically-minded Zen that talk of enlightenment feels as strange as talk of the dharmakaya, the different bodies of the buddha that we heard about yesterday, and yet we hear all these old stories that often end with . . . ”And with that the monk was enlightened”. . . and presumably lived happily ever after. So we should try to understand what was meant by the term, what relevance it has to our practice.
And here, enlightenment is contrasted with duality and the basic dichotomy being set up is enlightenment versus delusion, and how is it that we are able to distinguish one from another? What’s the nature of enlightenment and what’s the nature of delusion? The trick problem here is that delusion is supposed to be characterized by duality, but if you set up an opposition between enlightenment and delusion, isn’t that a duality? So how can that be enlightenment if you’re always comparing it to something else?
In the preface, we’re given two examples of presumably enlightened behavior that don’t seem to display any particular signs of enlightenment. Bodhidharma, when asked by the emperor, Who are you? says I don’t know. When Manjushri and other Buddhist disciples ask Vimalakirti to present to them the reality of nonduality, instead of talking, he remained silent. So we get two expressions: not knowing and staying silent, that on the one hand was something anybody could do or say. Anybody could say, I don’t know. Anybody could sit there and be silent, and somehow, these were masterful expressions. How come? What about the context makes them so?
In the case, Beiko and Kyozan, I gather, are dharma brothers, and Beiko I guess is trying to mess with Kyozan a little bit, set him up, and he tells a monk who must be one of their students, to go ask him a question: Do people these days have to attain enlightenment? It begs for a yes or no answer, but anytime you see a koan that seems to look for a yes or no answer, you know that there’s a little trap being set up. You’re not supposed to want to have this either/or dichotomy. So how is Kyozan supposed to say something without falling into that? He essentially answers a question with a question, not saying that there’s no enlightenment, but if you say that, how do you not fall into duality? So he doesn’t try to answer. He just in a sense repeats the problem.
Now we might want to back up a little and ask What’s the problem exactly with duality? Why is that an issue that everybody is trying to avoid? Why is enlightenment supposed to be the opposite of that? To answer that I think we have to think about duality in terms of separation, in self and the world most basically, and a separation that we experience as alienation, that we do not feel we are in harmony with the world or with our life, and this is essentially the experience of suffering. Things are not going the way they’re supposed to. Life is not treating me the way I want it to. I can’t make things happen the way I want them to. So that one way or another I don’t have this experience of nicely going with the flow of things. And so I feel somehow out of sync with my life, and that out-of-syncness, or separation, is basically what we’re talking about with duality. There is life and there’s me and I can’t get them to harmonize.
Now the problem then becomes we create an idea of what that harmony is supposed to be like. If this is suffering, what’s the alternative? And we come up with lots of what I call curative fantasies to describe how I or life has to be different to get everything back in sync. Maybe I have to stop having so many desires, wanting things to go a certain way. Maybe I have to develop greater mastery and control so I can make it go the way I want it to go. We can come up with all sorts of pictures of that harmony, and in a way, they all are fantasies about how life should be, or how we should be, and one name we end up giving to that fantasy of harmony is enlightenment.
So one of the paradoxes here is that holding onto some fantasy of harmony, holding on to some picture of how we’re supposed to be or how life is supposed to be, turns out to be the very thing that gets out of sync with life because we’ve created a new picture in our mind of how it’s supposed to go, and lo and behold, we can never make it go that way. So we might then imagine that if only I could get rid of all my pictures of enlightenment, then I would be enlightened. Then we get the idea that it’s our very notions of harmony that stand in the way of harmony, so we have to get rid of all that and then just be with life as it is. And when we read some of Joko in terms of what practice is, it has a lot to do with the sense that practice is about coming to terms with the disparity between what we want and what actually is.
Now the dilemma there is if you say the whole idea of enlightenment is itself the problem, and what you have to do is just essentially get real about life as it is, then it’s a kind of picture of resignation. There really is no way to get into harmony with life. You’ve just got to accept it and deal with it. That seems sort of like: Life is suffering, get used to it. Right? But we’ve gotten the message from all these teachers that maybe that shouldn’t be the end of the story. It doesn’t seem like enlightenment really only means resign yourself to suffering. But then what else is it going to be?
Now the fact is that when we let go of our pictures of how things should be or we don’t even think of it in terms of letting go, but just in terms of simply being present in our life, that’s not neutral, and it’s not negative. There’s something essentially positive, even joyful about simply being alive and present to our life, strangely almost regardless of the content about what’s going on. And when we sit and do this practice, what we’re doing is just staying present to who and what we are as we go through the day. Sometimes that is clear and bright and attentive and sometimes it’s sleepy and boring and sometimes it’s painful and sometimes there are little pockets of delight, joy, but we’re just carried along by all these different experiences.
In one way or another, we are starting to get practice with leaving ourselves alone. Now when we do that, sometimes life bursts in on us in an unexpected way, and we may have a rather intense moment of … Wow! This is it! This really is it! And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s actually nothing wrong. And that can bring about a little smile or it can bring about tears or big whoops of laughter. It can be quite dramatic. But then there’s the question, what happens next, and how do we carry some of that over into our life?
I don’t know if you all in Philadelphia have read the book written by Lou Nordstrom, Memoirs of an American Zen Pioneer, but it’s a very valuable case book of practice on the nature of enlightenment experiences and how they do and don’t get integrated into a person’s life and personality. I really recommend it to everybody as a picture of how practice can both dramatically succeed and fail at the same time. Lou was an old friend of mine back from the days with Bernie Glassman, so I know some of the stories he tells in there. But Lou was somebody who grew up in a very deprived and traumatized childhood household, abandoned by his parents and raised by senile grandparents. He had really no sense of being seen or known by them, and there’s a way he always longed for that. I think he sought that from teachers.
But instead, he sort of got trained in the practices of deep concentration and samadhi, which led him more and more into a kind of a bliss of concentration and what comes from being able to make a great effort at really just sitting and focusing on the sitting. As a result, he had one of these storybook kensho experiences, one you really write home about, that gets put into the books. And everybody was really, really impressed with it, including one teacher after another, and eventually he got dharma transmission and became a teacher himself. And so you had the part where the monk was enlightened, but you didn’t get the part where he lived happily ever after, because it turned out that he was as miserable as he was before, and the lesson was the way that this experience of a certain kind of okayness or perfection, was sort of confined to the cushion. It really didn’t reach down into the depths of that whole trauma, where he felt unknown and unseen, and it was only late in life when he got himself into therapy that a kind of simple attention and recognition by a therapist suddenly gave him something that was missing from decades of Zen practice.
So it’s important that we try to get some idea of what this practice does and doesn't do. And I think that as Kyozan is saying, there’s a danger here that as soon as you focus on special kinds of enlightenment experiences, they can very easily be split off from the rest of your life. They just don’t automatically percolate down. We used to have that kind of notion that there was this top down, trickle down theory of enlightenment. You’d have this big experience and you’d have this universal solvent for all your neurotic problems. It didn’t work. It took us fifty years to realize it didn’t work.
So what we’re trying to do instead is something bottom up, trying to make practice about staying with, being okay with, all the little moment to moment fluctuations in our self experience, and try to just be very carefully in tune to: Is this okay with me or is this not okay with me? How am I always judging even in little ways – how am I doing? Or how is this going? How is the other person sitting next to me doing? What’s a good sitting? What’s a bad sitting? It’s about all the little dualisms, all the little this rather than that, all the little judgments that we make in sesshin in the course of our day.
Rather than have sesshin be an extraordinary experience where we undergo an intense ordeal in an attempt to generate one special moment of insight, I like to think of sesshin much more as a laboratory of presence and attention that more easily blends in with how we are in the rest of our life. How do we sit with silence? How do we sit with a certain amount of discomfort or discipline or having to follow along with what's happening? How do we watch how we handle ourselves in all these different kinds of sittings?
We used to say, sesshin is like a process to tenderize meat. The Rinzai method was to beat it with a stick, with a hammer. That’s one good way to tenderize meat. But another way is to slowly marinate it, to let it sit in some spices and let it sit for a long time, and so here I hope we’re marinating you, not beating you. The tenderizing process comes slowly but gradually, less dramatic but maybe a little more thorough. And the idea is really that as we sit, we’re just being ourselves, and by being ourselves, we’re being what’s happening, and we’re being with everybody else here, doing the same thing. In a way it’s very simple, but it can be quite profound and it turns out that that kind of simplicity, that kind of okayness that comes from leaving everything alone, does radically transform our life. It’s not resignation: Life is tough, get used to it. Instead, it really is: Settle in, feel your breath, feel your body, feel this moment, and feel the joy in it.