The conflict
between these two approaches was, according to Tibetan tradition, settled in
the eighth century in a formal debate. Whether the debate actually occurred as
such has been called into doubt, but there is no question of the importance of
the legend of the debate to the Tibetan tradition. According to the Tibetan
histories, the debate was arranged in Samyé temple in the late eighth century
to determine whether Tibet Tibet
which nonetheless became widely accepted in Tibet
. I can’t see how it Mr. Lewis managed to leave that out but other than
that his blog was spot on. I really hope that he doesn’t resent
my republishing part of his blog, but I think what he has written
needs to be preserved and remembered because we second wave baby boomer
Buddhists are on our way out and history has a way of being rewritten
especially when it comes to American Buddhism. I have watched this occur on a
very fundamental basis over the last 20 years in the practice of Zen and in
what I consider a tragic corruption of the Tibetan tradition by Westerners with
money.
Mr. Lewis Richmond is a Buddhist writer and
teacher, and the author of the upcoming Aging as a Spiritual Practice, to be
published Spring, 2012. Lewis leads a Zen meditation group, Vimala Sangha
, and teaches at Workshops And retreats throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
He has published three books, including the national bestseller Work as a
Spiritual Practice. Lewis also leads a discussion on aging as a spiritual
practice at Tricycle magazines online community site.
“A Cultural History of the Word 'Enlightenment'”
By Lewis Richmond
“ The word "enlightenment" in a Buddhist context
has been used so frequently and in so many ways, many people may not realize
that this use of the word began fairly recently, and has a complex cultural and
literary history.
Though 19th century translators of Buddhist texts sometimes
used the word "enlightenment" to refer to Gautama's moment of
spiritual awakening on seeing the morning star, the first time a large number
of general English readers saw the word used as a spiritual term was with the
publication Essays on Zen Buddhism First Series by D.T. Suzuki in the 1930s.
Before that time the word referred to the 18th century rationalist movement in Europe that strove to understand the world using logic
and reason.
D.T. Suzuki used the word "enlightenment" to
translate the Japanese term satori¸ and his recounting of the enlightenment
stories from the Zen koan literature made quite a splash among intellectual
elites at the time. From that time forward, the idea of a sudden transformative
spiritual experience became embedded in Western cultural imagination. It is
worth nothing that D.T. Suzuki paid relatively little attention in his writings
to the Buddhist practices of precepts, mindfulness, meditation, and the
monastic life.
The best-selling books of Alan Watts in the 1950s, and
Philip Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen in the 1960s, filled in some of D.T.
Suzuki's omissions (Kapleau's book had good instruction about how to meditate,
for example). But it was not until the arrival of Asian teachers in the late
1960s, that students began to understand that Buddhism was about much more than
a single epiphany; it was a lifelong path of spiritual development which
included both sudden and gradual transformations.
It was Shunryu Suzuki (not D.T. Suzuki), who said in the
1960s, when asked directly about satori, "Satori is not the part of Zen
that needs to be stressed." (This was quoted in the introduction to the
paperback edition of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind). In other words, he did not
deny the reality or importance of satori; he just pointed out that satori, when
separated from rest of Buddhist practice, has a tendency to devolve into just
another object of desire, something the ego wants for itself.
"Satori" is the Japanese reading of the Chinese
character "wu," which is in turn a Chinese translation of the
Sanskrit "bodhi," which does indeed mean spiritual insight or
awakening. We see this root term in words such as "bodhisattva"
(literally enlightenment-being) or "bodhicitta" (the thought of
enlightenment). Some Buddhist scholars (Edward Conze, for example) have felt
that the Zen emphasis on satori as the sine qua non of Buddhist experience is
somewhat outside the mainstream of Buddhist tradition. The Buddha himself
taught an eight-fold path with many facets, all of them important. The Tibetan
and Vipassana approaches each have detailed descriptions of the gradual stages
of spiritual development. Even within Zen, there were various schools and
approaches; not all of them emphasized satori as primary.
During the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s the sudden
alteration of consciousness brought on by LSD and other drugs dovetailed neatly
into the satori stories of Zen. Many veterans of psychedelics sought out
Buddhist teachers to see if meditation could reproduce those altered states.
Many Buddhist teachers and writers worked to counteract that view. That may
have been the context of Shunyru Suzuki's remark about satori. Lama Anagarika
Govinda, a German-born Buddhist teacher popular at the time, likened the
psychedelic experience to a deep rut in the center of a wide road. Once you
have carved that rut, he said, all your other spiritual experiences tend to
roll down into it.
In the 1960s book Conversations Christian and Buddhist by
Catholic priest Aelred Graham, he recounts the time Yamada Mumon Roshi an eminent Japanese Zen Master at the time,
took LSD. Mumon Roshi's comment about the experience was, "This is form is
emptiness, but this is not emptiness is form."
Shunryu Suzuki had his own teaching on this point. He said,
"'Form is emptiness' is relatively easy to understand; 'emptiness is form'
takes a lifetime."
It will be interesting to see how the next generation of
Buddhist teachers and practitioners deal with the cultural history (and
baggage) of the word "enlightenment." Maybe they will bypass it;
maybe they will change it. I have a feeling that whatever they do they will
come up with their own rather different understanding (and possibly mis-understanding)
of this deep matter.”
This is the end of the part of Mr.
Richman’s article that I have reproduced here. As readers of this blog
know I practiced with the Tibetans for many years. And I will always
appreciate the teachings I received from any and all those old monks who have probably gone
on to their next rebirth by now. I was always fascinated by the
statements that were made virtually every practice session that enlightenment
could be achieved in a single lifetime, this statement accompanied by the
fact that old-time fundamentalist Buddhist like the Tibetans have a firm belief
in reincarnation and rebirth, they also pride themselves on their logic and
logical analysis, so it always seemed kind of funny to me to say that
enlightenment could be achieved in one lifetime when in fact no one is on their
first lifetime and by their own teachings the rebirth into this lifetime where
you have encountered the teachings means that you have progressed through
numerous lifetimes to reach this point. I think when the Tibetans came
over to America they encountered the Zen Buddhist that were already here and
adopted the term enlightenment without giving much thought as to whether or not
their western students would be able to distinguish their cultural illusions of
what that word meant from what they ( the Tibetan Monks) were
talking about and the problems it would cause later on down the road. Of course
there are other words like Nirvana and prajna', as well as Dharana,
Dhyana, and Samadhi in Hinduism and in Buddhism, that have led to endless
confusion in the teachings of traditional Buddhism when translated into English.
I think the
translation of prajna and various other Sanskrit words into the
word enlightenment and the English translation for the Sanskrit word Śūnyatā
as the English word “emptiness” have made them the two most misunderstood
concepts in American Buddhism. Emptiness as
Americans understand it in its normal application has nothing to do
with the Buddhist concept of Sunyata. (I suspect
somewhere out there Mr. Richman has probably written a blog post on this
very subject as well, it’s like the guy can read my damn mind, and his is
probably better than I can do.) Of course the concept of
Sunyata is as old as Buddhism itself, and what it means may depend
upon whether or not you're reading the Pali cannon or a Mahayana Sutra.
So according to Pali Philosophy as Thanissaro Bhikku, writes
emptiness is a quality of dharmas, in the early canons, means simply that
one cannot identify them as one's own self or having anything pertaining to
one's own self...Emptiness as a mental state, in the early canons, means a mode
of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away
from what is present, noting simply, "There is this." This mode is
achieved through a process of intense concentration, coupled with the insight
that notes more and more subtle levels of the presence and absence of
disturbance .
Meanwhile
in the Mahayana schools, the famous monk philosopher Nagarjuna
decided that he would redefine Śūnyatā , He equates emptiness
with dependent origination. On the basis of the Buddha's view that all
experienced phenomena (dharma) are "dependently arisen" (pratitya-samutpanna),
Nagarjuna insisted that such phenomena are empty (sunya). This did not mean
that they are not experienced and, therefore, non-existent; only that they are
devoid of a permanent and eternal substance. . Since they are experienced
elements of existence, they are not mere names. In his analysis, any enduring
essential nature would prevent the process of dependent origination, or any
kind of origination at all. For things would simply always have been, and will
always continue to be, without any change. In doing so, he restores the
Middle way of the Buddha. His goal seems to have been at the time to refute the
essentialism of Abhidharma, a third century BCE reworking of
Buddhist teachings found in the Pali Cannon. But in no case is
emptiness in Buddhism related directly to the English word that simply means
containing nothing, not filled or occupied.
I think it’s
important that the history of the English word "enlightenment"
and the history of the English word "emptiness" as they
stumbled into Buddhism in America be recorded somewhere. I’ve heard it
said that once something is on the Internet it lives forever maybe this little
bit of knowledge about how we got to where we are will hang around longer than
the baby boomers that screwed all this up in the first place.
Gassho, Togen
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