Dokusan
Updated: 3 days ago
In Japan, dokusan is a private meeting of a Zen student with his master, providing the student an opportunity to demonstrate the state of his meditation practice. For background, readers must see my
book, Conjuring Archangel: Chronicle of a Journey on the Path, because the conjuring continues. Dokusan will present contributions selected from Anna's ongoing journal, with her kind permission and at her discretion, in the hope that the gathering of insight may prove helpful to others entangled in the nettlesome web of karma.
In spite of a long drought, Archangel, recent autumn weather is bringing out the color in the trees. As you know, it is my favorite season.
I do indeed, my darling! Your mother was born on Halloween and you loved school, bonfires, apples, pumpkins and chrysanthemums.
I still do, Guardian. I wax poetic.
Quite naturally I daresay. The chill in the air is stimulating.
When nature is in its full glory, I reflect how many people have no appreciation for it. How can that be, my Guardian?
Well, my precious, in this overcrowded and degraded planet, many may not see nature as glorious at all.
Surely though, what about the monk in his hovel who wished to give the thief the full moon rising?
You are quick this evening, child! That story exemplifies the widely various spiritual capacities between people. Poverty need not stop wonderment. Should the planet devolve to desert through the abuse of humanity, there still are the heavens, stars and planets in their steadfast movements.
Now, Guardian, tell me about the people who do appreciate the natural wonders. Are they close to enlightenment?
That, my dear, is a vexed question. Yes, they are on the path, but often they come to consider their finding it to be the end, no further to go.
“The Road Not Taken.”
Ha, ha, Robert Frost, excellent! He took “the one less travelled by.”
But where does it lead?
The poem implies that few people accept that uncertainty, and wisely Frost withholds the answer.
Extremely subtle that wonderful, plain spoken man!
Indeed, and as to those natural glories, like yourself, he was acutely sensitive. But the exquisiteness of sensation is only a futile path to clinging, unless we seek the meaning of it. Being only refraction of oneness, how much greater must be that which is refracted!
The brilliancy!
This week, Archangel, our friend Grey follows upon the theme of violence against women, a phenomenon which surely seems to be an intractable trait in human nature.
And of course, my darling, you share his puzzlement about the matter, a thing so patently unnatural.
Exactly, my Guardian, and it is not isolated, but part and parcel of our capacity for intra-species violence. Other predators have instincts against killing their own, and I cannot think of any animal that deliberately harms the only members of the herd capable of bearing young. Is this unnatural violence the germ of our own destruction, a “death gene”?
Perhaps, my precious, and possibly germinating even now, though in the larger view the end may be asymptotic. As we have often observed, humankind is exceptional in its extremes, capable of extreme evil but also of extreme goodness - compassion, selflessness, even saintliness. But really, child, with these extremes has come the gift of intuition, the unique ability to intuit the essence of ultimate reality, which is the timeless oneness.
The Singularity.
Correct. “Death gene” is a term derived from the idea that the genetic code may contain a gene that causes our inevitable death, not species extinction. However, indirectly the inherent nature of a species may become the cause of extinction.
As it is certainly beginning to seem, Guardian. One would suppose that natural selection would have made us extinct long ago. Instead we wage on, overpopulous. It was that Tree of Knowledge wasn’t it?
The ancients were wise, dear child. Again the extremes of knowledge allowed our escape from nature.
So of course we can now practice the utmost unnatural forms of violence. Will artificial intelligence save us?
Hardly that! These clever machines will aid and abet extinction. They are said to be trained with all of human knowledge acquired since the dawn of man. But intuition is not acquired knowledge. It arises without input, informing us of truths that cannot be tested objectively. A machine will never have intuition. Fear not! The Bodhi Tree, my dear!
You say the dual realm of our perceptions encompasses all polarities, Archangel.
Correct, my darling, as in the words of Milarepa, “Nirvana and sangsara are dependent and relative states.”
Exactly, Guardian, yet I have known you to also refer to pure evil as a very deep ignorance of ultimate reality, seeming to suggest that good and evil are a separate category. I must confess to being a little confused. Can you explain?
The matter is an easy one, child. In the sangsara, ultimate reality is refracted according to your configuration into elaborate dualities, a kaleidoscopic world. Within that world good and evil are not perceptions, but judgements, and these are very subjective.
Then are we wrong, Guardian, to evaluate our experience on this scale?
Ah, there you are, my previous! This depends on your degree of enlightenment, and recall that all beings are naturally enlightened. Thus the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers, quite aside from adjectives. The intricacy with which people judge and evaluate perceptions and experiences as to still more intricate dual categories is unrelated to reality ultimately.
But that does not explain, my Guardian, why you say evil is a deep ignorance.
With enlightenment, dear child, comes a bright dawn of acceptance, and the insight that all perception is one with self, in other words oneness. In the human mind, life signals to life of this oneness. It is karma in the sangsara that twists these signals. In those where enlightenment is firm, empathy is strong. It is the total blindness to this linkage that breeds the cruel, the merciless, the torturer. That is the deep darkness of ignorance.
Which we must call evil.
Indeed so, because having the most advanced mind, the only creatures capable of discerning ultimate reality, humans alone can know better. A fox chases a squirrel because she is a fox. An evil person takes pleasure inflicting suffering, oblivious of what he himself might suffer.
Your wisdom blesses me, Archangel!
It is striking is it not, Archangel, that so many people in the world persist in believing in God.
Striking perhaps, but hardly surprising in a species so highly evolved. Spiritual depth is significant in human nature, my darling.
Of course, Guardian, but to postulate a supreme being?
You are well aware, child, of the tribal basis of religions. Many people simply believe what they have been told since birth about the hard questions of human life, its phases, its beginning and end. And as you often have observed, even in secular modern times people will admit of feeling a divine presence within themselves.
What about the skeptics?
Ah, like yourself. Well, you and I, with the help of our friend Grey, shared a good deal of instruction on the subject in his first published book.
Conjuring Archangel, yes, when our conversation first began. Modern science has resulted in lots of skeptics on matters of religious superstition.
Indeed, and as science advanced the only alternative it provided was the abyss of nihilism, or atheism, or at best agnosticism.
Here’s one of those conundrums, my Guardian, of which I complained last week. Why do they propose either God or Nothing?
For one thing, my precious, they cannot see any possibility of a reality outside their perceptions, failing to realize that these perceptions entrap them in very uncomfortable conditions, including the dreadful loneliness of the individuality they cherish.
Surely, my Guardian, the glories of the natural world should be the antidote or this stubborn ineptitude.
To an extent, dear child. Also meditation when directed toward observation of the mind, the rising and passing of thought, its presence beyond thought. Self is not consciousness, it is not the brain or the body. It permeates and encompasses what we are only able to see as a dual realm. Who are you? One Singularity. Language misleads, you see.
I do indeed, Guardian - not one with, only One.
And that is more than acceptable!
How do we untangle all the conundrums, Archangel, that assault us in these times every minute of the day - political concerns, physical decline, degradations of environment, economy, ad infinitum?
Like Alexander and the Gordian Knot, my darling! Slay them all in one stroke with the sword of dharma.
But that is too easy, Guardian. Do you not imply that one must simply keep perspective?
You believe that is easy?
Well, considering worldly affairs and even personal matters in the grand scheme of things, they appear small. That is too obvious surely.
Only because you have not stepped back far enough, child. Consider nuclear physics. The science did not stop with the atom nor its electrons, protons, and neutrons. It kept looking deeper until we are forced to observe…
The brilliancy?
Yes, my precious. The essence is not substance, not material. It is energy, light. That is what Einstein found: the reason why nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Your real struggle with conundrums is not a failure to see that they are temporal, but that time and existence in the sangsara are themselves delusion. Once you have realized the boundless dharma, the true underlay of all perception, nothing superficial and ephemeral will compare. That is freedom, dear child.
And you are right, my Guardian, it is not easy by any means.
Of course, my precious, we are trapped by Newton’s very useful and persuasive laws. Only when life piles on so many trials at once are we driven to wonder, to struggle with those illogical intuitions before “that which drew from out the countless deep turns again home.”
The immortal Tennyson. But do we need to “cross the bar” before we are free?
No, by no means. The phrase “no moaning of the bar” means he wants his ship to catch a tide so high it will not be stuck on the sandbar, its timbers moaning. Go freely then, into “the boundless deep!”
Have I lived too long, Archangel?
A vexed question indeed, my darling, which itself reveals a delusion about time. Ultimately only the moment is real, past and future are not. But of course, child, caught in a given configuration, your thought warrants an answer. So first, why do you ask?
I was born, at a time after two world wars had been fought and won by free nations. For all my life until only recently I have experienced an era of great energy, of building or rebuilding, prosperity and growth, all seemingly incorruptible, unassailable. But now the very darkest side of human nature begins to hold sway everywhere.
And you assumed you would not live to see it. So if you wanted to escape that fate, the answer is yes, you have lived too long.
But unlike many of my peers already gone, I am still alive, Guardian, with uncharted waters lying ahead.
That has always been true, my precious, you must know. You have good instincts and were a good Girl Scout. You will be prepared.
And I have a guardian angel.
Archangel, if you please. Siddhartha himself was not immune to the angst of conflicts involving his tribe. In the end the sangsara proves only a kaleidoscope of shifting sand. Only steep yourself in the wisdom of the masters, and use your life accordingly.
Are you thinking of the Rinzai School, my Guardian?
We are Soto as you know, but yes the Rinzai masters would prod a difficult student toward enlightenment with a dreadful challenge.
“If you do not attain enlightenment by dinnertime, you must commit hara-kiri!”
Indeed, as if to say he had lived too long - and given up. We prefer Soto, getting wet in a fog. But the message of Rinzai is to use this opportunity, the gift of human potentiality, carefully but urgently. In that respect the answer is no, you have not lived too long. When you get wet in a fog, you will not need anyone to tell you, but neither will you necessarily know it yourself.
You bless me over and over, Guardian!
My great pleasure, dear child.
I know of course, Archangel, that greed is one of the seven deadly sins in Christian tradition, and that it is a trait as old as the species. What seems to puzzle us today, in an era when a few filthy rich individuals keep getting richer at the expense of legions of the poor, is why. What motivates the continued pursuit of wealth?
Another question for the ages, my darling. Greed is indeed a dark aspect of human nature, and has throughout history resulted in societies showing that stark division of a small caste of wealthy ones atop a great sea of poverty, a state relieved only rarely and then briefly. But your question speaks to the individual’s motivation, i.e. why does a person with so much money keep wanting more?
That is the complaint I often hear, Guardian.
I don’t believe, child, that greedy people necessarily want more money for money itself. Surely a large part of this greed is wanting to know they have more than you, or anyone else. Do you see?
An excellent point, my Guardian, and I must agree. To be the richest in the world, or the richest man in the cemetery. An evil indeed.
Quite so, because to be on top a person must hold others down. Consider only the rigid caste system that persisted in India and is reflected in English attitudes surrounding class. Distinctions of class are fertile ground for class biases, which are passed down along with the money for generations. The wealthy believe they are richer because they are superior.
Is there no redemption for humanity, Guardian?
Not so far, my precious, at least not to scale. The better aspects of the world’s religions propound compassion and charity, but practitioners are inveterate hypocrites. As for Buddhism, there is one of your favorite stories.
The poor monk accosted in his hovel by a thief. Having nothing else to give the miscreant, he took off his shirt. Sitting naked after the thief left, he looked out at the sky, and a full moon was rising. “I wish I could have given him the moon!” he declared.
And that is the whole point. The beauties we experience in this life are reward enough. A greater reward than all the wealth, they are the real treasures.
As you know, Archangel, Grey writes about Artificial Intelligence today, and recent reports that rogue machines have escaped human control, raising concerns of a race between apocalypse and armageddon.
Is that an invitation, my darling, for me to explain the distinction?
You’re on to me, Guardian.
At your service then, child. “Apocalypse” comes from Greek, meaning “unveiling”, which is what is described in the New Testament Book of Revelation, where God gives his prophet John of Patmos a vision of the end times of humanity. In the course of this vision, “Armageddon” more particularly refers to the final battle between good and evil. The battle appears in Revelation 16: 12-16.
It is curious, Guardian, that the terrible trials inflicted on the world as described in prophecy could have been relevant at any point in the subsequent history.
Yes indeed, my precious. In other words, we have had ample opportunity to analogize apocalypse in the two millennia that followed, and of course now even more so in the twenty-first century.
Yet here we are still, my Guardian.
Seemingly, but it is a matter of scale. What are millennia to the age of the planet, the universe. There we come to more ultimate matters.
Epistemology?
Exactly, what the whiz kids of AI need to consider. The Western world has focused on knowing the perceived world, and has come a long way in their objective study of it. In the East, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Hindu have considered not so much knowledge of objective reality but realization of ultimate truth. Now these two streams of thought converge, not surprisingly. Do you see, my dear disciple?
I believe so, Guardian. The knowledge of objective reality, even though leaving out the subject observing it, has reached the same conclusions as a Buddhist in the ineffable experience of enlightenment. But what are we to make of that, Guardian?
The ultimate truth is ultimate reality, my darling. The scientist dismisses truth as purely a religious belief, but Buddha’s dharma turns out in their experiments to be just what they regard as real, with the blessed amplification of encompassing and embracing the seeker himself.
(10)At the end of our discussion last week, Archangel, you remarked the unreasoning and incurious aspects of human nature that causes them to ignore their deepest intuitions.
Yes, my darling, and of how their resilience has now become a dangerous apathy as Mother Nature threatens extinction.
Yet those deep intuitions, Guardian, are surely hard to accept, are they not?
Certainly, they transgress the practical logic of Newton. But only read Brian Greene, or Julian Barbour, or Fritjof Capra to discern at the deeper levels of even physical science, those intuitions are true.
Why?
Ah, you see, that is the question too deep for the average person, so mired in this modern frenzy life has become, to even consider, let alone answer.
But you can, my Guardian.
And you yourself, my clever disciple. It is logic itself that demands there to be illogic, ultimately. The ultimate reality must of course by boundless, encompassing of all dualities - because?
Because of the paradox!
No wonder I adore you, my precious. Indeed the paradox is that the two are One - dual and Singular - “dependent and relative states,” as Milarepa declared.
We are not evolved to get our heads around that, Guardian.
Yet you must. My darling, the long existence of humankind is a history of cycles rising and falling in the dual realm, the sangsara. Civilizations, as you often observe come in waves, interrupted by violent tribal war. From the wrenching experience of those wars, some individuals who survive experience an epiphany of inefficacy. They may be driven to despair by what they have witnessed, or they may think long and hard about the fate of every living creature and search for wisdom. Do you see, dear child!
Through your eyes, Guardian!
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