Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.Roger Sperry (1913-1994)
Ah, if my brush could only catch
the faint
Scent of the white plum-blossoms
that I paint!Shôha
Brains brought pain and anxiety into the universe, along with other qualities. The Zen Buddhism we have been pointing toward throughout part I offers teachings about these matters. You don't have to believe them. Nor must you embrace doctrines that run counter to common sense. As novices continue their practice, they will discover on their own, the most effective way, how each experience validates the teachings. Successive awakenings then cut off each outmoded premise, whether it was rooted earlier in ignorance or in delusion. Thereafter, their old egocentric universe will never be the same.Nervous systems arrived late on planet Earth. Only recently did the human brain evolve its many striking conscious properties. None of its convoluted sensibilities, and no part of any of the rest of the whole universe is extrinsic to the scope of Zen. So, in its larger universal context, Zen embraces all of life's natural dimensions. One of them is the sentient, experiential dimension.
Every brain still goes on informing its bearer about what it encounters in the everyday worlds of its personal experience. There are at least four of these worlds, and they overlap. Start with the first, perceptual world. You might suppose that it would be the most familiar one. Yet, how rarely do we savor the miracle whereby impulses from our sense organs are transformed into the scent of plum blossoms, or into taste, sight, and touch! We feel the thrust of our second, emotional, realm. Its pulsing, visceral energies invade us with fear, love, desire, or anger. Next, using thoughts, ordinary mentation fumbles its way along in the third, rational, world. It uses the vehicle of language to help reason out what seems to be true. Less often do we catch--let alone hold on to--the glint of the fourth, complementary, world. It is our ordinary intuitive world. Its insights dart in, extracting and integrating knowledge otherwise hidden among countless networks within our brain.
Is there another dimension beyond all these--a fifth, transpersonal world? The early masters thought so. Indeed, Huang-po believed that enlightenment was our open access into this "Universal Mind." Those less sure today may still find Siu's concept interesting. He views this dimension as the universe of "sage" knowledge. No boundaries constrain this world. It extends infinitely beyond what a single brain can either imagine about itself or can project into nature. Instead, sage knowledge is intrinsic to all nature. It is nature's essence shared intimately by one and all. Some readers may be more comfortable thinking about this fifth dimension as a "Great Self," a kind of earthly Mother Nature projected on a cosmic scale. Still others use different words to describe it, such as Buddha Nature, or they conceive of it as the highest, universal principle.
Rational knowledge can bring us intellectually in tune with the facts of scientific mankind. And ordinary intuitive knowledge can then go a step further, so that we include in our scope the totality of mankind. But sage knowledge is the profound comprehension that all our atoms resonate in their oneness with all other forms of stardust everywhere in the universe. Sage knowledge, then, is a kind of "self-articulation of the Ultimate Reality itself." This is where Zen appears to be coming from. Within this fifth dimension, our levels of human awareness and those of the ontological unfolding of reality will correspond so intimately with each other, stage by stage, that they may be thought of as ultimately constituting one and the same process.
Zen training does in fact orient itself in this general direction. But Zen itself remains unadorned. Yes, it still encompasses all of the four earlier levels. But it will steer just as clear of all such abstract notions of "levels" as it does of every other entangling conceptualization. Negating itself, it withdraws before each step of the advancing intellect. Zen is more at home with "soft" things closest to poetry, with elusive scents of plum blossoms, with other experiential things that don't reduce well to numbers. Therefore, at first, it will seem far removed from our rigorous fields of science which are packed with coldly objective data and hair-splitting discriminations. On the other hand, when the Zen aspirant finally awakens in kensho, it will be to the coldest, clearest basic truths stripped of every soft personal sentimentality.
Yet, it is especially in such matters that Zen masters and orthodox neuroscientists tend to part company. Each group would prefer to hold fast to its own hard-won citizenship. In fact, each is trying to objectify experience. In practice, the two camps operate using the biases imposed by their own training. Each is hampered by the limitations imposed by their complex methods. Perhaps the most one might hope for is that neither group will go out of its way to avoid, to deny, or to suppress the other's field.
From its vantage point, Zen continues to invite us to look critically, objectively, into our sovereign, self-referent I. Slowly, we then discover the fictions that made it seem vulnerable. We find a self that had been indoctrinated by others, one currently assaulted by the senses, driven by emotions, beset by thought-forms, bound by long-fixed habit patterns of behavior. This discovery is more humbling than scary. Finally comes the major flash of insight. Only then, from the fresh new perspective of No-self, No-I, can sage wisdom spring.
Where is Zen going? Look for no well-intentioned but overemotional intrusions; no busybody mentality. Its province is the simple, deft, preventive measure. Its moves are the more effective low-profile actions. These anticipate future problems, and head them off. Forget about crusading impulses which must remake the world in one's own self-image. They are covert distortions of the creative process. Mature adults no longer need to carve their names into the bark of a living tree. First, let our self-indulgent, self-referent Idrop out of the scene. Then, in the long view of things, salutary behavior will flow freely along novel constructive lines.
Meanwhile, newcomers approach Zen as if they were sitting down to sample an elegant, exotic, five-course meal. What could spoil such an otherwise splendid occasion? Only the attitudes that they bring with them. First, they try to translate each word on the menu into English, bringing a dictionary to the table. Then they strive to analyze each morsel of food solely in terms of the source of its unusual ingredients. Soon they wonder when the dessert will come, imagining how delicious it must be. And all along they worry about the size of the bill and the tip at the end.
Zen is the awareness of the whole setting, the simple tasting of each mouthful, and the enjoying of the company.
So far, we have begun by presenting some orthodox Zennist views about where Zen thinks it is coming from. But suppose we now ask, Where is Zen really coming from? Then we must do two things. First, get into the brain and repair our own ignorance. Second, strip off the heavy baggage of centuries of mystical, philosophical, and doctrinal speculations. So it will be to find out how the brain itself functions, both in meditation and in various specified states of consciousness, that we now turn in the next three parts.