The Philosophical Debate Thread

[The Batlord]

Originally Posted by Mr. Charlie

No, it was a tongue in cheek comment. I don't consider myself Taoist, Buddhist, or similar, I just find some of their teachings interesting and beneficial.

[Mr. Charlie]

We're waving goodbye to the mother of Zen, Taoism, for now. Boooo.

And turning instead to the father of Zen, Buddhism. Yay.

Bit too preachy for my liking if I'm honest, a few too many dos and don'ts. Booo. But still a good message though.

[The Batlord]

Am I the only one creeped out by the concept of the Dalai Lama? Small child taken from his parents and brainwashed into thinking he's some sort of demigod? If some cult tried doing that in America, people would forget all about Scientology to hurl rotten vegetables at them.

[Mr. Charlie]

I don't know how the 14 Dalai Lamas feel/felt, but I wouldn't mind being taken away and taught wisdom from an early stage. I trust that any feelings of loss or separation are quickly tempered when the Buddhist method of living in the moment is put into practice, coupled with the faith that happiness lies in embracing the present wholeheartedly regardless of circumstance.

[The Batlord]

Originally Posted by Mr. Charlie

I don't know how the 14 Dalai Lamas feel/felt, but I wouldn't mind being taken away and taught wisdom from an early stage. I trust that any feelings of loss or separation are quickly tempered when the Buddhist method of living in the moment is put into practice, coupled with the faith that happiness lies in embracing the present wholeheartedly regardless of circumstance.

If a bunch of cardinals showed up on some Italian family's doorstep and told them to give them their child so that he could become the new Pope, would you think of it the same way? And no, that isn't a joke about child molestation.

[Mr. Charlie]

Well, I don't know much about Christianity so I wouldn't feel the same, no.

[Mr. Charlie]

Zen

You know, a lot of people come up to me and say, “Hey Mr. Charlie, you’re a dude, a cool cat, a Zen master – what’s your secret?" Okay, that’s never happened. Haha.


Ahem. Okay. Take two. No more nonsense. Right. Rather than continue my lazy habit of posting videos in this thread, I’m going to explain what Zen means to me. Why? Because I want to. Because I think of Zen as the art of losing one's mind in order to become sane. And because Zen can transform one’s mind and thus their world. Because Zen is based more on experience and the scientific approach than on faith. Because Zen can make the ordinary extraordinary.


So what exactly is Zen? What does it entail? Well, good questions both, but a more pragmatic question is why would anyone adopt Zen? The short answer is to move away from bondage and towards freedom. Freedom from what?


Freedom from the reality prescribed to us. Life is not the serious, meaningful and purposeful affair society would have us believe. Meaning is man-created, and because we constantly look for meaning, we start to feel meaningless. But the moment we start seeing life as non-serious, as playful, the burden on our heart lightens. The fear of death, of life, of love - it all wanes. Zen gives us an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world; the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities, the systems, the rules; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children. So not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules - this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.


Freedom from fear and suffering. Zen teaches that once we open up to the impermanence of all things and the inevitability of our demise, then we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it. It teaches us that although loss and pain are inevitable, suffering is optional.


Freedom from the past and future. Zen lives in the present. The whole teaching is how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centred, in that which is. This really is the cornerstone of Zen practice. Nothing is ever done with an aim in mind, not even meditation, one meditates to meditate, one eats to eat, that’s all, no more, no less. As Zen Master Lin Chi put it "When it’s time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking Buddhahood. When you’re tired, lie down. The ignorant will laugh at this, but the wise will understand."


Freedom from knowledge. Modern mind has lost all capacity to wonder. It has lost all capacity to look into the mysterious, into the miraculous - because of knowledge, because it thinks it knows. Well Zen is a kind of unlearning. It teaches you how to drop that which you have learned, how to become unskilful again, how to become a child again, how to start existing without mind again. To quote Zen Master Ma-Tzu "The mind that does not understand is the Buddha. There is no other." Well this non-understanding mind is the mind Zen promotes.


Therefore the Zen disciple does not hanker for knowledge; he wants to be, not to know. He is no longer interested in having more knowledge; he wants to have more being. To quote another Zen saying "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few". What Zen does is return your mind to that of a beginner in order so that it can open to the infinite possibilities that exist and the realisation that ordinary life itself is miraculous. As the famous D. T. Suzuki put it "Zen opens a man's eyes to the greatest mystery as it is daily and hourly performed; it enlarges the heart to embrace the eternity of time and infinity of space in its every palpitation; it makes us live in the world as if walking in the garden of Eden". Eloquent words indeed, but also very true. To watch the clouds without thought is to love the clouds, to see the flowers without thought is to enjoy the flowers, to sweep the floor, to peel potatoes, to wash the dishes, to sit on a wall and watch the cows, even the most seemingly mundane activities become enjoyable when they are perfomed with am empty mind in full attendance.


Freedom from desire. Desires can never be satisfied. We all know this deep down. Even if we get what we want, we desire to keep it, and so Zen teaches to be empty. To look into the nature of things without want, without plan. Nothing is there to be done. There is nothing to gain. This is another cornerstone of Zen Buddhism, and indeed Taoism; one does not practise to gain. This flys in the face of Western thought and seems counterintuitive to many and so it’s worth expanding upon: one doesn't practice Zen with an aim to seek one's true nature or truth. That is not how to discover true nature. That is not how to discover truth. Both true nature and truth are ever present. So how does one realise them? By shedding that which keeps us from them – namely desire and illusion. So, yes, one has simply to be. Have a rest and be ordinary and be natural. We can say that the life of Zen begins, therefore, with the disillusion in the pursuit of goals which do not really exist - the good without the bad, the morrow which never comes, and the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea.


Freedom from ego. This is the crux. The meat and bones. Desire, suffering, knowledge, all products of the ego, but the ego is a phantom, nothing other than the focus of conscious attention, so to tackle fear, desire and the rest of it, one must tackle the ego.


This is no easy task. Indeed it's been described as the most difficult thing in the world, for it involves the abandonment of the self. It takes courage to abandon the self, it involves shedding things you like about yourself, shedding things others like about yourself, in short it means becoming detached and disentangled from the world - something that quickly manifests into isolation. As Buddha himself put it, "Those who commit to my teaching walk alone". And it’s this apect that is difficult or frightening to many. However, this is only an outward appearance, for deep down one feels a heightened sense of connection to every single thing, from a grain of sand to a pebble to a tree to a mouse to a human being to a cloud to a star. For ultimately it is the ego that stands between one's unity with everything.


That's all for now. I'll be looking into what Zen actually is next time. And what it is may surprise you. It ain’t gold. No. It's more like poo.

[Mr. Charlie]

So what is Zen?

(Note: we are looking at traditional Zen Buddhism, sometimes called Chan or Chinese Buddhism - not Japanese Zen Buddhism which came later and is very different in practise)


One answer is Zen is the fusion of Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism.


Another answer is Zen is: “A special transmission outside the scriptures; no dependence on words and letters; direct pointing to the mind of man; seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.”


But neither of those answers are particularly useful or satisfying. Neither give us a flavour for what Zen really is. So, again, what is Zen?


Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks. It is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song. It is not morality, it is aesthetics. It does not impose a code of morality. It does not give you commandments: do this, don't do that.


It is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it. It has no theory. It is a non-theoretical approach into reality. It has no doctrine and no dogma - hence it has no church, no priest, no pope. If you want to call it a religion then it is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.


In essence, Zen is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being. One has to reach the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour here and there and then forget about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you even have to sleep in it. But when you see for the first time, a great laughter will arise in you - the laughter about the whole ridiculousness of your misery, the laughter about the whole foolishness of your problems, the laughter about the whole absurdity of your suffering.


Zen is everything and it is nothing. As the ancient Zen proverb goes, “Learning Zen is a phenomenon of gold and dung. Before you understand it, it's like gold; after you understand it, it's like dung."


Or, as Bodhidharma put it, “Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the Buddha...Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.”


Zen is a realisation, a way of life, a state of being, and, ultimately, an experience.


So there we are. We’ve looked into why someone might want to adopt Zen and we’ve looked at what it is, well… an approximation of what it is, for in the same way a menu can never tell you what food tastes like, so words can never really communicate what anything really is. They can point to things at best, and so we have at least pointed to Zen.


I’ve purposely not talked about the zenith of Zen - enlightenment – as that’s something far beyond my experience and my knowledge, but is said to involve completely transcending the ego. Now doesn’t that sound nice? Oh yes. Very nice indeed.



So how does one experience Zen?


Meditation. Meditation. Meditation. Ingesting enough psychedelics to get to the point where the ego dissolves is another, indeed this is an extremely popular method of experiencing temporary Oneness. But it's fleeting. Unreliable. Dangerous. But usually fun. Haha.


But, no, meditation is better. Meditate. Meditate. Meditate. Do this enough and separation occurs, the space between the thinking mind and the awareness behind the mind is established. Furthermore it is immediately clear on which side of the space the real us reside. And having made the realisation and established this new identity, ignoring thoughts in everyday life gets easier. You no longer associate thoughts as your thoughts. They're just thoughts. And the opinions you feel are just opinions. They're not your opinions anymore. And so those become easier to ditch too. And therein begins the life of Zen.


Nothing mystical about it. No Gods. No mantras. No sutras. No prayers. Merely experience.


Now convert!

[Mr. Charlie]

Now, this book, 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind' by Shunryu Suzuki, is widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on Zen, and does a pretty fabulous job of describing the indescribable:

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

[Carpe Mortem]