Essays by Steve Hagen & Norm Randolph
Essays by Steve Hagen
Not What You think (regarding koans)
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Steve Hagen on Koans
Not What You Think Foreword to The Iron Flute |
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When I first began practicing Zen under Dainin Katagiri Roshi, he asked me to comment on a Zen koan. I told him, in all honesty, that I found the koan puzzling. Immediately his face wrinkled up as if he had bitten into a lemon. “Not puzzle!” he shouted. He quickly made it clear to me that Zen teachings are not puzzles to which we students are expected to come up with clever answers.
People often think of koans as riddles or problems that need to be solved. But this is not the case at all. With every koan, the point is not to arrive at an answer through our ordinary, conceptualizing minds. Rather, the point is to see for ourselves that our concepts can never provide us with a satisfying answer. (This is not that satisfaction cannot be found. It can—but not through any concept or explanation.)
Unlike school exams, koans are not a matter of coming up with the right answer and thereby winning an endorsement or gaining the teacher’s approval. There is a great deal more at play in these exchanges between Zen teachers and their students. Indeed, if it were merely a matter of coming up with the right answer, you could simply look it up in one of several volumes that claim to provide answers to koans. But in an exchange with a true teacher, this isn’t going to do you much good. If you don’t understand the heart of a koan, it will be quite obvious the moment you’re asked a follow-up question—one that’s not in one of the books.
No concept, no idea, no piece of intellection will ever give you “the answer.” Whether we’re talking about life or koans (the same thing, really), there are no pat answers or solutions.
For this reason, koans have often been labeled anti-intellectual, or irrational, or as invitations for us to abandon ourselves to our impulses or our irrational minds. Indeed, some people unfamiliar with Zen think that Zen practice is about acting strange and silly, or making outlandish statements, or forgetting everything and just letting the flowers bloom. Some scholars and writers have even claimed that the purpose of koans is to break down and destroy the intellect. None of this, however, is true.
Though koans do reach beyond reason, they’re not a call to destroy or deny the intellect. They simply point out that Reality is not to be captured in a thought, or a phrase, or an explanation. Reality is the direct seeing of the world as it is, not as our intellects map it, describe it, or conceive it.
It’s not that human intellect is bad or that we must get rid of it; but we must bring ourselves back to the fact that the intellect can only construct models of Reality, never Reality itself. Our problem, however, is that we get taken in by our mental constructions, mistaking them for Reality. The fact is that Reality cannot be constructed, nor does it need to be. It’s already here—and we’re all inseparable from it. If we could only see this, we’d be freed from a great and painful burden. We’d no longer be confused or cowed by human life.
Another common misunderstanding of koans is that they are exercises of wit in which the teacher asks the question, and the student must immediately come back with an adroit response. In this erroneous view, koans are a jousting game in which teacher and student strike and counter-strike, each trying to best the other. Though some teacher/student exchanges may give this appearance, to use the model of a debate or contest is to miss the point entirely.
Koans also have a reputation for being paradoxical, enigmatic, and inscrutable—and, thus, Zen itself has gotten a reputation for being the same. But koans themselves are not paradoxes at all. Rather, they direct our attention to the sense of contradiction or paradox that naturally arises in any conception of the world. Koans help us to see that these apparent contradictions in fact occur only within our minds, not within the world itself.
Rather than serving up an idea or conceptual framework that will supposedly save us, koans help us to recognize how we constantly do indeed reach for prefabricated explanations and answers. They also help us to see that this never gets us anywhere. Indeed, it is this very grasping for conceptual solutions and explanations that causes us so many problems. Yet even as we grasp at concepts, we overlook the supreme treasure that is right at hand—Reality itself.
The term koan is generally translated as “public case.” But what, exactly, makes a koan public? Simply this: every koan is a finger pointing to Reality, to what is right now, right here. Reality is totally and immediately available to everyone all the time. It doesn’t have to be transmitted to you by a teacher. In fact, it can’t be. You can’t get it from a book, either. Nobody can hand it to you. It’s already right here. We’re inseparable from it. There’s nothing in our experience more public that Truth or Reality itself.
The koans presented in this volume were collected in the eighteenth century C.E by Genro, a Soto Zen master. This may seem somewhat unusual, since koans are thought to be more widely used by Rinzai Zen teachers. The Soto school generally does not use koans in one-to-one teacher/student interactions. This is probably due to Dogen Zenji, who transmitted Soto Zen from China to Japan in the thirteenth century C.E. Though he used koans as teaching stories, he frowned on their regular use as hoops for students to jump through. He found such graduated training to be wide of the mark and short on delivery.
Dogen defined the term ko as “sameness” or “ultimate equality.” According to Dogen, every thing, thought, or emotion we encounter or experience is an equal and necessary component of Reality. Nothing is superfluous. Nothing is left out. In fact, nothing can be left out. Whether we recognize it or not, we’re always dealing with Totality, which is utterly beyond our concepts of part or whole, equal or unequal.
The term an, according to Dogen, means that everything within Totality has its own natural territory or sphere. For Dogen, then, a true koan is an authentic expression of the merging of difference and unity, the thoroughgoing interpenetration of the Whole and its “parts.”
Related to the matter of Totality is non-duality. Our conceptualizing minds are highly dualistic. They keep themselves busy thinking, analyzing, controlling, and scheming. To such a mind, everything is either good or bad, right or wrong, friend or foe, this or that—or else off our personal radar altogether. But koans point beyond all this, to the immediate and first-hand non-duality of Reality. Koans are expressions of immediate awareness--before we categorize, label, arrange, or evaluate everything.
Koans also point to the freedom of non-attachment—a major theme in Zen. Non-attachment is the recognition that thoughts of “this is right and that is wrong,” “this we should do and that we shouldn’t do,” “it ought to be like this,” or “this is what I want, and that is what I don’t want,” only serve to make our lives complicated, contradictory, confusing, and ultimately unbearable. Such thinking fills our hearts and minds with longing and loathing—all of which drives us to anger, frustration, and despair. Koans cut through such confusion and draw our attention to things as they are, before we make judgments about them and create contradictions for ourselves.
Non-attachment is not the same as detachment. Detachment presumes the realness of the objects of our longing and loathing, then counsels us to turn away from them. It’s an attempt to escape from Reality. But there is no escape from Reality. Non-attachment, on the other hand, is to see the emptiness, the non-particularity, of every thing or thought we encounter.
Koans speak of genuineness and ordinariness—actual, True, Reality—without any need for explanation, embellishment, or improvement. They remind us that we don’t need to push the river, or add legs to the snake.
Reality is always right here, out in the open—a public case. Dealing with it is forever a matter of calming down, focussing, and noticing how we spend the greater portion of our time explaining everything to ourselves. Koans—like meditation—are a practical way of watching our own minds, paying careful attention to what is really going on, and perceiving Reality directly, free of our ideas about it, explanations for it, and habitual responses to it.
In short, koans are serious business. They’re about life and death, about all our deepest questions and concerns—the ones that are most immediate, urgent, and unavoidable. Life isn’t a matter of pleasing the teacher or getting the right answer or passing a test. Koans direct us to be present with what is going on now, and to notice how our minds respond to this.
Once this is seen, there’s no wasting of the day, or yourself, or the world. What binds you drops away, and you will let it go.
—Steve Hagen
© 2000
People often think of koans as riddles or problems that need to be solved. But this is not the case at all. With every koan, the point is not to arrive at an answer through our ordinary, conceptualizing minds. Rather, the point is to see for ourselves that our concepts can never provide us with a satisfying answer. (This is not that satisfaction cannot be found. It can—but not through any concept or explanation.)
Unlike school exams, koans are not a matter of coming up with the right answer and thereby winning an endorsement or gaining the teacher’s approval. There is a great deal more at play in these exchanges between Zen teachers and their students. Indeed, if it were merely a matter of coming up with the right answer, you could simply look it up in one of several volumes that claim to provide answers to koans. But in an exchange with a true teacher, this isn’t going to do you much good. If you don’t understand the heart of a koan, it will be quite obvious the moment you’re asked a follow-up question—one that’s not in one of the books.
No concept, no idea, no piece of intellection will ever give you “the answer.” Whether we’re talking about life or koans (the same thing, really), there are no pat answers or solutions.
For this reason, koans have often been labeled anti-intellectual, or irrational, or as invitations for us to abandon ourselves to our impulses or our irrational minds. Indeed, some people unfamiliar with Zen think that Zen practice is about acting strange and silly, or making outlandish statements, or forgetting everything and just letting the flowers bloom. Some scholars and writers have even claimed that the purpose of koans is to break down and destroy the intellect. None of this, however, is true.
Though koans do reach beyond reason, they’re not a call to destroy or deny the intellect. They simply point out that Reality is not to be captured in a thought, or a phrase, or an explanation. Reality is the direct seeing of the world as it is, not as our intellects map it, describe it, or conceive it.
It’s not that human intellect is bad or that we must get rid of it; but we must bring ourselves back to the fact that the intellect can only construct models of Reality, never Reality itself. Our problem, however, is that we get taken in by our mental constructions, mistaking them for Reality. The fact is that Reality cannot be constructed, nor does it need to be. It’s already here—and we’re all inseparable from it. If we could only see this, we’d be freed from a great and painful burden. We’d no longer be confused or cowed by human life.
Another common misunderstanding of koans is that they are exercises of wit in which the teacher asks the question, and the student must immediately come back with an adroit response. In this erroneous view, koans are a jousting game in which teacher and student strike and counter-strike, each trying to best the other. Though some teacher/student exchanges may give this appearance, to use the model of a debate or contest is to miss the point entirely.
Koans also have a reputation for being paradoxical, enigmatic, and inscrutable—and, thus, Zen itself has gotten a reputation for being the same. But koans themselves are not paradoxes at all. Rather, they direct our attention to the sense of contradiction or paradox that naturally arises in any conception of the world. Koans help us to see that these apparent contradictions in fact occur only within our minds, not within the world itself.
Rather than serving up an idea or conceptual framework that will supposedly save us, koans help us to recognize how we constantly do indeed reach for prefabricated explanations and answers. They also help us to see that this never gets us anywhere. Indeed, it is this very grasping for conceptual solutions and explanations that causes us so many problems. Yet even as we grasp at concepts, we overlook the supreme treasure that is right at hand—Reality itself.
The term koan is generally translated as “public case.” But what, exactly, makes a koan public? Simply this: every koan is a finger pointing to Reality, to what is right now, right here. Reality is totally and immediately available to everyone all the time. It doesn’t have to be transmitted to you by a teacher. In fact, it can’t be. You can’t get it from a book, either. Nobody can hand it to you. It’s already right here. We’re inseparable from it. There’s nothing in our experience more public that Truth or Reality itself.
The koans presented in this volume were collected in the eighteenth century C.E by Genro, a Soto Zen master. This may seem somewhat unusual, since koans are thought to be more widely used by Rinzai Zen teachers. The Soto school generally does not use koans in one-to-one teacher/student interactions. This is probably due to Dogen Zenji, who transmitted Soto Zen from China to Japan in the thirteenth century C.E. Though he used koans as teaching stories, he frowned on their regular use as hoops for students to jump through. He found such graduated training to be wide of the mark and short on delivery.
Dogen defined the term ko as “sameness” or “ultimate equality.” According to Dogen, every thing, thought, or emotion we encounter or experience is an equal and necessary component of Reality. Nothing is superfluous. Nothing is left out. In fact, nothing can be left out. Whether we recognize it or not, we’re always dealing with Totality, which is utterly beyond our concepts of part or whole, equal or unequal.
The term an, according to Dogen, means that everything within Totality has its own natural territory or sphere. For Dogen, then, a true koan is an authentic expression of the merging of difference and unity, the thoroughgoing interpenetration of the Whole and its “parts.”
Related to the matter of Totality is non-duality. Our conceptualizing minds are highly dualistic. They keep themselves busy thinking, analyzing, controlling, and scheming. To such a mind, everything is either good or bad, right or wrong, friend or foe, this or that—or else off our personal radar altogether. But koans point beyond all this, to the immediate and first-hand non-duality of Reality. Koans are expressions of immediate awareness--before we categorize, label, arrange, or evaluate everything.
Koans also point to the freedom of non-attachment—a major theme in Zen. Non-attachment is the recognition that thoughts of “this is right and that is wrong,” “this we should do and that we shouldn’t do,” “it ought to be like this,” or “this is what I want, and that is what I don’t want,” only serve to make our lives complicated, contradictory, confusing, and ultimately unbearable. Such thinking fills our hearts and minds with longing and loathing—all of which drives us to anger, frustration, and despair. Koans cut through such confusion and draw our attention to things as they are, before we make judgments about them and create contradictions for ourselves.
Non-attachment is not the same as detachment. Detachment presumes the realness of the objects of our longing and loathing, then counsels us to turn away from them. It’s an attempt to escape from Reality. But there is no escape from Reality. Non-attachment, on the other hand, is to see the emptiness, the non-particularity, of every thing or thought we encounter.
Koans speak of genuineness and ordinariness—actual, True, Reality—without any need for explanation, embellishment, or improvement. They remind us that we don’t need to push the river, or add legs to the snake.
Reality is always right here, out in the open—a public case. Dealing with it is forever a matter of calming down, focussing, and noticing how we spend the greater portion of our time explaining everything to ourselves. Koans—like meditation—are a practical way of watching our own minds, paying careful attention to what is really going on, and perceiving Reality directly, free of our ideas about it, explanations for it, and habitual responses to it.
In short, koans are serious business. They’re about life and death, about all our deepest questions and concerns—the ones that are most immediate, urgent, and unavoidable. Life isn’t a matter of pleasing the teacher or getting the right answer or passing a test. Koans direct us to be present with what is going on now, and to notice how our minds respond to this.
Once this is seen, there’s no wasting of the day, or yourself, or the world. What binds you drops away, and you will let it go.
—Steve Hagen
© 2000
Merging with your object
Excerpted from
How the World Can Be the Way It Is:
An Inquiry for the New Millennium Into Science, Philosophy and Perception
by Steve Hagen,
published September 1995, by Quest Books.
How the World Can Be the Way It Is:
An Inquiry for the New Millennium Into Science, Philosophy and Perception
by Steve Hagen,
published September 1995, by Quest Books.
We must see, when we pick up any object of consciousness, whether it be mental or physical, that the “rest of all that exists”—i.e., Totality, Wholeness—must enter into the picture. As long as we operate with discriminating consciousness and see ourselves only as a fragment—a part of Reality which is divided off and intrinsically separate from everything else—we can know only uncertainty, fear, and the misery of that hollow, empty feeling of utter meaninglessness. It need not be this way for us.
I cannot give you the direct experience of knowing that aspect which remains hidden from our common-sense consciousness. I can, however, give an example that may remind you of this hidden aspect of consciousness as it works in our everyday life. Let me tell you about my mother and lefse. (Lefse, for those of you who don’t know, is a kind of Norwegian pancake or bread made from potatoes, cream, flour, butter and sugar.)
Like all real boundaries, the boundary between my mother and lefse is infinitely complex. I witnessed this complexity years ago as a child, though at the time I did not realize just what it was that I had witnessed. The occasion was when my eldest brother and his wife, newly married and inexperienced in the kitchen, tried to make lefse on their own. Once they had put all the ingredients together, they discovered that they could not work with the dough. When they tried to roll it out it would stick to the board. When they tried to pick it up it would fall apart. They thought they had ruined it and were about to throw it out when, in desperation, they put in a distress call to Mom. I went along to see if I could be of any help. I had a major interest in lefse in those days.
My mother appeared on the scene like a midwife approaching a distraught hus- band. Rolling up her sleeves and taking a sure command, she went to the huge lump of dough rising from the large mixing bowl in the center of the table. I can still see her as she put her hands upon that mound and in a soft but certain tone she said, “Oh, it’s just about right.” Giving us a nod and a smile, it was clear that this baby would be spared. Quickly she dispatched her orders. It needed just a little more of this, and just another touch of that—and in seconds she was rolling out lefse and frying them up. Lefse ap- peared one after another, until soon the stacks were piling up under steaming cloths.
My mother’s boundary was intimately connected with that of the lefse. The two merged, while nevertheless remaining separate. In fact, many things came together in that moment—not just my mother and the lefse. The dough had to be there, obviously. And though it was “just about right,” my mother had to be there as well or there would have been no lefse. With my mother came the know-how—which, in turn, revealed that many other, previous and unseen events were also entangled in this happening of my mother making lefse. And within the dough were those who produced the ingredients, and who trucked them to market. Within that dough were entangled the potato plant, and last year’s harvest.
Yet all the while these countless hidden things came together in this event, it was nevertheless quite evident which was my mother and which was the lefse.
There’s nothing mystical about what I’m trying to point to here. It’s not a poetic metaphor or a Zen-like analogy. It’s a simple, concrete example of that “other” aspect which must be accounted for if we would avoid contradictions. It’s an example of some- one actually becoming merged in an exchange of identity with her object.
I cannot give you the direct experience of knowing that aspect which remains hidden from our common-sense consciousness. I can, however, give an example that may remind you of this hidden aspect of consciousness as it works in our everyday life. Let me tell you about my mother and lefse. (Lefse, for those of you who don’t know, is a kind of Norwegian pancake or bread made from potatoes, cream, flour, butter and sugar.)
Like all real boundaries, the boundary between my mother and lefse is infinitely complex. I witnessed this complexity years ago as a child, though at the time I did not realize just what it was that I had witnessed. The occasion was when my eldest brother and his wife, newly married and inexperienced in the kitchen, tried to make lefse on their own. Once they had put all the ingredients together, they discovered that they could not work with the dough. When they tried to roll it out it would stick to the board. When they tried to pick it up it would fall apart. They thought they had ruined it and were about to throw it out when, in desperation, they put in a distress call to Mom. I went along to see if I could be of any help. I had a major interest in lefse in those days.
My mother appeared on the scene like a midwife approaching a distraught hus- band. Rolling up her sleeves and taking a sure command, she went to the huge lump of dough rising from the large mixing bowl in the center of the table. I can still see her as she put her hands upon that mound and in a soft but certain tone she said, “Oh, it’s just about right.” Giving us a nod and a smile, it was clear that this baby would be spared. Quickly she dispatched her orders. It needed just a little more of this, and just another touch of that—and in seconds she was rolling out lefse and frying them up. Lefse ap- peared one after another, until soon the stacks were piling up under steaming cloths.
My mother’s boundary was intimately connected with that of the lefse. The two merged, while nevertheless remaining separate. In fact, many things came together in that moment—not just my mother and the lefse. The dough had to be there, obviously. And though it was “just about right,” my mother had to be there as well or there would have been no lefse. With my mother came the know-how—which, in turn, revealed that many other, previous and unseen events were also entangled in this happening of my mother making lefse. And within the dough were those who produced the ingredients, and who trucked them to market. Within that dough were entangled the potato plant, and last year’s harvest.
Yet all the while these countless hidden things came together in this event, it was nevertheless quite evident which was my mother and which was the lefse.
There’s nothing mystical about what I’m trying to point to here. It’s not a poetic metaphor or a Zen-like analogy. It’s a simple, concrete example of that “other” aspect which must be accounted for if we would avoid contradictions. It’s an example of some- one actually becoming merged in an exchange of identity with her object.
Ergo sum?
Excerpted from
How the World Can Be the Way It Is:
An Inquiry for the New Millennium Into Science, Philosophy and Perception
by Steve Hagen,
published September 1995, by Quest Books.
How the World Can Be the Way It Is:
An Inquiry for the New Millennium Into Science, Philosophy and Perception
by Steve Hagen,
published September 1995, by Quest Books.
The subtlety with which we make many of our assumptions is profound indeed. In fact, there is a basic unwarranted (i.e., not found in experience) assumption that goes unidentified by nearly everyone all the time. The consequences of this assumption—this ignorance—are great. The best example of this unwarranted assumption appears in Descartes’ classic proposition, “I think, therefore, I am.”
Descartes wanted to get to some statement that could not be doubted. He wanted certitude. In his day, religious authority had fallen under attack. There had been a renewed interest in the ancient skeptics, most notably Sextus Empiricus, and the unsettling idea was about that all propositions could be rendered equally improbable. It was even being seriously questioned whether there could be any knowledge at all. This was a very troubling problem in Descartes’ time…it still is.
Descartes contemplated the possibility that all we commonly believe might be false. For him the question was, “What do I know?” He tried to find the answer by searching through the various beliefs he felt inclined to hold and, though he was not a skeptic himself, he used skeptical methods to bring himself to doubt all (or so he claimed)…even beliefs he had long held. He doubted all until he came upon his cogito—“I think”—which he regarded as a “primitive datum that the mind can recognize only when it encounters it.”
Descartes set down the assumption that “I think” is the ground that is beyond all doubt. But even in the simple statement “I think,” Descartes had already made an assumption—he assumed the existence of a self. Once he had done this, of course, it was not too difficult for him to “prove” the inevitable conclusion (“therefore I am”), since he had already arrived at that conclusion even before he stated his premise.
Such a tightly knit package is likely to appear as a truism to most of us—and, indeed Descartes’ cogito does appear as a truism to many. But Descartes clearly did not doubt enough. In saying, “I think, therefore I am,” we have already assumed the “I’s” existence even before we begin. This merely reflects our normal way of thinking—we all assume a self most of the time.
Descartes “proved” that he existed by simply positing the “I” prior to setting out on his proof. But this is no proof. Just as it is not difficult to discover “God” if we begin with the foregone conclusion that “God is,” so too it is not surprising that Descartes could discover “I am” after he had already posited the “I” in his thought. This isn’t the unshakable proof, the indubitable ground that Descartes was seeking. If he truly questioned his existence, how could he have gotten away with having already assumed it? He didn’t say, “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I do exist, now what would this entail?” He came right out, first thing, with “I.” In fact, what he said was:
I noticed that while I was trying to think everything false, it must needs be that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth, I am thinking, therefore I exist [Je pense, donc je suis] was so solid and secure that the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics could not overthrow it, I judged that I did not scruple to accept it as the first principle of [the] philosophy that I was seeking.
But where or what is this “I”? What does Descartes mean? Does he mean his mind is thinking? Does he mean his body is thinking? Notice how the “I” gets tossed into the picture from out of nowhere. What is doing the thinking here? What exactly is the “I” referring to?
The absurdity of this assertion becomes clearer once we switch subjects. We’ve all used the common expression “It’s raining.” But would we say, “It is raining, therefore it is”? What is raining? Do we suppose there is some entity corresponding to the word “it” which is doing the raining? No, of course not!
But how does this situation differ from “I am thinking”? What is raining? Who is thinking? Where are these hidden entities? What is this “I” we keep referring to? What thing corresponds to this word? What is this “I” that is doing the thinking?
You may say, “But, of course, when we use the expression ‘it is raining,’ there’s nothing out there which corresponds to the word ‘it’—it’s just that we cannot construct a proper sentence in English unless it has a subject. And so, by convention, we insert one. But this is obviously not the case with the ‘I’ in ‘I am thinking.’”
Oh? Then what is the “I” referring to? Where is it located? What are its properties? The more we try to grasp what “I” is, the more it slips away from us. As Ambrose Bierce put it, “I think I think, therefore, I think I am.” We’ve assumed and have locked our homuncular self at the end of an endless regression…and we can’t get to it. “I” seems to refer to something we tacitly assume is there, but which we can’t seem to find. The “I” is deeply, profoundly, yet quietly assumed…but it’s assumed without justification. Recall how difficult it is to answer a simple question such as, “Is that you in your baby picture?” We can’t find anything in experience which clearly corresponds to the word “you”—that is why we find it so difficult to answer this question.
So now, how does “I am thinking, therefore I am” differ from “it is raining, therefore it is”?
I is a most difficult thing to come to doubt—but we must go beyond Descartes and doubt it, for it is in fact no more than a mere construct, a concept, a belief, and it is nowhere to be found within direct experience (i.e., through perception). We do not find anything in our experience which corresponds to that word, “I.”
Let’s consider how Descartes might have constructed his “proof” in a manner that better reflects actual experience—i.e., which reflects perception rather than conception. Note that, short of its being demanded by the conventions of language, the “I” is absent. What Descartes was directly aware of was “thought” and not “I.” Whichever way we might put it—“thought,” “cognizance,” “awareness,” “mind,” “consciousness”—these words more closely refer to immediate experience than the word I.
The problem with Descartes’ cogito is that it admits of a self before it admits of other, and such is in direct violation of actual experience. (The old joke is that he put Descartes before de horse—but I hasten to add that putting Descartes after the horse doesn’t work either.) If it is “thought” and not “I” which is directly experienced, then Descartes should have said, “thought, therefore I am.” But, of course, such a proposition is clearly absurd, for now it is plain to see how the “I” just pops into the picture out of nowhere. The insertion of “I” follows neither logically nor experientially from the first statement.
To get his statement more in line with direct experience, Descartes might have said “cogitatio ergo esse”—“Thought, therefore to be.” Or, “Thought, therefore existence.” Thought, therefore something (without naming it) is. Something’s going on, in other words.*
We must come to doubt the common-sense idea that we experience an “I” antecedent to, separate and distinct from what is “not-I.” We must come to doubt the explanation that there can be a self (literally a “not-other”) that is separate from an other.
*But the word “esse”—“to be, to exist”—is still not quite reflective of actual experience, for it has a static quality about it. Since all our experience is in (or of) time, the phrase “thought is to be” does not quite hit the mark, for “to be” implies an abiding, unchanging thing. To get closer to actual experience, then, Descartes might have said “cogitatio ergo existere,” or better yet, “sensus ergo existere” (consciousness, therefore becoming).
Descartes wanted to get to some statement that could not be doubted. He wanted certitude. In his day, religious authority had fallen under attack. There had been a renewed interest in the ancient skeptics, most notably Sextus Empiricus, and the unsettling idea was about that all propositions could be rendered equally improbable. It was even being seriously questioned whether there could be any knowledge at all. This was a very troubling problem in Descartes’ time…it still is.
Descartes contemplated the possibility that all we commonly believe might be false. For him the question was, “What do I know?” He tried to find the answer by searching through the various beliefs he felt inclined to hold and, though he was not a skeptic himself, he used skeptical methods to bring himself to doubt all (or so he claimed)…even beliefs he had long held. He doubted all until he came upon his cogito—“I think”—which he regarded as a “primitive datum that the mind can recognize only when it encounters it.”
Descartes set down the assumption that “I think” is the ground that is beyond all doubt. But even in the simple statement “I think,” Descartes had already made an assumption—he assumed the existence of a self. Once he had done this, of course, it was not too difficult for him to “prove” the inevitable conclusion (“therefore I am”), since he had already arrived at that conclusion even before he stated his premise.
Such a tightly knit package is likely to appear as a truism to most of us—and, indeed Descartes’ cogito does appear as a truism to many. But Descartes clearly did not doubt enough. In saying, “I think, therefore I am,” we have already assumed the “I’s” existence even before we begin. This merely reflects our normal way of thinking—we all assume a self most of the time.
Descartes “proved” that he existed by simply positing the “I” prior to setting out on his proof. But this is no proof. Just as it is not difficult to discover “God” if we begin with the foregone conclusion that “God is,” so too it is not surprising that Descartes could discover “I am” after he had already posited the “I” in his thought. This isn’t the unshakable proof, the indubitable ground that Descartes was seeking. If he truly questioned his existence, how could he have gotten away with having already assumed it? He didn’t say, “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I do exist, now what would this entail?” He came right out, first thing, with “I.” In fact, what he said was:
I noticed that while I was trying to think everything false, it must needs be that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth, I am thinking, therefore I exist [Je pense, donc je suis] was so solid and secure that the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics could not overthrow it, I judged that I did not scruple to accept it as the first principle of [the] philosophy that I was seeking.
But where or what is this “I”? What does Descartes mean? Does he mean his mind is thinking? Does he mean his body is thinking? Notice how the “I” gets tossed into the picture from out of nowhere. What is doing the thinking here? What exactly is the “I” referring to?
The absurdity of this assertion becomes clearer once we switch subjects. We’ve all used the common expression “It’s raining.” But would we say, “It is raining, therefore it is”? What is raining? Do we suppose there is some entity corresponding to the word “it” which is doing the raining? No, of course not!
But how does this situation differ from “I am thinking”? What is raining? Who is thinking? Where are these hidden entities? What is this “I” we keep referring to? What thing corresponds to this word? What is this “I” that is doing the thinking?
You may say, “But, of course, when we use the expression ‘it is raining,’ there’s nothing out there which corresponds to the word ‘it’—it’s just that we cannot construct a proper sentence in English unless it has a subject. And so, by convention, we insert one. But this is obviously not the case with the ‘I’ in ‘I am thinking.’”
Oh? Then what is the “I” referring to? Where is it located? What are its properties? The more we try to grasp what “I” is, the more it slips away from us. As Ambrose Bierce put it, “I think I think, therefore, I think I am.” We’ve assumed and have locked our homuncular self at the end of an endless regression…and we can’t get to it. “I” seems to refer to something we tacitly assume is there, but which we can’t seem to find. The “I” is deeply, profoundly, yet quietly assumed…but it’s assumed without justification. Recall how difficult it is to answer a simple question such as, “Is that you in your baby picture?” We can’t find anything in experience which clearly corresponds to the word “you”—that is why we find it so difficult to answer this question.
So now, how does “I am thinking, therefore I am” differ from “it is raining, therefore it is”?
I is a most difficult thing to come to doubt—but we must go beyond Descartes and doubt it, for it is in fact no more than a mere construct, a concept, a belief, and it is nowhere to be found within direct experience (i.e., through perception). We do not find anything in our experience which corresponds to that word, “I.”
Let’s consider how Descartes might have constructed his “proof” in a manner that better reflects actual experience—i.e., which reflects perception rather than conception. Note that, short of its being demanded by the conventions of language, the “I” is absent. What Descartes was directly aware of was “thought” and not “I.” Whichever way we might put it—“thought,” “cognizance,” “awareness,” “mind,” “consciousness”—these words more closely refer to immediate experience than the word I.
The problem with Descartes’ cogito is that it admits of a self before it admits of other, and such is in direct violation of actual experience. (The old joke is that he put Descartes before de horse—but I hasten to add that putting Descartes after the horse doesn’t work either.) If it is “thought” and not “I” which is directly experienced, then Descartes should have said, “thought, therefore I am.” But, of course, such a proposition is clearly absurd, for now it is plain to see how the “I” just pops into the picture out of nowhere. The insertion of “I” follows neither logically nor experientially from the first statement.
To get his statement more in line with direct experience, Descartes might have said “cogitatio ergo esse”—“Thought, therefore to be.” Or, “Thought, therefore existence.” Thought, therefore something (without naming it) is. Something’s going on, in other words.*
We must come to doubt the common-sense idea that we experience an “I” antecedent to, separate and distinct from what is “not-I.” We must come to doubt the explanation that there can be a self (literally a “not-other”) that is separate from an other.
*But the word “esse”—“to be, to exist”—is still not quite reflective of actual experience, for it has a static quality about it. Since all our experience is in (or of) time, the phrase “thought is to be” does not quite hit the mark, for “to be” implies an abiding, unchanging thing. To get closer to actual experience, then, Descartes might have said “cogitatio ergo existere,” or better yet, “sensus ergo existere” (consciousness, therefore becoming).
What the buddha never taught (Regarding Reincarnation)
I have received more questions on reincarnation than any other topic I’ve written about, with the exception of the cow picture in Buddhism Plain and Simple. People are surprised when I point out, as I did in Buddhism Is Not What You Think, that the Buddha not only didn’t teach reincarnation, his message actually counters such belief. Since I have repeatedly been asked to say more on that topic, as I was in a recent online interview, I thought it might be helpful to expand on that point here.
For thousands of years, if we are to rely on the Vedas and archaeological evidence, people living in the region we now call India worshiped countless gods through the performance of meticulous rituals. Though their needs were simple, worldly, and direct, the people devoutly believed these rites had to be performed flawlessly to ensure that they would obtain what they were seeking—prosperity, abundant crops, health, and long life. What more could anyone want?
Yet at the start of the first millennium bce, this rapidly began to change. The Vedas had been written down by this time, but now a new kind of writing began to appear—the Upanishads. In these writings people began to ask what their former worldly concerns amounted to if, even after a life with prosperity, children, and longevity, all would be taken from them by death. Questions of death and the possibility of an afterlife became of increasing concern, discussion, and speculation. After death, they wondered, even if one ascended to heaven, how could one be sure of not dying yet again? Wasn’t life difficult enough? The prospect of dying over and over and over again seemed truly dreadful, devoutly to be avoided.
They began to speak of “redeath,” and the more that idea was tossed about, the more the people engaged in debates to find some solution to this new and dreaded prospect. Those who held sway in the debates competed for students and lay followers. Thus many teachers emerged at this time, all touting their own ways of defeating the dreaded prospect. Heated rivalries became common. Indeed, the idea of redeath had become a widespread and urgent problem for the populace at large. Evolving into various ideas of reincarnation over the next few centuries, these notions spread relatively quickly, taking firm hold even among the common people of the Gangetic plain. By the time of the Buddha belief in reincarnation had become deeply rooted and widely accepted.
It must be understood that, unlike many people living in our culture today who see the prospect of reincarnation as hopeful—as a continuation of “me,” the self—people of this ancient culture saw redeath as something to be dreaded, a problem to be overcome. Unlike those who entered into debates about what happens to the transmigrating soul—the atman—after death, the Buddha, as he said of his own teachings, “went against the stream.” His teachings not only went against the beliefs of those who still looked to various deities for help and against the masses who kept themselves bound to the dictates of the caste system, his teachings went against the many who believed in the dismal prospect of a transmigrating self and against those who diligently sought release from that prospect.
Central to the Buddha’s teaching is the profound and subtle insight that permanence is never to be grasped. In other words, if we settle the mind and look carefully, we do not find a self within human experience. Furthermore, he recognized this insight as the very release from the dreadful prospect of the transmigrating soul that people had been seeking. But it wasn’t release because it provided a way to deal with the dreadful prospect. It was release because it was to see thoroughly that the dreadful prospect itself was utter delusion. Simply seeing through the illusion of self is the release. There is no such prospect as redeath to be dreaded.
Though we don’t know precisely what the Buddha’s actual words were, it seems he may very well have spoken of rebirth, or more specifically, of rebirth consciousness. It is likely that, because the notion of reincarnation was so prevalent, and because his insight that we don’t find a self within human experience was so subtle and profound and difficult, many people down through the ages have construed his possible mention of rebirth consciousness as a reference to reincarnation—the very delusion for which his teaching, when properly understood, provides the antidote.
Consequently, over the centuries a great deal has been built upon this misinterpretation. This confused and incoherent understanding of the Buddha’s message has been widely propagated and handed down as if it were what the Buddha actually taught. Or, as the late Jiddu Krishnamurti aptly observed, “They didn’t listen to Buddha, that’s why we have Buddhism.”
It seems quite unlikely that the Buddha endorsed the notion of reincarnation, since it goes so strongly against his most powerful, subtle, and profound insight—namely, anatman, the unlocatability of a self.
If the Buddha was not speaking of reincarnation, what could he have meant by the term rebirth consciousness? Simply that the immediate experience of this moment does not appear as this moment but, rather, as continuous change. In other words, this moment appears as very like, but different from, what appears to have immediately preceded it. The world appears as reborn, over and over, moment after moment.
Reincarnation requires a speculative belief in a substantiated self that persists from moment to moment—precisely what the Buddha’s teaching of anatman rejects. In contrast, rebirth consciousness refers to nothing more than the awareness that this moment appears now, with its own unique before and after, without ever entailing any presumed entity that persists through time.
In other words, while reincarnation requires a self that persists through time—something that is not directly experienced and that was thus rejected by the Buddha—rebirth consciousness makes no reference to anything that is not directly experienced or observed. In short, it relies not on abstraction, speculation, or belief, but on immediate, direct experience alone.
The Buddha’s realization that a self is never found—let alone that such transmigrates—precludes the possibility that he ever taught reincarnation. He was simply trying to help people out of their confusion regarding that notion.
is there life after death?
Suppose that someone were to ask you this: does the great expanse of the Earth go on forever or does it have an edge? We might conclude that the person asking it is ignorant or confused. They’ve presumed something—a flat Earth—that’s not supported by actual experience.
So it is with this seemingly urgent question about life after death.
There were a number of questions the Buddha kept silent on, and this was one of them. He was not silent because he was perplexed by it, but because he knew the real need of the questioner was to get out of his or her confusion, rather than to grasp at an answer that would be unsupported by actual experience.
The vital question for us lies in how we live our lives now. When we fully attend to this, vain speculations about “life after death” lose their urgency.
—Steve Hagen
April 2003
Essay by Norm Randolph
You are buddha
Throughout his teaching career, Katagiri Roshi taught, “You are Buddha; all beings are Buddha.”
At first no one understood, but eventually, a few people did. At his last Dharma talk, before he died of cancer, he was very weak and had to be helped to sit down on his cushion. But when he spoke, he gave a very powerful lecture. He knew it was his last talk, so he gave it everything he had. And in this talk, he very strongly emphasized, “You are Buddha.”
The great Zen master, Suzuki Roshi, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, also pointed this out. He would say to his students, “When I look at you, I see you all as perfect Buddhas.” However, he would go on to say, “I see you all as perfect Buddhas until you open your mouths to say something.”
He saw very clearly that our True Nature was the Buddha Nature. Yet, it was also clear to him that we were ignorant of our True Nature.
Buddha is the Reality of Awakeness, which is the True Self, the True Life, the True Nature of each being. It is the subjectless, objectless Awakeness which is being directly experienced by all beings now.
The historical Buddha, who lived in India approximately 2,500 years ago, was a person who profoundly realized the Reality of Awakeness. He clearly saw that this Reality was his True Self. He realized that the seemingly separate individual that he seemed to be was an empty, illusory manifestation of the True Self or Buddha. He realized this was true for all the seemingly separate beings and phenomena in the universe.
The Reality of Awakeness or Buddha is the boundless, all-inclusive Reality of here and now. Different terms are used to point to this Reality—Totality, Wholeness, the Universe, Dharma, Truth, Thusness, the True Self, Supreme Enlightenment, the One Buddha Mind, and other terms as well.
This Reality of Awakeness is sometimes described as being wondrous and inconceivable. It is described in this way because it cannot be objectified or conceptually grasped. No matter how much we speak about it or write about it, it cannot be pinned down or objectified, or explained or packaged into a conceptual description. Nevertheless, it is clear and obvious; it is being directly experienced now, and everything is a manifestation of it. It cannot be hidden. Dharma teaching is pointing to this Reality of Awakeness, which cannot be explained or objectified and yet, which cannot be hidden.
This Reality of Awakeness or Buddha, which is clear and obvious, is usually ignored or overlooked. It is ignored by getting caught up in the belief in separation of self and other and the belief in a dualistically structured Reality. Reality is ignored when we are caught up in these beliefs and respond and act based on these beliefs. We are profoundly taken in by these beliefs in many ways. We have many beliefs or assumptions about ourselves, others, and the nature of Reality, and we live our lives based on these beliefs. This is the ignorance by which our Buddhahood is ignored.
We don’t try to get rid of beliefs. We don’t try to get rid of the ignoring or ignorance. We don’t try to get rid of the emotional responses, desires, and patterns of behavior based on this ignorance. Instead, we are just aware of them. Eventually these can be seen as empty, illusory manifestations of the True Self or Buddha—then they cease to be problems. Then they can be seen as helpful pointers—showing us how we are interpreting Reality, how we are responding to it, how we are getting stuck, and how we can be released. In this practice of Awakeness the ways in which the True Self is ignored can eventually be seen through, and they drop away by themselves.
Suzuki Roshi used to say, “Since you are Buddha, you must be Buddha. That is our practice.” In a lecture he gave at the monastery at Tassajara in July 1968 he said, “When it is hot you should be hot Buddha. When it is cold you should be cold Buddha.”
He went on to say that each individual, each thing, each event, each situation, each experience is Buddha. Each thought, each feeling, each emotion, each desire, each perception, each state of consciousness is Buddha. When you realize that you are Buddha and understand everything as an unfolding of the Truth, then whatever you experience is the actual teaching of Buddha, and whatever you do is the actual practice of Buddha.
Usually people practice for a long time believing that it is a separate ego self who is carrying out this practice. With continued practice, with help from a teacher, this belief can eventually be seen through.
People usually begin practice with the belief that after a long time, they will eventually attain Enlightenment. But Supreme Enlightenment or Buddha is being directly experienced now. It is not a matter of practicing for a long time and eventually attaining Enlightenment.
Most people starting out in this practice believe that practice is a means to attain Enlightenment. They believe practice and Enlightenment have a dualistic, before-and-after, means-and-end relationship. But, with continued practice, this belief can eventually be seen through. It becomes clear that Enlightenment, Buddha, or Truth is what we are and that practice and Enlightenment are one.
Some questions might arise, such as, “Who practices?” “Who eventually sees?” “What is eventually seen?” and “How long is eventually?”
These are interesting questions, but don’t try to figure out or conceptually grasp particular answers. Whatever concepts or beliefs we have about Reality are just limited views. It is by holding to these beliefs and limited views about Reality that the actual Reality—Buddha—is overlooked.
So, just live a life of wide open Awakeness and curiosity as if we are discovering who we are and what our experience is for the first time. Just be Awake to directly-experienced Reality now. Just be Awake to directly-experienced Reality now without being taken in by beliefs and limited views. If we believe there is a separate self who practices and “eventually” sees and there is a separate reality that is “eventually” seen, then the directly-experienced True Self or Buddha is being ignored.
The True Self manifests itself in such a way as to bring about the appearance of separation of self and others and the appearance of duration in time and extension in space. There seem to be separate beings, times, places, and events to which names, labels, personal pronouns, and conceptual categories can be applied. In accordance with how things appear to be and in accordance with conventional speech, we use names, labels, personal pronouns, and conceptual categories. We need to function and communicate in the conventional, seemingly dualistic world where there seems to be separation of self and others, without being taken in by the belief that there actually is this separation. Then we can be truly helpful to ourselves and all the seemingly separate beings that we meet.
In this practice of Awakeness it can eventually be seen that all beings are mutually assisting each other. These are not separate beings. If they actually were separate beings, this life of mutual assistance would not be possible. When this is clearly seen, a life of compassion, joy, and fearlessness opens up to us, and we can live as the great Buddhas that we are.