“The great work of life and death”: Merton and Zen confront mortality

A piece I wrote for the blog ccsignum.wordpress.com in October before I started this blog.

Signum

by Matthew Kizior ’11

My spiritual life is a complicated mess, and I like it that way. Raised Catholic, I embrace the more mystical aspects of the Catholic part of my life, as you may have been able to figure out if you read my earlier piece on Thomas Merton. Ever since I was fourteen, Merton has captured my imagination, and I’ve read exactly fourteen of his works over the past eight years. It was the Trappist monk’s exploration of Zen Buddhism in his books that led me to the path of practicing it myself. Buddhism and Catholicism have a lot in common, which I could not even begin to get into here.

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Notes From The Classroom: Teaching Hinduism

“The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.” – Swami Vivekananda

After a week of straight classes in Homestead, PA, I returned to the Social Studies classroom at Arsenal Middle School in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville on January 8th. I had been preoccupied with my own grad classes, so I did not know what to expect when I re-entered the classroom. I knew we were learning about Ancient India, but with how the last three units went (Prehistory, Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt), I assumed we would still be studying geography or agriculture. When my mentor teacher told me he had already introduced Hinduism to the students, I was surprised. I was also thrilled, because having majored in Religious Studies, Hinduism was something I could have fun with.

“My specialty,” I thought.

The Difficulty

India is a tough nut to crack in terms of teaching history. Not because the history is hard to figure out or learn, but because there is so much of it! The Indians developed very early on. There is evidence of plumbing technology in Mohenjo-Daro to rival Rome centuries before that western empire even existed. The Ancient Indians also figured out the Earth was round thousands of years before Europeans would stop thinking of it being flat by simply looking at the shadow of the Earth on the moon during an eclipse (though the concept of a Flat Earth was itself debunked in Europe long before Columbus sailed to America in 1492). Among these achievements, you have the various different empires, their rulers, those who conquered them, and so on and so forth until you get yourself caught up in a complicated cultural menagerie that is difficult to explain. Hinduism is not the least of those complicated subjects, one part of that being due to its continued relevance in the human psyche.

Unlike other religions that are taught in World History, Hinduism is not a dead religion. Sure, there may be those neo-pagan cults here and there that worship Ra or Baal, but for the most part, Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Mesopotamian religions do not hold the same sort of cultural capital they used to. This is exactly the opposite. As the centuries and then millennia have passed, Hinduism has only continued to excite the imagination of Indians everywhere more and more. From polytheism, to Upanishadic monotheism, to Bhagavan mystical theism, Hinduism and its belief structure has taken many forms over the lifetime of the religion, and just as no two Catholics practice their religion the same, there are definitely no two Hindus that practice their religion the same either.

Any teacher of comparative religion or theology would it difficult to explain Hinduism to adults let alone to middle school students. Here is a question to test my statement: What is the difference between brahmin, brahman, and brahma?

Answers:

brahmin – Vedic Hindu Priest

Brahman – The monotheistic understanding of God in Hinduism; the “Oversoul”

Brahma – The Creator god with three heads. Not predominantly worshiped in modern Hinduism

Those are the answers, but chances are there’s still plenty more about those words that need to be unpacked before you even start to understand what the difference exactly is between Brahma and Brahman, what the word “Vedic” means, and so on. Once again, like the history of India, the concepts and ideas of Hinduism are quite a lot to unpack as well. There are straightforward answers to many questions, but then there are those aspects of any religion that only become more nuanced and opaque as you delve deeper into them.

The Gateway 

Then how does one make Hinduism understandable to students in a middle school setting? It’s not like you can broach the topic of philosophy or theology when it comes to Hinduism with the students, or talk about the intricacies of yoga or the like. However, there’s a basis for everything, and Hinduism finds its basis in it many gods.

The answer to the question “How many Hindu gods are there?” is usually 300 million. Hinduism is not so much a syncretic (the combination of different schools of thought ) religion so much as it is a religion of synthesis. The disparate gods and goddesses of Indo-Aryan, Tamil, and various other cultures that existed in the Indian subcontinent have come together in one single religion, if you even want to call Hinduism a religion. Different gods from vastly different villages became placeholders for Vishnu or Indra, and the combination of different goddesses would culminate in deities such as Devi, the Mother Goddess of all. Surya, the Hindu sun god, who drove his chariot across the sky bringing the sun with him, is said to have even inspired the Roman sun god Sol Invictus, with the similarities in action and function being unlike other sun gods from Hellenistic areas. These different gods and goddesses bring flavor and create a gateway to teaching a religion and culture that otherwise may be alien. Unlike Christianity with its abstract idea of a Triune God, or the Buddhist concept of nirvana, the Hindu pantheon brings color and vivacity unlike other religions I have studied.

Kali, the goddess of death and warfare. Ganesha, the god of wisdom with the head of an elephant. Hanuman, the god of the apes and attendant to Rama, the avatar of Vishnu. Shiva Nataraja, the destroyer-creator who keeps the balance of the universe through acts of spiritual annihilation and rebirth. With images both serene and terrifying, Hinduism evokes the imagination through idols and artwork students do not see in their usual environments. To them, it’s a whole different way of approaching and envisioning religion and divinity. Whether you are in a public or private school, the students have reactions and connections to these representations you may be hard pressed to find when talking about other religions. Students do not often identify with ancient Egyptian or Roman gods. The only corollary I could possibly think of the fascination some students have with Greek mythology.

Greek gods are chaotic and narcissistic, representatives of an uncaring universe,  while Hindu deities themselves are essentially the universe. Whereas Greek gods do not play by the rules, Hindu gods enforce the rules by bending them. You can make this clear to the students through the plethora of fantastic stories that exist about Hinduism. Krishna, the cowherd who easily bested the strongest men as a child and whose mother saw the entirety of the universe when he opened his mouth. Or Rama, who broke the divine bow and defeated all the mortal men to win the hand of his wife-to-be, Sita. The Hindu gods do not interfere in the affairs of the world so much as they are a part of the order of the world. Whereas other gods are far off and living in places such as Mt. Olympus or the Underworld, the Hindu gods are a living part of the universe they helped create.

In this way, the Hindu gods are instantly more relatable for students and teachers alike. We can see the universal story of individuals, whether heroes or villains, play out in these ancient stories the way they may play out in their modern ones, just with different heroes in such figures as Batman or The Flash. The Hindu gods are a good way to explain difficult concepts and ideas we find throughout Indian history and culture, but also provide something that goes one step further – a living, breathing, and imaginative tradition of how humans have come to understand the universe and our place in it. Hindu gods and goddesses are continuing to help future generations become excited and curious about their world in their infinite and eternal capacity as teachers to us all.

Shobogenzo & Zenki: Dogen on Life and Death

Now that we have introduced our audience to the basics of what Zen may entail for the practitioner, we will dive right into one of the greatest minds Japanese Buddhism has to offer – Dogen Zenji (1200-1253). While Buddhist philosophy is dense, hopefully this exposure to Dogen and commentary on a single chapter of his magnum opus, Shobogenzo, will encourage those who read this not to be deterred if they ever encounter Buddhist philosophy in the future.

The Master

Dogen Zenji is the founder of the Japanese Soto school of Zen Buddhism, and one of the greatest philosophical minds to come out of Japan and the Zen tradition. Rehabilitating the Japanese Zen tradition after it was subsumed by the larger and more influential Tendai school of thought, Dogen traveled all the way to China to relearn Zen as it was practiced before being diluted by more esoteric schools of thought. China is the place where Dogen believed he would find Zen in its purest form.

From there, the rest tends to become history as they say. He returned to Japan, and immediately found push back from the Tendai religious authorities in the capital. In response, Dogen relocated his Soto school to Fukui Prefecture, where he established his first temple, Eihei-ji (Eternal Peace), then known as Sanshoho Daibutsuji (a possible reference to the four Buddhist guardians who used to protect the temple). At this place of residence he trained monks and wrote down the rules and philosophy for his school in the Eihei Koroku and Shobogenzo. Of these two texts, the latter has had the more definitive impact on Japanese and Western Zen.

The difficult part about explaining the Shobogenzo is that the Shobogenzo is difficult to explain in the first place. An altogether comprehensive document, the Shobogenzo is a cumulative and exhaustive synthesis of the ideas and teachings of a single Zen master over a lifetime of arduous work and introspection. On one level, it is simply another clandestine philosophical document in a long line of great Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhist philosophy hearkening back to the Zen roots of Yogacara and Madhyamika thought.  On another level, the Shobogenzo is to Japanese and Buddhist philosophy what Hegel’s philosophy of phenomenology was to Existentialism and the Berlin school of thought – both redefining and definitive in many aspects.

Dogen was able to explain in the Shobogenzo what some Zen Masters had been teaching wordlessly to their students for centuries. As a document, it continues to be an expression of concepts and views that may have otherwise been lost over the eight hundred years that have passed since Dogen wrote it during the duration of his brief time in this world. Just as Hakuin, Ryokan, Kukai, and Ikkyu sought to recapture the spirit of Buddhism in Japan through their works, so Dogen sought to solidify the spirit of Zen he had found  in China for generations to come. And the funny part of this is that Dogen’s insight into the predicament that would befall later generations actually had some truth to it. High Buddhist Philosophy in Dogen’s own Soto school would fall to the wayside. When his work was found again in the nineteenth century, it brought philosophical thought back to the forefront of modern Japanese Zen.

The Shobogenzo was a much more esoteric text than it is today. Written in the classical Japanese language and calligraphy of the Kamakura Jidai (1185-1333), most Zen monks of the Soto school forgot how to read the text altogether. This issue was only compounded by Soto Zen’s turn to the more mystical Buddhist philosophy of one of Dogen’s successors, Keizan Jokin (1268-1325). Due to these and other internal issues, the text was lost until the nineteenth century, when Japanese scholars and Orientalists rediscovered the text and translated it into modern Japanese and then into other various languages. The rediscovery of the Shobogenzo led to a burgeoning interest in Dogen’s Soto philosophy among Japanese Buddhists and academics and eventually Western practitioners as well, though it would take them a while to get to a point of familiarity with Zen to even broach the Shobogenzo.

Even after all this talk about the Shobogenzo, it’s historical origins and implications, you probably are left wondering about it. If this text is so important to philosophy and Buddhist thought, then, as a possible philosophy major or Buddhist who is reading this article, why have you never heard of it? There are two immediate answers to that:

1. Western philosophy has had a tendency to focus on analytic philosophy for the last three decades, even ignoring their own traditions found within Continental philosophy. This alone is damaging enough to Western philosophy and its survival within the popular mindset.
2. Western Buddhism does not tend to hit upon the larger philosophical topics and authors of the religion, such as that of shunyata (emptiness) and Nagarjuna. This is due to Western Buddhism’s inordinate attention on mindfulness and self-help. In my opinion, this has cost Western Buddhism the respect of those interested in philosophy and has brought about a great deal of reliance on ceremonialism, clericalism, and even worse, pseudo-buddhism. Meditation is the root of Buddhist practice and is an important part of the philosophy of the Buddha himself, but familiarity with Buddhist thought has to be ingrained in the Western community if it seeks to continue for generations to come.

As a person who grew up Catholic, many people find it difficult to ultimately leave behind the ideas and ideals of Catholicism because of the ingrained philosophical tradition that exists within that religion. Just as Catholics become familiar with their own philosophy, Buddhists need to know their own traditions and ideas if they are to pass on a living, breathing tradition that continues to edify and enervate the Western mind. It is for this sake that I am starting this series of commentaries on the Shobogenzo. Others have come before (shout-out to Brad Warner), but the number is few and there need to be those who continue the tradition of engaging with these texts so as to transmit the message to the next generation. Zen may be a tradition of wordless transmission, but it is through the medium of word that man continues to engage with his world. So, for the sake of engaging with the world and engaging with the Shobogenzo, the first of hopefully many “Zen Millenial Shobogenzo Commentaries” is underway.

Dogen’s Shobogenzo: Zenki Commentary

First off, I am by no means an expert on the Shobogenzo. I have not dedicated my “entire life” to studying it because I haven’t lived much of life yet and there are many more things I want to do other than read the works of one, singular person. I write as a spiritual practitioner and everyday person writing for spiritual practitioners and everyday people. My commentary and essays are informed by personal experiences and thoughts and insights I have meditated on.

In the Zenki, there is a passage we can isolate to get to the heart of what Dogen is attempting to tell us:

“The Great Path of the Buddhas, in its consummation, is passage to freedom, is actualization. That passage to freedom, in one sense, is that life passes through life to freedom, and death too passes through death to freedom. Therefore, there is leaving life and death, there is entering life and death; both are the Great Path of consummation. There is abandoning life and death, there is crossing over life and death; both are the Great Path of consummation.

Actualization is life, life is actualization. When that actualization is taking place, it is without exception the complete actualization of life, it is the complete actualization of death. This pivotal working can cause life and cause death. At the precise moment of the actualization of this working, it is not necessarily great, not necessarily small, not all-pervasive, not limited, not extensive, not brief.

The present life is in this working, this working is in the present life. Life is not coming, not going, not present, not becoming. Nevertheless, life is the manifestation of the whole works, death is the manifestation of the whole works. Know that among the infinite things in oneself, there is life and there is death. One should calmly think: is this present life, along with the myriad things concomitant with life, together with life or not? There is nothing at all, not so much as one time or one phenomenon, that is not together with life. Even be it a single thing, a single mind, none is not together with life.”

What Dogen is proposing is nothing if not revolutionary in a way: life does not happen without something to do the living.

1. Life & Death

What are the implications of this view?

Was there not life when the Big Bang occurred? Did not the smallest molecules an single-celled organisms live?

Were not the dinosaurs alive in a more ferocious manner than we could ever fathom?

What is it that makes our experience and relation to life any more pronounced and extraordinary than for those creatures who came before us?

The answer to these questions is that, yes, beings and creatures other than humans have lived and will continue to live, but it is our conscious act of living that gives life that quality of consciousness in the first place. Our actions and being are a part of what defines the use and nature of time and space. Our mere existing is actualized buddhahood, because to awake ourselves to a sense of being, to a sense of “The Now,” is to be fully immersed in all the threads of action and intent that have brought us to this very moment. This leads into one of Dogen’s more radical conceptualizations: being-time.

There is a lot that goes into the concept of being-time, but for now, let us interpret it as the fact that there is no time or moment without something there experiencing the time or moment. If it was not for the quality of something being in the first place, there would be no sense of time that we could hold onto in the way we may experience it every day. Hence, “actualization is life, life is actualization.” Only in the presence of life , and death, can time and moment take on form and action.

Which brings me to an earlier part in the passage:

“…life passes through life to freedom, and death too passes through death to freedom. Therefore, there is leaving life and death, there is entering life and death…”

As I pointed out in my earlier essay, there is a way of looking at Zen as “the great work of life and death.” These words and what they mean to us – life and death – carry a lot of weight within Buddhist doctrine. In looking at this aspect of Dogen’s Zenki, we may want to pay mind to the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy spelled out in the brief Heart Sutra:

“All things are empty:
Nothing is born, nothing dies,
nothing is pure, nothing is stained,
nothing increases and nothing decreases.”

Pay close attention to the second line of this passage from the Heart Sutra. “Nothing is born, nothing dies” – surely this must be a mistake. We see things come into this world of existence and depart from it all the time. What do Buddhists mean when they say they believe nothing is born and nothing dies? Life cannot be non-life, and death cannot be non-death. Out of all the assurances we have in this world, it is that we come into it alone and we leave this world alone. However, ask yourself – what is it that perishes? Do you perish? Does the Jeffery, or Miranda, or Gerald that people knew, is that what perishes?

Or does this concept we have of a static, unchanging self at the center of constantly changing phenomena have a flaw in it somewhere?

When Dogen says “life passes through life to freedom” and “death passes through death to freedom,” these are not simple statements admonishing us to live a good life or to die like a hero. Instead, it asks us to go a step further and realize the thin boundary between what we view as definite states of existence and non-existence may be fuzzier than we had imagined before. In fact, the boundary we thought existed between these two states may not exist in the way we imagine it at all. When we live, we have to contrast it with the extreme opposite that we think of, and that is death. However, death itself is simply a consequence of being alive, and guess what, being both lifeless and deathless was the antecedent to our lives as we currently live them. What Dogen, and Buddhist philosophy in general, is trying to make us see is that the labels we put on ephemeral states do not make the states themselves any more lasting or concrete. They are simply one among many types of states of being in this universe that come and go. To be free, we must live a life not beholden to the concept of life, just as we should not die beholden to the concept of death. While Zen strips our consciousness down to the basics – which life and death are – it also makes us go one step further. To peer over the cliff into the vast expanse below to glimpse what we were too afraid to look at before. Zen makes us look at what may lie beyond life and death. Just as it says at the end of the Heart Sutra:

“Gone,
gone,
gone over,
gone fully over.
Awakened!
So be it!”

2. “The Whole Works” 

The word Zenki itself is a Japanese term meaning “the whole works.” In this sense, talking about life and death for Dogen is not a morbid subject, but a discussion of all that Buddhist practice encompasses and reveals through the quieting of the mind and working through the illusion we have set up for ourselves. When we talk about the whole works, we want to refer to a passage from earlier:

“The present life is in this working, this working is in the present life. Life is not coming, not going, not present, not becoming. Nevertheless, life is the manifestation of the whole works, death is the manifestation of the whole works. Know that among the infinite things in oneself, there is life and there is death.”

To build on it, here are two other sections from later in Zenki:

“…the principle of in life the whole works appears has nothing to do with beginning and end; though it is the whole earth and all space, not only does it not block the appearance of the whole works in life, it doesn’t block the appearance of the whole works in death either. When the whole works appears in death, though it is the whole earth and all space, not only does it not block the appearance of the whole works in death, it doesn’t block the appearance of the whole works in life either. For this reason, life doesn’t obstruct death, death doesn’t obstruct life.”

“In the manifestation of the whole works these is life and there is death.”

When we look at these passages as a whole, not only do you the reader now have a practically complete picture of Zenki in Dogen’s Shoogenzo, but you have access to a critical core tenet of a Buddhist understanding of the world: interdependence. Interdependence is a nifty way of saying that all things are united, but instead of simply being united, they are formed because of the interaction of these forces in the world, and contain a bit of each other as well. If that sounds Taoist to you, well then, congratulations, because Taoism is in Zen’s DNA from it’s days as Ch’an in China. Just as there is yang in yin, and vice versa, in the Tao, each thing in the universe contains its opposite.

This may seem odd to us:

“Does peace contain war?”

“Does a dog have a part of a cat?”

“Does vanilla ice cream have a part of chocolate ice cream in it?”

Dogen is not making this point by accident. The issue may have been just as difficult for his students to grasp eight hundred years ago as it is for us today. When he points out that life does not obstruct death, death does not obstruct life, and that the whole works exists in both, he is showing that interdependence is not a viewpoint that settles for simplistic notions of one thing literally being within another. What interdependence makes us realize is that we are in a complicated relationship with our surroundings. Just as a mother and father take care of the child, so do the sun, rain, trees, and ground take care of us by providing us nourishment and new life. The crux of interdependence is all things are intimately connected. All things are in relation to another. If this is true, where do I begin and the other thing/being end?

In answering this question, we see interdependence naturally seeps into the philosophy of shunyata, or emptiness. Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, has a lot in common with the Buddha’s conceptual model of anatman (non-self). Interdependence and emptiness, as Buddhism largely does, puts aside the notion of self. This “self” we believe in is a construct of our opinions, views, knowledge, and more. The life we are currently living is predicated on the notion that there is some thing that is actually there to experience itself, and the world around it, this whole time. If we have the courage to let go of this sense of self, this “ego-I,” then we penetrate into a deeper truth – the stuff behind the self. The mishmash of threads and circumstances that have brought us to this particular body, in this particular time, in this particular place, on this particular day. Once we are privy to these aspects of self, of what has come together to make this self, we see these particularities and pick them apart, thread by thread. When the threads that made you up have unraveled, what is left of what is it that we are? For many, this is where Zen practice starts.

However, Dogen is also attempting to say something else through his Zenki chapter as well. That is, while the idea of self is illusory and ill-advised, being itself is something that is actually there. While there is no self that may be there, in the end, we continue to be. All the people we have been and all the people we have met; all the situations and events of our life; all the books we have read and experience we have gained – all of these things are caught up in one another. There is no separation between any of it. While our idea of who we are and how we continue to live and die may be revolutionized, we continue to be and never stop being. Everything that has ever been and ever will be – that is contained in us. It is contained in the universe. You are the universe. Dogen is asking you: How does it feel to be the universe, to be the whole works?

Well, go on – how does it feel?

The Shobogenzo translation that was used for this essay was from Thomas Cleary’s book, “Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen (1986)”

 

 

 

 

Negative Spaces: Black Holes, Apocalypse, and Enlightenment

“Hidden in the mystery of consciousness, the mind, incorporeal, flies alone and far away.” –The Dhammapada

What is the universe like?

Buddhism accentuates silence, solitude, and all kinds of negative spaces as vessels that may bear a being toward enlightenment.  Zen koans (or riddles that appear to be nonsensical) challenge the mind to break free of human constructs and soar into the void, aimless, thoughtless, and formless.  When one embraces negative spaces, one relinquishes dread, and becomes a gentle force of pure curiosity.

In this piece, I propose that though Western society fears the void, it is the void that will wash away fear.  Death, decay, and apocalypse are sites of immense anxiety for modern minds that wish to cling to the thin fabric of illusive reality.  With our material bodies we become attached to all that makes us comfortable–to fecundity, to the light of the sun, and to aliveness.  We deny that the earth is a necropolis, that we haunt it with living bodies.  The terror we feel in response to the unknown thrives because we resist the unknown.  Here, I examine the mysteries of the black hole and uncover the secrets hiding in our notions of death and apocalypse to illustrate how the Western aversion to negative spaces–to endings, to lackings–tethers us to a fantastical hologram and distracts us from enlightenment.

***

There is a point at which the laws of physics cease to make sense.  The marker for this point in spacetime is the event horizon of a black hole.  Throughout the cosmos, endless possibilities and realities are unknown to beings on earth–the notion of the void permeates the universe/multiverse.  In the words of Carl Sagan, “I stress that the universe is mainly made of nothing, that something is the exception.  Nothing is the rule.”  I find a link here between the black hole’s distortion of constructed reality and the Buddhist view that reality is, indeed, constructed.  Buddhist scripture itself states, quite simply, that “All is unreal” (Dhammapada 75).  What can the black hole teach us about the delusion of reality?

To start, science possesses very little understanding of what lies beyond the event horizon, which is considered the point beyond which it is impossible for anything to escape a black hole’s gravitational pull.  Theories suggest that a singularity may exist beyond the event horizon, but if the singularity does exist, it is entirely obscured to us.  We cannot measure anything past the event horizon–we can only speculate its nature.  Until it can be measured, the singularity suspends in the plane of guesswork, and thus it is very tentatively, if at all, thought to exist in the material world.  What we know is that past the black hole’s event horizon, all human-constructed laws of physics appear to entirely break down.  In other words, the exterior of the black hole is comfortably measurable to human beings, since we can observe, for instance, the accretion disk of light and matter spiraling into the black hole.  But the interior is veiled and impenetrable to us as long as we exist outside of the event horizon.

The main characterizing feature of the black hole is, as Western science sees it, its darkness–its obscuring nature.  As heterotrophic beings that feed off energy originally derived from sunlight, humans possess an inherent bias for the light and an aversion to darkness.  This is reasonable; similarly, one would expect worms to be most comfortable in the dirt and birds to be most comfortable in the air.  Does it behoove any given species to explore the realms in which it is least at ease?  Is there anything to be gained from venturing into darkness when we are creatures of the light?  In answer to these questions, I illustrate the human relationship with and anxiety around nothingness.  I use the black hole (and later, death and apocalypse) as a model and a symbol for this anxiety.

The number of black holes is as quantifiable as is the full universe/multiverse–that is to say, hardly quantifiable at all.  We are aware that there are many black holes scattered throughout the cosmos, some small and roguish, others the colossal centers of solar systems and galaxies.  There being a multitude of black holes of varying sizes and galactic roles, the black hole is a source of intense scrutiny for myriad kinds of human beings, whether scientist or layperson.  As such, we note about the black hole what is most intriguing to us: its representation of the unknown.  Timothy Morton aptly argues that human beings find it troublesome to acknowledge what lies outside human measurement:

The measuring device–an apparatus of some kind such as a photographic place–takes the place of the human correlator, but the argument is the same, Protagoras-like one: man (the measurer) is the measure of all things.  Things are caught in a circle: they are real because they are measured, because measuring measures them. (Morton 313)

If we are to accept the proposed phenomenon that humans cannot conceive of existence outside of measurement, then the black hole is an object that inspires perplexity because it is both measurable and immeasurable.  It is measurable because, as I mentioned above, we can observe the accretion disk flowing toward and into the event horizon.  Even those particles of light we cannot see with the naked eye–infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, microwaves, etc–are observable by other means, namely instruments we have developed for such a purpose.  We can also identify the effects of the black hole’s immense gravitational pull upon surrounding objects.  But when we reach the event horizon, we can only theorize.  Past the event horizon, we are all but lost.

I hold that getting oneself lost, and embracing the terrible unknown, is necessary for enlightenment.  Perhaps we can only reach nirvana when we relinquish the need to measure all corners of reality; when we find, as we find with the black hole, that reality is not as real as we had believed.  Another Buddhist verse poses, “Who can trace the invisible path of the [person] who soars in the sky of liberation, the infinite Void without beginning?” (Dhammapada 48).  The answer, inevitably multi-layered, is always “no one.”  If nirvana is the imperturbable stillness that results after all attachments to the material world, the body, space, and time, have all fallen away, then what does the black hole signify?  Perhaps it signifies what is not, since all human-determined “laws” are rendered more and more useless as the gravity pulls stronger.  The black hole also forces earth-bound beings to stare deep into the face of the abyss, which we cannot begin to understand, measure, or categorize.  Let’s fall into this abyss, and see what happens.

***

In his ecotheoretical piece entitled “Grey,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen observes, “Grey is the tint our flesh acquires as cells deprived of nutrients become energy for other creatures, for whom our demise is a flourishing” (Cohen 273).  Such a passage has the power to make many readers intensely uncomfortable, since human beings tend to exercise whatever control they possess to avoid the inevitability of death, even and especially if human death means life for another species.  Images of flesh turned grey slowly creeping off stark white bones, maggots thriving enthusiastically in the eye sockets, flies alighting upon a slack mouth–such descriptions are loathsome to the world of the living.

The abhorrence for death is twofold.  First, the abstract plane of existence (or non-existence) that may follow the act of dying is a site of anxiety because it is unknowable; like the singularity of the black hole, it is entirely obscured.  Second, living beings often experience emotions of resentment and disgust toward bodies that have been voided of life and consciousness.  Again, dead, rotting flesh is a source of extreme revulsion, and even terror, for the living.  Western society has deemed it necessary to keep corpses out of the public sphere–corpses should be embalmed, sterilized, boxed into a lovely vessel, and put into the ground where the living cannot see (or smell) them.  There is a practical reason for this–death tends to be contagious, in that the presence of decay can bring a panoply of diseases and other unsanitary hazards to the world of the living–and, of course, the living usually wish to stay alive.  But there is also an emotional explanation for hiding corpses: because they remind us that all living beings are headed in the same direction.  We are shuffling slowly toward death, our brains preoccupied with insignificant details.  Dead bodies bring a tangible sample of the future for us all.  This rotting nose will be my rotting nose; my skeleton will be visible, too.  Better to bury the corpses, or burn them, and pretend they never tainted our domain.

Even more fascinating than the living’s fear of death is the fear of apocalypse–not just a grey body, but a grey world.  A wasted land with no governmental structure, no law, no resources.  Just the ashen remnants and the faint echoes of culture, society–those things we often refer to as “the real world.”  Think about that commonplace phrase for a moment.  “Welcome to the real world,” adults say after you receive your first shock of injustice, after you graduate from a state of childlike peace, after you depart from the Now.  “The real world” is not the Now.  It is not peace or understanding, whimsy or boundless joy.  “The real world” is taxes, insurance, mortgage, racism, sexism, economic inequality, violence, politics, institutions, hatred, pollution, mass production, monoculture, traffic, greed, anxiety, obsession, and addiction.  

How strange, that such things are what we consider “real.”  In her book, The Fruitful Darkness, Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax challenges the materialistic noise of “the real world”:

For some, silence is a medicine.  For others, silence seems like a poison and is actually feared.  We in the “developed” world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude … Perhaps we fear that with silence we might hear the cries of our own suffering and the suffering in the world. (Halifax 30)

A post-apocalyptic landscape is the muting of such auditory insulation.  Apocalypse topples the commotion of “the real world” and grinds it into dust.  Like the death of the individual, the death of the human-constructed world means a powerful launch into the dark, quiet void of the unknown.  All laws and institutions become meaningless.  If “the real world” is extinguished, then what is reality?  In the ashen ruins of humankind’s dominion, was there ever such a thing as “reality” at all?

When I was a child and teenager, fear of apocalypse bloomed within me.  I remember how, when I was seven or eight years old, I would lie in my bed in the darkness and pray to God that the world would not end that night.  Biblical images of fire and brimstone raining upon the earth haunted me for too many years, before I asked myself one pivotal question: What would happen if I explored the end of the world?  Nowadays, I make it a practice during meditation to envision myself walking into post-apocalyptic settings.  To kneel down, to take a handful of depleted soil and let it run through my fingers before watching it blow away.  To gaze up at the sun burning harshly in the sky.  To feel the silence enveloping me.  To smell the ashes of crumbled cities on the wind.  To sense the multitudes of bones littering the planet.  To experience the raw ecosystem of the Now.  I must ask myself: Is this worse than “the real world”?  Or was “the real world” the true apocalypse?

There are dark regions of human thought that many of us push away at all costs, and most of these regions concern death.  So I walk into the apocalypse, not because I wish it to happen, but because it is going to happen someday whether I wish it or not, whether I am around to see it or not.  Human beings are not special, just as the billions of lifeforms wiped out by ancient extinction events were not special, either.  Perhaps the reason why the notion of apocalypse is so pervasive in the human scope of anxiety is because the end of constructed existence would mean nothing.  Because a post-apocalyptic space is a negative space, and absence would dominate.  Sagan unearthed a compelling point when he wrote that nothingness is the rule, and “somethingness” the exception.  Inevitable apocalypse, death, and the presence of the abyss suggest he was correct.  After all, the universe according to Buddhism is organized thus: human beings have created Somethingness via the errors of craving, attachment, and desire.  Somethingness is failure, where nothingness is the dharma.  

“For death carries away the [person] whose mind is self-satisfied with [their] children and [their] flocks, even as a torrent carries away a sleeping village” (Dhammapada 76).  I have never read a more beautiful illustration of release into the void.

***

Now imagine falling into a black hole.  As you approach the event horizon, you see the accretion disk of light and matter coiling toward the center of the great nothing, the immovable hole in spacetime.  You are part of the halo of light yourself.  You fade slowly inward: you have crossed the event horizon.  Visions of past, present, and future flash before your eyes as you enter the realm of spacetime distortion.  Notions of interior and exterior fall away, since the crossing of the event horizon warps and inverts your perspective.  The borders of the black hole dovetail behind you, making it appear as though you are actually falling out of a spherical orb containing what used to be the “outside”–all the galaxies and nebulae that existed in the dimension from whence you came are reduced to a starry marble behind you.  The marble becomes smaller and smaller until the black envelops you completely.  The gravity here (if there is a “here”) is so dense that your feet are pulled toward the singularity at a faster rate than your head, a phenomenon that stretches your whole body out until you are a string of atoms.  You are dead; you are canceled; you are nothing.  

So.  What is the universe like?

What a useless question.  Better, I think, to ask: What is the universe not like?  Western society’s entrenchment in Judeo-Christian dogma and philosophy conditions an enormous swath of the world’s population to believe that nothingness, apocalypse, and death are phenomena to ignore, or to evade.  But when I use the phrase “negative space,” I do not mean “bad space.”  I mean a lack of space at all.  “All is unreal,” The Dhammapada tells us, but the “un-” prefix is not a warning–it is an encouragement.  As we reach toward nirvana, we must let go of our bias against endings, lackings, and absences.  We must stop gnashing against the void, and allow ourselves to fall in.  

Therefore, in the Emptiness there are no Forms,

No Feelings, Perceptions, Volitions or Consciousness

No Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Body or Mind;

No Form, Sound, Smell, Taste, Touch or Mind Object;

No Realm of the Eye,

Until we come to no realm of Consciousness.

–The Heart Sutra

***

Work Cited

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Grey.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

Dhammapada, The. London: Penguin Classics, 1973. Print.

Halifax, Joan. The Fruitful Darkness. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. Print.

Heart Sutra, The. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2004. Print.

Morton, Timothy. “X-Ray.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

Sagan, Carl. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. New York: Hudson Books, 2006. Print.

Breaking the Bright Mirror into a Million Pieces

“Bodhi is originally without any tree;
The bright mirror is also not a stand.
Originally there is not a single thing —
Where could any dust be attracted?”

-Hui-Neng, Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism

Imagine

Imagine looking at yourself in a mirror.

You study every feature on your face. Every crease, every wrinkle. Every hair and follicle. Every pore and hole. You smile, revealing your half-yellow, half-white teeth. You make your eyes bug out, not being able to decide whether they are too big or just the right size.

You know your eyebrows are too big, everyone always told you that. Bushy and brown, they are an ecosystem unto themselves. They need tending and care, the sort of tending and care that only you would notice and no one else.

Those ears. Those ears are okay, though. You’ve seen a lot of ears in your day, and you can unilaterally say you have some of the best ears you’ve seen. They’re nothing to brag about, but they’re not terrible, and for that, you’re grateful. Someone may have been watching out for you at the moment of your creation.

Your nose, a little bulbous. This perturbs you because you know noses only get bigger as time goes on. No one wants a bigger nose, you tell yourself, but everyone else learns how to deal with it, so you don’t make too much of a fuss over it. At least your lips are not too big or too small. Just right.

Then imagine that mirror breaks into a million pieces. There’s no reflection anymore, just you staring at nothingness and nothingness staring back at you. You put your hand and arm forward to reach out, but nothing’s there. As your reflection goes, you go. Everything you saw yourself as and saw as a part of you is annihilated. Nothing to see and nothing to be. Nothing to do and nothing to act upon. You open your mouth to shout, but you hear nothing. Even if you did hear it, would it be you screaming if you had no mouth to scream with?

Now you are staring back at yourself. You see yourself, but you really don’t see anything. Only that nothingness you peer at is more you than the features you were looking at now. Where others may see blackness, you see definition. Where others see empty space, you see yourself as one part of a void filling all and being all.

Then, a blinding light. You are back in front of the mirror, with your just-right-lips, your bulbous eyes and too-big-nose, those bushy eyebrows you pay so much attention to. All those features are in front of the mirror again, and are staring back at you through the mirror.

But are you there?

Zen dismantles you, and I’m not quite sure it puts you back together again. Zen isn’t sure there really is a “you” to put together in the first place. It asks the practitioner to really think about what it is we are in the first place.

Well, what are you?

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Be careful how you answer, or you may be condemned to Hell for a thousand years.

The Great Work

Why Zen? Well, what is Zen? You may have a hundred questions as to what Zen really is. You may have thought that it meant peace, bliss, tranquility, etc. Did you know it meant “concentration?” Derived from the Sanskrit word Dhyana, which became Ch’an when it hit China and Son when it found its way into Korea, and finally Zen when it settled in Japan, Zen is a school of thought in Buddhism that seeks to find enlightenment through the act of silent, absorbing meditation. The “I-Thou” is dismantled, the objective and subjective cease to have differences. The only sounds you hear are your breathing and the chirping of the cicada, which are the same sound.

The truth is Zen’s literal translation is “concentration,” but the truth is that words honestly mean nothing and that whatever meaning you attach to them is just as significant and important as the definition that appears in the pages of Merriam-Webster Dictionary. There is a way of looking at and defining Zen that I like far more than the definition we find in the dictionary. The Zen Master Seung Sahn (1927-2004) defined Zen as “the great work of life and death.” Defining Zen in this manner makes it more than simple concentration – our life depends on it.

What does this imply when it comes to practicing Zen? To practice Zen is to practice the art of living. To live is to be aware, awake, cognizant of what you are and what is in your surroundings. Most of the time we do not so much live as survive, and if all we do with the time we have is survive, then what was the point of living in the first place? Life is something you have to work at and with, not against, as so many of us do. We go against the direction life is pulling us in, against the tide of change that inevitably comes with being alive. Zen sits you down and tells you not to rush through or against the flow, but to stay still within it.

Death is another matter entirely. Just as Zen teaches us to live, it teaches us to die. To die to ego, to the idea we have of ourselves, of others, of what life supposed to be. To die to life, and to live with the knowledge that death is with us when all is said and done. Just as death gives way to life, life gives way to death. If it was not for the cycle of change, death, and renewal, life would not continue to go on and thrive. Without death, life would stagnate, bereft of the glaring definition it gains when compared against death. Zen sees the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end. When sitting still, breathing in, and breathing out, you notice you are on the precipice of death. It was always there. You just never noticed.

Zen is “the great work of life and death” simply because life and death is all there is when everything else is stripped away. Your ego, zen, the world and your body – when we tear ourselves away from all the words and concepts that constantly bind us, all there ever was or will be was the beginning and the end. Zen is what comes in between.

Look at the mirror again and tell me – was there ever a mirror there to begin with?