Debate, from “The Dao Bums”

ST:  Do you have a fear of death when your mind is still?

MF:  My mind does not “still” per se. I arrive at a rhythm:

1) Relax the activity of the body, in inhalation and exhalation;

2) Find a feeling of ease and calm the senses connected with balance, in inhalation and exhalation;

3) Appreciate and detach from thought, in inhalation and exhalation;

4) Look to the free location of consciousness for the automatic activity of the body, in inhalation and exhalation.

The reflection on impermanence, on the lack of any abiding self, follows the detachment from thought (in the mindfulness that was Gautama’s way of living), and precedes equanimity with regard to the pleasant, painful, and neutral of sensation. That, in turn, precedes “observing stopping (inhaling and exhaling)”, observing a ceasing of volitive activity.

ST:  This is a meditation technique. Aren’t there times when the technique drops out and there is just stillness, even if it is for just moments at a time?

MF:

“Here where it appears ready-made, you do not exert any mental effort:  you go along freely with the natural flow, without any grasping or rejecting. This is the real esoteric seal.”

(“Zen Letters: Teachings of Yuanwu”, tr. J.C. and Thomas Cleary, p 68)

ST:  Forgetting Syd (Siddhartha) and your interpretation of his experience for a moment, what is YOUR experience of “detachment from thought” like? What does that mean to you in plain English?

MF:  “Detachment from thought” is just what it sounds like, and detachment takes place in the normal rhythm of things. Which I am still learning!

In particular, I have to appreciate thought or at least that I can still think, in order to detach from thought, and the detachment is complete with the abandonment of grasping after self with respect to the mind and the five groups in general.*

None of it flies without the return to a cessation of volition in inbreathing and outbreathing. I set that up when I sit, and I touch on it in the rhythm of things

Why do you bother to sit, ST?

****

MF: That’s what I’m saying–enlightenment in the Pali scriptures is not the same enlightenment as the enlightenment of those who came from Asia to teach in the second half of the twentieth century.

ST:  So there are multiple “enlightenments”? That would be impossible from the perspective of enlightenment. Besides, how would you know?

MF:

I know what I know, I’ll sing what I said, we come and we go:  it’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head.

(“I Know What I Know”, Paul Simon)

I would say there are two versions of enlightenment:

1) the enlightenment of “the five limbs of concentration” plus Gautama’s way of living (his way of living was “the mindfulness of inbreathing and outbreathing”, SN 54.8 and SN 54.11);

2) the enlightenment marked by the utter destruction of the three cankers (the asavas):

Sensual craving

Craving for existence

Ignorance

Gautama only regarded the second version as enlightenment, and anyone who engaged in sexual intercourse did not qualify–they had to leave the order and could not be reinstated. How many Zen masters from Japan do you know who aren’t married?

The trick is that Gautama’s way of living requires a rhythm of mindfulness that includes the mindfulness of cessation, of cessation in the course of inhalation and exhalation, presumably the cessation of the fourth concentration. In my limited practice, action of the body without choice, will, or intent must be experienced at regular intervals, or mindfulness can’t be sustained.

****

ST:  What point are you trying to make here? Are you equating the 4th jhana with shikantaza?

MF:  You know you only quoted half of what I had there, right?  The other half was Gautama’s:

… seated, (one) suffuses (one’s) body with purity by the pureness of (one’s) mind so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded with purity by the pureness of (one’s) mind.

(AN 5.28, tr. PTS vol. III pp 18-19, parentheticals paraphrase original; emphasis added)

You don’t see a similarity in these descriptions? Gautama’s is from his description of the fourth jhana.

 

*In Gautama’s teaching, grasping after an abiding self with regard to form, feeling, mind, habitual tendency, or consciousness is identically suffering. He described suffering as “in brief, the five aggregates (groups) subject to clinging”:

Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection, and anguish are suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

(AN 3.61; tr. Bhikkyu Bodhi; emphasis added)