Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First seriesSuzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Religion
Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First series
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Zen Buddhism
We read in the _Katha-Upanishad_: “As rain water that has fallen on
a mountain ridge runs down on all sides, thus does he who sees a
difference between qualities run after them on all sides. As pure water
poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the self
of a thinker who knows.” This pouring pure water into pure water is,
as we have it here, the “viewing all qualities in one thought” which
finally cuts off the hopelessly entangling logical mesh by merging all
differences and likenesses into the absolute oneness of the knower
(_jñānin_) and the known (_jñeya_). This, however, in our practical
dualistic life, is a reversion, a twisting, and a re-adjustment.
Eckhart, the great German mystic, is singularly one with the
“one-thought-viewing” of things as done by Buddhists when he expresses
his view thus: “Das Auge darin ich Gott sehe, ist dasselbe Auge, darin
Gott mich sieht. Mein Auge und Gottes Auge ist ein Auge und ein Gesicht
und ein Erkennen und eine Liebe.”[f55] The idea of reversion is more
clearly expressed in Jacob Boehme’s simile of the “umgewandtes Auge”
with which God is recognised.
Enlightenment therefore must involve the will as well as the intellect.
It is an act of intuition born of the will. The will wants to know
itself as it is in itself, _yathābhūtam dassana_, free from all its
cognitive conditions. The Buddha attained this end when a new insight
came upon him at the end of his ever-circulatory reasoning from decay
and death to Ignorance and from Ignorance to decay and death, through
the twelve links of the Paṭicca-samuppāda. The Buddha had to go over
the same ground again and again, because he was in an intellectual
_impasse_ through which he could not move further on. He did not repeat
the process, as is originally imagined, for his own philosophical
edification. The fact was that he did not know how to escape this
endless rotation of ideas; at this end there was birth, there was decay
and death, and at the other end there was Ignorance. The objective
facts could not be denied, they boldly and uncomfortably confronted
him, while Ignorance balked the progress of his cognitive faculty
moving farther onward or rather inward. He was hemmed in on both sides,
he did not know how to find his way out, he went first this way and
then that way, forever with the same result—the utter inutility of all
his mental labour. But he had an indomitable will; he wanted, with the
utmost efforts of his will, to get into the very truth of the matter;
he knocked and knocked until the doors of Ignorance gave way: and they
burst open to a new vista never before presented to his intellectual
vision. Thus he was able to exclaim to Upaka, the naked ascetic, whom
he happened to meet on his way to Benares after Enlightenment:
“All-conqueror I, knower of all.
From every soil and stain released,
Renouncing all, from craving ceased,
Self-taught; whom should I Master call?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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