MYSELF: We are agreed, then, that the first sighting of one’s Void is the same as the last; and that, if there’s a race on, it’s one in which the starting line and the finishing line obligingly rush together. But of course, as you insist, there’s a sense in which they stay far apart and there’s much effort to be put in, stern discipline to be subjected to, regular meditation to be practised. Now you’ve said in evidence that I don’t meditate. That’s libel, and you know it! What did you mean? What is meditation, anyway?
WITNESS: Don’t give me that one! Why, the very first time we met, you said that meditation - sitting meditation, with folded legs and straight back - was not for you. Well, I never held that this or any other posture is absolutely essential for spiritual growth, but only that it’s a great help for most of us. Buddhism, as you know, isn’t any kind of body-training or physical yoga. It’s the practice of mindfulness, being awake to what’s going on. Normally we’re out to lunch, wool-gathering, in a coma, and a lot of practice is needed to snap out of it at will. More, to stay out of the coma. This is the discipline of Buddhism, and sitting in the right fashion helps it along.
MYSELF: It's in detail that my practice differs from yours. You sit still for hours daily in the lotus position, being mindful. I sit around in any old position, stand around and walk around and lie down and get up, as impulse and occasion demand, being mindful. You reserve a part of each day for formal sitting in the quiet of the meditation hall. I don’t divide my day into a sacred and a secular part: all of it is sacred, all of it is secular - and as mindful or attentive as I can make it. So now I find the commotion of the city is just as conducive to attention as is the peace of the countryside or my own room. The roaring world is my meditation hall.
WITNESS: We both aim at full wakefulness, but go about the training differently. However...
MYSELF: However, we come now to a huge, perhaps insuperable difference between us. Many, if not all, Theravada Buddhists assume - and you as good as stated outright - that a human being can be perfected, and hasn’t made the grade to Buddhahood till he is indeed perfect. Repeat, perfect! I say that no human being can ever, ever be radically reformed, let alone perfected. And anyway doesn’t need to be, seeing he’s absolutely perfect anyway - as the non-human Being he really, really is. I say that my Enlightenment is my ceasing to look for and to cultivate perfection in the wrong place, out there in my human region, and instead to find it shining brightly in the right place, here at my Centre. From where it lights up the world.
This issue between us is crucial. In fact, it’s what this Trial is all about. As we look into it together now, let’s keep in mind Santayana’s warning: ‘Nothing requires greater intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s own equation written out.’
WITNESS: You can have your intellectual heroism. I’ll content myself with men and women as they are - and as they could be. You are going by the folk you know. Prove to me that they could never, given the time and the training, become Buddhas. Which is to say perfect.
MYSELF: I’ll do so twice over. Here’s number one: The notion that human nature is a sow’s ear you can make a divine silk purse out of is so ridiculous, when you come to think of it, it’s not worth refuting. Why, the mere fact that it’s human nature - and not also lion nature and dolphin nature and hummingbird nature (to say nothing of bedbug nature and so on ad infinitum) - means that it’s only a tiny fragment of Nature!
And here’s number two: Just think of a man without desire, without any weaknesses, thinking only perfect thoughts and feeling only perfect feelings! What sort of fairground monster would he be, for Buddha’s sake? A man with no shadow side to him at all! I, for one, would run a mile from such a freak. It’s a man that has failings and limitations and doubts and a silly side to him, and is honest about it all, who warms and moves my heart. One who hasn’t, and isn’t, leaves me shivering and stone-cold. And incredulous. He’s no more real than a tentacled robot escaped from a horror movie.
WITNESS: A Buddha is a perfect human in the sense that a perfect rose is a perfect rose. Neither pretends to a perfection that lies outside its own nature.
MYSELF: You’re tying yourself in knots, Venerable Sir. First you say that Buddhahood is freedom from all limitations. Now you explicitly admit innumerable limitations. Besides, if you now define perfection as excellence of one kind as against excellence of countless other kinds, why then you strip the word of all meaning. Buddha Nature is perfect Buddha Nature. Wonderful! But equally, Devil Nature is perfect Devil Nature. Wonderful! And filth is perfect filth - perfectly filthy. Wonderful! And blasphemy is perfect blasphemy - perfectly blasphemous. Wonderful! All true, but not helpful!
Of course, like you, I would just love to straighten out and polish up my human self. It's God-awful! But, unlike you, I propose to do so by resting in my God-lovely non-human Self, in the expectation that perhaps a little something may rub off the latter on to the former. In which case the improvement, however marginal, will at least be real and not phony. Why? Simply because I shall be living from my true and central Buddha Nature into my peripheral human nature. Remaining a vulnerable man out there, I shall become a more natural man, poles apart from that monstrous (and, happily, quite mythical) creature who is invulnerable and perfect man. I shall be as truly human as a human can be.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, if you will please refer once more to Diagram No. 15, you will see at once what I mean [see Witness 15 The New Apocalyptic].
The two versions of oneself which it clearly distinguishes - the peripheral and the central - are in all respects diametric opposites. To merge them is nonsense and blasphemy and endarkenment. To distinguish them - and to go on to live that distinction - is Enlightenment, and also plain horse sense.
WITNESS: Buddhism doesn’t go in for this sort of speculation.
MYSELF: It does, you know! Mahayana Buddhists find a crucial place and role for what lies at the centre of my picture. They call it the Nirmanakaya or Transformation Body of the Buddha. Throughout the ages this Buddha is born and reborn into the world. Clearly seeing into his true Nature, he devotes each lifetime to sharing that vision with deluded humanity; and all the while he’s subject with them to the ills that flesh is heir to, including old age and death. Under countless guises he gives himself in compassion for all beings, suffering vicariously on their behalf and making over to them his merits. Here, hardly disguised at all, is none other than the one who, throughout this Trial, I depict as the First Person Singular - the headless, upside-down, world-embracing Person that each of us is, once we wake out of our coma. I need hardly point out the parallel between this sort of Buddhism (very unlike yours, if I may say so) and the Christianity you were good enough to attribute to me in the course of your evidence.
Well, Venerable Bhikkhu, is this view of life and way of life of mine so far out that it can’t be got under the marquee-umbrella of Buddhism? Isn’t it, in fact, very close indeed to what some schools of Mahayana Buddhism teach and practise anyway? And altogether in line with the Buddha whose dying words - ‘Be ye lamps to yourselves’ - I take most seriously?
WITNESS: You are conveniently forgetting the Buddha’s life, and one of the most significant episodes in it. Having at last attained perfect Enlightenment - after six years of austerities that nearly killed him - his first thought was that this treasure was for sharing with suffering humanity. His second thought was that the sharing would be next to impossible, seeing what Enlightenment had cost him. His third thought was that - given training as thorough as his own, though less hard on the body - some could attain to the same perfection. Accordingly he mapped out the Eightfold Noble Path, and founded the Sangha, or community of disciples who follow that long and arduous discipline. The discipline you have no time for.
MYSELF: There are various versions of that story. Have you come across the Burmese and Tibetan tradition that there’s a very different reason why the Buddha at first felt that no one would get what he was on about? It’s t
hat people would reject his discovery because it was too obvious, too simple, too accessible!
WITNESS: No. I didn’t know that.
MYSELF: Venerable Bhikkhu, in the light of this information, let me repeat the question: is my way incompatible with this hold-all religion of yours? Does anything I’ve said justify the anger of Buddhists who know their Buddhism?
WITNESS: It’s what you haven’t said in so many words which upsets them so. They see you cheating - arriving (or pretending to arrive) all fresh and un-travel-stained at the goal, without bothering to make the journey. All varieties of real Buddhism insist on the long haul, on the need for hard training over many years, if not lifetimes. The Theravadins of Burma and Sri Lanka and Thailand with their Eightfold Noble Path, the Mahayanists of Tibet with their visualizing and body-toughening techniques, and the Mahayanists of China and Japan and Korea with their zazen and the Pure Land practice of japa or recitation - all are saying you get what you work for, in the prescribed way and with patience and determination. And here are you, John a-Nokes on your simplistic lonesome, no tradition at your back, as good as announcing that the vast experience behind these training systems counts for nothing. That for you the Eightfold Noble Path, and the routes running parallel to it, are superseded by Nokes’s Short Cut!
MYSELF: Not true! All right, this Short Cut exists and in fact is no distance at all. Our True or Buddha Nature is on show right now, brilliantly lit up for all to see. But to stay with it and live it, I must take what (to avoid confusion) I call the 8 x 8-fold Plebeian Path. Which in its lowland fashion is as long and as hard going as the most aristocratic of high roads. In fact, if you’re interested, I have a map of it here. A bunch of copies.
JUDGE! If this map is part of your Defence it must be produced in court, for the Jury and Counsel and me to examine. If it’s just an interdepartmental memo passing between you two, I don’t want to hear any more of it.
MYSELF: Your Honour, the fact that it exists and outlines my practice - yes, this is part of my Defence against this Witness’s testimony. The map’s details, which are complex, would only confuse the Jury at this stage. That’s why, though it’s available for anyone’s inspection, it’s not one of my regular Defence Exhibits.
JUDGE: Let’s see this map, as you call it. [Copies are distributed...1]
MYSELF: My purpose in producing this document is to show how mistaken the Witness is about Nokes’s Short Cut. It’s a chart of Nokes’s Long Haul, of his protracted 8 x 8-fold Plebeian Path - to the Place he never for a moment left...
Well, Venerable Bhikkhu. Am I still giving offence, a heretic not allowed under the vast canopy of your religion?
WITNESS: It will take a little while to sort all this out. I just can’t give a snap answer.
MYSELF: While you are sorting, a word in the Jury’s ear. Early Zen masters were given to likening the Buddha to well-used loo paper! Bumph, toilet paper - whatever you call it. (An apt simile, when applied to that monstrous mix-up which soils our perfect Buddhahood with our very imperfect humanhood.) And if that wasn’t blasphemy, I’d like to know what I’m being accused of! If that’s OK (and I’ve heard Buddhists go into raptures about it), anything goes. And I’m a model of Buddhist tact and reverence!
Venerable Sir, you’ll remember how Counsel summed up your testimony against me. According to him, you say I claim to be Who I’m not, mislead others into making the same claim for themselves, and insult the Buddha - and thus outrage the feelings of assorted Buddhists. Tell me, what now remains of all that?
WITNESS, taking some time to reply, hesitatingly: Not much I can put my finger on just now...
COUNSEL, intervening: The court has listened patiently to this cosy in-house chat about Buddhism. In the end, what does it amount to? The Accused does little to discredit the Witness’s original testimony by reducing him in the end to a state of some bewilderment. Soon enough, I’ll wager, he will think of all the things he could and should have said in court today, in defence of his position.
MYSELF: A court of justice is interested in the real arguments of today, not the hypothetical ones of tomorrow.
COUNSEL: Your Honour, these insults - and from -
JUDGE: I think perhaps learned Counsel had better call his next Witness.
MYSELF: Before he does so, Your Honour, I would like to read to the court a quotation from Dr Walpola Rahula, a leading spokesman for Theravada Buddhism; and to conclude with some contrasting quotations from Mahayana Buddhism - from Chinese Ch’an masters of the eighth and ninth centuries CE. My own position vis-à-vis these two schools will be self-evident, I think. Here is Rahula:
Among the founders of religions the Buddha was the only teacher who did not claim to be other than a human being, pure and simple... He attributed all his realization, attainments and achievements to human endeavour and human intelligence... He who has (by this endeavour) realized the truth, Nirvana, is the happiest being in the world. He is free from all ‘complexes’ and obsessions, the worries and the troubles that torment others. His mental health is perfect... He is joyful, exultant, enjoying the pure life, his faculties pleased, free from anxiety, serene and peaceful. As he is free from selfish desire, hatred, ignorance, conceit, pride and all such defilements, he is pure and gentle, full of universal love...
Such - mirabile dictu - is the Buddha state which all the Venerable Bhikkhu’s practices are aimed at! A tall order for him (let alone us undisciplined lay types) to comply with in a million kalpas -and all by means of ‘human endeavour and human intelligence’ if you please!
I’m happy to add that many Mahayana texts, by contrast, invite us right now to awaken to and lean back on the Eternal Absolute (Dharma-dhatu or Buddha-kaya), the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajna, the ‘goddess’ who is lovely and holy) and Suchness (Bhutatathata or Perfect Immutability) - three aspects of our True Nature at Centre which are about as remote from Dr Rahula’s ‘human being, pure and simple’ as they could be. Closing the gap, trying to bring together one’s humanness and one’s divinity, and doing without the latter - this is (I invoke the well-known Zen metaphor) trying to turn a brick into a mirror by assiduous polishing.
It is also an instance of the age-old fallacy of misplaced perfection. To see through it is the acid test, the sine qua non of the spiritual life. It guards against the nonsensical blasphemy which confounds who I appear to be as that third person with Who I am as this First Person. It lets things be what they are, where they are. It is mindfulness. Mindfulness which, the Witness agrees, is the very heart of Buddhism. In that case this great religion - like some others - is occasionally subject to cardiac arrests!
I conclude with quotations from two famous Ch’an masters who never ceased warning their disciples about the fallacy of misplaced perfection. The fallacy that perfection is not here, and not now, and not mine. First, Huang-po:
Our original Buddha Nature is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy - and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awaking to yourself: That which is where you are is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete.
As for gaining merits countless as the sands of the Ganges, since you are fundamentally complete in every respect, you should not try to supplement that perfection by such meaningless practices. There is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings, except that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood.
Second, Hui-hai:
Instead of recognizing the Buddha right where you are, you spend aeon after aeon searching for him.
Illumination is not something to be attained. You can come to Buddhahood in a single flash.
You may be compared with lion cubs, which are genuine lions from their birth.
* * *
1 See Appendix.
Prosecution Witness No. 20
THE BODY WORKER
COUNSEL: Three days ago the Prosecution’s twentieth Witness left this country - with our full agreement - to be at the bedside of her very
sick mother in San Juan Capistrano, California. Here she is, however, on our witness-box telescreen, to be sworn and give evidence in the usual way...
For me at least, it’s as though this Witness - on screen so much larger than the others - were more present in court than they had been...
Witness testifies that she holds certificates from three institutes concerned with the improvement of physical well-being. She has been practising for fifteen years, and treats an average of thirty clients a week. Her methods, in part her own, have been written up in several professional journals. They consist mainly of manipulation of the muscles and connective tissue to give better alignment and to remove what she calls knots.
COUNSEL: What light does your professional experience throw on the claims of the Accused, which I understand you know about? I’m thinking specially of his idea that his limbs are put forth by a bodiless divinity, and so are quite exceptionally agile and efficient.
WITNESS: My impression is that, to get out of facing the screwed-up and uncoordinated state of his body, he dismisses much or all of it, writes it off. As if he could! His body is very real and very typical. Head and trunk and limbs, it incorporates all manner of imbalances and knots and rigidities and constrictions, trouble spots built up over the years from wrong body-use and unacknowledged reactions of fear and anger and hate and frustration. What isn’t typical is his trick of avoiding these negative conditions by voiding their physical basis. With remarkable thoroughness and ingenuity the Accused spirits away the troublesome man - and substitutes the trouble-free God! What a hope! So far from clearing up his trouble spots, this stratagem draws a protective veil over them. So far from loosening his rigidity, it puts on yet another suit of armour. His pretended divinity can only exacerbate his all-too-human condition. There’s no panacea, no quick and easy and foolproof substitute for the patient untying of what was once tied up.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 21