You just wait in the abyss of perplexity without expecting anything. You open yourself to the uncanniness of what unfolds without construing it as this or that. You abandon any notion of a result of such practice. In exhorting his followers to “kill Buddha,” Lin-chi insists that we rid the mind of every image or idea we have ever had of awakening. “If you seek Buddha,” he declares, “you’ll be held in the grip of the Buddha-Mara.” However noble, refined, and erudite one’s idea of Buddha, it can never be more than a collage of memories and concepts drawn from your own and others’ past experience. It encloses you in the realm of what is already known.
Instead of settling into a calm awareness of the effortless unfolding of experience, part of us strives to be already one step ahead of ourselves. Mara is impatient. He is never content to sit still and wait. His goal is always to be elsewhere. Like a print which is slightly out of register, our wraithlike double strains to slip off into an alternative world. The unease of such restlessness lies in this rebellious longing to be elsewhere when it is impossible to be anywhere but here. In making a concerted effort to remain here by returning again and again to the present moment, it is as though we are deliberately provoking the devil.
The forces that Mara summons to strike back are sensual desire, ill-will, restlessness, torpor, and doubt. These hindrances “lead away from nirvana” by destroying the calm, focused awareness of what is unfolding here and now. One moment we are mindfully attending to the breath or asking “What is this thing?” only in the next to be besieged by an erotic fantasy or a furious resentment. Or our equanimity is rattled by a visceral anxiety; or we slump into a mire of lethargy; or niggling doubts resurface to mock our convictions and aims. Once possessed by these demons, the mind quickly loses its natural suppleness and radiancy and becomes brittle, dull, and unfocused. Buddha describes such hindrances as “encirclers of the mind,” comparing them to giant creepers that bind themselves round other trees, making their hosts “bent, twisted and split.” Once more we find ourselves enclosed in Mara’s snare.
Just as a waiter attends to the needs of those at the table he serves, so one waits with unknowing astonishment at the quixotic play of life. In subordinating his own wants to those of the customer, a waiter abandons any expectation of what he may be next called to do. Constantly alert and ready to respond, the oddest request does not faze him. He neither ignores those he serves nor appears at the wrong time. He is invisible but always there when needed. Likewise, in asking “What is this thing?” one does not strain ahead of oneself in anticipation of a result. One waits at ease for a response one cannot foresee and that might never come. The most one can “do” is remain optimally receptive and alert.
We hate waiting. When a train doesn’t come on time or if a friend is late, we find ourselves frustrated by a situation over which we have no control. Rather than things happening according to plan, we are suddenly at the mercy of someone else and powerless to influence the outcome of events. As the consoling illusion of a dependable and manageable world evaporates with each passing second, we are exposed to the anguish of life’s intrinsic unreliability. Our impatience mounts, the self’s composure crumbles into resentful frustration or erupts into panic, and we are exposed as an infantile creature of Mara.
Instead of regarding it either as an affront to one’s dignity or a waste of time, waiting can be seen as a cipher of nirvana. Since life is ultimately a situation over which we have no control, waiting is a response that accords with its fleeting and unreliable nature. The practice of waiting is to learn how to rest in the nirvanic ease of contingent things. Yet waiting is not passive inaction any more than emptiness is nothingness. As an alert stillness that cradles perplexity, it is the ground from which we can respond in unpredictable ways to life’s unfolding and the inevitable encounter with others.
THREE
LIVING WITH THE DEVIL
16
An Ordinary Person’s Life
TO LIVE WITH THE DEVIL is to plunge into this elusive, beguiling, obstructive, giddying, unreliable, bewitching, sublimely ephemeral world. To survive in the midst of such dazzling contingency requires that one understand, tolerate, and love this world. For were the world not this way, there would be no path, no awakening, no nirvana, no freedom. Mara and Buddha are entwined with each other. To pretend that either can exist in isolation is to fall prey to Mara’s oldest trick: tearing a conditioned thing out of the matrix in which it lives and raising it to the status of an unconditioned truth.
If Mara is death, then, as his polar opposite, Buddha is life. The Evil One and the Awakened One are as inseparable from each other as death is from life. Life without death and death without life are meaningless. Life is what it is because it streams irrevocably and magnificently toward its end. The pouring forth of each living thing in its fecund, glorious excess is also its death throe. To live is to surrender to one’s end. One gives oneself over to responding to the question of being here at all—in the knowledge that each day, each hour, each minute may be your last chance to do this. Like the blowing out of a flame, nirvana is life’s extinguishing of itself each moment.
Without the devil to obstruct it, one could not create a path. For a path is kept open by overcoming the hindrances that prevent freedom of movement along it. If Mara did not get in the way, there would be nothing to give us the purchase we need to propel ourselves out of a crisis. Were there no circular drift to our lives, there would be no need for a guiding vision to orient ourselves; if we were not frustrated, there would be no need to break out of a rut; were there no isolation, then no need to participate in communities of shared ideas and practices; and without conflict or contradiction, no possibility of achieving harmony or resolution.
Rather than gaining insight into a single Absolute Truth, Buddha awoke to a complex of truths that embraced the conflicts of human existence as well as their resolution. This awakening did not leave him stranded in a permanent mystical enlightenment, but opened up for him a path to follow in the midst of the world’s vicissitudes. The impact Buddha had on those who encountered him was not solely due to his wise words and compassionate acts. For it seems that he appeared to others as someone in whom something had stopped in a radical and startling manner.
When the serial killer Angulimala tried to add Buddha to his string of victims, he waylaid him on the road and chased after him. But no matter how fast he ran, he could not catch up with the calmly walking monk. So he shouted, “Stop! Stop!” Buddha said, “I have stopped. Now you stop,” explaining, “I have stopped forever. I abstain from violence toward beings; but you have no restraint toward things that live: that is why I have stopped and you have not.” So impressed was the killer that he threw away his weapons and asked to become a monk.
Each interaction between Buddha and Mara (or his proxy such as Angulimala) dramatizes abstract ideas by turning them into the interplay between human characters. The tensions between samsara and nirvana, fixation and freedom, start to crackle with immediacy. What is at stake bursts into life. It is this vitality that makes stories more compelling than theories. One’s own life is mirrored in these dramas in a way that no amount of theorizing can achieve.
Te-shan was a ninth century Chinese scholar monk renowned for his knowledge of the monastic rule and as an authority on Buddha’s Diamond Sutra. One day he was incensed to learn that a new school called Ch’an (Zen) was flourishing in the south of the country. “How dare these southern devils say that just by pointing at the human mind one can see one’s nature and become a buddha?” he remonstrated. “I’ll go drag them from their caves and exterminate their ilk, and thus repay the kindness of Buddha.” With his books on his back, he set off on his mission.
On reaching the town of Li-chou, Te-shan put down his bundle of texts and approached an old woman who was selling refreshments by the roadside. Eyeing his stack of books, she said,
I will only serve you if you can answer my question. The Diamond Sutra says “past mi
nd can’t be grasped, present mind can’t be grasped, future mind can’t be grasped.” Which mind does the learned monk desire to refresh?
Te-shan was speechless. Aware of the inadequacy of his knowledge, he followed the old woman’s advice to seek out Lung-t’an, one of the Zen teachers he had come to persecute. One dark night as he was about to leave the master’s quarters, Lung-t’an offered him a candle to light his way. As Te-shan reached for it, Lung-t’an blew it out. Te-shan was suddenly awakened to what Buddha had taught. The following day he set fire to his texts and spent the next thirty years in obscurity practicing meditation.
Buddha and Christ may have conquered the devil, but that does not prevent the devil from corrupting Buddhism or Christianity. The theme of the Diamond Sutra is a liberating vision of emptiness. Te-shan turned it into a doctrine of oppression. He could not tolerate the suggestion that Buddha might infuse ordinary life. For him, Buddha and emptiness had become isolated from the turbulent, contingent flux of existence and placed out of reach on the pedestal of Truth. Mara had succeeded in making his own what was intended to defeat him. As the “imposer of limits” (Antaka), he enclosed emptiness within the confines of a religious doctrine that its believers would fight to uphold.
Zen sought to reconquer Mara by rejecting these divisions and affirming Buddha at the heart of the everyday. In the sensuous, painful flux of the here and now, Buddha is neither silent nor alone but in endless conversation with the devil. Mara is not rejected or condemned but embraced and transformed. Buddha accepts his incarnation in the diabolic stuff of existence. He knows that every moment “Mara’s stream” is slipping away and in the end will destroy him. But he neither gets entangled in it nor recoils from it. Thus are fears and desires, frustrations and doubts transformed from hindrances into catalysts of understanding and freedom.
By the time he emerged from his retreat, Te-shan had abandoned his idealistic view of Buddha. “What is awakening?” asked a monk. “Get out!” said Te-shan. “Don’t defecate here.” “And Buddha?” persisted the monk. “An old Indian beggar,” said Te-shan. Once he told his assembly:
Here, there are no ancestors and no buddhas. Bodhidharma is a stinking foreigner. Shakyamuni is a dried-up piece of shit. “Awakening” and “nirvana” are posts to tether donkeys. The scriptural canon was written by devils; it’s just paper for wiping infected skin boils. None of these things will save you.
He sought to dispel any lingering attachment to Buddha as something to be found apart from the messiness of the everyday. He had no time for the grandiose conceits of religion. “What is known as ‘realizing the mystery,’” he said, “is nothing but breaking through to grab an ordinary person’s life.”
Like other Zen teachers of his time, Te-shan sought to shock his audience into seeing that Buddha was not a remote historical figure to be venerated as a saint, but a vital presence in the pulsing heart of each living creature. Declared Lin-chi,
In this lump of raw flesh is a true person of no status continually going in and out of the face of each one of you. Those who have not confirmed this, Look! Look!
Lin-chi sought to awaken the innate responsiveness of his students that shines forth just before the anesthetic of self-consciousness takes hold. When a monk in the gathering asked him to explain what he meant, Lin-chi came down from his seat, grabbed the man, and yelled, “Speak! Speak!” The monk hesitated and Lin-chi shoved him aside, muttering, “The true person of no status—what a caked shit-stick.”
The “true person of no status” evokes the ambiguity of each human being we encounter. “True person” (chen-jen) was the common Chinese term for an awakened sage, whereas to have “no status” in the China of Lin-chi’s time was to be marginalized as a nobody. In the face of another person, we simultaneously glimpse a natural dignity as well as the anguish of one who is radically unsure of his place in the scheme of things. To recognize Buddha in the eyes of each person we meet is to engage with another who silently calls upon us to respond to her buddhanature.
17
“Do Not Hurt Me”
PEOPLE STREAM TOWARD you on the sidewalk of a city street. With each approaching step, a human singularity gathers into sharper relief until for a tantalizing moment she stands exposed before you: red lips sealed tight in a sea of wrinkled skin, the sharp aquiline nose, a darkly shining inwardness of eyes, strands of disobedient hair across a furrowed brow. The face reveals a contradictory person: loved, admired, disliked, and feared by others as you are, who could have been but never will be known. In a blur she is gone.
Just as you peer out beyond yourself to scrutinize others, so do they gaze from their interiority to wonder about you. The curiosity and rapid sideways glance when our eyes accidentally meet are mutual. Consciousness is keenly impacted by the uncontrollable presence of others. Otherness reaches its apotheosis in the face of that most familiar and strange of beings: someone else. A stranger has the power to discharge inside one a rush of loathing or longing that can make one sweat and tremble. The lineaments of a face can suggest a lifetime of intimacies to be given or withheld, accepted or rejected.
Like myself, each sentient creature I encounter is in pursuit of a path. The glint in their eyes reflects an anguished concern with goals and obstacles. Even a fly, restlessly probing the pane of glass that stands in its way, speaks to my condition. Others are the mirror in which I most vividly glimpse myself. The consciousness of being the person we are unfolds from our interactions with others. One’s identity is not given ready-made at birth. It emerges when a configuration of inborn potentiality is subjected to the identities and desires of others: parents, siblings, educators, priests, rulers, enemies, role models. I understand myself in concepts and phrases that belong not to me but to the linguistic community of which I am a member. The internal monologue of a self is intended as much for others as for myself.
Incessant social intercourse continues unabated even when we are alone with our thoughts far from other people. We compulsively nuance the definition of ourselves through shared words, images, and codes. The concept of self is intelligible only in relation to the concept of other. However vividly I seem to stand apart from you, without you there would be nothing from which I could stand apart. “I” without “you” makes as little sense as “here” without “there.” Asserting a separate self affirms participation in a world of others even as one tries to deny it.
In the naked glimpse of another’s face, we encounter both a fear of and yearning for intimacy. A core paradox of human existence is that we are inescapably alone and at the same time inescapably a participant in a world with others. While we long for intimacy in order to dispel loneliness, we resist it because it threatens to interrupt our privacy. Just as Mara prompts us to flee the overwhelming contingency of our birth and death to the safety of an isolated self, so he urges us to flee the disruptive impact that intimacy might have upon such a self. And just as Buddha’s wisdom springs from focusing attention unwaveringly upon the turbulent flux of contingency, so his compassion springs from returning the intimate gaze of the other that implores you not to hurt her.
If flight is a retreat from intimacy, then fixation on one’s self and one’s obsessions is a way of denying it. Rather than opening to another, you close down behind a frozen gaze and expression so as not to betray insecurity or fear. Even as she speaks to you, concern with how you appear outweighs your attention to what she says. The poses and disguises we assume to make an impression on others conceal our ambivalence as to who we are. Rather than confront the unfathomable question of our existence, we seal ourselves in the membrane of a story that we know only sketches our surface. As long as we can convince ourselves and others of the reliability and value of this narrative, we feel safe.
To behold another’s face is to tolerate a gaze even as I glance aside in shame. Whereas to smile compliantly while studying the complexion of the face’s skin, judging the attractiveness of its features, or trying to decipher what conclusi
ons about us are being drawn behind its façade is no longer to encounter one another. In Martin Buber’s terms, the “you” has been replaced by an “it.” But when we relate to another as “you,”
he is not a point in the world net of space and time, nor a construct that can be experienced and described. . . . Neighborless and seamless, he is you and fills the circle of the sky.
Just as Mara’s strategies reduce the other to a manageable “it,” thereby avoiding the threat of intimacy, Buddha’s perspective opens up the limitless vista of an ineffable “you,” thus making it possible to encounter the other without hesitation.
Even when no words are spoken, your face calls out to me. “The first word of the face,” says the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “is the ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. At the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all.
We recognize this call because we hear in it the echo of our own deepest fears and longings. Another’s face shocks us into a helpless silence in which we are called to respond from the same depth within ourselves that we witness in his plea. In the very instant that we hear Mara prompting us to utter a consoling cliché, a religious platitude, or a gem of psychotherapeutic wisdom, we hear Buddha urging us to let go of the self-consciousness that paralyzes a selfless response.
The roots of empathy, compassion, and love lie in that intimate encounter where we hear the other wordlessly say
do not kill me, do not rob me, do not abuse me, do not deceive me, do not betray me, do not insult me, do not waste my time, do not try to possess me, do not bear me ill will, do not misconstrue me.
Living with the Devil Page 9