Let's Pretend: Surangama Sutra, The Coming into Being of Illusion
Like all toddlers, my two grandchildren enjoy tasting the world. They put all sorts of things in their mouth. Recently Lucas and Noemi have delighted in a new game: they take hold of one of their toy fruits and vegetables and, knowing it’s not a “real” banana or cucmber, hold it close to their mouth, look at me with a twinkle in their eye, and say: “yum yum!” Then they offer it to me, and I join them in their pretend play.
It’s fun to use our senses to explore, and to pretend. A problem arises, though, when we forget our senses are only pretend tastes of the world, not the world itself. There’s a well-researched psychological phenomenon: the more often we see or hear something, the more we believe in it. This tendency is beloved by advertising executives and used in the repeated proclamations of politicians, television gurus, and internet influencers. After the nth retelling and a few thousand “likes,” lies masquerade as common knowledge.
As we go through various stages while we’re growing up, it’s natural to pretend to be firefighters and explorers, teachers and rock stars. We try on images of ourselves and see how they fit. When our pretend play turns into badges of identity, though, we get caught by our pretensions. When I was an adolescent I decided to pretend I liked spicy foods: my friends and I had a game to see who could eat the hottest chili without spitting it out. A few years later when I was living in Tokyo, some Japanese friends heard I liked spicy food and took me to a Korean restaurant. I ordered a soup and the waiter said to me: “you don’t want that, it’s too spicy-hot.” I replied I liked spicy-hot. The waiter insisted: “this is really spicy-hot, I don’t think you’ll like it.” Feeling challenged, I insisted he bring me the soup as my main meal. When it arrived, the soup was a scarlet sea - bright red with not much else in it to temper the pepper puree. My first spoonful told me I’d made a big mistake, but I had to save face, and finish it all. I’m not sure my taste buds ever fully recovered from that trial by fire.
Children like to pretend to be adults. By the time they turn thirty years old, adults often regret how, pretending to be this or that, they’ve locked themselves into restrictive roles. Then adults like to pretend they’re children. Some people are uncomfortable in their work roles or parent roles: they fulfill all their duties but feel like they’re phonies, that they are only pretending to a competence they don’t really have (a competence which nobody “really” has). Other people pretend their work and family roles are who they “really” are: they become so identified with their images that when they retire or their children grow up, they feel they no longer know who they are.
Buddhists sometimes like to pretend they’re Buddhists, sometimes they like to pretend they’re not. There’s always a few people who pretend to be enlightened: this often snares religious communities in scandals of power, sex, and money.
Most of us pretend we are not enlightened. This is very sad.
The Surangama sutra strips away our pretensions to understanding what we are and are not. It reminds us that every time we say “I am seeing /hearing/tasting/touching/thinking that” we’re pretending our illusions are our reality. Perceptions of self and world are refracted through the filters of our Big-I minds. Our illusions of the world are us, bent back onto ourselves: illusions of self projected onto the world, illusions of the world projected onto the self.
It’s not surprising that Buddha’s disciples, having had all their perceptions uprooted, are assailed by doubt. They complain: ‘we don’t understand - Buddha says the Matrix of the Thus Come One is fundamentally pure, empty of any thing which comes into being or ceases to exist. In that case, how do mountains, rivers, and everything else subject to causes and conditions, birth and death - [every material thing, including me and you] - arise? Even very wise Pūrṇamaitrāyaṇīputra laments that when he tries to listen to the Buddha’s discourse he feels he “might as well be a deaf man trying to hear a mosquito from a distance of more than a hundred paces…..”
I’ll paraphrase Buddha’s response. Basically, Buddha sighs.“Ah, Pūrna! Still trying to understand!” Still making conceptual distinctions! Still trying to sort the world into categories!” Still trying to reconcile the many and the one, delusion and enlightenment.
Because the category of what is differentiated and the category of what is uniform have been established, the category of what is neither uniform nor differentiated is further established. The turmoil of this….gives rise to mental strain, and as the mental strain is prolonged, grasping at objects of mind begins…..[this] creates a turbidity of mind, out of which the afflictions are generated.
Does that clarify the matter for you? Or is your mind feeling muddy at this moment?
Thich Nhat Hanh, when teaching meditation, sometimes likes to use the metaphor of a glass of muddy water to represent the mind full of thoughts. If you try to calm the mind by picking out all the little pieces of dirt, you’ll only stir things up and maintain the turbidity. If instead you just settle down and do nothing, the mud will gradually subside and the glass of water will clarify. This is excellent instruction for beginning meditators who strain themselves trying to control their minds by grasping and rejecting mind-objects.
This metaphor, though, can be misleading: it may give the impression that the bits of dirt really exist and the muddy water is really unclear. In the Surangama Sutra Buddha goes further by insisting this, too, is delusion. The muddy water manifests as an illusion in the Matrix of the Thus-Come-One. In true reality, the muddy glass of water is eternally clear throughout all time and space: that clarity just appears, for this moment, as a muddy glass of water.
Our self-centered Big-I mind makes distinctions: muddy, clear. Then we get confused, and we have troubles understanding. Enlightenment, though, is itself wondrous understanding.
Buddha wants us to wake up to how we all are, were, and will be fundamentally enlightened. We mistakenly believe we must become enlightened by gaining some additional understanding. But that would mean our fundamental enlightenment is somehow incomplete, that it needs something extra - that we need something extra.
When we try to add (Big-I) understanding to wondrous (G-B) enlightened understanding, we trip over our own feet:
An enlightenment to which an understanding is added cannot be a true enlightenment……
an enlightenment that lacks understanding cannot be the true intrinsic enlightenment that is inherently pure…..
Once the category of ‘something understood’ is mistakenly established in the mind, the category ‘that which understands’ is mistakenly established as well.
When you or I try to understand something, we separate ourselves from what we wish to understand. This creates a seemingly unbridgeable chasm where self and other can never meet. The illusion of “self” and “objects” alienates us from our true world of inter-being. This delusion is the root of all suffering.
Let’s take a concrete example. We all have phases where we’re slumbering in bed and periods where we’re aroused and going about our business. We assume “I” wake up and “I” go to sleep. However, while we’re dozing our brain stays active and our heart continues to beat. Who is this dragon who never sleeps? To think you are “out of it” when asleep and “with it” when awake is an illusion.
Sometimes, when I go to bed, I say to myself: “time for dream-self to wake up.” Often, when I get up in the morning, first thing I say to myself is: “how did that (waking up) happen?” When the mind wanders during meditation, and the mind notices itself wandering - what is the mind which embraces wandering, embraces catching itself, and embraces catching itself catching?
My eight year old daughter once posed a riddle: “why did the girl close her eyes when she looked in the mirror?” The answer: “to see herself asleep.”Whenever we look at ourselves with Big-I mind, we are looking in the mirror with our eyes closed, we are asleep thinking we’re awake.
When our inner eye is not open, we make false discriminations between asleep/awake, enlightenment/delusion. We don’t realize: we are always fully right where we are, whether asleep or awake. To think otherwise is like thinking the sun is “gone” when it sets at night, and “there” when it rises in the morning. The sun is always there: we just turn away from it for a while every twenty-four hours. The stars are always there: we just are too dazzled sometimes to see them. Enlightenment is like the sun: it is not a lamp that needs to be plugged in, that turns on and off: it offers itself to us as an ever-present star. Enlightenment is like the dark that reveals the stars: nothing needs to be extinguished or snuffed out to go beyond understanding.
Not understanding opens the horizons of wonder. Understanding has its practical uses, but it also causes major problems. As Shakyamuni says:
[once understanding arises] there arises a firm attachment to that understanding, and this firm attachment is categorized as solidity.
A point of light is seen to appear. When the light is seen clearly, deluded thoughts arise — both hatred in response to incompatible points of view and love in response to compatible ways of thinking.
Light is wonderful, but it also pollutes: in most urban areas at night now, we cannot see the stars. In the light of knowledge, we become attached to our dualistic distinctions. We identify with our limited ideas of who (me not you) and what (this not that). From these illusions come desire and aversion, bringing suffering. Darkness, if we do not violate it with light, has its own means for dispelling illusion.
Wendell Berry’s poem is apt:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
At this moment, you are thinking something different from what I am thinking. In the light of thinking we know what we know, skin colors divide us, voices are upper- and lower-class, tastes are pleasing or harsh. But also at this moment, you are not-thinking what I am not thinking. As the Sandokai says, “the dark makes all forms one.” In dark non-knowing, beyond understanding, there is no color nor sound no taste no smell no touch no object of mind: no racist divisions, no highs nor lows, no inequality, no equality.
One of the Lojong guidelines for cultivating compassion is: “Don’t try to figure things out.” When I first learned that, I was shocked. I like figuring things out. Then I remembered how frustrated my loved ones and friends can get when they want me to just listen to them, and instead I start analyzing and problem-solving. Trying to figure things out can get in the way of empathizing and being fully present.
As soon as we start to figure things out, we identify causes and conditions: we find reasons to blame someone or something for our difficulties. If we encounter suffering without trying to analyze it, we can respond naturally with loving-kindness. When I attend my daughter’s middle-school concert, I can cavil about ragged entrances, wince at wrong notes, and protest problems with pitch. Deeper down, though, there is nothing but love. When my daughter comes up to me after the concert and asks how I liked it, I can respond sincerely: it was wonderful.
Zen master Gensha liked to say: “all the universe is One Bright Pearl.” One day a student said to him: “you teach that ‘all the universe is one bright pearl - but I don’t understand. How can I gain an understanding?” Gensha replied: “All the universe is One Bright Pearl - what need is there to understand it?”
Our need for understanding comes from pride (“I am only as good as what I understand”) and fear (“if I don’t understand what’s going on, I’ll lose all control of the situation”). Understanding, though, is not insight. Insight turns us back to the fundamentals, looking for the teachings within us, our in-tuition. There’s not only nothing shameful about not understanding, it often is the spark we need to bring out previously unthought-of perspectives. Sometimes my students will start asking me about something by saying “This is a stupid question, but…” Usually, what follows is a great question. It’s often about something which I’ve taken for granted, and the student’s inquiry challenges me to go deeper. As my teacher Sojun sometimes would say, “If you want to realize enlightenment, you have to be willing to be a little bit stupid.”
A little bit stupid, though, is not the same as ignorant. Ignorance is the breeding ground for delusion. If you grasp at understanding you aggressively break the universe apart into small bits. This violates the universe. However, if you settle for not understanding, you’ll miss out on the wonders of the universe. This dishonors the universe.
It’s not a matter of understanding or not-understanding, not a matter of illusion and not-illusion, not a matter of “is” and “is not.” All these do is perpetuate dualistic distinctions. Whenever we separate delusion from clarity, we tend to treat clarity as better, as more “real.” We tend to treat delusion as if, being false, it were also “unreal” - perhaps even evil. A successful illusion, though, is completely real in its deceptiveness, and can be destructive or beneficial. The myth of WMDs in Iraq justified a war; the placebo “illusion” has very real curative effects.
Clarity is ungraspable and transparently invisible - how can you call it “real?” That which does not exist is very real in its non-existence. As the Tao Te Ching says, “that which is not penetrates every crack.” If that which does not exist were unreal, where would we find the space which provides us room for all that exists?
Trying too hard to understand false and real can give you a head ache. Before pinning your hopes on understanding false and real, right and wrong, enlightenment and delusion, consider the limits of our understanding. There will always be more that we do not understand than we do understand. To paraphrase Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: we have three-dimensional brains, how can we hope to understand a universe which has ten dimensions (or more, according to scientists and mathematicians). Even more fundamentally: do you think it is possible to truly understand yourself? If not, how could you possibly understand anyone else - let alone Buddha-dharma?
Do we even understand what understanding is? School systems have problems measuring it; philosophers have troubles defining it. Zen insists words cannot describe our understanding, even though we are continually demonstrating our understanding by how we live. We realize our enlightenment by how we stand here and face now.
Luminous, wondrous, enlightened understanding is is not a cognitive operation (though it is includes, and is not separate from, cognition). It is always in good standing; it underlies all.
What is under standing?
- The Great Earth.
What is under The Great Earth?
- The center.
What at the center of the center?
- A dimensionless point.
In meditation we cultivate intimacy with this center, with this dimensionless point, not by understanding it (or not understanding it). We cultivate this center by harmonizing body-and-mind, dropping body-and-mind, settling the self on the Self, as described in the Tao Te Ching:
Reach the pole of emptiness
- abide, still, in the center.
Constant things co-arising
- see them turn and re-turn.
Return to the root
- at the root to be still
In stillness recover, revive, and endure.
My teacher Sojun once said: “I could explain it to you, but it would be doing you a dis-service.”
The Matrix - Surangama Sutra, The Matrix of the Thus-Come-One
The Matrix
Surangama Sutra: The Matrix of the Thus-Come-One
Our ordinary mind is self-centered - and our ordinary mind is our gateway to enlightened being. By recognizing our delusions, we can wake up to realize our true selves.
In Ordinary Mind Zen we chant:
Caught in a self-centered dream - only suffering;
Holding to self-centered thoughts - exactly the dream.
Every thought, feeling and sensation is a dream within a dream. As a neuropsychologist, I’m bemused by how meditators are willing to acknowledge thoughts are often misleading, but continue to believe their sense-perceptions are “really real.” In this section of the Sutra, Buddha dispels this illusion. Shakyamuni expounds on how we pile up not just thoughts but also sensations and all the factors of body-and-mind into heaps, creating the oneiric illusion there is a world separate from our selves. In each case, Buddha shows how the myriad things add up to no thing whatsoever. Every aggregate is an illusion.
In this section of the Surangama, Buddha takes each of the various components of being -
- five aggregates (form, sense-perception, cognition, mental formations, and consciousness)
- six faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, cognition)
- twelve sites (eye-faculty and visible objects; ear-faculty and sounds; nose-faculty and odors; tongue-faculty and flavors; body-faculty and objects of touch; cognitive faculty and objects of cognition)
- Eighteen constituents (eye-consciousness, ear—consciousness, nose—consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, mind-consciousness)
- Seven primary elements (earth, fire, water, wind, space, awareness, consciousness)
and shows how each “does not come into being from causes and conditions, nor does it come into being on its own.” Rather, all these heaps, and their seeming components, are inherent in the Matrix of the Thus-Come-One, the field of enlightened nature far beyond form and emptiness. This
“true, wondrous, luminously understanding [G-B] Mind contains the body and everything outside the body — mountains, rivers, sky, the entire world…..Our enlightened nature can be involved with things throughout all ten directions, and yet it remains clear and still. It is eternally present. It neither comes into being nor ceases to be.”
This may seem wildly solipsistic or, at best, idealistic. We may intellectually acknowledge that our sense-perception and thought are sometimes fallacious, but protest they are usually pretty accurate guides. After all, the existence of our own bodies, our own minds, and the objects around us is “undeniable.” Perhaps not. When we delve more deeply into the neuropsychology of body-mind phenomena, we’re in from some surprises.
Consider asomatognosia, a syndrome some brain-injured patients experience where they do not recognize parts of their body as their own. The affected body part isn’t paralyzed or insensate, but it becomes alien. In some cases the patient insists the body part belongs to and is controlled by someone else (e.g. in alien hand syndrome, also called “Dr Strangelove hand”).
I had a brief taste of this after my CVA. It was an uncommon type of stroke, a cerebral venous thrombosis which produced intermittent symptoms, mostly problems with leg weakness and balance. One day while working at the computer I needed to use the mouse in my right hand to move the cursor to the menu bar. I gave the mental command to my hand….and was surprised when nothing happened. I didn’t have any sensory or motor problems: I could grip the mouse, I could move my hand (and the mouse) any which way. But when I told my hand to move the mouse to the menu bar, the hand simply didn’t respond. I looked at my hand, puzzled: wasn’t this my hand? But how could it be my hand if I could feel it, move it, but it didn’t do the simple movement I wanted it to do?
Neuropsychology calls this experience an agnosia: the “lower” nervous system sensations and movements are intact, but disconnected from the “higher” nervous systems of recognition and intention. I was relieved when, after several hours, my agnosia disappeared.. While it lasted, though, the feeling of body-mind disconnection was quite disorienting. It gave me a greater appreciation for patients who deal with more severe forms of this neurological disorder, and also for the depersonalization and derealization which occur in some psychiatric disorders.
A related phenomenon occurs in reverse: a person experiences their body in places where it isn’t. After a limb amputation, patients experience pain in the missing limb. You don’t need to sacrifice a limb to experience this. If you put your right hand in a box which has a rubber hand on top in line with your shoulder and arm, and someone strokes a finger of your real hand (unseen, in the box) while simultaneously stroking the same finger of the rubber hand you are looking at, after a few minutes it will seem like your “real” hand vanishes and the fake hand is your own.
We think of these as disorders or illusions. From a Buddhist standpoint, though, they illustrate how our sense of “my” body is always illusory: it is a brain image, a representation rather than a fact.
Letting go of “my” body need not be pathological; it can scrape away the belief of personal ownership and allow us access to luminous experiences of non-separation. Hopefully you’ve had experiences of this sort, where you’ve been so immersed in an activity “you” vanish. Perhaps, singing or dancing, you’ve felt the music doing the crooning, the dance itself capering through your limbs. It’s quite wonderful when, after a few years of practicing qigong or taiji, once in a while everything aligns and we feel it is not us, but the qigong/taiji which is performing the form “through” us.
Shunryu Suzuki used to say: “it is a big mistake to think you are doing the meditation.” When we sit down to meditate, it’s important to get out of the way and let the meditation meditate. If you are therapist, when you sit down with a client let the meeting give rise to the therapy; when you are a carpenter, let the wood grain, nails, and hammer secure the joint. As a teacher, simply make room to participate in the rekindling of wonder with your students. When you garden, don’t pull weeds out: reach down through the roots into the soil; draw on the whole earth and whole sky. Allowing the plant-in-the-wrong-place to find a new place in the light, it emerges effortlessly.
Our sense that my body-and-mind belongs to me is a culturally reinforced delusion regarded as “normal” by our individualistic society. However, in times of war your body belongs to the State and can be drafted into the army whether you want it to or no. In patriarchal societies, the legal system explicitly treated (alas, in many places, still treats) the bodies of women and children as belonging to their husbands and fathers. Our individualist society acknowledges sports teams win more games when individual players function as one organism, but treats this as requiring some degree of self-sacrifice rather than as the most natural way of being. Many social systems, though, treat bodies as existing only insofar as they belong to their communities, to be called on as needs arise. When I trek in Nepal, we give every crew member a sleeping bag, but they usually put these aside and prefer to huddle together under a shared blanket (which, actually, is much warmer).
What if we have it backwards in our culture? Buddha suggests our usual notion that “I have a body which I occasionally share or aggregate with others” is false: it obscures that fundamentally all being - including “mine” - is inter-being. Perhaps the sense of “my” body is merely a bothersome addition to our collective “being” body. Perhaps the sense of “my” body is an extra layer which gets in the way as much as it protects and serves us. I wonder whether dolphins playing in their pods or solitary snow leopards invisible in their white world experience a sense of “my” body, or if they function perfectly fine without it?
In the Surangama Sutra, Buddha discusses how each of the aggregates, faculties, and so forth are illusory in their own-existence: in reality they are manifesting the Matrix of the Thus Come One. In the case of the body-faculty, Buddha gives an example of a person who joins her hands together when one hand is cold and the other is warm: with the exchange of warmth and cold, she becomes aware of contact. This awareness of contact, though, is inextricable from, and depends on, a sense of separation. With no separation to compare it to, how can there be separation?
Actually, the dualism of separation-and-contact is illusory. Even when the hands are not touching each other directly, they are continuously connected with each other through the rest of the body, the nervous system and the environment. Even when the hands are resting on each other, which hand is touching and which hand is being touched? Jointly experiencing this recursive contact, are the hands separate or apart? The philosopher Merleau-Ponty suggests we come to know ourselves by touching ourselves touching. I would add: and through being touched by others.
Buddha explains that discriminating contact-and-separation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral imposes a strain, and distorts perception. However, Buddha also asserts this tactile body-awareness has no ultimate basis. How can this be? What is the nature of the distortion? It seems obvious that in contact-and-separation, touching ourselves or being touched by others, we close a spatial gap. So Buddha’s analysis of what constitutes “space” becomes crucial.
We all are certain we know what space is: it’s the physical thing which provides room for us to be ourselves, and also the chasm which isolates us from the intimate wholeness we yearn for. We also experience space as a mental phenomenon; meditators attend to the space between thoughts, to the “space in mind,” the infinite “room” in which consciousness seems to arise. On closer examination, though, space - whether physical or mental - is quite mysterious. Is space a thing? Buddha says to Ananda:
“Ānanda, consider the example of a person who takes up an empty pitcher and plugs up its two spouts so that it seems he has confined some space in the pitcher. Believing that he is carrying this pitcherful of space, he travels a thousand miles to another country with the intention of making a present of it. You should know that the aggregate of consciousness can be described in similar terms.
The space that is in the pitcher, Ānanda, does not in fact come from the place where the person began his journey, nor is it transported to the country he travels to. It is like this, Ānanda: if the space had been transported from the first country by being confined in the pitcher, there must have been a loss of space at the place where the pitcher had come from. Moreover, if the space had been brought to the second country, then if the spouts were unplugged and the pitcher turned upside-down, the space within it would be seen to pour out.
In this way you should know that the aggregate of consciousness is an illusion. It does not come into being from causes and conditions, nor does it come into being on its own.”
We’re continually plugging up our consciousness with thoughts and feelings, urges and sensations. Big-I mind is constantly making its pitch, with shows of self-esteem and self-humiliation funded by commercials for things which, if we acquire or remove them, promise to improve our selves. Meditation helps us empty the pitcher. This is quite a relief. But even when we quiet the skandhas of forms, feelings, perceptions, and formations, the beguiling skandha of consciousness has no more graspable essence than does physical space.
Buddha explains that space, in whatever amount, can never be accumulated. It’s easy to fall into the illusion that if we accumulate mental space, it will expand into enlightenment. But in that case enlightenment would come into being - which would imply enlightenment is subject to birth and death. To counter this, Buddha provides us the physical metaphor of digging a well. Buddha points out that if you dig out soil to one foot, space is discernible to one foot; when you dig a well to ten feet, space is discernible to ten feet. But
does the space in the well come into being out of the soil? Does it come into being because of the digging? Or does it come into being on its own…..
The soil that is removed is solid matter, while the space is insubstantial, so they cannot function together. They cannot be aggregated or combined with each other….
Given that the fundamental nature of space is all-pervasive and does not move, you should know that the real nature…[of space, and the other elements] is one with the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, neither coming into being nor ceasing to be.
If this seems confusing, you may take comfort from the fact that space confuses physicists as well: they cannot agree on the fundamental nature of space. When Isaac Newton was formulating his laws of motion, he was very aware that he left unexamined what might be the nature of the space “in” which motion occurs. When Einstein moved from the special theory of relativity (where he intuited that time was not invariable) to the general theory, he intuited that space is not invariable.
Just as time dilates and contracts, space bends and straightens. Space curves around objects with mass (though we don’t know whether the overall “shape” of space is flat or curved, negative or positive). Space could be flat and infinite, flat with an edge, or flat and curve around onto itself. Most modern physicists assume space did not exist prior to the Big Bang, but there are several countervailing models, such as the Big Crunch which treat space as eternal - i.e., in Buddhist terms, unborn and undying.
Physicists cannot even agree on whether or not space is a thing. They agree matter cannot exist without space, but cannot agree whether space can exist without matter. If space can exist without matter, space is a thing (in which case, physicists disagree on whether space is composed of small bits or is it an unbroken, smooth field). However, it’s entirely plausible space is “only” a relationship - that is defined by where matter isn’t, but has no qualities in and of itself.
We know there are “ripples” in space; we have observed gravitational waves. To call them “waves,” though, is a little misleading. When we see, hear, or surf ocean waves, we are enjoying energy propagated through the physical medium of water. In physics, though, the physical medium traversed by light waves, gravitational waves, and other forms of energy is mysteriously nonexistent. One hundred years ago, experiments failed to find the ether which was supposed to “fill” space and provide the medium conveying the electromagnetic energy of the sun to the earth. So instead of a physical medium, physicists talk about - and can compute - the effects of energy fields. “Empty” space is “filled” with fields - but while physicists can compute the effects that fields have on matter, they cannot say what fields are in themselves. As one physicist notes: we’ve replaced the ether with the field, but the field is “the tension in the membrane, but without the membrane.” These are fields far beyond form and emptiness.
I hope this has confused and unsettled you. That’s the point. As Master Hua says in his commentary to the Surangama Sutra, “reading this, you should feel terror.” In our society meditation practice has too often become commercialized and complacent, a form of relaxation, a coping mechanism. All of those are fine palliatives, but they don’t do enough to deconstruct the delusive sense of privileged separateness which is eating away at our interbeing, destroying species, insulating us from each other and raising our temperatures to fever levels. To experience true liberation, we need to drop all our assumptions and conditioned habits of “me” and “mine.” We need to take refuge by recognizing, respecting, and taking responsibility for our co-arising with all being.
This is simply how it is. This is The Matrix of Thus Comes One: a lattice with uncountable intersections, all the spaces in-between, each point a field far beyond form and emptiness, each and all free, yet mysteriously united. To realize liberation, we can join with Ananda and the rest of the assembly who, at the end of this section of the teaching,
felt that their bodies and minds were emptied and hardly seemed to exist…. that their minds pervaded the ten directions….that all things in all worlds are the wondrous, fundamental, enlightened, luminous mind that understands, and that this mind, pure, all-pervading, and perfect, contains the entire universe.
Freed from hindrances, Ananda exclaims:
No need to wait forever to attain the Dharma-body.
I vow to reach enlightenment and
returning
rescue beings countless as the Ganges’ sands.
May the seven billion people of this maha world join in this vow. We can re-phrase it and expound the nature of The Matrix of Thus Comes One in a few familiar words:
All for One
and
One for All
Seeing is Believing (Not!) - Surangama Sutra, “The Nature of Visual Awareness”
When we look in a mirror, it shows a warped version of ourselves. It flattens us, reverses right and left, and is distorted by our fears and hopes. It doesn’t fully embody our sense of who we are, nor does it necessarily convey how others see us. All our visual images are constricted by the limitations of our visual apparatus as well as tainted by thought and desire. To take the image as the reality is to be corrupted as Ananda was (almost) corrupted by a vision of loveliness when he encountered the Matanga courtesan. Shakyamuni warns Ananda:
“all that you can now see — the mountains, the rivers, the many lands, and the various forms of life— are the result of a disease that has existed in your visual awareness since time without beginning.”
Let’s use an example from perceptual psychology to clarify this. When you look at the figure to the left, you probably can see the downward pointing white triangle in the center - - despite the fact that there is nothing there. The appearance of the triangle depends on the three black pie shapes and the placement of three carats (V-shaped lines). Without those shapes, there is no white triangle; but without our visual perception “filling in” the implications, there also would be no white triangle. We cannot grasp the white triangle itself; we cannot grasp our visual perception of it.
Here our visual perception of the center of the figure shifts from appearing as the letter “B” to appearing as the number “13.”
With some effort of visual awareness we can “unsee” both “B” and “13” and instead see simply a straight line to the left of two arcs:.
_______________________
**************************************
The Surangama scripture says:
When I don’t see, why don’t you see my not seeing?
If you see my not seeing, that is naturally not the characteristic of not seeing.
If you don’t see my not seeing, it’s naturally not a thing
- how could it not be you?
Unreal
The next section of the Surangama Sutra picks up from Buddha’s question to Ananda, “precisely where are your mind and eyes?”
This question is a good spur to cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness, though, is not an end in itself. These days mindfulness is sometimes practiced and promoted as a technique which, if mastered, produces good results. True mindfulness is not results-oriented. Practicing mindfulness doesn’t necessarily make you into a virtuous adept. Mindfulness is not a skill: it is a skillful means. Like any skillful means, it can foster realization and liberation from suffering - but it is not a sure-fire antidote which works for everyone. There isn’t any single practice which works for everyone - which is why the Surangama Sutra introduces us to a wide variety of skillful means.
Let’s remember the specific instance giving rise to the Surangama Sutra: Ananda nearly violates his vow of sexual chastity. In Christianity or Judaism, such a misdeed results in a divine judge imposing a verdict of “guilty!” along with a (possibly eternal) punishment. Buddhism is less judgmental but more pragmatic: everything we do has consequences (aka “karma”), so it’s important to have our deeds align with our intentions. If Ananda violates his vow with a sexual liaison, he’s likely to encounter more hurdles in the way of his continued practice. He’d risk losing faith in himself. He might feel ashamed; he’d have to deal with the responses of other people - the courtesan, her associates, his fellow sangha members.
Worst of all - he might have enjoyed his carnal adventure! Sex can be so exhilarating and captivating Ananda might have to struggle with another of his vows - the one about not indulging in intoxicants. Here, too, the problem in Buddhism is not that intoxicants are “sinful:” the problem is intoxicants get in the way of clarifying the mind. Clarifying the mind is not a moral mandate, it’s a necessity if we want to transform suffering at its base. The basis of suffering is desire (being caught by aversion and attachment). Desire arises through the ways our mind-body interacts with the objects we encounter, giving rise to a fundamental delusion: that what we sense, feel, and think is real.
When I was a young adult, if my peers wanted to say something was amazing, we would say: “that’s unreal, man!” The power of delusion is unreal. Delusion is intoxicating, but ungraspable.
As is everything. Or, perhaps better said: as is every unthing.
The delusion Buddha exposed, the root cause of suffering, is our mistaken belief that “things” exist. This is inextricable from the belief that “I” exist as a graspable, fixed “thing.” This belief arises from our material senses, our thoughts, feelings, impressions, and consciousness - from the ghostly-real projections of body-mind. When Buddha asks Ananda where his mind and eyes are, he invites him to take the first steps to realize how he is taken in by his usual assumptions.
The sutra now takes the first steps on a long epistemological excursion, drawing from centuries of abhidhamma, yogacara and madhyamaka analyses of the mind and its vicissitudes. We’ll soon encounter the Five Aggregates, the Six Faculties, the Twelve Sites, and the Eighteen Constituents. It’s easy to get lost in these philosophical deconstructions, or to feel they’re irrelevant to the issue at hand. After all, while the enticing young Matanga woman is caressing Ananda, he’s more likely to feel aware of his hard breathing, his elevated heartbeat and his elevated hard penis than of the Eighteen Constituents. The Eighteen Constituents are just an idea, while the hormones rushing through his bloodstream and the feel of warm flesh and the blue of her eyes and red of her lips are real, right?
Actually, they’re not real. They’re also not unreal. But they are so very convincing, they often snare us.
I was meditating the other day when a stray thought arose. It wasn’t anything particularly spectacular, just some idle musing on the derivation and meaning of a word. I let go of the thought and returned to my center…..and the train of thought arose again. I noticed the thought, noticed my mild surprise at its return, along with some mild irritation at its “interruption” of my meditation. I let go of the irritation, inquired as to whether there was any emotional attraction to or dislike of the content of the thought which might make me cling to it or push it away. I didn’t find anything meaningful. I let go of the thought, returned to my center - and the thought came back again. I became amused by how, after fifty years of meditation, I still prone to preferences about how meditation “should” be. So let go of letting go…and the same thought arose again.
Every thought wants to live forever. Usually one thought is replaced by another thought, or by some physical sensation or emotional feeling. When there is nothing to displace a thought, though, it can be sticky, as if it doesn’t “want” to be released. Each of our thoughts strives to claim our attention. None of our thoughts want to die. Neither do we. Life is sweet - or at least bittersweet.
Speaking of bittersweet: at the start of one seven-day meditation retreat I was attending, an image arose of a Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk chocolate ice cream bar. I wanted one. I smiled at it, let the image go: the desire and image returned. Each time I let go of the desire and the image, they’d return. No matter what I did or didn’t do, the ice cream smiled back at me and had a good time accompanying me throughout the seven days - one long meditation on a Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk chocolate ice cream bar. Surely this could not be enlightenment….
At the end of the retreat, I stopped on my way home and bought myself a Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk chocolate ice cream bar. It didn’t taste as good as its meditation counterpart. It was less vivid, less real than the imagined one.
How often are we caught by a fantasy and disappointed by the actual experience? Despite this, fantasies have a habit of coming back. They don’t even have to be pleasant fantasies: whenever we are depressed, our misery proclaims: “this is the real truth…..you’ve just been deceiving yourself into avoiding the ugliness of heartbreak and hate…now that you’ve seen this, you will feel this way forever.” When we are angry, we reinforce our high dudgeon by thinking we are right to be angry, we must be an advocate for righteousness. When we are scared, the little spider insists it is a large threat, a carrier not of irksome pain, but potent poison. We may feel some combination of relief, shame or annoyance when a friend scoops up the spider saying “it won’t hurt you!”
When others do not share our experience, they challenge us to entertain the possibility that we’re deluding ourselves. Then we may cultivate catching ourselves, taking a step back to view our inner dialogue from a different perspective. Such self-observation can be the first steps to mindfulness, and much of psychotherapy involves strengthening the faculty which compares what we feel and think with what others feel and think, in the service of “realistic appraisals.” But psychotherapists don’t go far enough: they do not question the normative expectancies which constitute agreed-upon “realities.” We are all least likely to question the experiences that we all take for granted. The Surangama Sutra targets our most crucial, most unexamined assumption: that self and psyche exist, that “I” • “have” • a “mind.”
In response to Ananda’s request to Buddha to please help him clarify his mind, Buddha asks Ananda to examine mind itself: “where, precisely, are your mind and eyes?” In this section of the sutra, Ananda offers many answers, proposing the mind is in the body; no, the mind is outside the body; the mind is in the middle; the mind lies within the sense-faculties; the mind arises in response to conditions. Buddha dismantles each proposition with a metaphor or a chain of reasoning, demonstrating none of these can be so. Finally, in desperation, Ananda proposes the mind has no specific location - to which Buddha replies, if there’s no where that mind exists, how can it exist at all?
I’m not going to delve into details here of Ananda’s answers and Buddha’s refutations. We’ll visit some of the issues in more depth further on with the sutra. When we do, we may find some of the reasoning and evidence profound, while some of it - especially in the context of the long history of Western philosophical and scientific explorations of perception and mind - may seem unconvincing. Whether or not we agree with the specifics is not so important as the very act of questioning the unquestionable - the gateway of liberation.
For now, let’s take take a fairly simple example by slightly re-phrasing Buddha’s question to Ananda. Let me ask you: where are your thoughts?
Most people assume “my thoughts are in my head.” They’re not.
•••
If while you were thinking we were to cut open your skull and peer inside we wouldn’t see any thoughts. We’d see a gooey mass of brown-grey-peach colored flesh marbled with white fibers and reddish blood vessels. You might object: “well, of course we couldn’t see the thoughts. They’re in the neurons firing, too small for us to see.” Thoughts, though, are not inside the neurons, nor in the synapses. Despite the media hype touting the discover of the “Angelie Jolie” neuron, there’s no one-to-one correspondence between any single neuron and a single thought or image arising from it. Sometimes if you stimulate a single neuron repeatedly, a single percept arises. But sometimes when you stimulate a single neuron repeatedly, different percepts arise. And sometimes, stimulating different single neurons leads to the same percept. The same holds true for larger brain structures. There’s a popular misconception the amygdala is the seat of rage and fear, but the amygdala only lights up when scary faces are presented full frontal, not when the face is in profile. Furthermore, the amygdala also lights up in pleasant emotional states, and in response to novel stimuli.
The brain functions via multiple pathways to the same end, and multiple ends to the same pathway. If you seek to locate thought in the electrical activity of the brain, you’ll find that activity occurs spread across complex networks far more entangled than the wires of a switchboard. In addition, electrical activity is certainly not the whole story: chemical changes are important (and neurotransmitters don’t localize precisely, there’s seepage and spreading across and around areas); fluid flows (blood and cerebrospinal fluid) play an important role; subtle shifts in neuron sizes during nerve conduction may also influence the process. Because so many interacting factors are involved, many neuroscientists believe the subjective experience of conscious thought is an emergent process which cannot be tied to isolated components of the brain, and are skeptical we will ever be able to locate “where” thoughts occur - or even “what” they are.
The brain is not the mind. The brain is not even the entire central nervous system. The CNS is not restricted to the space in the skull, it also occupies the spine, and is intimately tied to the peripheral nervous system. All of the nervous system is sensitive to changes in heat and cold, to pressure, to what’s circulating in the bloodstream and to what’s occurring in the gut.
“Knowing” thoughts are in our heads this leads too many meditators to meditate only from the neck up. Many cultures “know” differently. Some cultures locate thought in the heart; Chinese and Japanese use the same written character for “heart” and “mind,” and many meditation methods are best practiced “in” or “with” the heart (for example, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests cultivating heart-smiles). Many cultures see thinking as a product of what happens in the gut; when I was introduced to meditation in Japan, I was told to put my thoughts in my hara (belly, gut, lower dantien) or, if that was too hard, to hold my thoughts in the mudra formed by my hands. Our own culture talks about “gut feelings.” Biologists are investigating the gut-brain axis, and the bidirectional communication between the enteric and central nervous systems.
Many cultures believe thoughts are present in nature spirits: trees, animals, all the beings - including the seemingly inanimate - with which we share the world. Some believe these beings transfer their thoughts to us, either in special states like dreaming and trances or as an everyday matter of course. Research on embodied cognition shows our entire body participates in the experience of thinking, and is subject to environmental factors such as pollutants, heat/cold, music/noise and the whole of nature. If you meditate under a willow tree, you may have a different experience than meditating next to a pine or sequoia.
The crucial point here is: thoughts have no fixed physical location and arise in response to far more than what occurs in our heads. Thoughts are not tangible things: they are essentially no-thing at all. Thoughts are more insubstantial and more variable even than clouds, but they are stickier. Thoughts can block the light of realization more persistently than any thunderstorm cumulus or any morning sea-fog. Water vapor condenses around atmospheric dust-motes and coalesces to appear as clouds; our mental processes condense around the dust-motes of our ideas and coalesce into thoughts. Clouds take form as bright cumulus billows and dark pouring rain; thoughts take form as inky images and dazzling self-instructions. We mistake thoughts for reality, but they are mirages not mirrors.
Ananda was ensnared by a confluence of sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and desire in part because he failed to fully recognize: all our sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires are mirages. So is consciousness. Consciousness has some particular issues we’ll discuss in subsequent portions of the sutra, (so we’ll defer what we mean by “consciousness” until then). In any case, a huge amount of our perceptions, thoughts and feelings occur outside of conscious awareness, and even when that’s not so, consciousness by itself doesn’t necessarily act as a reliable guide. I’m sure Ananda was very conscious and aware of how desirable the courtesan appeared and how good she felt to him!
Ananda, remorseful about his susceptibility to pleasurable sensations, asks Buddha to help him purify his mind. We like to think that if we purify our minds, we’ll be able to rely on them: our minds will rule over our wayward senses and thoughts. But - as Sengcan reminds us in the poem Hsin Shin Ming, (“Faith in Mind”): - to seek the mind with the mind is the greatest of all mistakes.
Ananda is very learned; he has a very good mind, but has lost track of the fundamentals. So Buddha raises his golden-hued arm, makes a fist, and sends for light which dazzles his mind and eyes. Buddha asks Ananda what he takes to be the mind that is dazzled by the light: Ananda replies his mind is that which has the capability of seeing, that which makes distinctions between light and dark, and determines “bright! dazzling! Buddha-fist!” To which Buddha replies:
Ananda! That is not your mind!. It is merely your mental processes that assign false and illusory attributes to the world of perceived objects….these processes delude you about your true nature….[and cause you] to lose touch with your own original, everlasting mind.”
The mind which thinks, “my thoughts are in my head” is not the mind.
The problem, Buddha says, is that Ananda is caught by the “first fundamental:” the mind of death-and-birth, the mind dependent on perceived objects. However, there is a second fundamental, beginningless and endless:
the original understanding, the real nature of consciousness. All conditioned phenomena arise from it, and yet it is among those phenomena that beings lose track of it. They have lost track of this fundamental understanding though it is active in them all day long, and because they remain unaware of it, they make the[ir] mistakes……
The remainder of the sutra guides us back to our real nature. In Zen, we often call this “True Mind,” or “Unconditioned Mind,” or “Big Mind.” Buddhas describes this as the pure and luminous mind that understands without mental objects or the processes arising with them. Unfortunately, it’s easy to confuse this fundamental Mind with the conditioned mind, the “mind” with a lower-case “m.” It’s easy to slip into assigning the properties of “small mind” to Big Mind - but Big Mind doesn’t have, and cannot be constrained, by any defining properties. Because of this., Big Mind is fundamentally unlimited.
Let’s create some different terms so we can be clear in future discussions which mind we’re talking about - which mind we’re minding. Small mind’s task is to make the necessary distinctions so we can navigate the world. The physical brain and the psychological ego look for what’s safe and what’s dangerous, what’s possible and what’s not. In effect, small mind imitates a former New York City mayor, Ed Koch, who was fond of going around asking his constituents: “How am I doing? How am I doing?” The most basic function of the ego is self-centered safety and contentment. It works to obtain pleasure and avoid pain; it is biased to immediate experience, but with extra effort can engage in longer-term planning. The ego-mind protects and guards individuals by drawing on past experience, comparing it with current environmental conditions, and imagining what will happen next. Let’s call this ego-mind by the initials of its functions: basic individual guarding and imagining, or BIG-I.
In contrast, “Big Mind” is limitless: preferences would restrict it, so Big Mind is nondiscriminating. Big Mind doesn’t pick and choose: it underlies all and encompasses everything. I like to call Big Mind “The Ground of Being,” although even this term is a little misleading and overly limiting. It would be more accurate to call Big Mind “The Ground and Sky of Being and Non-Being,” but even that would not be quite accurate, and it’s too much of a mouthful. So let’s call Big Mind “Ground of Being” and refer to it by its initials: GOB. We could call Big Mind the Ground of Dharma - but it might be problematical to refer to Big Mind with the initials G-O-D….
Words seduce us with images, tempting us to turn intangibles into things. The words “Big Mind” can evoke echoes of brains, IQ scores, or perhaps the tangled circuit boards of artificial intelligence and Big Data. The words “Ground of Being” might evoke granite foundations or the dirt under our feet. Even the initials GOB may evoke a picture of some amorphous blob, some material thing. To minimize our tendencies to reify Big Mind, let’s take out the “O” from Ground of Being and abbreviate it “G-B.”
We relate to our minds through our bodies, and while words can point to vastness, we tend to think of “vastness” through the lens of a physical universe. In Zen, we sometimes try to convey G-B through the simile of the ocean. We are fish swimming in the seas of Mind; our thoughts are bubbles, our bodies dependent on a briny world which, because it is our element, we take for granted. We are subject to its currents and tides but, being immersed in water, we cannot perceive its wetness.
In this simile, the ocean manifests itself through waves: no waves without water, no water without waves. My teacher used to say Zen practice is navigating the surface waves while keeping our feet on the seabed. Even as we do this, though, we’re unaware of the far-off coastlines which contain our home, and the atmosphere above which grants us oxygen to breathe.
The Ground of Being is not an earthy core (though it does not exclude it); the Sky of Being is not a firmament of stars (though it does not deny it). Big Mind is vast beyond physical space-time, G-B is utterly without defining characteristics. We stand, sit, walk, and lie down on the Ground of Being but if we circumscribe G-B into a graspable thing, we are like the know-it-all who, after hearing Einstein lecture on the general theory of relativity, went up to him and said: “That was a very nice lecture, but of course we know in reality the world is a big ball which rests on the shell of an enormous turtle underneath it.” Einstein responded by asking what the turtle rested on - does it rest on another turtle, and if so, what does that turtle rest on?
“Oh, you can’t fool me,” says the know-it-all. “It’s turtles all the way down.”
Let's Pretend: Surangama Sutra, The Coming into Being of Illusion
Like all toddlers, my two grandchildren enjoy tasting the world. They put all sorts of things in their mouth. Recently Lucas and Noemi have delighted in a new game: they take hold of one of their toy fruits and vegetables and, knowing it’s not a “real” banana or cucmber, hold it close to their mouth, look at me with a twinkle in their eye, and say: “yum yum!” Then they offer it to me, and I join them in their pretend play.
It’s fun to use our senses to explore, and to pretend. A problem arises, though, when we forget our senses are only pretend tastes of the world, not the world itself. There’s a well-researched psychological phenomenon: the more often we see or hear something, the more we believe in it. This tendency is beloved by advertising executives and used in the repeated proclamations of politicians, television gurus, and internet influencers. After the nth retelling and a few thousand “likes,” lies masquerade as common knowledge.
As we go through various stages while we’re growing up, it’s natural to pretend to be firefighters and explorers, teachers and rock stars. We try on images of ourselves and see how they fit. When our pretend play turns into badges of identity, though, we get caught by our pretensions. When I was an adolescent I decided to pretend I liked spicy foods: my friends and I had a game to see who could eat the hottest chili without spitting it out. A few years later when I was living in Tokyo, some Japanese friends heard I liked spicy food and took me to a Korean restaurant. I ordered a soup and the waiter said to me: “you don’t want that, it’s too spicy-hot.” I replied I liked spicy-hot. The waiter insisted: “this is really spicy-hot, I don’t think you’ll like it.” Feeling challenged, I insisted he bring me the soup as my main meal. When it arrived, the soup was a scarlet sea - bright red with not much else in it to temper the pepper puree. My first spoonful told me I’d made a big mistake, but I had to save face, and finish it all. I’m not sure my taste buds ever fully recovered from that trial by fire.
Children like to pretend to be adults. By the time they turn thirty years old, adults often regret how, pretending to be this or that, they’ve locked themselves into restrictive roles. Then adults like to pretend they’re children. Some people are uncomfortable in their work roles or parent roles: they fulfill all their duties but feel like they’re phonies, that they are only pretending to a competence they don’t really have (a competence which nobody “really” has). Other people pretend their work and family roles are who they “really” are: they become so identified with their images that when they retire or their children grow up, they feel they no longer know who they are.
Buddhists sometimes like to pretend they’re Buddhists, sometimes they like to pretend they’re not. There’s always a few people who pretend to be enlightened: this often snares religious communities in scandals of power, sex, and money.
Most of us pretend we are not enlightened. This is very sad.
The Surangama sutra strips away our pretensions to understanding what we are and are not. It reminds us that every time we say “I am seeing /hearing/tasting/touching/thinking that” we’re pretending our illusions are our reality. Perceptions of self and world are refracted through the filters of our Big-I minds. Our illusions of the world are us, bent back onto ourselves: illusions of self projected onto the world, illusions of the world projected onto the self.
It’s not surprising that Buddha’s disciples, having had all their perceptions uprooted, are assailed by doubt. They complain: ‘we don’t understand - Buddha says the Matrix of the Thus Come One is fundamentally pure, empty of any thing which comes into being or ceases to exist. In that case, how do mountains, rivers, and everything else subject to causes and conditions, birth and death - [every material thing, including me and you] - arise? Even very wise Pūrṇamaitrāyaṇīputra laments that when he tries to listen to the Buddha’s discourse he feels he “might as well be a deaf man trying to hear a mosquito from a distance of more than a hundred paces…..”
I’ll paraphrase Buddha’s response. Basically, Buddha sighs.“Ah, Pūrna! Still trying to understand!” Still making conceptual distinctions! Still trying to sort the world into categories!” Still trying to reconcile the many and the one, delusion and enlightenment.
Because the category of what is differentiated and the category of what is uniform have been established, the category of what is neither uniform nor differentiated is further established. The turmoil of this….gives rise to mental strain, and as the mental strain is prolonged, grasping at objects of mind begins…..[this] creates a turbidity of mind, out of which the afflictions are generated.
Does that clarify the matter for you? Or is your mind feeling muddy at this moment?
Thich Nhat Hanh, when teaching meditation, sometimes likes to use the metaphor of a glass of muddy water to represent the mind full of thoughts. If you try to calm the mind by picking out all the little pieces of dirt, you’ll only stir things up and maintain the turbidity. If instead you just settle down and do nothing, the mud will gradually subside and the glass of water will clarify. This is excellent instruction for beginning meditators who strain themselves trying to control their minds by grasping and rejecting mind-objects.
This metaphor, though, can be misleading: it may give the impression that the bits of dirt really exist and the muddy water is really unclear. In the Surangama Sutra Buddha goes further by insisting this, too, is delusion. The muddy water manifests as an illusion in the Matrix of the Thus-Come-One. In true reality, the muddy glass of water is eternally clear throughout all time and space: that clarity just appears, for this moment, as a muddy glass of water.
Our self-centered Big-I mind makes distinctions: muddy, clear. Then we get confused, and we have troubles understanding. Enlightenment, though, is itself wondrous understanding.
Buddha wants us to wake up to how we all are, were, and will be fundamentally enlightened. We mistakenly believe we must become enlightened by gaining some additional understanding. But that would mean our fundamental enlightenment is somehow incomplete, that it needs something extra - that we need something extra.
When we try to add (Big-I) understanding to wondrous (G-B) enlightened understanding, we trip over our own feet:
An enlightenment to which an understanding is added cannot be a true enlightenment……
an enlightenment that lacks understanding cannot be the true intrinsic enlightenment that is inherently pure…..
Once the category of ‘something understood’ is mistakenly established in the mind, the category ‘that which understands’ is mistakenly established as well.
When you or I try to understand something, we separate ourselves from what we wish to understand. This creates a seemingly unbridgeable chasm where self and other can never meet. The illusion of “self” and “objects” alienates us from our true world of inter-being. This delusion is the root of all suffering.
Let’s take a concrete example. We all have phases where we’re slumbering in bed and periods where we’re aroused and going about our business. We assume “I” wake up and “I” go to sleep. However, while we’re dozing our brain stays active and our heart continues to beat. Who is this dragon who never sleeps? To think you are “out of it” when asleep and “with it” when awake is an illusion.
Sometimes, when I go to bed, I say to myself: “time for dream-self to wake up.” Often, when I get up in the morning, first thing I say to myself is: “how did that (waking up) happen?” When the mind wanders during meditation, and the mind notices itself wandering - what is the mind which embraces wandering, embraces catching itself, and embraces catching itself catching?
My eight year old daughter once posed a riddle: “why did the girl close her eyes when she looked in the mirror?” The answer: “to see herself asleep.”Whenever we look at ourselves with Big-I mind, we are looking in the mirror with our eyes closed, we are asleep thinking we’re awake.
When our inner eye is not open, we make false discriminations between asleep/awake, enlightenment/delusion. We don’t realize: we are always fully right where we are, whether asleep or awake. To think otherwise is like thinking the sun is “gone” when it sets at night, and “there” when it rises in the morning. The sun is always there: we just turn away from it for a while every twenty-four hours. The stars are always there: we just are too dazzled sometimes to see them. Enlightenment is like the sun: it is not a lamp that needs to be plugged in, that turns on and off: it offers itself to us as an ever-present star. Enlightenment is like the dark that reveals the stars: nothing needs to be extinguished or snuffed out to go beyond understanding.
Not understanding opens the horizons of wonder. Understanding has its practical uses, but it also causes major problems. As Shakyamuni says:
[once understanding arises] there arises a firm attachment to that understanding, and this firm attachment is categorized as solidity.
A point of light is seen to appear. When the light is seen clearly, deluded thoughts arise — both hatred in response to incompatible points of view and love in response to compatible ways of thinking.
Light is wonderful, but it also pollutes: in most urban areas at night now, we cannot see the stars. In the light of knowledge, we become attached to our dualistic distinctions. We identify with our limited ideas of who (me not you) and what (this not that). From these illusions come desire and aversion, bringing suffering. Darkness, if we do not violate it with light, has its own means for dispelling illusion.
Wendell Berry’s poem is apt:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
At this moment, you are thinking something different from what I am thinking. In the light of thinking we know what we know, skin colors divide us, voices are upper- and lower-class, tastes are pleasing or harsh. But also at this moment, you are not-thinking what I am not thinking. As the Sandokai says, “the dark makes all forms one.” In dark non-knowing, beyond understanding, there is no color nor sound no taste no smell no touch no object of mind: no racist divisions, no highs nor lows, no inequality, no equality.
One of the Lojong guidelines for cultivating compassion is: “Don’t try to figure things out.” When I first learned that, I was shocked. I like figuring things out. Then I remembered how frustrated my loved ones and friends can get when they want me to just listen to them, and instead I start analyzing and problem-solving. Trying to figure things out can get in the way of empathizing and being fully present.
As soon as we start to figure things out, we identify causes and conditions: we find reasons to blame someone or something for our difficulties. If we encounter suffering without trying to analyze it, we can respond naturally with loving-kindness. When I attend my daughter’s middle-school concert, I can cavil about ragged entrances, wince at wrong notes, and protest problems with pitch. Deeper down, though, there is nothing but love. When my daughter comes up to me after the concert and asks how I liked it, I can respond sincerely: it was wonderful.
Zen master Gensha liked to say: “all the universe is One Bright Pearl.” One day a student said to him: “you teach that ‘all the universe is one bright pearl - but I don’t understand. How can I gain an understanding?” Gensha replied: “All the universe is One Bright Pearl - what need is there to understand it?”
Our need for understanding comes from pride (“I am only as good as what I understand”) and fear (“if I don’t understand what’s going on, I’ll lose all control of the situation”). Understanding, though, is not insight. Insight turns us back to the fundamentals, looking for the teachings within us, our in-tuition. There’s not only nothing shameful about not understanding, it often is the spark we need to bring out previously unthought-of perspectives. Sometimes my students will start asking me about something by saying “This is a stupid question, but…” Usually, what follows is a great question. It’s often about something which I’ve taken for granted, and the student’s inquiry challenges me to go deeper. As my teacher Sojun sometimes would say, “If you want to realize enlightenment, you have to be willing to be a little bit stupid.”
A little bit stupid, though, is not the same as ignorant. Ignorance is the breeding ground for delusion. If you grasp at understanding you aggressively break the universe apart into small bits. This violates the universe. However, if you settle for not understanding, you’ll miss out on the wonders of the universe. This dishonors the universe.
It’s not a matter of understanding or not-understanding, not a matter of illusion and not-illusion, not a matter of “is” and “is not.” All these do is perpetuate dualistic distinctions. Whenever we separate delusion from clarity, we tend to treat clarity as better, as more “real.” We tend to treat delusion as if, being false, it were also “unreal” - perhaps even evil. A successful illusion, though, is completely real in its deceptiveness, and can be destructive or beneficial. The myth of WMDs in Iraq justified a war; the placebo “illusion” has very real curative effects.
Clarity is ungraspable and transparently invisible - how can you call it “real?” That which does not exist is very real in its non-existence. As the Tao Te Ching says, “that which is not penetrates every crack.” If that which does not exist were unreal, where would we find the space which provides us room for all that exists?
Trying too hard to understand false and real can give you a head ache. Before pinning your hopes on understanding false and real, right and wrong, enlightenment and delusion, consider the limits of our understanding. There will always be more that we do not understand than we do understand. To paraphrase Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: we have three-dimensional brains, how can we hope to understand a universe which has ten dimensions (or more, according to scientists and mathematicians). Even more fundamentally: do you think it is possible to truly understand yourself? If not, how could you possibly understand anyone else - let alone Buddha-dharma?
Do we even understand what understanding is? School systems have problems measuring it; philosophers have troubles defining it. Zen insists words cannot describe our understanding, even though we are continually demonstrating our understanding by how we live. We realize our enlightenment by how we stand here and face now.
Luminous, wondrous, enlightened understanding is is not a cognitive operation (though it is includes, and is not separate from, cognition). It is always in good standing; it underlies all.
What is under standing?
- The Great Earth.
What is under The Great Earth?
- The center.
What at the center of the center?
- A dimensionless point.
In meditation we cultivate intimacy with this center, with this dimensionless point, not by understanding it (or not understanding it). We cultivate this center by harmonizing body-and-mind, dropping body-and-mind, settling the self on the Self, as described in the Tao Te Ching:
Reach the pole of emptiness
- abide, still, in the center.
Constant things co-arising
- see them turn and re-turn.
Return to the root
- at the root to be still
In stillness recover, revive, and endure.
My teacher Sojun once said: “I could explain it to you, but it would be doing you a dis-service.”
The Matrix - Surangama Sutra, The Matrix of the Thus-Come-One
The Matrix
Surangama Sutra: The Matrix of the Thus-Come-One
Our ordinary mind is self-centered - and our ordinary mind is our gateway to enlightened being. By recognizing our delusions, we can wake up to realize our true selves.
In Ordinary Mind Zen we chant:
Caught in a self-centered dream - only suffering;
Holding to self-centered thoughts - exactly the dream.
Every thought, feeling and sensation is a dream within a dream. As a neuropsychologist, I’m bemused by how meditators are willing to acknowledge thoughts are often misleading, but continue to believe their sense-perceptions are “really real.” In this section of the Sutra, Buddha dispels this illusion. Shakyamuni expounds on how we pile up not just thoughts but also sensations and all the factors of body-and-mind into heaps, creating the oneiric illusion there is a world separate from our selves. In each case, Buddha shows how the myriad things add up to no thing whatsoever. Every aggregate is an illusion.
In this section of the Surangama, Buddha takes each of the various components of being -
- five aggregates (form, sense-perception, cognition, mental formations, and consciousness)
- six faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, cognition)
- twelve sites (eye-faculty and visible objects; ear-faculty and sounds; nose-faculty and odors; tongue-faculty and flavors; body-faculty and objects of touch; cognitive faculty and objects of cognition)
- Eighteen constituents (eye-consciousness, ear—consciousness, nose—consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, mind-consciousness)
- Seven primary elements (earth, fire, water, wind, space, awareness, consciousness)
and shows how each “does not come into being from causes and conditions, nor does it come into being on its own.” Rather, all these heaps, and their seeming components, are inherent in the Matrix of the Thus-Come-One, the field of enlightened nature far beyond form and emptiness. This
“true, wondrous, luminously understanding [G-B] Mind contains the body and everything outside the body — mountains, rivers, sky, the entire world…..Our enlightened nature can be involved with things throughout all ten directions, and yet it remains clear and still. It is eternally present. It neither comes into being nor ceases to be.”
This may seem wildly solipsistic or, at best, idealistic. We may intellectually acknowledge that our sense-perception and thought are sometimes fallacious, but protest they are usually pretty accurate guides. After all, the existence of our own bodies, our own minds, and the objects around us is “undeniable.” Perhaps not. When we delve more deeply into the neuropsychology of body-mind phenomena, we’re in from some surprises.
Consider asomatognosia, a syndrome some brain-injured patients experience where they do not recognize parts of their body as their own. The affected body part isn’t paralyzed or insensate, but it becomes alien. In some cases the patient insists the body part belongs to and is controlled by someone else (e.g. in alien hand syndrome, also called “Dr Strangelove hand”).
I had a brief taste of this after my CVA. It was an uncommon type of stroke, a cerebral venous thrombosis which produced intermittent symptoms, mostly problems with leg weakness and balance. One day while working at the computer I needed to use the mouse in my right hand to move the cursor to the menu bar. I gave the mental command to my hand….and was surprised when nothing happened. I didn’t have any sensory or motor problems: I could grip the mouse, I could move my hand (and the mouse) any which way. But when I told my hand to move the mouse to the menu bar, the hand simply didn’t respond. I looked at my hand, puzzled: wasn’t this my hand? But how could it be my hand if I could feel it, move it, but it didn’t do the simple movement I wanted it to do?
Neuropsychology calls this experience an agnosia: the “lower” nervous system sensations and movements are intact, but disconnected from the “higher” nervous systems of recognition and intention. I was relieved when, after several hours, my agnosia disappeared.. While it lasted, though, the feeling of body-mind disconnection was quite disorienting. It gave me a greater appreciation for patients who deal with more severe forms of this neurological disorder, and also for the depersonalization and derealization which occur in some psychiatric disorders.
A related phenomenon occurs in reverse: a person experiences their body in places where it isn’t. After a limb amputation, patients experience pain in the missing limb. You don’t need to sacrifice a limb to experience this. If you put your right hand in a box which has a rubber hand on top in line with your shoulder and arm, and someone strokes a finger of your real hand (unseen, in the box) while simultaneously stroking the same finger of the rubber hand you are looking at, after a few minutes it will seem like your “real” hand vanishes and the fake hand is your own.
We think of these as disorders or illusions. From a Buddhist standpoint, though, they illustrate how our sense of “my” body is always illusory: it is a brain image, a representation rather than a fact.
Letting go of “my” body need not be pathological; it can scrape away the belief of personal ownership and allow us access to luminous experiences of non-separation. Hopefully you’ve had experiences of this sort, where you’ve been so immersed in an activity “you” vanish. Perhaps, singing or dancing, you’ve felt the music doing the crooning, the dance itself capering through your limbs. It’s quite wonderful when, after a few years of practicing qigong or taiji, once in a while everything aligns and we feel it is not us, but the qigong/taiji which is performing the form “through” us.
Shunryu Suzuki used to say: “it is a big mistake to think you are doing the meditation.” When we sit down to meditate, it’s important to get out of the way and let the meditation meditate. If you are therapist, when you sit down with a client let the meeting give rise to the therapy; when you are a carpenter, let the wood grain, nails, and hammer secure the joint. As a teacher, simply make room to participate in the rekindling of wonder with your students. When you garden, don’t pull weeds out: reach down through the roots into the soil; draw on the whole earth and whole sky. Allowing the plant-in-the-wrong-place to find a new place in the light, it emerges effortlessly.
Our sense that my body-and-mind belongs to me is a culturally reinforced delusion regarded as “normal” by our individualistic society. However, in times of war your body belongs to the State and can be drafted into the army whether you want it to or no. In patriarchal societies, the legal system explicitly treated (alas, in many places, still treats) the bodies of women and children as belonging to their husbands and fathers. Our individualist society acknowledges sports teams win more games when individual players function as one organism, but treats this as requiring some degree of self-sacrifice rather than as the most natural way of being. Many social systems, though, treat bodies as existing only insofar as they belong to their communities, to be called on as needs arise. When I trek in Nepal, we give every crew member a sleeping bag, but they usually put these aside and prefer to huddle together under a shared blanket (which, actually, is much warmer).
What if we have it backwards in our culture? Buddha suggests our usual notion that “I have a body which I occasionally share or aggregate with others” is false: it obscures that fundamentally all being - including “mine” - is inter-being. Perhaps the sense of “my” body is merely a bothersome addition to our collective “being” body. Perhaps the sense of “my” body is an extra layer which gets in the way as much as it protects and serves us. I wonder whether dolphins playing in their pods or solitary snow leopards invisible in their white world experience a sense of “my” body, or if they function perfectly fine without it?
In the Surangama Sutra, Buddha discusses how each of the aggregates, faculties, and so forth are illusory in their own-existence: in reality they are manifesting the Matrix of the Thus Come One. In the case of the body-faculty, Buddha gives an example of a person who joins her hands together when one hand is cold and the other is warm: with the exchange of warmth and cold, she becomes aware of contact. This awareness of contact, though, is inextricable from, and depends on, a sense of separation. With no separation to compare it to, how can there be separation?
Actually, the dualism of separation-and-contact is illusory. Even when the hands are not touching each other directly, they are continuously connected with each other through the rest of the body, the nervous system and the environment. Even when the hands are resting on each other, which hand is touching and which hand is being touched? Jointly experiencing this recursive contact, are the hands separate or apart? The philosopher Merleau-Ponty suggests we come to know ourselves by touching ourselves touching. I would add: and through being touched by others.
Buddha explains that discriminating contact-and-separation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral imposes a strain, and distorts perception. However, Buddha also asserts this tactile body-awareness has no ultimate basis. How can this be? What is the nature of the distortion? It seems obvious that in contact-and-separation, touching ourselves or being touched by others, we close a spatial gap. So Buddha’s analysis of what constitutes “space” becomes crucial.
We all are certain we know what space is: it’s the physical thing which provides room for us to be ourselves, and also the chasm which isolates us from the intimate wholeness we yearn for. We also experience space as a mental phenomenon; meditators attend to the space between thoughts, to the “space in mind,” the infinite “room” in which consciousness seems to arise. On closer examination, though, space - whether physical or mental - is quite mysterious. Is space a thing? Buddha says to Ananda:
“Ānanda, consider the example of a person who takes up an empty pitcher and plugs up its two spouts so that it seems he has confined some space in the pitcher. Believing that he is carrying this pitcherful of space, he travels a thousand miles to another country with the intention of making a present of it. You should know that the aggregate of consciousness can be described in similar terms.
The space that is in the pitcher, Ānanda, does not in fact come from the place where the person began his journey, nor is it transported to the country he travels to. It is like this, Ānanda: if the space had been transported from the first country by being confined in the pitcher, there must have been a loss of space at the place where the pitcher had come from. Moreover, if the space had been brought to the second country, then if the spouts were unplugged and the pitcher turned upside-down, the space within it would be seen to pour out.
In this way you should know that the aggregate of consciousness is an illusion. It does not come into being from causes and conditions, nor does it come into being on its own.”
We’re continually plugging up our consciousness with thoughts and feelings, urges and sensations. Big-I mind is constantly making its pitch, with shows of self-esteem and self-humiliation funded by commercials for things which, if we acquire or remove them, promise to improve our selves. Meditation helps us empty the pitcher. This is quite a relief. But even when we quiet the skandhas of forms, feelings, perceptions, and formations, the beguiling skandha of consciousness has no more graspable essence than does physical space.
Buddha explains that space, in whatever amount, can never be accumulated. It’s easy to fall into the illusion that if we accumulate mental space, it will expand into enlightenment. But in that case enlightenment would come into being - which would imply enlightenment is subject to birth and death. To counter this, Buddha provides us the physical metaphor of digging a well. Buddha points out that if you dig out soil to one foot, space is discernible to one foot; when you dig a well to ten feet, space is discernible to ten feet. But
does the space in the well come into being out of the soil? Does it come into being because of the digging? Or does it come into being on its own…..
The soil that is removed is solid matter, while the space is insubstantial, so they cannot function together. They cannot be aggregated or combined with each other….
Given that the fundamental nature of space is all-pervasive and does not move, you should know that the real nature…[of space, and the other elements] is one with the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, neither coming into being nor ceasing to be.
If this seems confusing, you may take comfort from the fact that space confuses physicists as well: they cannot agree on the fundamental nature of space. When Isaac Newton was formulating his laws of motion, he was very aware that he left unexamined what might be the nature of the space “in” which motion occurs. When Einstein moved from the special theory of relativity (where he intuited that time was not invariable) to the general theory, he intuited that space is not invariable.
Just as time dilates and contracts, space bends and straightens. Space curves around objects with mass (though we don’t know whether the overall “shape” of space is flat or curved, negative or positive). Space could be flat and infinite, flat with an edge, or flat and curve around onto itself. Most modern physicists assume space did not exist prior to the Big Bang, but there are several countervailing models, such as the Big Crunch which treat space as eternal - i.e., in Buddhist terms, unborn and undying.
Physicists cannot even agree on whether or not space is a thing. They agree matter cannot exist without space, but cannot agree whether space can exist without matter. If space can exist without matter, space is a thing (in which case, physicists disagree on whether space is composed of small bits or is it an unbroken, smooth field). However, it’s entirely plausible space is “only” a relationship - that is defined by where matter isn’t, but has no qualities in and of itself.
We know there are “ripples” in space; we have observed gravitational waves. To call them “waves,” though, is a little misleading. When we see, hear, or surf ocean waves, we are enjoying energy propagated through the physical medium of water. In physics, though, the physical medium traversed by light waves, gravitational waves, and other forms of energy is mysteriously nonexistent. One hundred years ago, experiments failed to find the ether which was supposed to “fill” space and provide the medium conveying the electromagnetic energy of the sun to the earth. So instead of a physical medium, physicists talk about - and can compute - the effects of energy fields. “Empty” space is “filled” with fields - but while physicists can compute the effects that fields have on matter, they cannot say what fields are in themselves. As one physicist notes: we’ve replaced the ether with the field, but the field is “the tension in the membrane, but without the membrane.” These are fields far beyond form and emptiness.
I hope this has confused and unsettled you. That’s the point. As Master Hua says in his commentary to the Surangama Sutra, “reading this, you should feel terror.” In our society meditation practice has too often become commercialized and complacent, a form of relaxation, a coping mechanism. All of those are fine palliatives, but they don’t do enough to deconstruct the delusive sense of privileged separateness which is eating away at our interbeing, destroying species, insulating us from each other and raising our temperatures to fever levels. To experience true liberation, we need to drop all our assumptions and conditioned habits of “me” and “mine.” We need to take refuge by recognizing, respecting, and taking responsibility for our co-arising with all being.
This is simply how it is. This is The Matrix of Thus Comes One: a lattice with uncountable intersections, all the spaces in-between, each point a field far beyond form and emptiness, each and all free, yet mysteriously united. To realize liberation, we can join with Ananda and the rest of the assembly who, at the end of this section of the teaching,
felt that their bodies and minds were emptied and hardly seemed to exist…. that their minds pervaded the ten directions….that all things in all worlds are the wondrous, fundamental, enlightened, luminous mind that understands, and that this mind, pure, all-pervading, and perfect, contains the entire universe.
Freed from hindrances, Ananda exclaims:
No need to wait forever to attain the Dharma-body.
I vow to reach enlightenment and
returning
rescue beings countless as the Ganges’ sands.
May the seven billion people of this maha world join in this vow. We can re-phrase it and expound the nature of The Matrix of Thus Comes One in a few familiar words:
All for One
and
One for All
Seeing is Believing (Not!) - Surangama Sutra, “The Nature of Visual Awareness”
When we look in a mirror, it shows a warped version of ourselves. It flattens us, reverses right and left, and is distorted by our fears and hopes. It doesn’t fully embody our sense of who we are, nor does it necessarily convey how others see us. All our visual images are constricted by the limitations of our visual apparatus as well as tainted by thought and desire. To take the image as the reality is to be corrupted as Ananda was (almost) corrupted by a vision of loveliness when he encountered the Matanga courtesan. Shakyamuni warns Ananda:
“all that you can now see — the mountains, the rivers, the many lands, and the various forms of life— are the result of a disease that has existed in your visual awareness since time without beginning.”
Let’s use an example from perceptual psychology to clarify this. When you look at the figure to the left, you probably can see the downward pointing white triangle in the center - - despite the fact that there is nothing there. The appearance of the triangle depends on the three black pie shapes and the placement of three carats (V-shaped lines). Without those shapes, there is no white triangle; but without our visual perception “filling in” the implications, there also would be no white triangle. We cannot grasp the white triangle itself; we cannot grasp our visual perception of it.
Here our visual perception of the center of the figure shifts from appearing as the letter “B” to appearing as the number “13.”
With some effort of visual awareness we can “unsee” both “B” and “13” and instead see simply a straight line to the left of two arcs:.
_______________________
**************************************
The Surangama scripture says:
When I don’t see, why don’t you see my not seeing?
If you see my not seeing, that is naturally not the characteristic of not seeing.
If you don’t see my not seeing, it’s naturally not a thing
- how could it not be you?
Unreal
The next section of the Surangama Sutra picks up from Buddha’s question to Ananda, “precisely where are your mind and eyes?”
This question is a good spur to cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness, though, is not an end in itself. These days mindfulness is sometimes practiced and promoted as a technique which, if mastered, produces good results. True mindfulness is not results-oriented. Practicing mindfulness doesn’t necessarily make you into a virtuous adept. Mindfulness is not a skill: it is a skillful means. Like any skillful means, it can foster realization and liberation from suffering - but it is not a sure-fire antidote which works for everyone. There isn’t any single practice which works for everyone - which is why the Surangama Sutra introduces us to a wide variety of skillful means.
Let’s remember the specific instance giving rise to the Surangama Sutra: Ananda nearly violates his vow of sexual chastity. In Christianity or Judaism, such a misdeed results in a divine judge imposing a verdict of “guilty!” along with a (possibly eternal) punishment. Buddhism is less judgmental but more pragmatic: everything we do has consequences (aka “karma”), so it’s important to have our deeds align with our intentions. If Ananda violates his vow with a sexual liaison, he’s likely to encounter more hurdles in the way of his continued practice. He’d risk losing faith in himself. He might feel ashamed; he’d have to deal with the responses of other people - the courtesan, her associates, his fellow sangha members.
Worst of all - he might have enjoyed his carnal adventure! Sex can be so exhilarating and captivating Ananda might have to struggle with another of his vows - the one about not indulging in intoxicants. Here, too, the problem in Buddhism is not that intoxicants are “sinful:” the problem is intoxicants get in the way of clarifying the mind. Clarifying the mind is not a moral mandate, it’s a necessity if we want to transform suffering at its base. The basis of suffering is desire (being caught by aversion and attachment). Desire arises through the ways our mind-body interacts with the objects we encounter, giving rise to a fundamental delusion: that what we sense, feel, and think is real.
When I was a young adult, if my peers wanted to say something was amazing, we would say: “that’s unreal, man!” The power of delusion is unreal. Delusion is intoxicating, but ungraspable.
As is everything. Or, perhaps better said: as is every unthing.
The delusion Buddha exposed, the root cause of suffering, is our mistaken belief that “things” exist. This is inextricable from the belief that “I” exist as a graspable, fixed “thing.” This belief arises from our material senses, our thoughts, feelings, impressions, and consciousness - from the ghostly-real projections of body-mind. When Buddha asks Ananda where his mind and eyes are, he invites him to take the first steps to realize how he is taken in by his usual assumptions.
The sutra now takes the first steps on a long epistemological excursion, drawing from centuries of abhidhamma, yogacara and madhyamaka analyses of the mind and its vicissitudes. We’ll soon encounter the Five Aggregates, the Six Faculties, the Twelve Sites, and the Eighteen Constituents. It’s easy to get lost in these philosophical deconstructions, or to feel they’re irrelevant to the issue at hand. After all, while the enticing young Matanga woman is caressing Ananda, he’s more likely to feel aware of his hard breathing, his elevated heartbeat and his elevated hard penis than of the Eighteen Constituents. The Eighteen Constituents are just an idea, while the hormones rushing through his bloodstream and the feel of warm flesh and the blue of her eyes and red of her lips are real, right?
Actually, they’re not real. They’re also not unreal. But they are so very convincing, they often snare us.
I was meditating the other day when a stray thought arose. It wasn’t anything particularly spectacular, just some idle musing on the derivation and meaning of a word. I let go of the thought and returned to my center…..and the train of thought arose again. I noticed the thought, noticed my mild surprise at its return, along with some mild irritation at its “interruption” of my meditation. I let go of the irritation, inquired as to whether there was any emotional attraction to or dislike of the content of the thought which might make me cling to it or push it away. I didn’t find anything meaningful. I let go of the thought, returned to my center - and the thought came back again. I became amused by how, after fifty years of meditation, I still prone to preferences about how meditation “should” be. So let go of letting go…and the same thought arose again.
Every thought wants to live forever. Usually one thought is replaced by another thought, or by some physical sensation or emotional feeling. When there is nothing to displace a thought, though, it can be sticky, as if it doesn’t “want” to be released. Each of our thoughts strives to claim our attention. None of our thoughts want to die. Neither do we. Life is sweet - or at least bittersweet.
Speaking of bittersweet: at the start of one seven-day meditation retreat I was attending, an image arose of a Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk chocolate ice cream bar. I wanted one. I smiled at it, let the image go: the desire and image returned. Each time I let go of the desire and the image, they’d return. No matter what I did or didn’t do, the ice cream smiled back at me and had a good time accompanying me throughout the seven days - one long meditation on a Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk chocolate ice cream bar. Surely this could not be enlightenment….
At the end of the retreat, I stopped on my way home and bought myself a Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk chocolate ice cream bar. It didn’t taste as good as its meditation counterpart. It was less vivid, less real than the imagined one.
How often are we caught by a fantasy and disappointed by the actual experience? Despite this, fantasies have a habit of coming back. They don’t even have to be pleasant fantasies: whenever we are depressed, our misery proclaims: “this is the real truth…..you’ve just been deceiving yourself into avoiding the ugliness of heartbreak and hate…now that you’ve seen this, you will feel this way forever.” When we are angry, we reinforce our high dudgeon by thinking we are right to be angry, we must be an advocate for righteousness. When we are scared, the little spider insists it is a large threat, a carrier not of irksome pain, but potent poison. We may feel some combination of relief, shame or annoyance when a friend scoops up the spider saying “it won’t hurt you!”
When others do not share our experience, they challenge us to entertain the possibility that we’re deluding ourselves. Then we may cultivate catching ourselves, taking a step back to view our inner dialogue from a different perspective. Such self-observation can be the first steps to mindfulness, and much of psychotherapy involves strengthening the faculty which compares what we feel and think with what others feel and think, in the service of “realistic appraisals.” But psychotherapists don’t go far enough: they do not question the normative expectancies which constitute agreed-upon “realities.” We are all least likely to question the experiences that we all take for granted. The Surangama Sutra targets our most crucial, most unexamined assumption: that self and psyche exist, that “I” • “have” • a “mind.”
In response to Ananda’s request to Buddha to please help him clarify his mind, Buddha asks Ananda to examine mind itself: “where, precisely, are your mind and eyes?” In this section of the sutra, Ananda offers many answers, proposing the mind is in the body; no, the mind is outside the body; the mind is in the middle; the mind lies within the sense-faculties; the mind arises in response to conditions. Buddha dismantles each proposition with a metaphor or a chain of reasoning, demonstrating none of these can be so. Finally, in desperation, Ananda proposes the mind has no specific location - to which Buddha replies, if there’s no where that mind exists, how can it exist at all?
I’m not going to delve into details here of Ananda’s answers and Buddha’s refutations. We’ll visit some of the issues in more depth further on with the sutra. When we do, we may find some of the reasoning and evidence profound, while some of it - especially in the context of the long history of Western philosophical and scientific explorations of perception and mind - may seem unconvincing. Whether or not we agree with the specifics is not so important as the very act of questioning the unquestionable - the gateway of liberation.
For now, let’s take take a fairly simple example by slightly re-phrasing Buddha’s question to Ananda. Let me ask you: where are your thoughts?
Most people assume “my thoughts are in my head.” They’re not.
•••
If while you were thinking we were to cut open your skull and peer inside we wouldn’t see any thoughts. We’d see a gooey mass of brown-grey-peach colored flesh marbled with white fibers and reddish blood vessels. You might object: “well, of course we couldn’t see the thoughts. They’re in the neurons firing, too small for us to see.” Thoughts, though, are not inside the neurons, nor in the synapses. Despite the media hype touting the discover of the “Angelie Jolie” neuron, there’s no one-to-one correspondence between any single neuron and a single thought or image arising from it. Sometimes if you stimulate a single neuron repeatedly, a single percept arises. But sometimes when you stimulate a single neuron repeatedly, different percepts arise. And sometimes, stimulating different single neurons leads to the same percept. The same holds true for larger brain structures. There’s a popular misconception the amygdala is the seat of rage and fear, but the amygdala only lights up when scary faces are presented full frontal, not when the face is in profile. Furthermore, the amygdala also lights up in pleasant emotional states, and in response to novel stimuli.
The brain functions via multiple pathways to the same end, and multiple ends to the same pathway. If you seek to locate thought in the electrical activity of the brain, you’ll find that activity occurs spread across complex networks far more entangled than the wires of a switchboard. In addition, electrical activity is certainly not the whole story: chemical changes are important (and neurotransmitters don’t localize precisely, there’s seepage and spreading across and around areas); fluid flows (blood and cerebrospinal fluid) play an important role; subtle shifts in neuron sizes during nerve conduction may also influence the process. Because so many interacting factors are involved, many neuroscientists believe the subjective experience of conscious thought is an emergent process which cannot be tied to isolated components of the brain, and are skeptical we will ever be able to locate “where” thoughts occur - or even “what” they are.
The brain is not the mind. The brain is not even the entire central nervous system. The CNS is not restricted to the space in the skull, it also occupies the spine, and is intimately tied to the peripheral nervous system. All of the nervous system is sensitive to changes in heat and cold, to pressure, to what’s circulating in the bloodstream and to what’s occurring in the gut.
“Knowing” thoughts are in our heads this leads too many meditators to meditate only from the neck up. Many cultures “know” differently. Some cultures locate thought in the heart; Chinese and Japanese use the same written character for “heart” and “mind,” and many meditation methods are best practiced “in” or “with” the heart (for example, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests cultivating heart-smiles). Many cultures see thinking as a product of what happens in the gut; when I was introduced to meditation in Japan, I was told to put my thoughts in my hara (belly, gut, lower dantien) or, if that was too hard, to hold my thoughts in the mudra formed by my hands. Our own culture talks about “gut feelings.” Biologists are investigating the gut-brain axis, and the bidirectional communication between the enteric and central nervous systems.
Many cultures believe thoughts are present in nature spirits: trees, animals, all the beings - including the seemingly inanimate - with which we share the world. Some believe these beings transfer their thoughts to us, either in special states like dreaming and trances or as an everyday matter of course. Research on embodied cognition shows our entire body participates in the experience of thinking, and is subject to environmental factors such as pollutants, heat/cold, music/noise and the whole of nature. If you meditate under a willow tree, you may have a different experience than meditating next to a pine or sequoia.
The crucial point here is: thoughts have no fixed physical location and arise in response to far more than what occurs in our heads. Thoughts are not tangible things: they are essentially no-thing at all. Thoughts are more insubstantial and more variable even than clouds, but they are stickier. Thoughts can block the light of realization more persistently than any thunderstorm cumulus or any morning sea-fog. Water vapor condenses around atmospheric dust-motes and coalesces to appear as clouds; our mental processes condense around the dust-motes of our ideas and coalesce into thoughts. Clouds take form as bright cumulus billows and dark pouring rain; thoughts take form as inky images and dazzling self-instructions. We mistake thoughts for reality, but they are mirages not mirrors.
Ananda was ensnared by a confluence of sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and desire in part because he failed to fully recognize: all our sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires are mirages. So is consciousness. Consciousness has some particular issues we’ll discuss in subsequent portions of the sutra, (so we’ll defer what we mean by “consciousness” until then). In any case, a huge amount of our perceptions, thoughts and feelings occur outside of conscious awareness, and even when that’s not so, consciousness by itself doesn’t necessarily act as a reliable guide. I’m sure Ananda was very conscious and aware of how desirable the courtesan appeared and how good she felt to him!
Ananda, remorseful about his susceptibility to pleasurable sensations, asks Buddha to help him purify his mind. We like to think that if we purify our minds, we’ll be able to rely on them: our minds will rule over our wayward senses and thoughts. But - as Sengcan reminds us in the poem Hsin Shin Ming, (“Faith in Mind”): - to seek the mind with the mind is the greatest of all mistakes.
Ananda is very learned; he has a very good mind, but has lost track of the fundamentals. So Buddha raises his golden-hued arm, makes a fist, and sends for light which dazzles his mind and eyes. Buddha asks Ananda what he takes to be the mind that is dazzled by the light: Ananda replies his mind is that which has the capability of seeing, that which makes distinctions between light and dark, and determines “bright! dazzling! Buddha-fist!” To which Buddha replies:
Ananda! That is not your mind!. It is merely your mental processes that assign false and illusory attributes to the world of perceived objects….these processes delude you about your true nature….[and cause you] to lose touch with your own original, everlasting mind.”
The mind which thinks, “my thoughts are in my head” is not the mind.
The problem, Buddha says, is that Ananda is caught by the “first fundamental:” the mind of death-and-birth, the mind dependent on perceived objects. However, there is a second fundamental, beginningless and endless:
the original understanding, the real nature of consciousness. All conditioned phenomena arise from it, and yet it is among those phenomena that beings lose track of it. They have lost track of this fundamental understanding though it is active in them all day long, and because they remain unaware of it, they make the[ir] mistakes……
The remainder of the sutra guides us back to our real nature. In Zen, we often call this “True Mind,” or “Unconditioned Mind,” or “Big Mind.” Buddhas describes this as the pure and luminous mind that understands without mental objects or the processes arising with them. Unfortunately, it’s easy to confuse this fundamental Mind with the conditioned mind, the “mind” with a lower-case “m.” It’s easy to slip into assigning the properties of “small mind” to Big Mind - but Big Mind doesn’t have, and cannot be constrained, by any defining properties. Because of this., Big Mind is fundamentally unlimited.
Let’s create some different terms so we can be clear in future discussions which mind we’re talking about - which mind we’re minding. Small mind’s task is to make the necessary distinctions so we can navigate the world. The physical brain and the psychological ego look for what’s safe and what’s dangerous, what’s possible and what’s not. In effect, small mind imitates a former New York City mayor, Ed Koch, who was fond of going around asking his constituents: “How am I doing? How am I doing?” The most basic function of the ego is self-centered safety and contentment. It works to obtain pleasure and avoid pain; it is biased to immediate experience, but with extra effort can engage in longer-term planning. The ego-mind protects and guards individuals by drawing on past experience, comparing it with current environmental conditions, and imagining what will happen next. Let’s call this ego-mind by the initials of its functions: basic individual guarding and imagining, or BIG-I.
In contrast, “Big Mind” is limitless: preferences would restrict it, so Big Mind is nondiscriminating. Big Mind doesn’t pick and choose: it underlies all and encompasses everything. I like to call Big Mind “The Ground of Being,” although even this term is a little misleading and overly limiting. It would be more accurate to call Big Mind “The Ground and Sky of Being and Non-Being,” but even that would not be quite accurate, and it’s too much of a mouthful. So let’s call Big Mind “Ground of Being” and refer to it by its initials: GOB. We could call Big Mind the Ground of Dharma - but it might be problematical to refer to Big Mind with the initials G-O-D….
Words seduce us with images, tempting us to turn intangibles into things. The words “Big Mind” can evoke echoes of brains, IQ scores, or perhaps the tangled circuit boards of artificial intelligence and Big Data. The words “Ground of Being” might evoke granite foundations or the dirt under our feet. Even the initials GOB may evoke a picture of some amorphous blob, some material thing. To minimize our tendencies to reify Big Mind, let’s take out the “O” from Ground of Being and abbreviate it “G-B.”
We relate to our minds through our bodies, and while words can point to vastness, we tend to think of “vastness” through the lens of a physical universe. In Zen, we sometimes try to convey G-B through the simile of the ocean. We are fish swimming in the seas of Mind; our thoughts are bubbles, our bodies dependent on a briny world which, because it is our element, we take for granted. We are subject to its currents and tides but, being immersed in water, we cannot perceive its wetness.
In this simile, the ocean manifests itself through waves: no waves without water, no water without waves. My teacher used to say Zen practice is navigating the surface waves while keeping our feet on the seabed. Even as we do this, though, we’re unaware of the far-off coastlines which contain our home, and the atmosphere above which grants us oxygen to breathe.
The Ground of Being is not an earthy core (though it does not exclude it); the Sky of Being is not a firmament of stars (though it does not deny it). Big Mind is vast beyond physical space-time, G-B is utterly without defining characteristics. We stand, sit, walk, and lie down on the Ground of Being but if we circumscribe G-B into a graspable thing, we are like the know-it-all who, after hearing Einstein lecture on the general theory of relativity, went up to him and said: “That was a very nice lecture, but of course we know in reality the world is a big ball which rests on the shell of an enormous turtle underneath it.” Einstein responded by asking what the turtle rested on - does it rest on another turtle, and if so, what does that turtle rest on?
“Oh, you can’t fool me,” says the know-it-all. “It’s turtles all the way down.”