Turning the Light Around

In Zen, the most important function of consciousness is "to turn the light around," also known as "to turn yourself about" or "to take the backward step" (Sanskrit paravrtti).  But because of the very bifurcation function of our underlying “sub”-consciousness (the manas level of consciousness) that enables us to have self-consciousness,  we immediately make a mistake about this pointing out of what we must do if we want to comprehend our nature, our great meaning in life. That mistake is to literalize, objectify, or reify the pointing finger of “turn the light around” and look to an “inside” compared to the “outside.”  There is nothing wrong with this, except that we then create objectifications of “inside” and erroneously call our subjectivity our “inside” and vice versa.  This is why people mistake Buddhism as a kind of “subjective idealism” when we speak of mind, because they think Buddhism uses the term ‘mind” to mean subjectivity, when that is not the case at all.  

In the Buddhist context, the phrase “turn the light around” means to become free of that fundamental bifurcation of making reality into two sides: the objective-subjective or external-internal.  To turn the light around doesn’t mean to turn the light from the objective to the subjective, or to turn the light from the external to the internal; it means to turn the light around from our own deepest mental activity of dividing reality into an objective realm verses a subjective realm, or an external world opposed to internal world. We are taking a backward step that steps back from our instinctive need to polarize and reify our dualistic imagination.  When we are able to turn the light of our awareness around from our habitual bifurcation process, our awareness penetrates or “sees through” that veil created by this deepest polarizing activity of our own mind to awaken to, witness, and confirm with our own realization the unity throughout the root, branches, twigs, and leaves of the living universe of awareness.

A Brief Outline of the One Vehicle

 

 

The Buddha’s Ekayana is the One Vehicle or Vehicle of Oneness (eka = one; yana = vehicle).  Here “vehicle” means the conveyance and its connotation includes the travel of and the course traveled by the conveyance. One Vehicle is not a term of exclusion meaning only this one vehicle and not any other vehicle.  The One Vehicle is a term of universal inclusion meaning that all vehicles of all religions are within and not separate from the One Vehicle.  

 

When people perceive different vehicles, it is not because there are different vehicles at the root, but because the different capabilities and capacities of people’s understanding and perceiving create the appearance of different vehicles at the branches and leaves.  All vehicles are One Vehicle in essence because the teachings of all vehicles ultimately return to their root and original source that is the non-dual oneness of true Suchness.

 

Woven in the history of the Ekayana movement and the development of the One Vehicle teachings are several essential themes which may be outlined as follows:

 

(1) All beings are fully endowed with the Tathagata’s wisdom-knowledge (tathagatajnana, wise-knowing), also called Buddha knowledge (buddhajnana) or Noble wisdom (aryajnana), and the original enlightenment of the true mind.  [This is a restatement of the Buddha’s Third Noble Truth from the perspective of the One Vehicle.]

 

(2)  Ignorance: It is the erroneous views of antithetical conceptions (vikalpa) and the resulting attachments that obscure and obstruct beings from seeing and realizing this true nature of the Tathagata’s wise-knowing, and as these views become firm, like water turning to ice or wet cement drying like concrete, they form the fixed foundation of our ignorance of our true nature of the Tathagata’s wise-knowing. [This is the Second Noble Truth.]

 

(3)  Off-centeredness and Afflictions: All the myriad plethora of vexations, afflictions and troubles (klesa) of living beings are constructed on this foundation of fixated ignorance regarding our true nature of the Tathagata’s wise-knowing, and cumulatively, this condition is called the underlying and permeating feeling of off-centeredness (dukkha) of our own being and is also called our “self.”  [This is the First Noble Truth.]

 

(4)   The One Vehicle: The primary (and functionally sole) purpose of a Buddha appearing in the world is to reveal the nature of the Buddha’s wise-knowing and to lead all beings to their own realization of the Tathagata’s wise-knowing so that all beings may be free from off-centeredness (dukkha) and its concomitant vexations (klesa). Because carrying out this single purpose of showing humans how to be Buddhas is the essential teaching of the all the Tathagatas, it is called the One Vehicle, the Most Supreme Vehicle, the Buddha Vehicle, and the One Buddha Vehicle.  [This is the Fourth Noble Truth.]

 

(5) Skillful Means of Upaya: A Buddha-Tathagata uses teaching methods appropriate to the audience for revealing the nature and leading beings to awakening through their own realization of the Buddha’s wise-knowing.  The appropriateness of the teaching to the audience is called upaya or skillful means.

 

(6)  Many Teachings, One Vehicle: The many apparent differences in the teachings and methods of practice presented by the Buddha that arise from responding to the differences in capacities of the audiences do not create different vehicles or paths to different goals. The Buddha did not teach different vehicles with different purposes and only taught what appeared to be different vehicles with one purpose: describing or pointing to the awakening of beings to become Buddhas. Where it may appear that multiple vehicles were taught was because the audience being taught did not have faith that they could become Buddhas. So, for example, for people who could not believe that they themselves could become Buddhas, the Buddha taught the skillful means that they could become moral people with good behavior resulting in better future births at which time they would then be ready to receive the teaching that reveals the nature to become Buddha.

 

(7)  Names:  Names are just pointers. The nature of the wise-knowing of the Tathagata (“thus come”) is known by many names such as Sunyata (Emptiness), Suchness (Tathata); Dharmakaya (the body or essence of Dharma), Buddha-nature, Tathagata-garbha (the Inner Tathagata), Alaya-vjnana (the Storehouse of Consciousness), Nirvana; the Bhutakoti (Reality- Limit), the Signless, the Dharmadhatu (Dharma Realm), paramartha (the ultimate truth),  Mind (citta), One Mind (ekacitta), etc.; and people of other teachings use other terms such as the Source, God; Godhead; Allah; Brahma; Vishnu; Jehovah; Yahweh; Lord; the Victor; the Sun; the Moon; Truth; Reality; Ultimate Principle; the Eternal; Non-duality; etc.. Worldly views are vehicles of exclusion that consider these different names to be referring to different things.  In the all inclusive view of the One Vehicle knows these different names are pointing to the one and the same Tathagata.

 

(8)  Mind: However, because people can hear a label such as Buddha, Emptiness, or the Dharmakaya and believe the label refers to something outside of themselves, the term mind is often preferred, since no one can seriously say they are outside of their own mind. The term mind is the most intimate label and is least susceptible to being objectified or externalized, so it is the preferred term to anchor one’s attention to their Buddha Nature for purposes of actual practice and realization. However, since people may think the term mind means their ego, self-image, or cognitive consciousness, the term is often capitalized in English as Mind to indicate it is the non-individual non-separated Mind being referred to. Since Mind is non-dual it is called the One Mind, since it is unborn it is called Original Mind.  Since there is nothing with which it can be compared and it is inconceivable it is called No-mind. Since it has no fault of its own, it is called True Mind.

 

(9) Synthesis. Since all the teachings of Buddhism, including both Mahayana and the Early Schools, are essentially and primarily teachings about the One Mind of our own Buddha Nature they must be taken as an organic whole, and the reconciliation of apparent oppositions or contradictions within the Buddhist teachings is the essence of the synthetic approach of the One Vehicle. The view that synthesizes and includes, is the view of the Ekayana, and the context for this synthesis is the recognition that the teachings by skillful means do not create actual differences in the goal of the teaching. The synthetic orientation is extended to include within the One Vehicle all the teachings of humans and gods, i.e., non-Buddhist philosophies and religions, because all philosophies and religions are attempting to understand the knowledge, perceptions, and experiences of the One Mind common to all humans.

 

(10) Equality and Non-duality: Because all beings share equally the One Mind of Buddha Nature, there is an absolutely inherent basis (i.e., simultaneously transcendental and immanent) for human equality.  Therefore distinctions such as layperson and monastic, male and female, nationality, language, culture, etc. are all immaterial in relation to the ability of a person to cultivate, investigate and realize awakening. The path of the One Vehicle leads back to the oneness of the subtle principle of non-duality. When there are dualities and extremes, the equality wisdom of the One Vehicle is lost and viewpoints and perspectives become biased with people arguing that one is right and one is wrong.

 

(11) Turning the Light Around: The ultimate purpose for Buddhas being in the world is to relieve suffering by bringing people to awakening to the One Buddha Mind, and this is only accomplished by experiential practice bearing fruit in one’s own realization through what is variously called in Sanskrit paravrtti and variously translated as the “revolution at the basis,” “turning the light around,” “taking the backward step,” or “turning inward.”  Turning the light around culminates in directly seeing the True Suchness (tathata) of one’s Own-Nature (svabhava) of mind which is the Tathagata’s wise-knowing.

 

(12)  Not Established by Words: The primary meaning or whole truth (paramartha) is not found in words. Words merely point to meaning and are not to be mistaken for the meaning. Because turning the light around is not accomplished as an intellectual pursuit or by the construction of words or ideas resulting in elaborate exegesis, it must be directly realized without dependence on words.  Depending on words therefore prevents this turning about from our habitual externalizing (i.e., prevents cutting off the outflows), and thus obstructs our own realization. So when words are used they are used for the purpose of putting a stop to dependence on words. As the Treatise on the Arousing of Faith in the Mahayana (Mahayana-Sraddhotpada Shastra, 大乘起信論) states, “Designating the limit of verbal expressions causes words to banish words.” 

 

(13) Sutras: Because of the foregoing principles (of upaya, synthesis, names mind non-duality and words) there is no single Sutra that is superior to all others or the “king” of sutras.  For the purposes of conveying the One Vehicle, the One Vehicle Sutras have a place of importance, but because all vehicles are included within and lead to the One Vehicle, all the sutras are included within the One Vehicle. The specific Sutras of the One Vehicle are The Lankavatara (Going Down to Lanka) Sutra; The Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra; The Saddharmapundarika (White Lotus of the True Dharma) Sutra; The Srimaladevi Simhanada (Lion's Roar of Queen Srimala) Sutra; The Mahayana Mahaparinirvana (Great Parinirvana) Sutra; Shurangama Sutra; The Vajrasamadhi (Diamond Samadhi) Sutra; The Mahābherīhāraka-parivarta (Great Dharma Drum) Sutra; and The Samdhinirmocana Sutra. Each of these sutras presents the One Vehicle with a different emphasis.  Seeing the common teaching presented in all these sutras is a good way to perceive the One Vehicle.  Saying that one or another of these sutras presents the only real One Vehicle is a mistaken view of the One Vehicle that slanders the One Vehicle. 

 

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Delusions About God Don't Make God a Delusion

Two blogs this week bring up the question of God which inspired me to respond.  One is from an ex-Pentacostal preacher about his conversion experience and in particular reports his conversion experience as a believer in God who was converted to the belief in atheism. The other is a blog by Lawrence Grecco who writes about three common mistaken beliefs about Buddha Dharma including the belief that Buddhists are atheists.   

Let’s look at Venerable Grecco’s piece first. His blog post is titled, “Three Myths about Buddhism that Drive People away in Droves.”  The three misunderstandings are (1) Buddhists believe that "life is suffering", (2) Karma is a bitch, and (3) Buddhists don’t believe in God or prayer.  For Buddha Dharma to be transplanted and acculturated in the West, it is essential that followers of the Buddha Dharma are able to address these three concerns cogently without dodging the nuances and complexities of these issues.

Rather than taking up space to summarize his points here, I suggest just following the link and reading it there.   Here’s my response, somewhat edited from what I posted there.

Three Basic Mistakes About the Buddha Dharma.

Good points to consider. I agree that these are the three misunderstandings or misinterpretations (we could even call them delusions) that usually come up in discussion with those who have no personal experience of Buddha Dharma.  And even some people who have had relatively closer contact with Buddha Dharma than most are still clueless when it comes to karma.

Before I discuss the three points, I would like to pick a nit over the use of the word “myth” which is being used in the pejorative sense meaning “falsehood” that is derived from the overly rationalistic world view of materialist scientism.  As the greatest master of psychology of the 20^th century, Carl G. Jung, made clear in his voluminous studies, and also attested to by the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell, the word “myth” is a word that connects us to the sacred realm of life and living.  Only a materialist is blind to the psychic reality of myth even though there is no particular physical reality.  To equate the word “myth” with "falsehood" would itself be saying that the myths of Buddha Dharma (as portrayed in the Mahayana Sutras especially and exuberantly but also in a more limited extent in the Pali Suttas) are falsehoods. This is the great mistake of those who claim to support Buddha Dharma but who advocate "naturalizing" Buddha Dharma to take out the mythic qualities. Myths, including the myths of Buddha Dharma, are not falsehoods. They are myths that speak the truth of the mind, not the facts of physical perception.

Life As Suffering:

 

The false thinking that Buddhism teaches “life is suffering” is definitely the main point that people can get stuck on. Ven. Grecco has hit the target on dukkha meaning an off-center hub that turns with disturbance and it's opposite sukkha meaning the ease with which an in-balance or centered hub turns.  I like to remind people that the root of the word “passion” means suffering, as in the Passion of Christ, so the First Noble Truth that "Life is Passion" is completely in line with the role that suffering as passion plays in Christianity.  The Buddha saying “Life is passion,” is exactly what the Christian myth is saying when it says the Son of God was born into this world of passion and had to personally live this world’s suffering as a person not as a God. The difference between Buddha Dharma and Christianity on this point is that instead of saying that there was only one Son of God who experienced "Life is passionate suffering", Buddha Dharma teaches us that each and every one of us is a Child of God and it is only our own ignorance, craving, and mistaken attachments that prevent us from realizing it on our own.

 
The extension of this mistake about the First Noble Truth is the belief that the Third Noble Truth of the "Extinction of Dukkha" means taking a nihilistic view.  Buddha Dharma is the middle path between eternalism (i.e., an eternal life in a heaven) and nihilism (nothingness), both of which in their way posit a materialist universe. Buddha Dharma does not posit a materialist universe so there is no basis for a belief in either eternalism or nihilism in the Buddha Dharma.

Karma:

The misunderstandings about karma are hard to break through because karma is so complex that the Buddha often did not want to discuss it for fear of confusing his audience.  The Buddha acknowledged and affirmed the activity of karma, but he revolutionized the interpretation of karma as it was being discussed in his time. Unfortunately, today people mistake the pre-Buddhist, i.e., the non-Buddhist, view of karma to be the Buddhist view of karma, and they are completely ignorant about how the Buddha saw through those misinterpretations of karma.  The commonly conventional view of karma is like saying that inheritance is a matter of “blood” while ignoring that it is really a matter of genetics. To understand the workings of karma is even more complex than understanding the workings of genes and chromosomes.

As Ven. Grecco says, karma is not about “deserving” or “retribution” in the judicial sense. There is absolutely no judging in the function of karma.  If I step off a cliff, there is no judgment in the result when I hit the ground. There is just the degree of pain or injury, up to death, depending on the height of the fall.

When something happens to us, the Buddha taught that there may be a karmic aspect to the causal influences leading up to the occurrence but that karma is not ever the sole causative force.  If we are astute, then we may be able to perceive the karmic aspect, but it is not always necessary.  To take the example from Ven. Grecco, for instance, someone may think, “If you slip on a banana peel and fall down on your face, it’s because you insulted me last night.”  That is such a speculative over simplification that is amounts to plain stupidity.  However, there may be a seed of truth in it because the inattentive attitude, about how one is relating to others and the world, that one had the night before and which led to insulting someone could actually be an important condition that continued through the next morning as inattention to where the person is walking and not seeing the banana peel.  That is, if we don’t watch where we step in our relationships with people and we insult them, then for sure it is not unlikely that likewise we won’t watch where we step when walking down the street. The karma of "not watching where we step" with the actions of our tongue or our feet can be the connecting karmic principle. But again, that has nothing to do with “divine punishment.”  It just has to do with our own actions and our attention or inattention. 

Similarly, if we speculate “Perhaps that person begging for change on the street was Hitler in a past life, so it serves them right.” that is only our ego's self-serving rationalization that has absolutely nothing to do with an accurate analysis of karma.  If one analyzes the context, then it is infinitely more probable that the karma of the person begging on the street is due to his or her having previously (in the past of this life or another) met a beggar on the street and had just that exact thought that the beggar “deserved” that fate.  That is how karma works; it is a balancing mechanism that corrects the dualistic views in our relationships with others and the world.  If we walk past a beggar and blame the beggar for deserving his or her condition, then we are relating to the beggar dualistically, instead of saying “there but for fortune go I.”  If we walk past a beggar and blame the beggar for deserving his or her condition, then the karma that is most likely to flow from that action of ours is that sooner or later we will switch places to walk in the other’s shoes and see from first hand experience how that feels.

God:

The mistake about how Buddha Dharma relates to ideas of God is also one fraught with nuance that most people want to avoid because judgment of good and bad is so much easier within our mental conditioning.  The most important nuance is found in the question of whether or not it is beneficial to conceive of God as a being or a thing. If someone believes in a God, then Buddha Dharma won’t argue with the person because the person’s belief is exactly what defines their notion of God.  This is how we can say that some people believe in money as belief in a God.  When someone says, “There is no God but God.” then that comes closer to the Buddha Dharma because it points to the truth that God is not able to be grasped by notions that objectify God as a person or thing.
 
The theism of the Buddha Dharma has been most closely related to the term "panentheism" (not "pantheism").  There is a very interesting chapter called “The God-Conception in Buddhism” in the book Zen For Americans by Soyen Shaku written over 100 years ago    In this essay, Reverend Shaku says,

“At the outset, let me state that Buddhism is not atheistic as the term is ordinarily understood. It has certainly a God, the highest reality and truth, through which and in which this universe exists. However, the followers of Buddhism usually avoid the term God, for it savors so much of Christianity, whose spirit is not always exactly in accord with the Buddhist interpretation of religious experience.” (p 25-26)

The spirit he is referring to is the spirit of objectifying God as a person, supreme being, or creator and attaching anthropomorphic images of God as a separate entity.  In Buddha Dharma there are many words that are the equivalent of the term “God” such as Dharmakaya, Shunyata, Tathagata, True Suchness, the Unborn, etc.  However, the Lankavatara Sutra teaches that the Tahtagata is inconceivable, so the multitude of names such as “God,”  “Lord,” “Creator,” etc. are just names all pointing to the same reality.  To know that the name is just a name doesn’t mean that the name doesn’t really point to reality. If one wants to truly know that which is designated by a name such as “God” then one has to stop grasping at the name and turn one’s awareness toward what the name is pointing at. When we turn our awareness around from our belief in the discrimination of objectified external things toward the unified principle at the root of our own mind, then it no longer matters whether we call the fountainhead of our awareness by the name of Tahtagata, Buddha, or God.

When Carl Jung was asked about whether he believed in God he said, “I don’t believe. I know.”  That is the whole point of Buddha Dharma.  Don’t talk about believing or not, but instead do what it takes to inquire on one’s own to know on one’s own. The central clue we only need to remember is that as long as we objectify God as a separate person or thing, then we are still in the realm of belief and not knowing.

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In the Salon article titled “God is a delusion”: I was a Pentacostal preacher — until I lost my faith excerpted from the book, "Hope After Faith: An Ex-Pastor'sJourney From Belief to Atheism", Jerry Dewitt tells of his conversion from being a God believer to a disbeliever.  Here is my response which takes up where the previous response leaves off discussing the notion of God.

This story by Jerry Dewitt is a classic story of conversion. Sometimes the conversion is from not believing in God to believing in God. Here the conversion is from believing in God to not believing in God.  It is just a story of turning from belief in one delusion to belief in another. It doesn't matter which direction the turning goes. 

The word "conversion" means to convert, "to turn with."  It means turning from one belief to another.  The interesting thing about conversion is the emotional aspect. We bind up a raft load of emotions in our belief systems, some of them conscious but mostly unconscious, and when we let go of a belief system we experience an overflow of free flowing emotional energy in our body and mind. Then when we latch onto the new belief system the flooding emotions become anchored in the new patterns of thought and feeling, and we feel a tremendous relief. Then we take that feeling of relief as the self-fulfilling evidence confirming that the new belief is the real truth.  Sadly, the relief and excitement of conversion is not proof of anything other than that a genuine conversion took place. It is not proof of the new beliefs to which we have been converted. But new converts always take the emotions to be such proof.  

With the belief in God and the belief in atheism, there is truth and delusion on both sides. The belief in an anthropomorphic image of God is no more or less of a delusion than the belief that there is no God.  The truth found in the belief in God is that "God is," but the delusion is that God is an anthropomorphic being or a thing. The truth found in atheism is that there is no possible image that accurately portrays God, and the delusion of atheism is the conclusion that because there is no conceivable image of God that there is no God.

Rather than mistaking conversion as something real, we should know that converting from one belief system to another is not the answer. It doesn't matter which direction the conversion goes: from theism of one kind to theism of another kind, from theism to atheism, or from atheism to theism.  The conversion is nothing bur the switch from one belief system to another.  The actual truth of God can only be found in the space between belief systems, can only be realized in the brief time within conversion when our beliefs are not fixed and polarized in either system and our mind has the freedom of its own awareness unencumbered by belief systems.   

This returning to our true state is called reversion. In the Sanskrit language it is called paravrtti.  It is the remembrance of our true home, our actual birthright as aware human beings, and it has nothing to do with beliefs or with philosophical arguments or assertions about whether a God exists or does not exist.  When we turn the light of awareness around to see the fountainhead of our own mind, then we can experience God on our own and not have to worry about belief any more, because then we know.

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