A posting on alt.buddha.short.fat.guy today got me thinking about Right View. Right View is generally considered the first element of the Eightfold Path (although the elements are not actually sequential). In the sutras, Right View is usually described as an understanding of the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path itself is the fourth of the Noble Truths - the Way (do) leading to the cessation of suffering.Right View is also seeing things as they really are, without delusion. This is essential for anyone seeking the Way. Zen Master Dogen once said that a student of the Way must cool his mind and consider if what he is about to say or do is in accordance with reality or not. Yet it is most difficult to harmonize the mind, he noted, and meet various things and situations moment by moment.
Zen gives us the method of cooling the mind so that we can achieve Right View: zazen, or sitting meditation. In deepest concentration, body and mind fall away, leaving us naked, without our conceptualizations, abstractions and opinions of the world around us. What is, simply is - it's no longer what we imagine or conceive of it to be. This is seeing things as they really are - Right View.
Not to be too philosophical about it, but Right View then has a relative aspect - understanding of the Four Noble Truths - and it also has an absolute aspect - seeing and meeting all things and situations moment by moment as they really are.
But the relative and the absolute are just two of the aspects of the nature of reality. There's also the practical - Right View as the practice of sitting meditation. And finally, there's the supreme - the actual experience of body and mind falling away, the release from our delusions, Right View as our own vision.
These four aspects - relative, absolute, practical and supreme - are not separate things but just four different attributes of Right View (and of all the myriad dharmas), just as size, color, weight, and location are different attributes of any one thing.
And even though it's like this, flowers, while cherished, fade and weeds, while hated, fluorish.
2 comments:
If "cooling the mind" can give us greater objectivity [is that a useful synonym here?] for seeing what really is in the world, it is well worth the effort to develop a zazen practice.
Does it work equally well for the world in side our head? the question "why am I really trying to do this?" comes up a lot in my life at this moment.
I think "objectivity" is a good choice of words, although "relativity" would work just as well in a slightly different sense.
In true "right view," there is no difference between looking at an exterior world and the world inside our head. Both external and internal examinations are potentially clouded by our delusion, and "cooling" or harmonizing of the mind can dissipate the clouds of delusion on either side of the membrane we choose to call the self.
It is good and natural to question one's motives in a meditation practice. Are we practicing for ego gratification, or for the sake of all sentient beings?
Lots of opportunity for self-deluded answers to that one.
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