Aqueous Metaphors

In this week's The New Yorker, theater critic Jay Lahr asks two questions, namely, if Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican name, and more importantly, how come there are no Buddhist soul singers?

The soul music tradition was born from the African-American experience, specifically, both the suffering of slavery and routine discrimination, as well as the redemptive powers of spirituality. As I assume that most of my readers must know, Siddharta Gautama began his long-ago spiritual search along the path of asceticism, undergoing hardships and austerities, including prolonged fasting. But he failed to attain enlightenment by these means and, far from discovering an end to suffering, he was only suffering all the more. Half-dead from hunger and exhaustion, he came to realize the futility of pursuing a course which could only result in his own eventual death. So he drank the rice-milk offered to him by a concerned young maiden, and gradually regained his health.

He thereby set out to find a middle way to the truth, a path mid-way between asceticism and self-indulgence. He then famously sat down beneath the bodhi tree and resolved to practice meditation until he realized enlightenment. Eventually, at the very instant when he glanced at the morning star, he attained perfect, complete enlightenment.

At the moment of his enlightenment, he is said to have spontaneously cried out, "How wonderful! I and all sentient beings have awakened to enlightenment together." All living beings are intrinsically Buddhas, he realized, endowed with wisdom and virtue, but because people's minds have become clouded by delusion, they fail to perceive this.

Commenting on this first pronouncement by Shakyamuni Buddha, Yasutani Roshi noted how truly marvelous it is "that all human beings, whether clever or stupid, male or female, ugly or beautiful, are whole and complete just as they are. That is to say, the nature of every being is inherently without flaw, perfect, no different from that of Amida or any other Buddha."

This first declaration of the Buddha is also the ultimate conclusion of Zen Buddhism. Human beings, Zen maintains, live restless and anxious half-crazed existences because our minds, clouded by delusion, are inverted. To return to our original perfection, we need to see through our false images of ourselves as incomplete and sinful, and to wake up to our inherent purity and wholeness.

Zen offers a method to accomplish this, specifically through the practice of zazen, sitting meditation. Not only Shakyamuni Buddha himself but many of his disciples attained full awakening through zazen. Moreover, during the 2,500 years since the Buddha's death, innumerable practioners in India, China, Japan, and around the world have awakened to their true nature.

All beings, both ordinary persons and supremely perfected Buddhas, are manifestations of Buddha-nature. The substance of our Buddha-nature has been likened to water. One of the defining characteristics of water is its conformability - when it's poured into a vase, it takes the shape of the vase; when it's poured into a tank, it takes on the shape of the tank. It can take the shape and size of a dewdrop or a great and mighty ocean. We have this same adaptability, but as we live bound and fettered through ignorance of our own true nature, we have lost this freedom.

To pursue this metaphor, we can say that the enlightened mind is like water that is calm, deep and crystal clear, and upon which the "moon of truth" reflects fully and perfectly. The mind of the ordinary person, on the other hand, is like murky water, constantly being churned by the gales of truth. Although the moon continues to still shine steadily upon the waves, as the waters are roiled we are unable to see its reflection. Thus, we lead lives that feel frustrating and meaningless.

How can we illuminate our life and personality with the "moon of truth?" We need first to clear the water, to calm the surging waves by halting the winds of discursive thought. In zazen, we empty our minds of conceptual thought. Although most people place a high value of abstract thought, the experience of zazen clearly demonstrates that discriminative thinking lies at the root of delusion. To be sure, abstract thinking is useful when wisely employed, but as long as human beings remain slaves to their intellect, fettered and controlled by it, we remain deluded and in a state of suffering.

When we look at them closely, we see that all thoughts, whether ennobling or debasing, are mutable and impermanent; they have a beginning and an end even as they are fleetingly with us. But so long as the winds of thought continue to disturb the water of our Self-nature, we cannot distinguish truth from untruth. But once the winds abate, the waves subside, and the muddiness clears, and we perceive directly that the moon or truth has never ceased shining.

A stream provides a similar metaphor. Where the stream is still, the water is calm and clear. Where the stream flows rapidly, the water becomes chaotic and turbid. But once that very same chaotic and turbid water reaches a pool further downstream, it regain its original calmness and clarity.

Zen Master Shunryo Suzuki once referred to waterfalls in a similar way. Above the falls, the water occurs as one unified, calm, clear pool. But as it spills over the top of the falls, it becomes chaotic, and individual droplets of water can be distinguished both one from another, but also from the body of water from which they originated. Finally, though, at the bottom of the falls, the individual droplets reunite once again with the rest of the water in the stream and the individual droplets no longer can be distinguished. Whether in the stream above, the plunge pool below, or the falls in between, the droplets were always water and nothing but water, but that water took on different forms according to conditions. It should be noted that in the pool below, after everything returns to wholeness, the water is once again clear.

What we call our "selves" are like those individual drops of water, and the water here is a metaphor for Buddha-nature, which is at once both the potential for all beings to become a Buddha, and the very substance of all existence.

But don't take my word for it or rely on your own preconceived ideas. Just sit, watch your thoughts and then let them go, and experience for yourself the "moon of truth" reflecting on the plunge pool of your practice.

For the record, I don't know why there should be such a thing as Buddhist soul singers.