Zen and the Sutras

Zen and the Sutras

Albert Low

rev 2016.10.24

Copyright © 2009 Albert Low

Smashwords Edition

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http://www.albertlow.ca

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This book was first published in print by the Tuttle Publishing Company in 2000

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Mu and the Sutras

Chapter 3: Prajnaparamita

Chapter 4: Prajnaparamita Hridaya

Chapter 5: The Diamond Sutra

Chapter 6: The Platform Sutra

Chapter 7: The Vimalakirti Sutra

Chapter 8: The Lankavatara Sutra

Chapter 9: The Surangama Sutra

Notes

About the Author

Chapter 1: Introduction

Zen has a reputation for being anti-intellectual. Some of this is due to the fact that it came fully into its own in the West at the same time as New Age thinking was blossoming. At that time it was fashionable to criticize the ‘establishment.’ This criticism had a very strong anti-intellectual flavor, and academic and scholarly studies fell victim to it. This anti-intellectualism comes also, in part, from a general despair at the bankruptcy of much that passes for traditional religion. Many believe that religious thinking has been locked into meaningless phrases and dead dogma.

For these people it was a relief to hear about a Zen master, who, when asked by his student to tell him about the principles of Buddhism, turned on him and snapped, No barking like a dog! They would no doubt agree with the monk who, when the master asked what parts of the Buddhist scriptures had been written by the devil, retorted, All of them! An answer the master received with great hoots of laughter while congratulating the monk by saying, No-one will be able to take the rise out of you! The great Zen master Rinzai saw the sutras as having no more value than toilet paper.

Ironically in the very sutras we shall be studying we find it repeated again and again that words cannot get us to the truth. For example, Ananda was the cousin of Buddha, his disciple and close attendant. He was noted for his intellectual ability, so much so that the early sutras are said to be the result of his having heard Buddha speak, and his having remembered, word for word, everything that Buddha said. After Buddha's death Ananda recalled the talks and had them transcribed. Nevertheless during Buddha's lifetime he was unable to come to awakening, and, it was said, that this was due to this very intellectual capacity that he had. In The Surangama Sutra Ananda says, Although I have become the disciple of Buddha, my heart is not yet absorbed in Awakening. I am like a prodigal son who has forsaken his father. I now see that in spite of my learning, if I am not able to put it into practice, I am no better than an unlearned man. It is like a man talking about food, but who never eats and so does not become satisfied. We are all entangled in these two hindrances: knowledge and learning, and vexation and suffering[1]

While it is true that we are entangled in this way, nevertheless, it is evident that the masters were, even so, well versed in the sutras. Zen master Tokusan, for example, knew The Diamond Sutra well and, before meeting with a Zen master, lectured upon it extensively; the founder of the Zen sect, Bodhidharma, the very one who preached transmission outside the scriptures, nevertheless advocated The Lankavatara Sutra; Zen master Hogen knew The Avatamsaka Sutra well, and one of the koans in the Mumonkan, koan number twenty-six in which Hogen was the master involved, comes out of the teaching of The Avatamsaka Sutra. Other koans, too, often make reference directly or indirectly to the sutras. Yet another Zen Master, Hui Neng, was said to have written an autobiography, The Platform Sutra, that subsequently became one of the sutras so condemned.

Furthermore this apparent distaste for the intellect was not shared universally by Korean Zen masters. Much of the Korean Zen Buddhist tradition goes back to Chinul. Chinul came to awakening while reading the Platform Sutra. Later he meditated deeply on the role of the teaching of the sutras in Zen training and came to the conclusion that what the World Honored One said with his mouth are the teachings. What the patriarchs transmitted with their minds is Zen. The mouth of the Buddha and the minds of the patriarchs can certainly not be contradictory. How can [students of both Zen and the scholastic schools] not plumb the fundamental source but instead, complacent in their own training, wrongly fomenting disputes and waste their time?[2]

On reading the sutras

Zen Master Bassui has the following to say about sutras. If you truly want to read the sutras, you first have to awaken the mind that does the reading. All formal readings from the sutras are ultimately destructive. The wonderful dharma of one's mind does not change through successive eons; it is the essence of all sutras...When you see the wordless sutra only once, the sutras of all the heavens, with their golden words which fill one's eyes, clearly manifest. If you read the sutras with this kind of understanding, you will never be idle throughout endless eons. If you do not have this kind of understanding you will spend your whole life covering the surface of black beans[words][3]

The basic message of all the sutras of the Mahayana is Awakening, what Bassui is calling here seeing the wordless sutra. It is of course entirely possible for us to come to awakening without ever having heard of the sutras, Buddha, or even awakening itself. Hui Neng, the Zen master referred to above, came to awakening when hearing a monk recite from The Diamond Sutra. Up until that time he had not heard of either Buddhism or awakening. This is one of the more celebrated accounts of spontaneous awakening. Even so, throughout the history of the human race, untold numbers of people must, like Hui Neng, have come to this kind of spontaneous awakening that occurred outside the scriptures.

However while it is also true that some people make a fortune by winning a lottery, most of us have to work for our living. Just as it would be foolish to sit and wait for pennies to fall from heaven, so it would be foolish to sit and wait for awakening to strike. Just as we have to work for our physical well being, so we have to work for our spiritual well being as well. It is with this kind of work in mind that the sutras become important.

Our intellectual mind, although it is of limited value on the spiritual path, must be satisfied if we are to be able to commit ourselves fully to the work. It is true that, eventually, the mind must understand that it is indeed unable to settle the great questions which haunt us, at some level or another, throughout our lives, nevertheless a certain amount of preparatory work must be done, and reading and studying can help with this preparation.

Another value that reading can have is to help us understand that true spiritual work is so difficult because it has nothing for the personality. One can certainly practice Zen for reasons of health, psychological well being, to develop natural concentration or to improve creativity; this is what Yasutani roshi would call Bompu Zen. Nevertheless, true spiritual practice, the practice that leads beyond form, beyond thought and idea, beyond the sense of self, is not done to yield these kinds of results.

Spiritual practice is, from the point of view of the personality, useless, but then so is listening to music, or being at peace with someone you love, or even life itself. One of the diseases of our age is the belief that everything must have a use. The theory of evolution, which has now taken on all the characteristics of a religious dogma, preaches the dreary and narrow minded belief that all of life, all of its beauty, complexity, and intricacy, all of it, serves simply for the transmission of genes. All of life's activity is yoked to the service of survival. But why do genes have to pass on more genes? So that, according to this theory, they can pass on yet more genes. Why do life forms have to survive? Of course if genes were not passed on, there would be no life, nor, obviously, would life forms be possible if they did not survive. But this is a truism and it seems that, with the theory of evolution, so often consequence is confused with cause. The meaning of existence is ‘no-meaning,’ which is not the same as absence of meaning. The expression ‘no-meaning’ points to a meaning that cannot be grasped by the concepts of utilitarianism used by the evolutionist. Nevertheless this no-meaning is intrinsic in all spiritual endeavors. The ‘no’ in ‘no-meaning’ will be explored later in the book and will be shown to be more than a fanciful use of language.

Although the personality needs meaning that can be defined, understood, grasped, it is possible for meaning to lie beyond ‘usefulness,’ but to truly appreciate this requires awakening. Even so the mind can be introduced to the idea of this possibility, and a background be given, which enables the critical, discriminating mind to be suspended for a while, so that a deeper, and more penetrating awareness, can be aroused. Reading and study can help to provide this background.

On meditation and the sutras

Zen practice could be differentiated into meditation, concentration and contemplation. Zazen, what is often called Zen meditation, includes all three, but the emphasis in Zen practice is upon contemplation, or what is also known as being ‘one with’. Concentration, nevertheless, is also often necessary, particularly in the beginning of practice when working on a first koan. However meditation is also of great value. I have spoken about these three aspects of Zen practice in other books[4], but let me briefly review what has been said before.

Concentration means ‘with a center.’ It requires great energy, and is a way of focusing the mind to enable it to become rooted. If, when sitting in zazen, the back is straight and the center of gravity low, then this energy, called in Zen joriki, enables the mind to become steadfast and not troubled by random thoughts. With this steadfastness it becomes possible for contemplation to take over.

Contemplation, of the breath for example, means to be one with the breath. It is not a way of controlling the breath, nor a way of observing, visualizing or ‘watching,’ the breath. Contemplation is far more flexible than concentration, and is what has been called wu-wei, or the doing of no-doing. In Zen it is also called Shikantaza.

However, it requires many years hard practice before this kind of contemplation becomes truly possible, and one must pass through a long period which is neither concentration nor contemplation, but a kind of amalgam of the two. This often involves long and very dry periods during which practice seems to be pointless and without reward. Someone likened it to crossing the great Gobi desert. It requires great faith to go on and most of us do not have this kind of faith at the very time that it is needed most. It is for this reason that meditation is so necessary.

Meditation requires thought and ideas. It means that one takes an idea and allows thoughts to circle around it. The mind is kept flexible, but taut. Without the tautness one cannot hold the meditation idea. As a basis for this I recommend to students that they use sayings of spiritual masters, although not necessarily Zen masters. Writings of men like Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna, St. John of the Cross, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the Desert Fathers, The Bhagavad Gita, women like St. Julian of Norwich, the two Theresas, and so on. One reads just a little, a few phrases only, and then allows what has been read to sink into the mind. One makes no effort to understand, but allows the mind to come to its own understanding.

One should not do this to satiety, in other words one must stop well before the mind starts to want to grasp what is being read. Normally about twenty minutes is all that is necessary. One way in which the meditative process can be prolonged is by meditating while one is doing some handwork, such as knitting, rug hooking, embroidery or needlecraft, or some other simple, repetitive task. One reads a few sentences, and then allows the meaning to soak into the mind while doing some of the handwork. One then reads a little more and so on. This meditative practice is like rain falling on the desert. It awakens faith and gives encouragement to continue, even though one must work mostly in the dark and without clear direction through the vast desert of the mind. The Desert Fathers used to use this kind of meditative practice. They would weave baskets while meditating and when a basket was finished, they would undo it and start again.

It is partly with meditation in mind that this book was written because truly pondering the sutras is a valuable meditation practice. In addition the sutras will also provide a background for general practice as well as, later on, for koan practice. They also help to point up the limitation of the mind (indeed this is a constant theme of the sutras,) so that this discriminating mind will be more ready to let go and allow deeper parts of the mind to take over.

Our debt to scholars

We started off by referring to the apparent anti-intellectual bias of Zen meditation. However, for all that, those of us who are practicing Zen are deeply in the debt of scholars who have patiently translated the sutras, the koans, and the sayings of Buddha and masters. Obviously without the help of these scholars we would never have had access to these treasures. One must also admire the kind of scholarship involved in which a translator would refer often to Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan sources and, invariably, in the original languages.

However scholars have, for their primary audience, other scholars. They translate in such a way that they are able to maintain the approval and support of their peers, and they are conscious of the fact that they will be judged according to the rules and constraints of scholarship. In this way a translation may be very good in a literary sense, but this merit could be obtained at the expense of its value for practice. Indeed it can happen that the exactness of the translation may be a barrier to understanding, because the language becomes very stilted and unnatural. On reading the sutras one sometimes has the feeling that Buddha, or the masters, talked in a very stiff and artificial way, whereas the opposite must have been true. Buddha must have been a very charismatic, down to earth man, capable of mixing freely with all kinds of people, and of talking in the language of those who were listening to him. These scholarly translations, then, are good for people who have an academic and scholarly interest, but sometimes boring and tedious for those who want to practice.

The sutras and practice

I have tried to approach the sutras simply from the point of view of practice. It is true that this may mean that I shall sometimes wander away from the literal meaning. However what is being said comes out of many years of intense practice, many of these spent working on koans. When working on the text of a sutra I have come to it in much the same way as if I were working on a koan. The first, or preliminary, koan is often called a ‘breakthrough koan.’ Breaking through means to awaken to the truth that one is beyond all form. In subsequent koan practice one must work on the koan by way of the original awakening in order to ‘see into’ the koan in question. The resolution of each koan is, in its own way, a new awakening, and so the original awakening is broadened and integrated more securely into every day life. Furthermore awakening is not simply a single, homogenous event, but, like a diamond, has many facets. Subsequent koan practice enables one to penetrate into this vast treasure house. But this kind of work is only possible within the light of the original awakening.

What we are saying about returning to the original awakening is similar to what Bassui said above: If you truly want to read the sutras, you first have to awaken the mind that does the reading. All formal readings from the sutras are ultimately destructive. To see into a koan as well as into the sutra you must first awaken the mind that does the seeing into. Unfortunately it can happen that a teacher confuses the student’s being able to respond to all the questions that the teacher puts about a koan, with the student’s seeing into it. But this, like formal reading of the sutras that Bassui refers to, is destructive. As a consequence the student is forever blocked, and will never gain access to the pearl of great price. Awakening is to arouse primordial, non-reflected knowing; it is always sudden and penetrating. Because it is the awakening of knowing, it cannot possibly be unconscious, nor can an outside person bestow it upon another. The value of a teacher is to differentiate pure gold from fools’ gold. But one can be taken in by fool’s gold, and one needs someone who is able to recognize it as spurious; but with pure gold, one knows.

On the face of it, it would seem that only a very few people would be able to read the sutras. If by reading the sutras we mean penetrating deeply into their meaning this, alas, is true. However this does not mean that others cannot benefit from them. All of us, intrinsically, are awakened. When one reads something and is struck by the truth, the simple beauty and rightness of what is being said, one feels that this brilliance comes from what one is reading. But it does not. It is like the dew on the grass on an early summer’s day. Scintillating like a million gems, the dew flashes in the morning sunlight. But this brilliance and sparkle all come from the sunlight. In the same