The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [30]
As used in Buddhism, the term dhyana comprises both recollectedness (smriti) and samadhi, and can best be described as the state of unified or one-pointed awareness. On the one hand, it is one-pointed in the sense of being focused on the present, since to clear awareness there is neither past nor future, but just this one moment (ekaksana) which Western mystics have called the Eternal Now. On the other hand, it is one-pointed in the sense of being a state of consciousness without differentiation of the knower, the knowing, and the known.
A Tathagata (i.e., a Buddha) is a seer of what is to be seen, but he is not mindful (na mannati, or does not conceive) of the seen, the unseen, the seeable, or the seer. So too with the heard, the sensed, and the known: he does not think of them in these categories.15
The difficulty of appreciating what dhyana means is that the structure of our language does not permit us to use a transitive verb without a subject and a predicate. When there is “knowing,” grammatical convention requires that there must be someone who knows and something which is known. We are so accustomed to this convention in speaking and thinking that we fail to recognize that it is simply a convention, and that it does not necessarily correspond to the actual experience of knowing. Thus when we say, “A light flashed,” it is somewhat easier to see through the grammatical convention and to realize that the flashing is the light. But dhyana as the mental state of the liberated or awakened man is naturally free from the confusion of conventional entities with reality. Our intellectual discomfort in trying to conceive knowing without a distinct “someone” who knows and a distinct “something” which is known, is like the discomfort of arriving at a formal dinner in pajamas. The error is conventional, not existential.
Once again, therefore, we see how convention, how the maya of measurement and description, populates the world with those ghosts which we call entities and things. So hypnotic, so persuasive is the power of convention that we begin to feel these ghosts as realities, and make of them our loves, our ideals, our prized possessions. But the anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up. Perhaps, then, we are now able to understand the celebrated summary of the Buddha’s doctrine given in the Visuddhimagga:
Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
The Path there is, but none who travel it. (16)
1 See Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p. ix. (Oxford, 1951.)
2 Rigveda x. 90. The translation is from R. T. H. Griffith. Purusha is “the Person,” i.e., the original consciousness behind the world.
3 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad i. 4. 5.
4 Bhagavad-Gita xiii. 13.
5 Coomaraswamy (1), p. 77.
6 Bashya on Kena Upanishad, 9–11. “Cannot” may give the wrong implication since the word is ordinarily privative. The point is that, as light has no need to shine upon itself since it is luminous already, so there is no advantage to be gained and, indeed, no meaning in the notion of Brahman’s being the object of his own knowledge.
7 From the same root as maya, and from which also come our words “mensuration” (Lat., mensura), “mental” (Lat., mens), “dimension,” and “man” himself, “the measure of all things.” Cf. also the Latin mensis (month).
8 Samyutta Nikaya, 421.
9 Or, if we were to translate duhkha as “sour,” we might say that the Buddha’s doctrine is that life is soured by man’s grasping attitude towards it–as milk turns sour when kept too long.
10 The dynamic structure of the Round is called pratitya-samutpada, the twelvefold chain of “dependent origination,” in which the twelve causal links give rise to one another mutually, constituting a closed circle without beginning or end. Thus ignorance (avidya) gives rise to motivation (samskara), and this in series to consciousness (vijnana), name-and-form (namarupa), the