The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [85]
The second, and more serious, drawback can arise from the opposition of satori to the intense “feeling of doubt” which some koan exponents so deliberately encourage. For this is to foster a dualistic satori. To say that the depth of the satori is proportional to the intensity of seeking and striving which precede it is to confuse satori with its purely emotional adjuncts. In other words, if one wants to feel exhilaratingly light-footed, it is always possible to go around for some time with lead in one’s shoes–and then take them off. The sense of relief will certainly be proportional to the length of time such shoes have been worn, and to the weight of the lead. This is equivalent to the old trick of religious revivalists who give their followers a tremendous emotional uplift by first implanting an acute sense of sin, and then relieving it through faith in Jesus. But such “uplifts” do not last, and it was of such a satori that Yün-feng said, “That monk who has any satori goes right into hell like a flying arrow.”14
Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses. In time, the sense of relief wears off–but not the awakening, unless one has confused it with the sense of relief and has attempted to exploit it by indulging in ecstasy. Awakening is thus only incidentally pleasant or ecstatic, only at first an experience of intense emotional release. But in itself it is just the ending of an artificial and absurd use of the mind. Above and beyond that it is wu-shih–nothing special–since the ultimate content of awakening is never a particular object of knowledge or experience. The Buddhist doctrine of the “Four Invisibles” is that the Void (sunya) is to a Buddha as water to a fish, air to a man, and the nature of things to the deluded–beyond conception.
It should be obvious that what we are, most substantially and fundamentally, will never be a distinct object of knowledge. Whatever we can know–life and death, light and darkness, solid and empty–will be the relative aspects of something as inconceivable as the color of space. Awakening is not to know what this reality is. As a Zenrin poem says:
As butterflies come to the newly planted flowers,
Bodhidharma says, “I know not.” g
Awakening is to know what reality is not. It is to cease identifying oneself with any object of knowledge whatsoever. Just as every assertion about the basic substance or energy of reality must be meaningless, any assertion as to what “I am” at the very roots of my being must also be the height of folly. Delusion is the false metaphysical premise at the root of common sense; it is the average man’s unconscious ontology and epistemology, his tacit assumption that he is a “something.” The assumption that “I am nothing” would, of course, be equally wrong since something and nothing, being and non-being, are related concepts, and belong equally to the “known.”
One method of muscular relaxation is to begin by increasing tension in the muscles so as to have a clear feeling of what not to do.15 In this sense there is some point in using the initial koan as a means of intensifying the mind’s absurd effort to grasp itself. But to identify satori with the consequent feeling of relief, with the sense of relaxation, is quite misleading, for the satori is the letting go and not the feeling of it. The conscious aspect of the Zen life is not, therefore, satori–not the “original mind”-but everything one is left free to do and to see and feel when the cramp in the mind has been released.
From this standpoint Bankei’s simple trust in the “Unborn mind” and even Shinran’s view of Nembutsu are also entrances to satori. To “let go” it is not always