Shakyamuni Buddha attained this awakening experience called “illumination” through the practice of an exact and powerful meditation, based on the stilling of the body and mind and on deep introspection.Īfter your enlightenment, Shakyamuni Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths: “Buddha” is a Sanskrit term meaning “the one who has awakened”. This is an extract from Aeon Magazine, a new digital magazine which publishes a free original essay every weekday on science, art, nature and culture. You can read Tim Lott's essay on Zen Buddhism and Alan Watts in full here.Buddhism is the name given in the West to a spiritual liberation movement created five centuries before the beginning of the Christian era by Shakyamuni Buddha. The doctrine of reincarnation can be more accurately thought about as a constant rebirth, of death throughout life, and the continual coming and going of universal energy, of which we are all part, before and after death. Neither Buddha nor his zen followers had time for any notion of an afterlife. Don't waste your time thinking otherwise. Looking for security, Watts said, is like jumping off a cliff while holding on to a rock for safety – an absurd illusion. Life exists in the present, or nowhere at all, and if you cannot grasp that you are simply living a fantasy.įor all zen writers, life is, as it was for Shakespeare, akin to a dream – transitory and insubstantial. It tries to have you understand, without arguing the point, that there is no purpose in getting anywhere if, when you get there, all you do is think about getting to some other future moment. Zen, more than anything else, is about reclaiming and expanding the present moment. In our western relationship with time, in which we compulsively pick over the past in order to learn lessons from it, and then project into a hypothetical future in which those lessons can be applied, the present moment has been compressed to a tiny sliver on the clock face between a vast past and an infinite future. The emphasis on the present moment is perhaps zen's most distinctive characteristic. We are each expressions of the world, not strangers in a strange land, flukes of consciousness in a blind, stupid universe, as evolutionary science teaches us. We are not just separate egos locked in bags of skin. There is just one event, with multiple aspects, unfolding. Furthermore, there is not a multiplicity of events. This too, accords with modern scientific knowledge. Look at anything closely enough – even a rock or a table – and you will see that it is an event, not a thing. In this view, there is no stuff, no difference between matter and energy. This is the basis of zen itself – that all life and existence is based on a kind of dynamic emptiness (a view now supported by modern science, which sees phenomena at a sub-atomic level popping in and out of existence in a quantum froth). The word "zen" is a Japanese way of pronouncing "chan", which is the Chinese way of pronouncing the Indian Sanskrit "dhyana" or "sunya", meaning emptiness or void. Life was, in zen parlance, yugen – a kind of elevated purposelessness. The Meaning of Happiness (published in 1940) and The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) are striking primers to his work, and they underlined what Rowe was already teaching me: that life had no intrinsic meaning, any more than a piece of music had an intrinsic point. I wasn't interested in the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path, and I certainly didn't believe in karma or reincarnation.Īll the same, I read a couple of Watts's books. I was suspicious at first, perceiving Zen Buddhism to be a religion rather than a philosophy. But through Watts and his writing, I was exposed directly to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. His name evoked the image of a paper goods sales rep on a small regional industrial estate. Through Rowe's writing I first came across Alan Watts, and he sounded like an unlikely philosopher. While I was researching it, I read the work of psychologist Dorothy Rowe, a quiet, almost secret, follower of Buddhist philosophy. The consequence of this was my first book, a memoir called The Scent of Dried Roses. Which is perhaps why I fell into an acute depression at the age of 27, and didn't recover for several years. A sense of encroaching mental chaos was always skulking at the edges of my life. I have never been able to support either strategy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |