Tue, 17 Aug 2010
Kensho Is Not Bullshit
Just so people don't think I've died and gone to Devachan, I've been attending Chetsang Rinpoche's seminar this week and that leaves littel time or energy for posting. I was not feeling well last week, which is why you didn't see anything then. Rinpoche is the head of the Drikung subschool of Kagyu Buddhism, and not so comon to have an opportunity like this. So nothing has been posted. But nothing engages the creative juices like responding to a stupid comment and I found one over at Hardcore Zen. Here's the original remark and my comment.
Buddhism has nothing, NOTHING to do with kensho or satori or shit like that.
Time for a little philosophizing. First, there needs to be a definition of kensho, or else we are arguing past each other. Here's how I define it: "the direct perception of the absence of self." I hope my definition isn't too controversial. If you think "kensho is bullshit" and have some other definition, please let me know what it is.
The definition has two parts. Direct perception means not an intellectual understanding of no self inferred by argument. (i.e., you have no self because your body is constantly changing.) And absence of self implies that this is not an experience with a positive content, even an ineffable, indescribable one. What is perceived is a simple absence. An analogy is thinking there is someone in a room but going in it and seeing it's only a radio playing. We think we have a self, but when we first stabilize our mind and then look at it, we see that what we took as a self was only a habit of taking at it that way.
I hope it's clear that this definition of kensho is completely consistent both with Buddhism and Zen and I'll spare myself the effort of tracking down the quotes that demonstrate this. Buddhism without the idea of enlightenment that sees the selflessness of phenomena is not Buddhism at all.
So why do we see so much rhetoric against kensho in Soto Zen? Here's how I understand it. Belief in a self is not just one thing, it's a series of related beliefs. And one cuts through them, starting with the coarsest and going to the more fine. The coarsest idea of self is that it is the owner of the body and mind, that there is an experiencer separate from our thoughts and emotions.
Behind that there are other notions, one which is that the self can achieve enlightenment, There is nothing to achieve, because our notion of achievement implies an achiever. This notion of no achievement gets related to the beginner, who gives it a nihilistic spin and thinks kensho is bullshit. From one perspective, it is, but this is not the beginner's perspective. As long as you are hugging tightly to your idea of self, you need to think in terms of dropping the self. From the perspective that there never was a self, there was never a need to get rid of it. But these are two different sides of the same mountain.
