Gateway To Eastern Philosophy & Religion (February 2014)

From the book Gateway to Eastern Philosophy & Religion, excerpted and reprinted with permission from Good Karma Publishing, and available on www.gkpub.com.

~ Eight Fold Path ~

[This is] the way, the path to realize that there is no self. Remember Dogen said, “The way to realize the Self is by forgetting the self.” I’ll give you a personal instance of something like this. I went to see Paul Reps, the Zen writer, in Seattle. He said, “Well, Justin, you’ve been on a spiritual path for thirty-five years, what have you realized?” I said, “Paul, I realize there’s nothing to be done.” He said, “Ah, but if you hadn’t been on a spiritual path for thirty-five years, you wouldn’t know there’s nothing to be done!” What you are doing is like seeing the point of a joke. Someone tells a joke, and you don’t get it at all. But the next day, you’re walking along the street, and all of a sudden you start laughing. Nothing has changed, but suddenly you see the point of the joke. The spiritual teacher is giving you the tools so that you can see the point. Dogen tells you to follow the Buddha Dharma, do what you’re supposed to do, be faithful, and yet nobody is doing anything. Pai Ch’ang said, “The Buddha is helping you to enlightenment; where there is enlightenment, there is a Buddha. This is not the highest form. Where there is no Buddha, where there is no enlightenment, this is the higher form.” It is very paradoxical, very difficult to understand. It can only be realized through practice. It is not an intellectual matter. It isn’t ‘yes’; it isn’t ‘no’; it isn’t a combination of ‘yes’ and ‘no’; and it isn’t an absence of ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ What is it? It can only be experienced.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

~ Do You Want to Know the Truth? ~

It is very difficult to follow Indian teaching. I would not advise anybody living in the world to try and follow the way of the Buddha. But you can meditate; you can think properly; you can see that your way of livelihood, your speech, your thought, does not hurt others; and you can study the Buddhist precepts. He gave the unalloyed truth. Most people will exclaim, “But I don’t want the truth! I want to live in my illusion, my suffering.” That’s O.K., but Buddha gave the truth to those who want it.

Most religions come from an entirely different standpoint. They try to present it at a social, agreeable level. For example, the big argument in the Catholic Church now is about abortion and about women and celibacy. Those are very important questions, but are they dealing with ultimate truth? Are they dealing with the six philosophies that you originally learned about here? No, churches are becoming more socially oriented and oriented toward solving everyday problems. I’m not sure if that is a bad thing at all. But there are some who have to have ultimate answers, and who have to know truth. Some have given their lives for truth!

My Zen Roshi said to a group of people, (he really surprised me when he said this), “A little wine, a little women, a little song, and a little religion, all in proper amounts is all right.” In other words, it’s all right to drink a little, and it’s all right to have some fun, and participate in your religion but don’t get too serious about it. Of course, that isn’t the way he talks to the monks! He says to the monks, “Out there, you must be a social human being, you have to deal with others in a considerate way. Here you must see with religious eyes.” If you don’t see with religious eyes, which in the sense of Buddhism means non-duality (not two), he’s going to bang you around a little bit! Very few people seem to know it, but Zen Buddhism was never in the ascendancy in Japan as far as numbers go. It was always for a few. Yet the influence of Zen Buddhism has been so strong on Japanese culture.