Words: Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. A few other parts of
speech (I'm being fonding of gerunds). Grammar, syntax, predicates,
subjects, clauses, (I'm really fond of parenthetical statements).
Bodhidharma, First Patriarch of Ch'an (Zen) that Awakening is beyond
words...among other things. But of course, he said
something—maybe that, somebody remembered what he said, someone
else wrote it down. And it was communicated with those damn words. So
given the inevitable game of telephone (if you're too young to know
what that refers to, look it up!), and throw in a few centuries and
languages worth of translation, Bodhidharma may have said “The
Great Way is a bowl of rice, maybe a little cumin thrown in,”
somebody else says, “Yeah, that doesn't have the same ring as 'Vast
emptiness, nothing holy,' so I'll just massage it a little bit,”
and thus begin the paradoxical statements associated with Zen. Or
not, I wasn't there, so I'm only going by hearsay when you get down
to it.
The Buddhist Sutras speak of the “Third Dharma-Ending Age,”
during which people will be morally corrupt, unable to actually
receive the Dharma, Shakyamuni's words will lose all ability to save
people from their struggles. In some texts, Ksitigarbha (Jijang Bosal
in Korea, Jizo in Japan, Dayuan
Dizang Pusa in Mandarin) vows to take on the task of keeping
things going until Maitreya comes along. (And also to empty hell, but
that's another story). Now I'm sure there are some Buddhist
“end-of-the-worlders” out there saying, “Yep, that's where we
are now, degenerate age, corrupt people, 'why can't they just get
it?,” the end times when you
just want to go out on the corner of 47th
Street and Park Ave, and join the guy who screams at the Pan Am
building about the “End Being Nigh” (he's been there a while).
These days Israelis are shelling Palestinian schools and
hospitals, Palestinians are lobbing rockets into anywhere they'll
reach in Israel, Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhists are conducting
pogroms against Muslims, Russia is either doing or not doing
something in Ukraine, and there are any number of other conflicts and
outright wars going on elsewhere in the world, so yep, this must be
the Dharma Ending Age. Or not. Depending on your time-line frame of
reference, there are those who might point out to the Crusades, the
Feudal Warlord period of Japanese history, Stalin, British
colonization, Hitler, the anti-Buddhist pogroms in China in either
the 800's or the Cultural Revolution, and many other periods that
could possibly fall into the “corrupt” and downright ignorant
ages.
Personally I don't put too much stock in any of that as signifying
the End, as that's just a mental construct based in perceptions of
what good and bad are supposed to be, more perceptions of what right
and wrong are. After all, whoever was on the winning side of any of
those events thought it was fine...until they lost, in which case the
other side could say that they were right all along and were
suffering at the hands of their oppressors and have since liberated
“their” people. All these conversations going on in everybody's
heads, each thinking the other knows exactly what they're talking
about, and even than that, that the meaning of what they're talking
about is coming through loud and clear.
Upon examining all this, Awakening being beyond words is looking
pretty promising. Our innate Buddha-nature (a verbal description that
is totally inaccurate and incapable of describing it) would say that
we are already awakened, but maybe just a few layers of delusion need
to be scraped off, some of the habits need to be broken. The point
is, except in some rare cases, we all “know” how to behave—not
an intellectual knowing, but the internal gyroscope of balanced
behavior knowing—that sometimes gets buried by our preference for
greed, anger, aversion, delusion and all those other things we do
that we think will make us happy, but never quite get there, and if
they do, not for long. If you look at any number of Buddhist forums,
invariably there will be a point at which discussion goes way off the
expedient means rails and heads into the ravine of, “I'M right!
That's not what the Dharmakaya is, it's this! How
can I save you, sentient being, if you're so stupid!?!”(The
problems with the preceding being the dualism of right vs. wrong, the
reification of Dharmakaya, the duality of that being different from
any other -kaya, and “I'M” probably being the biggest mistake of
all. And there will be those who quibble about “problems” and
“mistake” being dualistic as well).
It's all fine just as it is, how
could it be any other way that it is right now, including that type
of interchange? Accepting the status quo as reality as it happens to
be presenting itself in this moment, but without settling for the
status quo, figuring out how, when present moves into the past and
there's a new present presenting itself, what are the Buddha-things I
can think and do that will lessen the struggle in the world in this
moment. But what can I say....
Better come up with something.
We're stuck with words. More often than not, there's a narrator
inside my head, who if he isn't talking to me about what's going on
at the moment, is doing a running commentary on what the other
narrator is saying, and second-guessing half of it. That “thinking
about thinking” issue, which more likely might be talking about
thoughts in conversation with other voices describing the thoughts,
but being the description of the thought rather than the thought
itself. But every now and then there are those moments of what I
assume to be clarity, when there are no nouns, no adjectives or
adverbs. The sentence has no subject, there are definitely no
pronouns, the only conjunction is “and” with no “or” or
“but.” In those moments when all there are is verbs (and maybe
gerunds if not descriptive), it doesn't feel so much like the
Dharma-Ending Age, in fact it doesn't feel like any age in particular
at all. It's just tasting, just seeing, just typing, just trying to
figure out a way to use the correct words where words are totally
inadequate. It's all “IS” with no “it's.” And that's all
fine.
