Expert: Joe McSorley - 2/5/2009

Question
QUESTION: I am very interested in Buddhism. I start to understand the no-self(anatta). The cause of suffering is attachment or clinging.
I want to ask the buddhism theory with survival. Can I survive if I have no job or money for making a living?
In the poor country like my country, there are many people are suffering from having no job and no home. These people suffering are so real.

ANSWER: Dear Chim Socheat,
 Thanks for your thoughtful question.  My view on this is through Zen school of Buddhism so other schools in your country may have a different view.  It is hard to write about this without using philosophical language so I apologize if this is difficult to understand.  You might want to read it several times. Also, I in no way want to minimalize the daily suffering of people, I realize this to be a huge problem for humanity.
  When you ask me “can I survive….” I have to ask you who the ‘I’ is that you are referring to?  This is not a silly question but the essence of Zen and Buddhism in general.  If you are asking if the person that you think is you, that being your memories, body, thoughts, emotions, those things the Buddhists call the aggregates, no, they will not survive.  These are just temporary manifestations of the self like a cloud having a form and then dispersing.  The question is ‘who or what gives rise to these forms’; what is their root.  The historical Buddha realized that all human life was suffering, not just the poor.  Eventually our bodies will age, sicken and die and there is no escape from that.  The first of the Four Noble Truths is “Life is suffering (dukkha)”.  The second truth “ The cause of suffering is ignorance (avidya)” is very important to understand.  What is it we are ignorant of?  We can fill our minds with all kinds of information and that does not lead to bliss so what is it?  It comes down to that what we think is real, who we think we are, is wrong, we do not see reality.   As a result we think we are this self of aggregates and we cling to it as true reality.  When we are sick, our mind is sick, when hungry our mind is torn with hunger, so our state of being is completely effected by the conditions around us.  If we breakthrough that bond of attachment to self, if we undergo a “Great Death” of that suffering self we are no longer grounded to that idea of this self we had for so long.  We are now the root of self , in fact all selves, all being and also the particular self we know as ego.  The root of self is unborn and undying and is not caught in suffering.  So while the particular self might suffer the root of your existence is untouched.  So there might be suffering but it does not define you.  If you only know yourself to be that being that is bound by existence, desire, life and death, then you do suffer because you are grounded in the temporary but this is an illusion according to Buddhism.  The true self is untouched by this.  While suffering you are also free from suffering.
   It’s hard to give a good example of this but I’ll try.  If you are a leaf on a tree and you come to self-consciousness you then think yourself to be a unique individual that has its own life.  It may be unique in shape, color and form but its root, the source of its life, is not the leaf.  It is a manifestation of the tree.  In its self-reflective ego state it only knows itself as the leaf, it only knows life from its own perspective but it does not know the life of the tree.  Anything that befalls that leaf is devastating to it because it does not know its existence is beyond or prior to the life of the leaf. Now it is caught in the matrix of living/dying.  It arose with the consciousness of the leaf and it will subside with it.  If the leaf were to break through that consciousness to its root, the tree, it would know that its individual life and death is an illusion.  What happens to the leaf does not happen to its root.  Likewise what happens to us happens to this momentary expression of nature we call ourselves.  To breakthrough to the root of our existence means that we are simultaneously a self and all of nature and we are now free of being bound to the individual self.  While the body might suffer the true self is free.  This is the idea of moksha or liberation in Buddhism.  This is not a psychological state but beyond mind and body.
   Your form as it is now will eventually fade but if you have awakened to your root that is not a problem.  Still, while knowing yourself as this form you will do what you can to survive.  Nature seeks to take care of itself at all levels.  Being free of the self you will be better able to see what you really need as it will come forth out of you naturally.  All of the creatures in nature see this but man because we are broken from our root by our ignorance.
  I realize that most people will never awaken to the root of their existence and therefore will just suffer.  It is a hard fact of nature that life is this way.  Those who are compassionate will do their best to ease the suffering of others in whatever way they can.  
  I hope this helps you.  Take care,   
         Joe




---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: thank a lot for answering my question. I want to ask one more question.
Buddha is said to achieve enlightment. what is enlightment? is it the way that free ourself from suffering? especially I want to know way for freeing our self from suffering.

Answer
Dear Chim,
Yes, awakening or enlightenment frees us from suffering.  The Third Noble Truth states that there is cessation or an end to the cause of suffering and the Four Noble Truth says there is a way (margo yoga).  There is also the Eightfold Path which describes how to approach the path to awakening. In fact there are many ways but they all have to do with stopping the mind the way it is now.
    Enlightenment is a hard thing to talk about because it is the ordinary mind itself that prevents us from seeing enlightenment.  In other words, your idea of who you are is what stands between you and seeing reality.  To see reality then you must lose this sense of  “I” that you have so you would no longer be realizing it as Chim but as all of nature.  Wanting to know about it is like being hungry and wanting to know what eating food is like.  Someone who is full cannot possibly convey this idea to you, what they eat cannot satiate you, and no matter how they describe it you will never fully understand it, the only way is for you to experience or realize it yourself by eating.
Buddhism is about self-awakening, like eating, only you can do it yourself.  There are many experiences you can go through that might fool you into thinking you are awakened but with time they all fade.  True awakening does not fade away and cannot fade away.
    There is no way to clearly define what awakening is that our normal minds can grasp.  This is where you get all the paradoxical and contradictory language of Zen that mainly confuses people.  Someone asks ‘what is awakening’ and the master replies ‘ 3 lbs of flax’ or ‘the willow tree in the yard’ and the student walks away.  What the master is trying to demonstrate is, you can’t know this, that is, this is something that the mind as you know it cannot know.  Our minds work by knowing things or so we think.  We know what a tree is or a cat, a rock or a chair but we really don’t know these things, we only know what we think they are.  So by ‘knowing’ something we hold it as a thought in our mind to grasp it. We have a thought of a cat, tree or rock but don’t know it other than as objects of our thoughts.  Enlightenment cannot be known, it is outside of knowing and the attempt to know it just reinforces the unawakened state.  
   Another way to express this idea of not knowing is through art like music or sports.  If you want to play a sport to the fullest, lose yourself to it, or to lose yourself to playing an instrument, you have to no longer know what you are doing and just be purely doing it in the moment.  You lose your sense of self to become the act of running or playing, you cannot ‘know’ what you are doing because that separates you from the action.  You are doing it, momentarily, without knowing what you are doing, you are pure action or motion.  You have lost your sense of self to do this, yet there is still a sense of self because it is a willful act to do it.  Once you ‘know’ what you are doing you now stand outside of it, apart from it to know it and you are no longer ‘it’ as itself.
  Suppose you, Chim, really try to set up the conditions for awakening through some practice like meditation or mindfulness.  You keep at it for ages and then one day your mind clears up and you see things as they are.  Now the world is real and vibrant but it always was in front of you. That which created the illusion or problem has dissolved and now you are fulfilled and happy where you are.  What changed?  Your view of self, self-identity and the illusion of separation, which were all aspects of your mind did and yet at the same time nothing changed.  This metaphor has lots of problems that I acknowledge but think of this; you just put on glasses and now you really see the world, it was always there.  Did anything change?  No, just your view of it and now you want everyone else to see it but they don’t think they don’t see it so what do you do?  You thought you saw it for years and it wasn’t until your vision cleared up that you realized you were wrong.  Now what can you possibly say to others?  They just don’t see it.   Some do realize that their vision is faulty and are trying to change it but most don’t.  So now you see and they don’t and you can’t describe it or anything else.  It’s like telling someone they have a nose, they can’t see it but it’s right in front of their eyes.  In awakening the world as it is becomes realized in you, it was always there and now you can enjoy it.  It is not your awakening but the awakening to what already is there so there is no power struggle here, no hidden knowledge or anything else, just nature as it is.  What do you do?  Whatever you normally do, eat your lunch, work and enjoy life.
  The most common tool used on the path to enlightenment is meditation.  It is taught by all the various schools of Buddhism. Meditation itself is very difficult to talk about because I think that most people are not critical in their assessment of what they are doing.  For meditation to be truly fruitful it must be done with ‘right understanding’ (Eightfold Path) and not just some ritualized practice.  Zen people talk about ego consciousness and overcoming it through meditation.  The problem of ‘ego consciousness’ is something else that is greatly misunderstood.  Zen people talk about ‘emptying ourselves’ to be or to create ‘no-self’ but how can one empty their self?  The very act of doing so creates the self that is doing the emptying; it is a self-negating process.  In the Zen understanding of the human condition man only knows things by contradistinction, by dividing one from the other.  We know good because it is not bad and bad because it is not good.  We know light apart from darkness and vice versa.  This is called differentiated thinking. We know that we are a subject but only know ourselves as an object.  We know that we are but not who we are. The act of separating to know things is called ‘dualistic discrimination’ and the human consciousness has to do this to be able to ‘know’ something.  It is this act of separation of self from other that creates the ‘I’.  I am I because I am not you or not other things.  This is the ego, the act of separating to be a self apart from and alienated from the rest of the world.  We do not see things as they are but as they are differentiated from us.  In reality this separation of self from other does not really exist.  It is the ignorant functioning of our minds in attempt to know something.   We as egos cannot live in the present, our minds flit between past and future but in the present we have no relativity so we cannot exist.  So our minds dance like drunken monkeys never settling or at rest.  We try to have a quiet or still mind but this is still a mind that is the product of dualistic discrimination. Many people describe meditation as quieting or stilling the mind but it is still the illusion of self so no matter how quiet we get it or how open we get it, it is still inside causation.  Ultimately self is other, other is self and we are mutually creating, mutually defining.  Without self there is no other, without other there is no self, therefore I am everything and everything is me. This is called the interpenetration of things or interdependent co-origination, non-duality or rightly: non-dual duality.  Since self is not just self but relative to other there is no one to be saved, no self, other, God, Buddha; these are all creations of the differentiated self but not of the True self.   In essence there is no one to become awakened for that self was an illusion.   The saying “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ is an articulation of this meaning.  If you meet the Buddha, then he is outside of you, apart from you, thus not you; so then he is not the Buddha but your minds creation of the Buddha.    Nothing apart from self, self apart from Nothing
 So meditation as something that you do, actually separates you from your goal.  That is why mediation must be overcome.  It must be ‘mind and body fallen off’ as Hisamatsu put it.  There are no levels of meditation here or different depths of understanding, there is just the attempt to become awakened at each and every moment of life, here, now, always and not just those moments when you are actually sitting.   The true practice of Zen meditation is sitting, standing, eating, drinking and sleeping or it is useless.
    To become awakened is to be come liberated from dualism is to be liberated from all anxiety, from birth and death.  To be unfettered by birth or death is to have no self- doubt.  You are free to be completely yourself, alive, vital and all encompassing.  
 So there are several paths to awakening; koan practice, mindfulness and meditation being the prime ones.  Whatever you choose you must dedicate yourself to it completely to overcome your suffering.
  I hope this has helped you. Take care,
         Joe