Stephen Batchelor's Articles on Lions Roar

Stephen Batchelor poses the classical Zen question, “What is this?” The answer, he says, is right in front of us. Each time I sit down on a cushion and pay attention to what is happening, I find myself utterly incapable of putting whatever it is I’m experiencing into words. There’s something about the practice of meditation, be it Seon or any exercise in which we are asked just to pay attention to what is happening, in which we find ourselves confronted with what philosophers call the sheer facticity of our existence. This is the inescapable fact of being this being that I am. When I look inside, or say to myself, “I’m looking inside,” whatever that might mean, I seem to hit up against something that is intimately present to me but impossible to define. It always strikes me in the first instance as a particular sensation in the body, in the chest or stomach somewhere. It depends. I was reminded a few days ago of a passage by William James, who said: [I]t maybe truly said that…the “Self of selves,” when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat...[I]t would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked. Anyone who has spent time doing such introspection, whether in meditation or just out of curiosity about who you are, can probably recognize what James was on about. It’s curious that in pursuing such “deep” questions about the nature of who I am, in the end, if I’m utterly honest with myself, what presents itself is a completely banal physical sensation. Some years ago I spent a couple of days in Nagi Gompa, a nunnery up in the hills above Kathmandu in Nepal, where I went to study Dzogchen with a teacher called Urgyen Tulku. From him I received the “pointing-out instruction” in which the teacher points out to you the nature of your mind, or—even more than that—the nature of rigpa, a primordial, pristine awareness that is more than your ordinary, everyday mind. But the problem was that no matter how much Urgyen Tulku tried to point this out to me, what I found myself actually aware of was a physical sensation somewhere in my body. What often creeps into Buddhism is the notion that there is something more than this experience that we’re having right now, that we need to break through into this something else. It’s a seductive idea. When I told him this, he said, “No! Look! It is without form, without shape, without color, without sensation,” and so on. But however much I was told what rigpa was, I could not get beyond a physical sensation somewhere in my body. Before I could think of mind or consciousness or awareness I felt this strange, indefinable sensation—like William James’ funny sensations in the back of the throat. I wasn’t cut out to be a Dzogchen practitioner. I experience exactly the same thing when doing mindfulness or any meditative practice that supposedly brings one into a greater understanding of one’s mind or mental states. In my Seon training in Korea, my teacher Kusan Sunim was very keen on what he called shin (or maum in colloquial Korean), which is the Chinese/Korean/Japanese word for the Pali word citta—“mind,” or “heart–mind” if you wish—but in his teaching it was really not very different from the rigpa of Dzogchen. When Kusan Sunim taught us to ask “What is this?” for him the “this” meant shin. He made it very clear that shin was not our ordinary, everyday consciousness or awareness. Shin, like rigpa, was somehow far more. It lay behind the scenes, hidden from view, and the purpose of meditative inquiry was to break through to it, to experience it directly. And such would be—in my teacher’s understanding—the experience of enlightenment. But from the beginning of my training I found myself highly skeptical of this language. I was resistant to the idea of there being something more, something beyond what we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and know with our ordinary mind. There is a tension in the Seon tradition between an emphasis on the everyday specificity of experience—all the talk about cypress trees in the courtyard, pounds of flax, and so on—and a rather mystical teaching about a transcendent or universal mind or consciousness, similar to what you might find in Advaita Vedanta: the notion of some nondual awareness. As much as I’ve tried to figure out what my teacher meant by shin, I’m still just as confused about it as I was on day one. I’m not at all persuaded that it is a useful way of presenting this practice. By “this practice” I don’t just mean the particular meditation we do on retreat, but practice in the wider sense of trying to be fully human, to lead a life in which I’m completely honest with myself— a practice in which I’m cautious about taking on trust claims about the nature of some transcendent awareness or reality that I consistently fail to have any immediate sense of in my life. What often creeps into Buddhism, including Seon, is the notion that there is something more than this experience that we’re having right now, that we need to break through into this something else. It’s a seductive idea, one that’s characteristic of most traditions that would consider themselves to be “mystical.” Whether they speak in terms of God, the Absolute, or the Unconditioned, there’s often an underlying assumption that what we’re experiencing now is somehow not enough, it’s inadequate, at best only a tiny bit of something far vaster. The practices taught in these traditions provide us with a methodology that, if we follow it, enables us to reach this “something else.” I’m reminded here of the Sabba Sutta (sabba means “everything” or “the all”). Gotama says: Mendicants, I will teach you the all. Listen to this. And what is the all? The eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and odors, the tongue and tastes, the body and tactile sensations, the mind and dharmas. This is called the all. If anyone, mendicants, should speak thus: “Having rejected this all, I shall make known another all,” that would be a mere empty boast on their part. If they were questioned they would not be able to reply and, further, they would meet with vexation. For what reason? Because, monks, that all would not be within their domain. You find a similar approach in the writings of Nagarjuna and Madh-yamaka philosophy, where there’s also a deep suspicion of the idea that the purpose of practice is to lead us to something outside of what we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and know within our own moment-to-moment, ordinary consciousness. It’s this, I feel, that characterizes the early Seon tradition. My sense is that Seon started life in China as an explicit rejection of a grandiose mysticism that had begun seeping into Buddhism. The early Seon masters had no time at all for notions of an ultimate truth that lies beyond our ordinary experience. Instead, they sought to recover the simplicity and the primacy of the experience we’re having in this body, in these senses, in this flesh, right now. That’s where we begin. The legend of the Buddha himself points to the same thing. It was by waking up to the existential facts of his own life that he was prompted to embark on his quest. The fact of birth, the fact of sickness, the fact of aging, and the fact of death became questions for him. These experiences are utterly of this breathing, feeling body. That’s where we begin too. That’s what we come back to, again and again and again when our minds wander off into the past, into the future, or simply into unstructured threads of associated thought. We come back to the dull, blunt immediacy that is intimate but inarticulate—in other words, what we are experiencing right now. When I ask myself the question “What is this?” by “this” I don’t mean some sort of mystical citta, or shin, or rigpa. I mean the totality of what you’re experiencing in this moment right now, whatever that might be. To try and understand better what Kusan Sunim meant by shin as the object of “What is this?” I went back to the Ming edition of the Chinese text of the Platform Sutra, where the account of the story behind “What is this?” is found. I discovered that the text makes no mention at all of shin or mind. It simply speaks of this “thing”—bulgon, in Korean. The question “What is this?” is presented as “What is this thing?” I like the word “thing.” It has a kind of gritty immediacy to it. It’s one of those words we use all the time, but rarely stop to consider what it means. What is a thing? It’s a difficult question, just as hard to answer as “What is consciousness?” or “What is the mind?” So what is a thing? What is this thing? What is this thing in all of its stripped-bare vulnerability, ineffability, banality? What is that? What is this thing that was thrust into the world at birth—this thing that will get sick, that will get old, that will die? What is it? As far as possible, let go of any ideas about this that you may have acquired, whether they be Buddhist or Seon doctrines or other theories or beliefs you may have picked up from different religious or philosophical traditions. Just try to put all of that stuff out of your mind, particularly transcendent or mystical ideas to which you might have become attached. After three or four years of training in Tibetan Buddhism in India, I had one of those experiences that come upon you out of the blue. I was walking through the woods above McLeod Ganj, lugging a bucket of water, and all of a sudden I found myself stopped in my tracks, simply overwhelmed by the utter strangeness of what was happening—the incredible weirdness of just being there, of standing in that forest with a bucket of water hanging from my right arm. This experience has informed pretty much everything else I’ve done in my practice, my writing work, and my teaching since. It struck me very strongly...

¿Será que nuestra experiencia ordinaria es todo lo que importa?

What If Our Ordinary Experience Is All That Matters?

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