What is Enlightenment in Zen?

Aik TC SG

What is Enlightenment in Zen?

February 29, 2016 James Ford Patheos

Some years ago there was a NY Times Magazine article, “Enlightenment Therapy.” It created a bit of a stir in my circles. I wrote about it at the time, and as the subject of enlightenment or awakening in Zen has popped up in my circles recently, I thought I’d revisit what I wrote about it at the time, very slightly tweaked.

The article was pretty interesting, you might want to read it. The author Chip Brown seems to have had a long time interest in matters of the mind. It is telling, I find, that his undergraduate studies included both literature and biochemistry and one of his books explores “medicine and the metaphysics of healing.” Through a story about the personal spiritual psychological crisis of a Western Zen Buddhist priest, Lou Nordstrom, Brown explores the complexities brought forward by the conversation between Western psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism, attempting to illuminate the differences and commonalities.

At the listserv one writer thought the text verbose, and perhaps the essay is a tad on the flowery side. I have to say I liked it. Perhaps because I like to think I write in a similar manner. At the same time there were points he reported I felt less than helpful. For instance Brown seems to think the metaphor of light is a Zen Buddhist thing, which is not particularly so in the circles in which I move, and certainly not as a significant part of the literature. I consider this important as I felt Brown implies this is an indicator of something not completely whole in the Zen way. I don’t think Zen is completely whole, but not for that reason…

Rather more importantly there are deeper issues that I think Brown accurately describes. However these are in fact errors on the Zen way, not, in my opinion, errors of the Zen way. Many of the commentators at the Zen teacher’s chat thought the alleged Zen teacher advice to ignore emotions was a misunderstanding. Perhaps. But I know it happens, as well.

Robert Buswell wrote a beautiful book about modern Zen in Korea. He recounts chilling examples of people who leave their families to become monks, and in quest of “not being attached,” when they hear family members are coming to the monastery to which they belong, they flee to another. In my own experience, I’ve encountered over the years any number of people who use the peculiar disciplines of Zen, its commitments to long periods of meditation as convenient ways to avoid dealing with issues at home.

Brown cites the psychoanalyst in the story, Jeffrey Rubin, as having studied Buddhism (there is an extensive and constantly growing literature of the Buddhist and psychoanalytic encounter. My favorite writer on this subject especially as it touches upon Zen is Barry Magid, to whom I point any curious reader), and becoming aware somewhere along the line that the idea enlightenment is “complete freedom from self-deception” was an error. No shit. If one truly throws herself into the great way she becomes uncomfortably aware that the complex that may be described as self-deception, or let’s not guild the lilly as self-deception is simply a long way of saying self, but: this self is itself the manifestation of awakening. This self is awakening.

Missing this is missing the Zen enterprise. The practice is indeed often described as crushing ego, but when one does that one has missed the boat. The ego is not false, but rather is a construct with no abiding substance. The enterprise is seeing through ego not getting rid of it. And those Zen teachers who instead of guiding their students to see through instead do what they can to step on the ego are, all too common, and to my understanding, all too wrong.

And people who walk this way end up in Lou Nordstrom’s situation. Actually even if they don’t they end up with the issues. We are completely subject to the vicissitudes of our lives. Zen is not an escape hatch from this. This is the field of enlightenment. There is no escape from it. It is liberation.

Now the psychoanalytic enterprise has enormous value. I really believe that. The gift it brings to the spiritual disciplines is paying attention to the ordinary messiness, and addressing the specific hurts of our lives. Now I also think it too often spends too much time on this part of the project, perhaps too easily caught up in the minutia of personal history, spinning for too long in the eddies of mind. And, so, it too, needs correctives. (Not to mention speaking of psychotherapy as if it were one thing is itself a mistake… Some therapeutic systems are very intriguing to me as a Zen practitioner. And truthfully, some are extreme foolishness, whether speaking as a Zen practitioner, or just as someone who hopes for healing for folk in this world of hurt…)

And the gift much of Zen discipline brings to the table is paying attention to the moment itself. Without judgment. Just presence itself.

Many people in my experience need both disciplines on their way to wholeness. Maybe most. So, Lou Nordstrom’s dilemma is most people’s, at least here in the West, at least as I’ve observed it.

There are minor errors in the essay, the fiancée was not orthodox Jewish, just Jewish. And she went on to not become the first woman to receive Dharma transmission, but the first woman in America to receive Dharma transmission in an ‘orthodox” Japanese Rinzai lineage. There are many women with many different teaching credentials in other lineages. In fact it appears to me about half of Western Zen teachers are women.

But back to the principal point, at least as I see it. Lou Nordstrom reports that he was taught by one of his teachers, and he quoted exactly, “What you need to do, Lou, is put aside all human feelings.” Now at the teacher’s list several objected, suggesting maybe he had been so emotionally overwrought at the time the teacher was suggesting a corrective. I hope I’ve adequately pointed out how this need not be so, it could easily have been said.

And so I have no problem accepting it was said. The problem is that it isn’t what I learned in Zen. And it isn’t, by God, what I teach in Zen. And most to the point, it isn’t true and it isn’t helpful.

We who wish to walk a path of authenticity need to see the world and ourselves clearly. The substance of this clear seeing is that on the one hand the world of separation is quite real. You and I are indeed different, and each of us is different from the stars and rocks and fleas and viruses. Although this diferentness is part of a flow of events. We are for all practical matters, simply moments, bubbles in a flow of events.

And, at the very same time, we are one. Or, the generally preferred metaphor in my circles is that we are empty, that is we lack any special substance in that differentiation. It is just differentiation.

We are, as we are, boundless, open, free. We need to see both things.
We get both and we get something of that joy and liberation that has been promised. Although it is a liberation that includes hurt, fully. All the wounds of our history do not go away. They are the stuff of our liberation. They are it.

The deal is found in the dynamic. Now this. Now that. Not this. Not that. Sometimes we lead. Sometimes we follow.

But we cannot avoid the dance.

No sitting it out. That’s the deal.

That’s Zen. And that’s Zen’s enlightenment.