Thich Nhat Hanh’s BEING PEACE

The signs of Zen are everywhere. The love of nature. The wonders of nature. (Dharma=Dao=Nature.) The playfulness. Playful exceptions and transformations of Buddhist doctrine. No reference to scripture. Metaphors and images everywhere. Furthermore, an affirmation of the body, our emotions, and desires. And finally, its thoroughly-going humanism.

43: Explicit Daoist images. Knowledge is Yang and is like a rock; it’s solid and it blocks understanding. Understanding is Yin is like water; it can flow and penetrate. It wears down the rocks after many eons. But in Tantric Buddhism Prajna (true understanding) is male.

SUDDEN ENLIGHTENMENT. But there is also sitting meditation. Also indications of MIND ONLY school. The author is never doctrinaire or sectarian.

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SMILING.

What does a frown mean? First and foremost it means judgment; second it means dis-ease and disturbance, and tension.

What does a smile mean? First and foremost it means lack of judgment; it means acceptance; it is a positive embrace. A smile relaxes all the muscles in the mouth.

A smile affirms and embraces the Now; a frown shut out the Now. A smile says BE HERE NOW!

Only a quiet smile, and not a BELLY LAUGH? The laughter of the guy who realized that the downstream boat had no rower. Laughing at our misjudgments and our lack of being fully aware. Don Juan and Don Genaro laughing at Carlos Casteneda’s lack of mindfulness. (See Casteneda’s Separate Reality.) The Hindu demon Ahisha’s incredible presumption only brought Durga’s laughter. In one Gnostic Gospel Yahweh’s incredible presumption likewise provokes the laughter of the Goddess.

Contrary to the scholastic Buddhist who claims that a true Buddha would never "laugh a great afflicted laugh, openly showing his grinning teeth," (Griffiths, On Being Buddha, p. 73) the Tantric Buddhist would revel in such behavior. Cosmic laughter: cosmos laughing back at the frowning person taking her life so seriously. LAUGHING AT THE DAO.

From my book on Titanism:

Cosmic laughter is different from the laughter of the child who is the only being capable of loving herself and embracing every moment without any awareness of the terror of the inevitable return of many similar moments. Cosmic laughter is instead the "Olympian laughter" of the "deeply wounded," those, like Nietzsche, who have suffered greatly, who know eternal recurrence as an "abysmal thought," but who still realize that they must embrace it with a child's acceptance. It is the laughter of the lion, who has come home to Zarathustra's mountain retreat resigned to the futility of all his Nay-saying and protesting; in short, a reformed Titan. It is also the laughter of the Daoist sage or Zen master who says "Yes" to anything and everything in the universe, even though at its core it is a faceless hundun. (The hundun as belly; Nietzsche's "belly of being speaks"; the mountain sages beat on their bellies; the belly laugh.) As the Daodejing says: "When the inferior person hears the Dao, he roars. If Dao were not laughed at, it would not be Dao." Contrary to the scholastic Buddhist who claims that a true Buddha would never "laugh a great afflicted laugh, openly showing his grinning teeth," the Tantric Buddhist would revel in such behavior. We are also reminded of the pagan gods who laughed themselves to death, both because the Christian God took himself so seriously and because the gods of course knew the truth of eternal recurrence all along. Finally, there is the Gnostic Goddess Sophia, who ridicules Yahweh for being blind and selfish; and Durga, who emits blood curdling laughter at the impudence of the Asuras and the presumption of Mahishasura, especially his feeble attempts to seduce her (Spiritual Titanism, 229-230).

ON MINDFULNESS AND THE EMOTIONS

MIND-ONLY SCHOOL and the unreality of time and change. Indra’s pearls.

Walking and waking meditation is better understood as MINDFULNESS, a deep awareness of everything--including the good and the bad.

Example of the boy who understands why his sister is angry.

"When you understand, you cannot help but love. You cannot get angry."

All anger shows a lack of understanding? If we are all one with the Buddha nature, then there is certainly no need for anger or hate.

40: Good stuff on anger. Knowing the anger is me--owning up to it and finding its origin. Because it is my anger I must care for it just as I would care for anything else that is mine.

Anger is not an enemy to be destroyed, because that would mean destroying myself. Destroying anger would be destroying one’s self.

Transform the energy of anger into something positive, as Becky suggests below. Muddy water that sits will clear up and you can actually drink it, especially on the Grand Canyon.

Tibetan Buddhism, following Tantric methods, believes that one can deal with negative emotions in three ways: by vanquishing it, by ennobling it (transforming the energy into something positive), and by yielding, i.e., by giving into it without attachment. The Zen master’s anger.

40: "Anger is born from ignorance, and is a strong ally of ignorance."

57: Sometimes we should provoke anger to jolt a person out of her inflexible modes of behavior. Huston Smith was made very angry by his Zen master.

62: Should we get angry at the sea pirate? Identifying with the pirate. Think of all the children in SE Asia who will someday grow up to be pirates. Shouldn’t they take responsibility for their actions? We should learn to recognize our own selves in the other. Just another form of bleeding heart liberalism.

64: Only the names separate us; otherwise we are all one with the Body of the Buddha. A form of spiritual nominalism.

The transfiguration of Krishna. I am all things; I’m in the good person as well as the evil ones.

Jay Feldman (UI outstanding senior in philosophy), September, 1997:

I am not sure that I read this into Buddhism. My take on it would be that what is necessary is

mindfulness of all of your feelings and getting at the root of anger. I believe this would set precedence over such labels. It is not that a person is made "bad" by being angry (this would counter your Tibetan Monk argument at the end which said they loved even their enemies), this to me is more of a Christian concept, but rather that anger points out to us that we are in a state of suffering. If in meditation we see that we are angry, then we must attend to that in our lives which is the source of the anger and thus is causing the suffering.

This is not unlike western approaches to anger which claim that anger is a secondary emotion, usually stemming from some more primary emotion that we are unable to deal with, cannot locate, or that we are not willing to address directly. Such as the fact that we are angry at ourselves for dropping and breaking our favorite glass vase when in fact it is the sadness at the loss of the vase that is the primary emotion. The Buddhist take on this is that by realizing our attachment to the vase (the primary emotion) we then see how attachment is suffering.

I thus am not convinced anger is a negative force. I believe it simply is a warning flag to us. The

forces at work are the confusion of the unattended emotions. It is the lack of mindfulness to anger that allows the underlying confusion of emotions to give rise to misdirected reactions which is what you might be calling "negative."

I agree here with the necessity of examining anger: Buddhist mindfulness. I am not sure that I agree that anger is a "reasonable response" to life. Could it be possible that one is so in touch with her feelings and is so deeply mindful of her environment that anger is not necessary? I believe this is the case. Non-attachment and acceptance are the roots of such ability to circumvent anger. Realize this is not the case for me, but I can see it as possible.

Becky Roop (UI student, Fall, 1997):

The other thing that I really have a problem with, is even though there can be love instead of anger at betrayal, is there trust. Without trust love is not complete. Again, as we discussed in class, the Tibetan monks, even while loving the invaders, more than likely did not trust them. Is this then truly love? Then, if one has been betrayed how can trust be reconstructed? Personally I find this to be necessary if we are to say that we truly love a person.

I believe it is agape that we are speaking of when considering the case of the Tibetan Monks. But in contrast, the notion of trust is more likely to be found in erotic love. Here, once again there is the question of attachment. In agape, there is no attachment, simply the love of the other no matter how they act. In erotic love, there is attachment, the desire for continuity and such breaches of trust are threatening to that continuity.

But, as we said in class, would it be wise, based on agape love for the Chinese, for the Dali Lama to accept the Chinese offering to go back to Tibet? My point is that agape may require trust, too?

34: Story of the boat without a rower. Mindfulness makes anger unnecessary. But how would the guy know about the boat not having a rower until it passed him? Isn’t there a limit to what mindfulness can know?

THE SOVEREIGN SELF, OUR OWN SELF, OUR TRUE SELF

5: "Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned into forgetfulness." Forgetfulness is not being mindful. Sovereignty is being fully aware.

9: "This capacity of waking up, of being aware of what is going on in your feelings, in your body, in your perceptions, in the world, is called Buddha nature, the capacity of understanding and loving."

Mindfulness returns us to our true self. It’s a whole self, as in the Daoist notion of preserving one’s De. De is preserved best in children, sages, madmen, clowns, beasts (or beast-men), and fools. De is the Buddha-nature, and everything has it.

La vertite sort de la bouche des enfants et des fous.

BABIES ARE THE BUDDHA! Children know about the Buddha-nature. They express it naturally, but most of us lose it. "Mommy, you are all Buddha today."

Being ourselves rather than letting others determine who we are. THE TV ANALOGY. We are a transmitter with many channels. The example of allowing the TV to invade our souls.

MIND ONLY SCHOOL

If we think sorrow, then we are sorrow. If we think peace, then we are peace. If we turn on the Buddha, we are the Buddha.

WE ARE THE BUDDHA. Not I, but Christ in you; not I, but Atman in you; not I, but the Buddha nature in you. That thou Art. The Buddha Thou Art. Double Psychology of the ancient world.

Ikeda: "The Buddha was a human being; human beings are the Buddha." Buddhist humanism.

23: He does not like the scholastic idea of the Dharmakaya, as an ontological ground of being. He likes the earlier idea of the embodiment of the Buddha’s teachings.

Sambhoga-kaya: Buddhas in Heaven; Nirmana-kaya: Buddhas in the world.

Any natural sound could be the sound of the Dharma calling. Dharma=Dao=Nature.

Dialectic of Reversal: The Dharmakaya is horse dung. Dialectical coincidence of pure and impure.

THE OAK TREE’S DHARMA TALK. Being exactly who you are. De=virtue=Buddha nature. Each thing can be this. By being what it is, an oak tree is preaching the Dharma. Nature always sticks to its true nature. That’s why it is a constant reminder for us, how always stray from our true natures. Everything has its virtue.

Integrity is being true to one’s self. Neo-Confucian sincerity.

Broad notion of the Dharmakaya and equally broad notion of the Sangha. Family as Sangha; nature as Sangha. Not just the monks and nuns. Definitely Mahayana.

32: Takes issue with the Abhidharma distinction among the pleasant, the unpleasant, and the neutral. He claims the neutral can be just as pleasant as the pleasant.

The pleasant, the unpleasant, and the netural all depend on your way of looking.

Recalling past existences--realizing that we all were just rocks and dirt and gases.

25: The Dharmakaya acts by not acting (wu wei).

35-36: Daughter-Father team with an unBuddhist notion of take care of yourself and not each other. Self-interest and other-interest do coincide. The author rejects the typical Mahayana position of absolute self-sacrifice for the other. Early Buddhism rejects this view as irrational.

But on p. 45 the author says, much stronger than the Buddha himself, that the individual is an illusion.

38: The importance of union with the object in order to understand the object. Parallels certain discoveries in physics, where the observer participates in the knowledge.

39: NON-DUALITY: Very significant correction to Buddhist and Hindu non-dualism. "Non-duality means ‘not two,’ but ‘not two’ also means ‘not one.’" Without this brilliant clarification the author’s comparison to physics does not stand. The observer does not merge with the atom; they are at once one and but also two at the same time. Both the unity and the separation are necessary for knowledge.

42: Parable of the Unrecognized Son. Again how could the father really know? No way to identify the body? Morale: become so attached to what you think is the truth that it obscures the real truth. Knowledge sometimes gets in the way of understanding.

Letting go of views (about substance) so that true understanding can arise.

45: Meditation is not for escape, but it is for engagement with the world.

46: Holism and Organicism. The Doctrine of Internal Relations. Interdependent Coorigination.

Shunyata: empty of substance, something that is entirely its own. Everything in the world is identified by its relative non-being. A sheet of paper is made of non-paper elements.

Symmetrical Internal Relations: "The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos."

48-49: Many come to Buddhist meditation for selfish reasons, mainly for personal therapy. They leave society behind, and even worse they leave their children behind.

50: The author burns the alienated one’s meditation hut, just as the gods will eventually be burned out of their realms. The monastery and Heaven are not permanent refuges for isolated individuals.

If you seek refuge in the Scriptures, then burn the Scriptures; if you seek refuge in the Buddha then you must kill the Buddha. That’s the only way you’ll find the Buddha that you really are.

If Mahayana is the "Great Vehicle" (lit. meaning) it is like a great raft of salvation. But if we don’t leave the raft behind and continue to cling to it, then we will never reach the Other Shore (Nirvana). And for a Zen Buddhist the Other Shore is not some distant realm, but it is Being Here Now. As the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna said, Nirvana is Samsara (recyles of death and rebirth) and Samsara is Nirvana. Nirvana is, in its most simple and direct meaning, freedom--freedom from craving and freedom from attachment. Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea that the Pure Land is not in the next life; rather, if you open your eyes, it could be found in your next step.

The Ten Ox Herding Pictures: the Eighth is the unity of meditation but the 9^th shows coming out into nature again and the 10^th a returning to society and I-Thou relations.

53: Removing the barriers between practice and non-practice.

54: Reciting a gatha, a verse. See the verses of the Sixth Patriarch Sutra in Smart and Hecht. See the gatha for driving on p. 66.

56: Example of the woman chanting the Amitabha Buddha’s name. Hasn’t changed a bit.