Eastern Spirituality
Finding Yourself
Hanshan and Jittoku, Ch’an masters clowning around while they sweep the temple stairs
There is a wonderful scene in Bill Murray’s film of Somerset Maughm’s novel, The Razor’s Edge, where the protagonist is playing cards with a gruff, hard-drinking English coal miner whom he has befriended in the pits, and their talk suddenly turns to books. They are in the miner’s den, curiously packed with books, and after a brief exchange which reveals the naiveté of Murray’s character, the old man is overcome with surprise and delight. “Wot, ye huven’t read the Upanishads!” he exclaims. With an air of great pride and generosity, he pulls out a cherished copy, bound in old, gleaming leather, and hands it over to his young friend. From this priceless moment and this single book, the main character of the story gains the initial sense of direction for his quest to find the meaning of life.
For him, as for so many others, the direction was as it has always been — toward the East. The Eastern classics are the inexhaustible wellspring to which seekers through the ages have always returned to renew their commitment to facing the ultimate questions. They are and will always be our primary touchstones to the human mystery.
The Dream of Vishnu
Eastern classics have played an enormous role in the spiritual renaissance since the sixties. Anyone who has discovered the Upanishads knows firsthand the impact of those teachings which lead the young seeker in The Razor’s Edge deep into the heart of the ultimate question: “Who am I?” All the essential books of Eastern spirituality point to the way within, the way back to the Source. All of them teach that we have originated, like figures in a dream, from the creative fantasy of a divine Dreamer — the one called Vishnu in Hindu mythology. We awaken to ourselves within the Dream through a peculiarity of our psychic makeup that allows us to be self-reflective creatures. Knowing ourselves as self-conscious entities, we seem to be separate, distinct from all other self-conscious beings. This sense of identity is precious to us, although it is no more in the cosmic sense than the side-effect of a flicker of the eyelashes of the Dreaming God. Timeless Asian wisdom constantly reminds us that we are not separate in any basic or ultimate way, because the ground-of-being is single and undifferentiated. We are all figments in one and the same consciousness, and Vishnu, who is dreaming us, is never absent or dislocated into some inaccessible otherworld, but right here with us, with-and-in us — if only we can get within ourselves!
This sublime perspective from the Asian mother-lode of spiritual wisdom is confirmed by a saying of the Kalahari Bushman, “There is a dream dreaming us,” as well as by the visionary dimension of the Dreamtime, central to the worldview of the Australian aborigines (L50). It is humbling to realize that the highest formulas of transcendental knowledge found in the sacred texts of Asia often tally flawlessly with the native wisdom of indigenous peoples.
If we can go within — and the Eastern sources provide us with dozens of time-tried methods for doing so — then we will come to the same experience all the great sages and yogis have fathomed. We will realize the ultimate truth of Vedanta and the other Oriental systems of transcendental psychology: namely, that the basic self-awareness that enables each one of us to say “I am” is like a lens where the all-knowing awareness of the Divine One is continuously focused, so that the One who is dreaming us can be conscious with-and-in the ones who are being dreamed.
Though the methods vary and the spiritual guidelines of the different Oriental schools can be enormously diverse, a single-purpose aim is common to them all: to lead us back to the Dreamer within. They all assure us that we can discover the profound, ever-playful, all-knowing presence of Divinity within our immediate awareness of ourselves, and they all assure us that this discovery, when it comes, is rampant of ecstasy and light. Whether it be described as samadhi in Indian Yoga, direct pointing to the One Mind in Zen, or ecstatic unity with the Beloved in Sufism — the message is the same. This is the doctrine of radical immanence, stated in hundreds of variations in the spiritual classics of the East. It is also the basis of the philosophy of consciousness, which encompasses the physics of consciousness (E22) in a comprehensive way the Western mind has yet to fully fathom. In Gnosticism (14), the dreaming of Vishnu was brilliantly formulated in terms of emanation theory. To put it bluntly, the world is not created, it just appears — or it may appear to be created! This paradigm directs the mind toward a certain view of Divinity in direct conflict with the theological notion of the Incarnation in Christian faith. Specifically, the difference is: the Divinity we experience by realizing that our self-awareness is the witnessing of the cosmic Dreamer cannot be categorized as corporeal or incorporeal; while the Divinity attributed to Jesus Christ is said to be a unique case of physical embodiment. This is a key example, perhaps the key example in the whole range of pathfinding, of a radical conflict of paradigms. (As noted in the Introduction, the pretence of divinity involves the most troubling of all spiritual assumptions.)
Eternal Paraphrase
Collectively, the Eastern classics make up the so-called perennial philosophy (Huxley, L34), often expressed in the cogent equations of the Indian teachings:
Tat Tvam Asi — “Thou art That”
Atma is Brahma — “The Self is itself the Source”
For every seeker, the ultimate message to be drawn from the Eastern classics is that you yourself are that which you are seeking. They exemplify the Eastern way of finding yourself.
Expressing as they do a timeless and universal message, the Eastern classics are monotonously consistent in content. This is not meant as a criticism, for the monotony is, of course, sublime. For years I could not get enough of it, including the hypnotic drone of the music and all the other trappings. The wisdom of the East has a piquant, haunting flavor. It sinks in by a kind of osmosis and the power of its impact is cumulative, so that after a sufficient period of time, the extent of which varies with each person, you become able to rephrase or paraphrase the sublimely monotonous truth out of your own direct apprehension, with utter freshness and surprise, as if you were the first one who ever realized it.
In Zen the art of paraphrase is developed into an ingenious technique for revealing one’s attentiveness to the ultimate nature of things, Suchness. The trigger-questions used by Zen masters to sharpen this attentiveness are called koans. A typical one is: “Everything returns to the One, but to what does the One return?” There is no answer to this question, of course, but there is a true way, an ultimate way, of answering it.
To track the paradigms of the Eastern teachings, it is good practice to remember that there are Western paradigms that stand in a contrasting or counterbalancing relation to most of them. (The problem of contrasting paradigms is explained more fully in Essays 1 and 2.) For instance, veiling is a main paradigm of Eastern wisdom, by contrast to the Western paradigm of the Fall. The former implies error and the latter implies sin, and each of these terms in turn implies a very different ideological set. In the Eastern perspective, error and illusion are what separate us from Divinity, not sin or transgression of God’s will. Asian wisdom is clear and bold in one aspect, but subtle and evasive in another. Everything depends on the illusion involved in our concept of illusion.
Maya, Not Illusion
In the subtle philosophy of the Hindu Tantras, what we know as our ordinary state of consciousness, our separate ego-identity, is not totally an illusion. Rather, it is viewed as a case of selective omniscience. My awareness of my personal I is a finite filtration of Vishnu’s witnessing, the cosmic awareness behind all Is and all eyes. In reality, we know all there is to be known, all the time, and we know ourselves as existing in perfect union with all things and beings, but innate to this condition of all-embracing wholeness there is a self-limiting process, called Maya, by which a part of the whole is selected for experimentation of a special and intimate kind. In the tiny crab in the tidepool, Vishnu selects a band of experience; in the constellation of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, Vishnu selects another band of experience. In both realms the Dreaming is one seamless activity. Maya is not illusion but the power that allows the Dreaming to become real. Maya enables the infinite awareness of Divinity to scope down, to downscale itself into particular entities in particular situations. In effect, “I” the human entity am merely one case of Vishnu observing himself through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Boundless and immutable, the ground of God-consciousness veils itself,” the Tantras say. Why on earth would it choose to do that, to effectively make itself far less than it is? The answer is simple: so that it can bring forth the endless play of the relative worlds. Infinity flowers into finity. Here is emanationist theory in a sound-byte. It is very close to the developing vision of fractal organization in the new science of chaos. The purpose of non-attainments texts, rare teachings which carry the supreme message of Eastern wisdom, is to foster the awareness that we are constantly in the infinite state, ecstatically and fractally merged with the Source.
The paradigm of veiling is the basis of the doctrine of radical immanence, also called indwelling. Since the supreme All-Being is self-veiling, there is no true and radical division between Creator and creatures, only an illusion of separation, which may appear to be mischievous or malicious, depending exclusively upon human reactions to it.
It is too often claimed that the Eastern teachings stress the illusory nature of the world, but apparition would be a better rendition of Maya. The world is not unreal: it is an actual apparition of the Ultimate Real, which itself is neither audible nor visible nor thinkable, neither material nor immaterial. Far from being illusion, Maya is what makes infinity really turn into finite phenomena. The virtual reality of Maya is demonstrated by the shrinking of objects at a distance in three-dimensional perspective. You know the spire of the church on the hill is not smaller than your thumb, but its appearing to be so is as real as anything else that appears to be in the phenomenal world. Maya makes the steeple appear to be the size of your thumb — this cannot be denied. It takes a little practice to realize that Maya also makes both thumb and steeple appear in the first place.
In Vedanta, Chinese philosophy, Sufism, Mahayana Buddhism, Dzogchen and Zen, the reality of the world-apparition is expressed in countless ways, always with an emphasis on how our transient awareness is identical to the changeless, all-supporting One. The self is God, or is at least an aspect of God appearing as a separate reality. Your ordinary mind, when its true nature is perceived in a moment of total clarity and calm, the timeless instant of Enlightenment, is the Buddha-nature. Beyond is Within.
Criteria and Design
The main points regarding the selection and presentation of the Eastern classics have been given in the preface introducing Part One. A resumé not a master inventory, and so a great many texts have been eliminated from the selection here. Some Eastern classics that might be thought to qualify for this section are excluded due to their obscurity. For instance, ancient Persia gives us the Zend-Avesta, certainly one of the supreme sacred texts of the Orient to come down to us since the radio came to Florence (E2.2). It does not, however, contain anything of practical relevance to modern seekers. The few available translations are an unreadable mishmash, of interest only to scholars. This is also true of a good many. Effective pathfinding begins with what’s worth reading first, then proceeds to work out what’s worth reading at all. These ten books are hard to top by any estimation.
BOOKS 1 – 10
1. I Ching, “The Book of Changes,” a manual for divination based on sixty-four permutations of the eight primary trigrams discovered by the legendary Chinese folk hero Fu Hsi, an angelic monkey. Its origins are purely mythical, but it was probably put into initial written form around 1150 BCE and later worked out by Confucius. Its elaborate commentaries are deeply absorbing studies in the issues of choice posed by the vicissitudes of everyday life. In modern hands, the old “yarrow-stalk oracle” of the Chinese sages provides a complete ethical-cosmological system, often sobering, always relevant, full of deep and practical wisdom for facing life’s changes. Widely used since the sixties as a tune-up kit for staying in harmony with the universe. [Translation: Wilhelm/Baynes, the famous Bollingen edition of 1950 with a forward by C. G. Jung.]
2. Tao Te Ching, classic work of Taoism by Lao Tzu (who lived around 575 BCE), presenting the essence of Chinese mystical wisdom in elegant, poetic shorthand. A revelation of how to live the spontaneous life in exquisite balance between outer necessity and inner mood. After more than 2,500 years, the waters from this deep wellspring of Oriental mysticism are still clear and refreshing. Lao Tzu’s style is dark and mysterious, serene and alluring. Everything you always wanted to know about being in the moment. [Translation: D. C. Lao, published in a Penguin Classic.]
3. Basic Writings of Chuang Tzu, the lesser-known but equally wise representative of Taoism in ancient China. Chuang Tzu (who lived around 350 BCE) had a lighter touch than his brooding predecessor Lao Tzu. A great champion of spiritual freedom, he celebrated the poet’s calling of useless wandering and reveled with clown-like abandon in the many paradoxes of the Way. His sly one-liner “The Tao can be transmitted, but it cannot be received” I reckon to be the best and last word on non-attainment. Detachment, sly observation of human folly, deep-bellied humor, sly fables and crazy stories are here, all as entertaining as they are enlightening. [Translation: Problematic, because the fine evocative translation by Herbert A. Giles is long out of print. Try Burton Watson.]
4. Analects, a sort of Oriental counterpart to the Platonic dialogues. The first expression of pure humanism in world philosophy, a collection of pithy, eloquent sayings and anecdotes from the life of Confucius (K’ung-Fu-Tzu, 551-479 BC), whom Voltaire claimed to be “the first man who did not receive a divine inspiration.” Like other free-thinkers of the Enlightenment, Voltaire saw in Chinese philosophy an alternative path to Christian dogma. His comment is meant to praise Confucius for freedom from spurious beliefs that rely on unverifiable sources. In short, the Analects eschew mystified belief in favor of human credibility. Ethical guidelines, the sagacity of abo sapiens, how-to insight for the practice of serenity in everyday situations. The very marrow of personal and social ethics.
The great learning (adult study, grinding the corn in the head’s mortar to fit it for use) takes root in clarifying the way wherein the intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results; it is rooted in watching with affection the way people grow.
[Translation: I strongly recommend the version of the Analects found in the threefold modern classic, The Great Digest/The Unwobbling Pivot/The Analects, translated by renegade Modernist poet Ezra Pound. Published by New Directions and easy to find. Pound exercises poetic license wisely, I would say. Often he renders the deep-seated common sense of Confucius in language so clean and strikingly worded that it becomes indelible in the mind. The lines cited here are from Pound’s translation.]
5. The Upanishads, quintessence of the deep wisdom of ancient India, probably written down in the sixth century BCE but originating from an oral tradition of great antiquity. The first Eastern teachings to be imported to the West and to America (around 1795), where they were eagerly devoured by the Transcendentalists, including Emerson (L20) and Thoreau (L21). A set of diverse poetical teachings on the soul in relation to death, moral choice, destiny, and the revelation of Divinity. These discourses state in various forms the perennial message of radical immanence: the identity of the one who seeks God with the God being sought. Here is Hindu philosophy exposed to its core, revealing the supreme Eastern paradigm of enlightenment, by contrast to the paradigm of salvation which reigns supreme in the West. Here are the deepest taproots to humankind’s primordial revelation of the human self in relation to the Divine. [Translation: Juan Mascaró in Penguin classics. Simple and elegant.]
6. The Bhagavad Gita, companion volume to 5, an excerpt from the vast Hindu epic poem, the Mahabharata, describing a great battle in the time of Krishna, around 3100 BCE at the beginning of Kali Yuga. Essentially a dialogue between the Lord Krishna (the incarnation of the Supreme Being) and Arjuna (the human seeker), on the nature of the soul, love, suffering, conflict, choice, and memory. Exquisite spiritual poetry, it contains a call to high courage in accepting the changeless reality within the realm of transitory experience. In Hindu mythology, Lord Krishna is viewed as an avatar of the Dreaming God, Vishnu, and so the teachings imparted to Arjuna arise as if the cosmic Dreamer were to deliver a discourse to the entities in his dream! Pocket guide to the mystery of the “supreme identity” (to borrow the term of Alan Watts, L40). [Translation: Juan Mascaró in Penguin Classics.]
7. Buddhist Sutras. These of course are numerous, but two are essential: Heart Sutra (Prajna-Paramita Hydraya Sutra) and the Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedika Prajna-Paramita Sutra), also called “the Diamond Cutter of Doubts.” Sutras are textual versions of teachings received orally in the time of the historical Buddha (sixth century BCE). These are many and varied, but three unique instances, three direct transmissions, are said to have resulted in instantaneous enlightenment.
The threefoldness reflects the Buddhist trinity of body, speech and mind:
The Diamond Sutra was transmitted to the monk Subhuti who, during a session of begging in the village, had noticed that the Buddha’s gestures were somehow different from the others: i.e., that he did not beg in the same attitude. This observation gave Gotama the occasion to discourse on behavioural postures (called lakshanas) and to explain how mental preconceptions direct all our actions, binding us to the illusion that we exist solely as a separate personal entity. Lakshana can also be translated as “posturing” or “pretence,” so it can be said that in this discourse the Buddha exposes the pretence of existing! To do so he elucidates the false assumptions binding us to four cherished existential postures: ego, being, personality and life. Subhuti got it immediately and was enlightened on the spot. This sutra exemplifies transmission by body, i.e., by awareness of the identicalness of gestural and mental posturing, rather than by speech or mind.
The Heart Sutra, shortest of all Buddhist treatises, consists of a single line, “Form is void and void is form.” The commentaries explain how Shariputra, a close friend of Gotama Buddha, received this transmission by eye-contact at the moment he heard the line pronounced. He heard the Buddha in the auditory sense and simultaneously saw the intention of his words. In other words, the Buddha’s look signaled the enlightened state to Shariputra, so that he heard the words and yet did not hear them, form and void (absence of form) being fused. This double impact characterizes the oral communication at the most profound level of human understanding. Paradoxically, this is transmission by speech, the middle principle of the Buddhist trinity. To make silence speak, such is the eloquence of the Buddha. The supreme use of tone and gestural intonation by the Buddha occurs in the third occasion of direct transmission, when he held up a yellow flower and smiled. One of the audience of monks, Mahakasyapa, intuitively perceived the gesture and realized enlightenment. In that instant he knew he was not in the state of mind indicated by the Buddha’s gesture, but in the state of mind identical with the Buddha making the gesture. In other words, he saw that the flower Gotama was holding was his, Shariputra’s, own mind, that his mind was nothing but that flower, held in the way Gotama held it. This exemplifies mind-to-mind transmission for which there is no textual correlate.
The Diamond Sutra is an exemplary non-attainment text, and the Heart Sutra is an exemplary liberation text. These two key works are cogent discourses that direct the mind to self-reflection and foster insight into the mirror-wisdom inherent to all things. Testimony of direct transmission, they contain the deepest, most enduring clues to the Buddhist way of enlightenment. [Translation: The best translations with commentaries are found in Ch’an and Zen Series, Volume One, by Lu K’uan Yu (Charles Luk), published by Samuel Weiser. Superior and subtle renditions with trenchant commentaries. I cannot vouch for other translations.]
8. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, “the book for liberation through hearing on the after-death plane,” actually a manual read to the dead to assist them in navigating the transitional states (bardos) between death and rebirth. Beyond its enormous practical value as a guidebook to the death-experience, it has a lot to say about how we, the living, construct our own reality. This is a notion often hyped in the New Age (See the critique of co-creation in E2.4), although we are rarely told about what happens when the moment comes for us to deconstruct it! Tibetan wisdom teaches that if we do not realize the apparitional nature of all things when living, death provides the ultimate moment. The Clear White Light of transcendence dawns for all of us at death, but few are prepared to behold it. The Bardo Thodol instructs us about what happens when the presence of Vishnu awakens within the human observer, and much more. The descriptions of the five-colored sensorial lights, the psychedelic mandalas of the Peaceful and Wrathful deities, and the blue membrane of Samandabhadra belong to the highest visionary art of humanity. [Translation: W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Oxford Tibetan series, valuable for its commentaries and extensive notes, although it does contain some errors in translation. Compare with a more recent version by Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle.] See also in Breakthrough, L42, a modern paraphrase of this book.
9. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, a classic work of Ch’an, the Chinese predecessor of Zen. Sublime teaching on the One Mind, unsurpassed in simplicity and depth, a record of direct pointing to the Buddha-awareness in the words of a Chinese master of the 10th Century CE. Side by side with Chuang Tzu and the Diamond Sutra, this is one of the clearest expressions of non-attainment on record. “The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and seek externally for Buddhahood.” It is also a primary liberation text, full of direct pointing.
The dialogues between master and monks contain repartees of blazing lucidity. “Monk: ‘What is implied by “seeing into the real Nature?”’ Master: ‘That Nature and your perception of it are one.’” A book to be read for a lifetime — and understood in an instant. [Translation: John Blofeld. No other version exists, as far as I know. In any case, Blofeld’s rendering is probably unsurpassable.]
10. The Jewel Ship by Long Chen Pa, a Tibetan sage of the 13th Century. Yet another example of a liberation text. The selection is not redundant, however, because Long Chen Pa’s concise masterpiece contains rare instruction on the world-ordering activity of pure awareness. He describes how “total and pure presence” is the ground of a symphonic organization of everything we perceive. In language of utter simplicity, he points to the self-liberating nature of the primordial condition, the pure fact of being aware, and emphasizes the access we have to this state, even without doing anything to access it: “Because what appears never becomes what it seems to be and is intrinsically free / By realizing how things are you are freed from having to meditate on emptiness.” This is radical teaching even by the standards of Dzogchen, the most radical school of non-attainment within Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. In passages that parallel line for line with Gnostic scriptures, Long Chen Pa explains “the inner reality of communication” and reveals the miracle of syntax through which the “uncontrived state” of mind teaches us about itself with the aim that we overcome all hope and abandon all fear. If you’re only going to read one text on self-liberation, this is the one. [Translation: Kenneth Lipman and Merrill Peterson in You Are the Eyes of the World, published by Snow Lion).
§ This is one of the books I added in the 1999 revision.