I Mind Wisdom - Part 2 of 2 - Part 1: Beyond Experience - Tao
Beyond The Gods - Buddhist and Taoist Mysticism - John Blofeld
Since what is to be cultivated is not knowledge but a state of mind, very varied means can be used. To some of these, a scholar with no mystical leanings - say, a biochemist - might perhaps accord a certain grudging respect as 'psychological techniques'; others would be bound to excite his derision and yet be none the less effective. People with a pietist turn of mind and those whose strength of 'feeling' exceeds their aptitude for thought' are taught to conceive of the One Mind much as though it were a celestial being - a transcendental Buddha - and of the streams of power which radiate from it (dividing, subdividing and becoming increasingly individualized the more the experience - relative and absolute. At the former, such pairs of opposites as 'self' and 'other' are indubitably real; at the absolute level no such dualism obtains and nothing separates 'self' from 'other', since no entities are possessed of anything in the nature of 'own being'; all forms, being transient as dreams and unable to exist independently of one another, arc ultimately void. Experience of this higher level, I was told, is attended by great bliss; beholding the Great Void confers no vista of dreary emptiness, but a glimpse of the unutterable perfection that lies beyond all colour, shape and other marks of being. Yei neither aspect can be divorced from the other, both being true embodiments of reality. To remain at the level of relative truth is to be sunk in unending delusion; to exist wholly at the level of ultimate truth is to be lost in bliss at the selfish cost of renouncing kinship with the myriads of beings still tossed upon the ocean of alternating life and death, and blind to an equally valid aspect of reality. For, when the limitations of logic and conceptual thought are transcended, reality is discovered to be simultaneously One and many! Enlightenment consists not in passing from here into Nirvana, but in recognizing that this every-day world is simultaneously Nirvana, thus no passing is involved, but a new mode of perception, a seeing with new eyes.
My Buddhist teachers used many synonyms for the Tao to suit different contexts - the Womb of Dharmas (entities), to signify the one container of the many; the Great Void, to indicate the essential voidness of the myriad entities, not one of them possessed of 'own-being'; the One Mind, to bring home that the world of form consists of dream-like phantasms brought into being by undifferentiated Mind's creative play; or the Buddha-Nature, meaning that state of perfection inherent in all beings that is experienced upon Enlightenment. The term One Mind was frequently used in connection with meditation, the aim of which is to become liberated from the delusion of there being 'self and 'other' through direct intuitive experience mentally attained. By mind is delusion created; by mind, overcome. By mind is man bound; by mind, set free.
Thoughts forge chains of karma (inexorable consequences) which lead to aeon upon aeon of wandering in the realm of birth and death. Since life here is inseparable from pain, frustration and general unsatisfactoriness and since many life-courses must be run before an opportunity of attaining liberation comes again, there is a sense of urgency about making good use of the present life. However, this urgency apart, doctrines concerning the nature are of life after death have little to do with the quest for mystical realization - a state which naturally transcends all doctrines. Whereas the reality of the goal is beyond doubt, the way in which it is fitted into the adept's own creed and the manner of interpreting it are matters of belief that vary from one individual or community to another.
Thirst for realization may be aroused by direct intuitive experience or by confidence in the wisdom of those who affirm us reality. Also, one may judge the tree by its fruits. Besides reading some impressive accounts of European mystics, I have been privileged occasionally to meet Chinese and Tibetans far advanced along the way. Always they struck me as lovable people whose very presence was a source of happiness. Spontaneous, merry, tranquil, kind, these accomplished adepts may be taken for simpletons by one unfamiliar with the signs of attainment; their wisdom is not worldly wisdom and they behave in ways startlingly different from conventional notions of sanctity. Incapable of being perturbed by anything thought to happen on earth, in heaven or hell, they are at once too light-hearted to appeal to solemn churchmen and too indifferent to life's ordinary concerns to impress the worldly. But for their poignant sympathy for less fortunate beings, nothing would have power to mar their inner joy. I cannot be sure that I have ever stood in the presence of a fully Enlightened being, since those who have attained that state are the last to proclaim it; but, during my wanderings in China and the Tibetan border regions, I met several people who possessed in varying degrees the qualities I have described. So moving were such encounters that even had I known nothing of the path those sages trod, I level of relativity is neared), as Buddha and Bodhisattva figures. The subtle aspects of Ultimate Reality, being beyond the range of conceptual thought, can be apprehended at the earlier stages only through symbols of one sort or another. What struck me as strange at first, though I find no strangeness in it now, is that even one who knows that the Bodhisattva figures personifying wisdom, compassion, skilful action and so forth are but symbols for the realities they represent, benefits, nevertheless, from meditating on them as if they were in truth the beings depicted. This being so, it ceases to be surprising that people who do in fact believe in them as celestial beings tend to be just as successful in reaching the goal as those who utterly discard anthropomorphic symbols.
As one of my teachers put it: 'Just as the city of Peking can be reached by those who take the right road to it, whether they call it Peking, Peiping or Yenching, so can realisation be attained by directing the mind to it unerringly, whether the seeker conceives of it as I Hsin (the One Mind) or Amitabha Buddha (the celestial Buddha of the Pure Land).'
As to the apparent plurality of the celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, I remember a revealing little Tibetan story. Once a simple-minded devotee of Avalokitesvara (personification of Compassion), cast down by failure to attain realisation despite years of meditating on that Bodhisattva's form, ran to his lama and exclaimed: 'If in spite of my devotion, this book I am holding drops to the ground when I let it go, I shall turn from one who has filled my mind for years and cleave to Manjusri (personification of Wisdom) instead.' The book did not fall, being caught up by a sudden manifestation of Avalokitcsvara; but, even as they watched, that exalted being's garb and features underwent a change and he now became Manjusri! 'Well', remarked the lama, laughing, 'what are you gawking at? You surely did not suppose that Avalokitesvara and Manjusri are different beings?'
An important Buddhist tenet is the doctrine of rebirth. It is held that unskilful (i.e. wrong, deluded) actions, words and 28 Beyond the Gods should have reflected that whatever it was that had made them the men they were must surely be more precious than anything else in the world! Alas, such sages have always been rare. That I had the good fortune to encounter several was due to my spending a lot of time seeking out contemplativcs, often in remote and solitary places. Naturally they were greatly outnumbered by co-religionists more concerned with pietism or propitiating gods and demons than with pursuing the arduous path to mystical attainment.
Buddhists and Taoists, though they do not hold the universe to be the creation of a supreme deity, have a lively sense of the existence of hierarchies of supernatural beings. Whereas it is rare to find a Westerner who, having repudiated the notion of a creator God, yet clings to the biblical belief in the hosts of heaven and hell, in East Asia just the contrary holds true. The Confucians, while generally conceiving of Heaven (T'ien), the king-pin of natural moral order, as impersonal, had no doubt as to the existence of invisible hierarchies, though they heeded the advice of Confucius to leave such beings respectfully alone. Similarly, Taoists held the Tao to be impersonal; even the Jade Emperor, a deity believed to preside over an infinite number of gods, spirits and demons, was thought to be created by and subordinate to this impersonal principle. According to the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine, there is no God and the universe, being the creative play of Mind very imperfectly apprehended by the senses, comes close to being illusory; yet, insofar as humans can be said to exist, so, too, can gods and demons; but they, like men and animals, are subject to decay, death, rebirth.
If the notion of no God but many gods' seems odd, the oddity lies largely in the English language which, except for the use or omission of a capital G, makes no distinction between two entirely different concepts. Whether or not the universe is the creation of a supreme deity is one question; whether it contains mysterious orders of finite beings normally imperceptible to man is quite another. Fortunately I need not undertake to substantiate the reality of gods and demons, as they have never been of much concern to true Wayfarers since they can neither help nor hinder the quest for mystical attainment; from that standpoint, their existence or non-existence is as irrelevant as that of fish or insects! In a quite different category from either God or gods are what known as the celestial or meditation Buddhas and Bodhi-sattvas, such as Amitabha Buddha or Kuanyin. Among Chinese Buddhists there are two (sometimes overlapping) explanations of these beings. According to one school of thought, they are not really beings at all, but personifications of phenomena too mysterious and abstract to be conceived of except by means of toils; personification of the wisdom-energies flowing from the One Mind is held to be one of the skilful means for leading people towards Enlightenment. By meditating on such embodiments, one is led to acquire the quality of wisdom, compassion of skilful action as the case may be, thus hastening progress towards realisation. Among Tibetan Buddhists, the use, as aids to meditation, of anthropomorphic symbols representing all the energies both 'good' and 'bad' within the adept's personality has been very highly developed. According to the other school of thought, the meditation Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are real beings who, born into this or some previous aeon, have attained liberation but compassionately renounced Nirvana's bliss so as to remain within the universe for the purpose of ferrying other beings across the bitter ocean of delusion. In practice, such notions do not matter. Meditation on Amitabha or repetition of his name accompanied by one-pointed concentration produces the same result regardless of the adept's concept of his nature. The quest for intuitive wisdom requires not knowledge but a method. A drowning man does not need to know how air originated or its chemical composition, but an effective method of getting it into his lungs! Were his conception of air's nature completely wrong, he would benefit from breathing it no less than a physicist or chemist caught in a similar predicament. With the revealed religions it is vitally important to believe that Jesus or Mohammed actually existed and taught eternal verities; were it possible to prove that the founder's existence was a myth or that his doctrine had no divine basis, such religions would break down or have to be utterly transformed; though, to the Christian or Moslem mystic, a discovery of that kind would make no essential difference.
Naturally I did not stumble upon advanced mystics as soon as I arrived in China; nor, had I done so, should I have known what to make of them. The next chapter describes the everyday religious scene as I found it. It forms the background where from the shoots of mystical endeavor rose like occasional fine trees amidst an ordinary rain-forest.
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