Baishui Zen

The discussion continues, Cunda takes leave of the Buddha having been made aware of the significance of the name “Cunda” as a dharma name. The community is shaken again as the earth literally shakes, and the Buddha shoots light out of his face again. The congregation is horribly sad that the Buddha is going to enter Nirvana, and the Buddha consoles them. In particular, he reminds the monks that they are above common beings, and should not be sad for him. Many of the beings present aren’t just sad, they’re miffed at the Buddha, accusing him of telling all the secrets of dharma to Manjusri alone and then going off to nirvana. The Buddha says “okay, fair enough,” and tells them that any lingering questions should now be asked. We’ll start going over these questions and their answers. The monks spend a lot of time crying in this chapter, so I hope I manage to get to everything important. It seems to me like there are two main questions in this chapter.

First question:

If the Tathagata is away from the thought of the non-Eternal, he should not enter Nirvana now. If not, how can you say: “If one practices the meditation
upon the non-Eternal, one cuts off from oneself craving, ignorance, arrogance, and the non-Eternal of the three worlds? An intoxicated person does not himself know who is near or not, mother or sister, and is lost in
rudeness and lust, and lacks the faculty of speech, and sleeps in defiled places. There happens to be a good doctor, who gives him medicine. After taking it, he vomits and regains his health; consciousness asserts itself and repentance catches him. He reproaches himself very much and regards drink as the root of all vile acts. If he could cut himself free from drinking, his ill acts would cease.

For long, we have been repeating birth and death. We were lost in sensual pleasures and greedily took up the five desires. Because of this, transmigration proceeds and one suffers from birth and death. Why do you mean to abandon us and enter Nirvana?

The Buddha’s answer:

“Now, you mention the case of an intoxicated person. This refers to knowledge, but not the signification. What do I mean by signification? Signification means referent, the underlying meaning. Consider a drunken man, for whom ordinary objects move around because of dizziness, even though they are stationary. As all illusion and ignorance overhang the mind, the mind turns upside down, and makes four inversions of truth: Self for non-Self, Eternal for non-Eternal, Purity as non-Pure, and Bliss as sorrow. Overhung by illusion, this thought arises. Though this thought arises, the meaning is not realized.

The Self’ signifies the Buddha; ’the Eternal’ signifies the Dharmakaya; ’Bliss’ signifies Nirvana, and ’the Pure’ signifies Dharma. Monks, why is it said that one who has the idea of a Self is arrogant and haughty, traversing round cyclic existence? Although you might say, ’We also cultivate impermanence, suffering, and non-Self,’ these three kinds of cultivation have no real value/ meaning.

These four inversions of truth are perverse to Dharma. Whoever has these inversions, that person does not know the correct cultivation of dharmas. Bhiksus, you give rise to the idea of Bliss with regard to phenomena associated with suffering; the idea of Eternity with regard to phenomena associated with impermanence; the idea of the Self with regard to phenomena without Self; and the idea of Purity with regard to phenomena that are impure. Both the mundane and also the supramundane have the Eternal, Bliss, the Self, and Purity. Mundane teachings have letters and are without referents; the Supramundane teachings have letters and referents. Why? Because mundane people have these four inversions, they are unacquainted with the true meaning. What are the true meanings? Non-Self is Samsara, the Self is the Tathagata; impermanence is the listeners and autodidacts, the Eternal is the Tathagata’s Dharmakaya; suffering is to be a heretic, Bliss is Nirvana; the impure is all compounded dharmas, the Pure is the one true Dharma that the Buddha and Bodhisattvas have.”

This and other sutras contain a great many analogies as ways to make points. Sometimes these analogies are sufficiently detailed or even long-winded as to be allegories rather than simple similes. This one is simple, but it’s already got some layers. The first and most obvious is that there are prohibitions against drinking alcohol in Buddhism, and this passage gives us an inherently Buddhist reason why that should be, rather than say, a social one like avoiding bad behavior in public. Intoxicants separate sign from significance. Significance enjoys a duality not unlike the duality of the Buddha himself. It is both embodied and transcendental. For example, it is embodied when, as the sutra says, something has significance to us because of our senses and our physical relationship to it. If you are going to walk into a door, that door has, at that point in time, tremendous significance, because failing to observe it results in hurt. On the other hand, it has a transcendent nature, as the dharma also carries a great significance but is not captured by any one phenomena, teaching or action.

Moreover, the Buddha here teaches that this separation of sign from significance is ultimately what causes ignorance. Ignorance is the root of all afflictions, and here we have not just ignorance of mind, but fundamental confusion about all of these ontological categories. The Buddha criticizes those whose understanding is mundane in this way – they have gotten the words, but not the meaning, not truly understood the pure dharma of the Boddhisattva.

Another theme that’s going to play out repeatedly throughout this sutra is a mixed degree of approval and disapproval for the autodidact, the pratyekabuddha. These are people who live in small communities or isolation pursuing their own enlightenment, and are often regarded as arising when there is no buddha in the world to teach. Now in this sutra, there clearly is a buddha in the world, there’s capital B Buddha, and so during this time, to be an autodidact meant some degree of rejection of these teachings. We see here, to be a listener or an autodidact of the way is impermanent, only the Buddha and his Dharmakaya (literally, the inconceivable, the ultimate and transcendent body of the Buddha) are permanent. In the Avatamsaka Sutra it is suggested that the Buddha’s transcendent body might be thought of as the universe itself, truly eternal and inconceivable in its vastness. This is why pratyekabuddhahood is somewhat looked down upon.

The other question for this chapter:

“You, the Buddha, said before that all things have no Self, that we should practice this, and that, when practiced, the thought of Self goes away, and that once the thought of Self is done away with, one does away with arrogance, and that after this, one gains Nirvana. How might we understand this?”

It took me a while to even understand what the question was here. It’s in reference to the above: “What are the true meanings? Non-Self is Samsara, the Self is the Tathagata.” The monks are pointing out a confusion they are, in my opinon, correctly, experiencing. On one hand, the Buddha is eternal, and there is no self. On the other, the Buddha is dying, and the self is the Tathagata? Why is non-self equated with cyclic existence? I thought the self was a physical thing, impermanent, and only the light of mind can be in any sense eternal, so that it can go through cyclic existence and eventually be liberated. Surely it should be Self matched with samsara, and non-Self with the Buddha, right? Buddha, explain this contradiction!

The Buddha does answer, he gives about two pages of allegory here to a story of a good and bad doctor. Without reproducing the whole story, let me try to hit the highlights:

A stupid king has a stupid doctor, who only knows one cure that he prescribes for all diseases, whether it makes sense or not. A good doctor, who actually understands medicine, comes from a far away place, comes across the stupid doctor, and convinces the stupid doctor that he is even stupider, and will have to learn from him. One day, they get an audience with the king, and the good doctor makes it obvious that the stupid doctor is incredibly stupid, so he’s fired. The good doctor explains that the old guy’s treatments don’t really work, and that you have to do lots of things depending on the illness. The king issues a proclamation that the old medicine is actually poison, and now we’ll be following the medical advice of someone who knows about medicine.

A problem arises one day where the old cure is actually the correct cure for an illness, and the king is angry, because it sounds like the doctor is trying to poison him and his people. The doctor explains what context is and how sometimes something can be poison, sometimes it’s a cure, and sometimes it’s just ordinary old milk. The king may be stupid, but he understands, and he explains this to the subjects so that they won’t riot about being poisoned by the doctor.

It’s a very long story, but basically it can be summarized by what the Buddha says afterwards:

Thus we say: “There is no self, no man, no being, no life, no nurturing, no knowing, none that does, and none that receives.” O Bhiksus! Know that what the heretics say is occasionally correct by chance. Because of this, the Tathagata teaches and says no-self. This is to adjust beings and because he is aware of the occasion. Such non-self is, as occasion arises, spoken of, and it is also said that there is the Self. Even though he has said that all phenomena are devoid of the Self, it is not that they are completely devoid of the Self. What is this Self? Any phenomenon that is true, real, eternal, autonomous, and whose foundation is unchanging, is termed ’the Self’.

So really the story is an extended example to illustrate the Middle Way. The Buddha teaches no self because the heretics, the materialists, claim that all there is, is self, as a material entity. But material things are fundamentally impermanent, so we must not be attached to them. There is no self, but not because there is literally no such thing as a self, but because clinging to self as a form of materialism is misguided and denies the true wisdom of impermanence. Thus, we adapt expedient means for each situation and each student.

The title of this chapter is, On Grief. The monks and other cosmic being present are clearly grieving the loss of the Buddha from this world, but we might ask ourselves to what extent these teachings address grief itself. In my view, the throughline is clinging. The allegory of the doctor is about clinging to methods that don’t work, being stubborn, refusing to let experience teach us, and how a stupid king can learn wisdom by learning from experience. The heretic materialists are clinging to their physical self and barred from enlightenment. Even the monks are clinging to the Buddha:

If you know well the Eternal, Bliss, Self, and the Pure, why not stay here a kalpa or half a kalpa, and teach us and turn us away from the inversions? And yet you abandon us and desire to enter Nirvana.

It’s almost petulant, the tone in which they are written. A kalpa doesn’t have a super-precisely-defined measurement of time, but it’s a long time. If you had to nail down a unit of time, you could work through the various units that are given in Sanskrit, and conclude that it would be measured in units ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of years, with “great kalpas” being trillions of years, depending on the source of the quote. “Pretty please, Buddha, can’t you hang around for just a FEW billion more years so that some more sentient beings can become enlightened?” And when the Buddha says no, they use words like “abandon us.” It’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it? The Buddha addresses grief the way he address all clinging. He offers teachings on ignorance, a way of addressing this clinging, and which are expedient means for the students. The goal is always the same: focus on the middle path. It’s not just a path for navigating the extremes of idealism vs materialism or emptiness and embodiment, but a path for finding a stable emotional center in times of great difficulty.

Core Teachings

1. Ignorance is the root of all afflictions, at least in part because it separates sign from significance. To understand the dharma is to understand the significance.
2. There is a middle path between self and non-self, which we must recognize. Both are true in an expedient way, but the true nature of these things is non-dual. We must teach non-self to materialists, to separate them from materialism. Then we can understand the true teaching of non-dual self.
3. The chapter shows the grieving process for the Buddhist community. We have to remember that clinging, and in particular, wanting things to be different from how they are, Buddha or not, is the essence of suffering.