Baishui Zen

This post continues the previous one on the complexities of emotions we encounter, and the complexities involved in understanding Buddhist doctrine regarding them. We’re going to look at four classes of feelings, as they are classified in English, and understand their positive and negative aspects, and how Buddhists distinguish between them. We must remember that the words “positive” and “negative” are already a bit slippery. In English, these concepts refer to how much we like this feeling. A feeling is positive if it has good vibes, so to speak, and negative if it brings us down in some way. In Buddhist thought, an emotion is positive if in the long term, it reduces our suffering, even if it is unpleasant right now.

At the absolute bare minimum, if you only internalize one thing from this post, that should be it. It is an excellent meditation, and indeed, the first patriarch of Zen taught us to embrace our suffering, so that we can pay our dues and right ourselves on the path. By this view, just about every negative experience can be made into a positive one. Embracing suffering actively is quite difficult, every fiber of our being resists unpleasant feelings. For today, let’s try to focus on some small shifts of mind that one might try to make towards this goal.

Attachment

This one is perhaps what Buddhism is most well-known for, relinquishing your worldly attachments, and such. Of course, attachment is fundamental, but Buddhism’s relationship to this concept is more complicated than I think some acknowledge.

One kind of attachment comes from psychology and refers to a feeling of closeness or connection between people. For example, psychologists speak of the attachment between a baby and their mother. Rather than something to relinquish, this is necessary for the psychological well-being of the child and is also an intrinsic part of motherhood. This feeling of closeness or attachment is present in families and enables them to function together as a unit for the benefit of each member. Healthy attachment in a harmonious family has a realistic understanding of each of the other family members, their roles in the family and fosters mutual respect. This form of attachment produces good results, and can be thought of as a positive emotion in our sense.

Buddhists have a positive use of the term as well. Bodhisattvas are said
to be “attached” to sentient beings because they feel a tremendous sense of
closeness and responsibility for the welfare of each and every sentient being
that spurs them to practice. Their love for sentient beings invigorates them
to do whatever they can to alleviate suffering and bring happiness. They do
this with greater energy and joy than we ordinary people work to benefit
ourselves.

When I was in school, it was very common for wise guy kids to pipe up and ask, “But how could the Buddha aspire to Nirvana then? Isn’t that an attachment? This religion doesn’t make sense!” This misconception comes about from not understanding what exactly is being rejected when we say “attachment.” Let’s analyze the idea.

The negative emotions are those which increase our long term suffering, which we learned we could summarize as, “the desire for things to be different than they are,” or even more briefly as “discontentment.” Which aspects of attachment are these? They are attachments to illusions or fantasies, idealized versions of people and things that we want or cling to, which end up disappointing us. In a word, these are all exaggerations. On the other hand, anxiety is also a kind of attachment and exaggeration. It is an anticipation of the future that we loop in our minds, which is often unrealistic or even outright fabricated. Even anxieties about things which we know will happen could be thought of as an attachment in the sense of a fixation. It certainly makes us feel discontentment, both now and in the long term, as we worry.

When attachments become negative in this way, it’s often got positive components to it that are corrupted in some way. For example, a healthy family relationship may turn into possessiveness or neediness due to anxieties about the health of the relationship, or doubts within one individual. Overemphasizing one’s doubts about their own self worth or relationship is certainly an exaggeration, and this is the calling card for negative attachment. The corruptive aspect of attachment is why this kind is described as one of Buddhism’s three poisons. The other two are “hatred,” perhaps more correctly translated as “aversion,” and, unsurprisingly, “ignorance,” or “delusion.”

So we see, it is not that one is attached to Nirvana if one has understood the teachings properly, as a correct understanding of Buddhist philosophy means there will not be any such exaggeration to cause this clinging to. A reader who is only now just learning Buddhism from the beginning may feel some attachment to the idea of Nirvana or Enlightenment, either coming from an incorrect understanding, or simply due to a sense of wonder surrounding these topics. This is OK! With time and training, correct understanding will set in, and this attachment is diminished and then eliminated. His Holiness says so in the book, but this was also my lived experience. I became interested in Zen originally as a philosophy student thinking it would come with some sort of secret understanding of the universe, locked away in cryptic puzzles. Well, that’s not what Zen is like at all, but hopefully what you find written here shows you that what it is like, is even better. Hopefully you can cut me some slack, nobody knows what they want as a teenager.

Fear

This one is evidently a negative emotion. We think of this as an umbrella term which includes everything from imminent panic to dread and ever-present anxiety. This gives us a clue that it should be related to the sense of attachment that we just discussed, and indeed, this is how Buddhists think about fear, trying to confront it and overcome it. A famous meditation practice is to go into dangerous situations, such as into a dark forest, with the intention of generating a state of concentration which overrides all feelings of danger or fear. In this way, fear is intentionally confronted as part of mental training.

This sense treats fear as a negative emotion, one which is to be overcome, by confronting it and realizing that the fear cannot harm you, it’s really just Buddhist exposure therapy. There is also a positive sense for fear too. This is the kind of fear that is rooted in respect for something dangerous, and encourages us to be cautious, responsible and attentive. Many of us feel a pang of nervousness when we cross a busy street, but this fear doesn’t disturb our lives or send us into full-blown panic, if we’re operating in a healthy way. Throughout the text, his Holiness emphasizes exaggeration as the primary way we can tell if an emotion is afflictive. From that point of view, we can see that a healthy respect for danger is also a good thing.

Another angle on fear that makes it clear which fears are positive and which are negative, is to relate it back to attachment. Fear is a negative emotion in most contexts, but attachment is promoted even beyond this to a root affliction. So it’s reasonable to ask ourselves, does my fear stem from an attachment? For example, think about the fears associated with jealousy. This is a kind of attachment that can be resolved with communication skills and introspection, so it’s obviously afflictive. On the other hand, a fear of sharks is only based on attachment insofar as one really wants to continue living.

Anger

His Holiness here points out that there isn’t much to say about anger as an emotion. We agree. It’s bad. Nevertheless, he points out that some people think that anger can be good. His Holiness disagrees, and he gives some examples.

The first example is of a teacher who grows frustrated and angry with a student who is failing to live up to their potential in some way. This one speaks to me personally as a teacher with a lot of experience with students, many of whom are not interested in fully utilizing their opportunities to get an education. These frustrations flow readily when our expectations aren’t met. The operative word of course is “expectation,” a sneaky way of talking about a kind of attachment to a certain vision for your student’s future, which is one they do not necessarily share. They walk their own path, and I walk mine. It’s extremely easy to become an overly stern instructor trying to hold students to standards that they can’t hold themselves to. As a teacher, one’s job is to incrementally push the students to cultivate certain mindsets and skills that are “on the test.” Very few people are able and willing to make huge jumps in maturity all at once. Probably, this story sounds familiar to anyone from a Buddhist context.

The second example comes from political movements, like protest over injustices. From a Buddhist point of view, this sort of anger is particularly insidious. The issue is that for the untrained mind, anger goes hand in hand with dehumanization, a fundamental exaggeration and mistake for a Buddhist. It is our core belief that all sentient beings have a buddha nature, and seek to rid themselves of suffering. As such, anger that motivates us to take sides and put down others must be rejected. But if we remove those feelings when thinking about conflict and injustice, what remains? The only motivations left are those which come from compassion and understanding, and these are exactly what we are trying to train on the Buddhist path. So what we see is that while anger is sometimes not entirely without merit, its underlying motivations of compassion are always fruitful.

From a purely practical perspective, anger just isn’t really helpful, both spiritually and in the world. It can motivate us to act, but the manner in which it does clouds the mind and incites us to act in ways that are retaliatory or destructive. It can sway our opinions in unjust ways, that contribute to cycles of violence or abuse. After all, it is never easier to harm others than when one has given one’s self a pass for the behavior, by saying it is justice, for the other party’s own good, or even just that they deserve something bad to happen to them for some perceived sleight. If those things were true, it should be equally easy to base your response in one of compassion. His Holiness points out that the way of the bodhisattva is to have compassion both for the offending party and the harmed party, as the offender is incapable of restraining themselves, nurturing their own compassion, and acting differently. Such a person is truly lost, and our compassion for them does not mean that we do not hold them responsible for their actions. In fact, holding someone responsible is a correct way for compassion to allow us to carry out justice.

In the Zen tradition, we have all sorts of public cases where hostility appears to play a role almost as a teaching device, and this deserves some commentary. There is a significant difference between feelings of outrage and reckless anger or rage, and the compassion of a Zen adept or master who is trying to help a student along to enlightenment. These methods are not in use any more today, but throughout medieval China, we would see instances of masters trying to teach students to stop intellectual thought using a swift *bonk* of some form or another. The Zen record describes these outright beatings as compassionate. This is because the participants are also Zen adepts, who understand that this is a teaching device, even if it unpleasant at the time. Incorporating that temporary suffering into their path is one of the core teachings as well, so represents an opportunity to practice the teachings. Moreover, it’s important to remember that public cases are different from day to day life – they are recorded because they are exceptional and noteworthy to the history of the tradition.

Disillusionment

These days, it feels that cynicism and jaded attitudes are everywhere. There’s a lot in the world that feels hopeless, and the difficulties and frustrations often lead to feelings of disillusionment, that this, whatever “this” is, is simply how the world works. This “falling out of love with the world,” or with an individual, comes from yet another kind of attachment – attachment to an idealized image of the situation that doesn’t hold up to reality. The simplest way to avoid this is to try not to form these idealization in the first place, to focus on the wisdom of the world as it is, in the present moment. Nevertheless, these feelings can be said to come from exaggerations or distortions of the truth of the world which have shattered upon contact with reality.

On the other hand, I have recently felt a different kind of disillusionment. As my own Zen practice has deepened, I’ve recently felt a disillusionment with the path that I once chose. Chasing a prestigious career and profound theories of the world was something I once prided myself on. I still like doing science and contributing to humanity’s collective understanding, but lately the emphasis in my mind has shifted away from those certain aspects of those things. This leaves “room” in my mind for new kinds of growth. I’ve felt a certain urge to spend more time with my practice, with the books I’m reading and writing about for this blog, and it’s been very refreshing.

His Holiness describes a disillusionment with samsara itself, that motivates us to try to achieve liberation. I think this is a big part of it, for example, with regards to career goals of being a “big” scientist. I wasn’t actively chasing a big salary or grant money, but I had the impression that those things would sure be nice. Now I am grateful that my job provides me the flexibility to let doing new research take a back seat every once in a while, and focus on my teaching and personal practice. I’d like to think this benefits a few sentient beings each semester, one Baishui included among them.