A Zen exploration of the Bahiya Sutta

@jhsaintonge - hi, it's pretty much on topic actually. On May 12, 2011, I was doing the laundry after struggling for days on the fundamental koan "if you knew that you couldn't do anything to gain elightenment, then what do you do?" Suddenly, everything felt dreamlike, everything namely may life, the universe, several past lives, everything felt like a dream, something that never happened, something illusory arising from a great void, a creative nothingness, unborn, uncreated, beyond birth and death, beyond time, non existing yet source and substance of all things; me, awareness, consciousness was seen as being nothing more than its projection that would then get identified with its projected dreamlike appearences to create the illusion of a real life in a real world. As a result of this event, everything felt perfect, whole and complete for weeks. And something did shift permanently.

Now what is that? Advaita Vedanta Jnanis told me you are That". You are a jnani. Zen masters said, "you have seen the ox", the essence of the Mind. Reading Christian mystics, it is clear that this event is seeing God as the Ground of Being, the unmanifest source of all things. Nothing wrong with the experience. It is great, awesome, and enlightening in the sense that it opened the an abiding non-dual state that some call technical 4th path.

But then, iis this the Buddha's awakening? Not so sure. Because although this event does validate the teachings of Neoplantonism, Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticsm, there is no real insight into "Co-dependent origination" and most as the other things that set the Buddha's teachings apart from other great Indian spiritual traditions.

There remains a duality between "That" and phenomena. "That" feels like an impersonal uncreated clean mirror in the background that reflect phenomena, yet remains untouched. As a matter of fact that is the Self that Raman Maharishi talked about. That is the Arma (or Atta in Pali).

On a later stage, we realize that "That" can self-contract or on the contrary expend. It is like zooming in an out. In reality, it never changes, but gets more or less identified with phenomena. Attending to this pure presence-awareness, it naturally grows and overpowers phenomena to the point where everything is seen as appearences reflected within it. Yet "That" is the Self.

The problem is not the Self, but what we make out of it. Grasping at it tends to create a subtle duality, since we can become more or less identified with its dreamlike projections. There is Awareness vs phenomena arising within awareness. Awarenees is IT. Phenomena arising within it are Maya, illusions. We must cease identification with, or disembed from illusory (empty, impermanent, not-the-self) phenomena. This is precisely what great Advaita Jnanis did, like Ramana Maharishi who meditated for years in a cave after his awakening.

The problem is that the more we disembed as this stage, the more we grasp at this pure non-dual Awareness, Absolute or Self and fail to realize what the Buddha realized under the Bodhi Tree.

My conviction is that in order to realize No-Self (Anatta), the Buddha has realized the Self. He was already an accomplished yogi, a master in his own right. But he still wasn't satisfied, because it wasn't yet the end of suffering. Why, because as long as there remains any tiny sense of "me" or "mine" either in relation with body and mind, or with a Self, primordial awareness, Consciousness, Brahman, the One Mind, God, etc. there will be suffering.

My guess is that the Buddha first realized the Self and then started deconstructing it. He took this non-dual awareness and thought, "how can I be sure that this will not perish with the body?", "isn't awareness nothing more than something that arises as the result of sense contact"; "can awareness or consciousness exist beyond the 5 aggregates?", "what is the sense of self, being, existence?", "how does it arise?", "why is it still there after self-realization?", "why is it still there in the highest arupa jhanas?", "how can it be extinguished without dying?"

Then one day, Gautama awakened to impermanence, co-dependent origination, no-Atma (antta), emptiness, suchness, etc. and knew that, "this is the end of suffering", "the holy life has been lived, there is no more coming and going, etc.".

I am far from that, but I am starting to realize that the Buddha did go beyond what everybody saw (and still seem to see -even Buddhists- as enlightenment, awakening or self-realization. Something that implies the realization of the Self, but goes further.

So what is this pure, unborn, empty, timeless and nondual Awareness? As I see it now, it is just the non-arising, unsupported, empty and self-luminous nature of what is that the mind grasps and imagines to be an essential sustancial inherhent ultimate reality beyond phenomena. Seeing a white ox on a while empty field covered with snow (common Zen simile for the experience of the One Mind), the mind assumes that there is a pure "Whiteness" beyond all white objects.

Why? Because when the mind is not yet freed from ignorance, it needs to hold on to some kind of stable reference point, reifying its unconditioned and nonabiding nature realized in a moment of total surrender into seeing the eternal Source and substance of all things.

As I am starting to see it now, there is no clean mirror behind the images reflected in the mirror.The mirror cannot be separated from its reflected images. The reflected images are the mirror. Reality is like a lucid dream, but there is no dreamer, nor dreamed reality beyond the dream. There is just an timeless flow of dream images dreaming themselves within the dream. In dreaming, only the dream / in seeing, only the seen / in hearing, only the heard.

Padmasambhava's take on the same subject (where we see that Dzogchen and Vajrayana do not contract Pali Buddhism):

"The mind that observes is also devoid of an ego or self-entity.
It is neither seen as something different from the aggregates
Nor as identical with these five aggregates.
If the first were true, there would exist some other substance.

This is not the case, so were the second true,
That would contradict a permanent self, since the aggregates are impermanent.
Therefore, based on the five aggregates,
The self is a mere imputation based on the power of the ego-clinging.

As to that which imputes, the past thought has vanished and is nonexistent.
The future thought has not occurred, and the present thought does not withstand scrutiny."

If Alex wouldn't post here, I would miss something

Alex, it is always interesting to read your ecumenical views on spirituality.

I do not recall having read any significant discussion by you of theistic traditions. (Advaita is not the only vedic tradition, for example.) Is there a reason for this? Do you think theistic traditions emphasizing the existence of a personal God are confused on this point?

@Loco - thanks

@EndinSight - I haven't posted much about other theist traditions on this forum, this is true. I did mention Kashmir Shaivism and Samkya amongst Hindu traditions however. As a matter of fact, I did explore Western magick (Aleister Crowley's A.:A.: system) as well as Christian mysticism. In relation with the latter, the most interesting material comes from Bernadette Roberts who clearly describes the passage from the 'unitive life' (our technical 4th path) to what she called 'No-Self' for the lack of a better word to describe the falling away of the Self (or divine presence) where all that remains is the functioning of the senses. After a few years in this state, the objective world liberated from subjectivity started to manifest as the transfigured resurrected body of Christ. Her description does match what I have experienced or only glimpsed so far. This means that for the Christian mystic, each major breakthrough is marked by the disappearance of God, followed his reappearance in a subtler form, until he is apprehended as he is in himself (and not as he is for us, filtered by subjectivity). We must die to ourself to know God as he is in himself. Mystics are often quiet about these higher insights, simply because they have often been accused of pantheism. A famous example is Meister Eckhart.

This means that Buddhism does not have a monopoly on these higher insights. What I find amazing with early Buddhism is its extremely practical and analytical approach. As to Advaita Vedanta, some Jnanis like Nisargadatta Maharaj seem to have stabilized themselves beyond the Self/Atma/Brahman. Some of his books tend to support this interpretations, while some other don't.

The way I teach the first stages leading to awakening to magicians and people who feel a connection with the Western tradition is in fact deeply rooted in Christian mysticism. I start with contemplative prayer using Saint Igniatius of Loyola's second method of prayer (reciting the Lord's Prayer very slowly, sinking in deeper and deeper states of silence between each word or phrase) followed by pure contemplation to apprehend God as the ground of being, starting with the apprehension of our own sense of being to gradually strip it from anything affective or personal until the divine presence starts to manifest as the beingness of all things (and the loss of the sense of self). The latter method comes from 'The Book of Privy Counseling' from the 14th century anonymous author of 'The Cloud of Unknowing'. Progress is fast and in some cases really impressive.

"
So what is this pure, unborn, empty, timeless and nondual Awareness? As I see it now, it is just the non-arising, unsupported, empty and self-luminous nature of what is that the mind grasps and imagines to be an essential sustancial inherhent ultimate reality beyond phenomena. Seeing a white ox on a while empty field covered with snow (common Zen simile for the experience of the One Mind), the mind assumes that there is a pure "Whiteness" beyond all white objects.

"

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it!

It's interesting to me that what I call "the natural state' or rigpa has manifested so consistently (in the sense that, each time, same insight) yet my conceptual tracking of it seems to have gone through stages of increasing refinement as at each stage there is a new duality adopted to define the indefinable. I look forward to a point when this tendency to attempt to define falls away decisively (as opposed to now where it is not taken so seriously as before), but maybe there is the current duality!

But yes, it's like seeing the wetness that is equally the nature of each wave and of the whole ocean of inter-dependant arising waves, and then saying, "hmm, there must be some special "place' where there is only wetness *without water*' which is indeed a strange conclusion

I see what you mean that such a conclusion is motivated by the conceptual / identification mind's felt need to have a reference point, something to hold onto upon which to define itself/reality. Thanks! Do you have any suggestions for working with this tendency to seek a reference point, even a very subtle one? Perhaps this is the point of this thread?
--jake

While Bernadette Roberts is an interesting case, her view (as she has stated herself) is that God is ultimately impersonal. So, I would be interested in hearing whether you have any thoughts on traditions that take God to be ultimately personal (e.g. traditions that read the Bhavagad Gita literally and take Krishna to be the personality of the Ultimate).

"As I am starting to see it now, there is no clean mirror beyind the images reflected in the mirror.The mirror cannot be separated from its reflected images. The reflected images are the mirror. Reality is like a lucid dream, but there is no dreamer, nor dreamed reality beyond the dream. There is just an timeless flow of dream images dreaming themselves within the dream. In dreaming, only the dream / in seeing, only the seen / in hearing, only the heard."


I'm not sure there is a dream, either, Alex. I think that still implies a subtle duality. There really is NO duality whatsoever. There is simply IS-ness. No mirror, no dream, just seeing parts of IS. Any separation is illusion and there is no illusion

"
Do you have any suggestions for working with this tendency to seek a reference point, even a very subtle one? Perhaps this is the point of this thread?
--jake
"


The suggestions that I have received were to acquire 'right view'. The mind needs to acquire some form of conceptual model that allows it to accept the possibility of its own non-abiding ungraspable empty nature. Right view is therefore required to facilitate the shift of perspective from "I am Awareness, everything is in me" to "nothing whatsoever is me or mine, all dharmas are empty".

A good start would be Walpola Rahula's classic "What the Buddha Taught: Revised and Expanded Edition with Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada". It can be completed by "The Way to Buddhahood: Instructions from a Modern Chinese Master" by Ven. Yin-shun. A great autoritative summary of the Mahayana path. Then, based on a solid understanding of the core insights of Buddhism, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal's "Clarifying the Natural State" (if still in print, or anything from the same great 16th century yogi) will be the best introduction to the Mahamudra and indirectly to the the sem-de series of Dzogchen.

The logical progression is therefore:

- Advaita Vedanta
- Pali Buddhism
- Mahayana Buddhism
- Mahamudra, Dzogchen

If we skip Pali and Mahayana Buddhism and jump directly to Mahamudra or Dzogchen, the risk is to interpret Mahamudra or Dzogchen as a Buddhist version of pop-neo-advaita, equating emptiness and rigpa with awareness.

This is very common nowadays and some Western lamas seem to encourage this trend to water-down the Dzogchen teachings, as always in order to appeal to a larger public. Business is business.

"
I'm not sure there is a dream, either, Alex. I think that still implies a subtle duality. There really is NO duality whatsoever. There is simply IS-ness. No mirror, no dream, just seeing parts of IS. Any separation is illusion and there is no illusion "


The great thing about Buddhism is that is never goes beyond our direct experience.

In our direct experience, "the seen" does not imply the existence of solid objects out there that are the objects of what is seen. They may or may may not exist, but our direct experience is only "in seeing, only the seen".

In our direct experience, "the seen" does not imply the existence of a subject (an entity located in our brain looking through our eyes) or an impersonal unmanifest eternal witness (the Self, Awareness). In our direct experience there is only "the seen", without anybody seeing.

The dream is just a metaphor. "The seen" is itself: not existing, not non-existing, nor both existing and non-existing

"While Bernadette Roberts is an interesting case, her view (as she has stated herself) is that God is ultimately impersonal. So, I would be interested in hearing whether you have any thoughts on traditions that take God to be ultimately personal (e.g. traditions that read the Bhavagad Gita literally and take Krishna to be the personality of the Ultimate)."


In all Hindu traditions, gods are worshipped in their manifest and unmanifest aspect. As an example, Krishna can be worshiped as Vitobha or Bala Krishna in a human form, in his cosmic aspect as Maha Vishnu, as he revealed himself to Arjuna or to his mother Yeshodhara when she looked in his mounth to see whether the nauty boy had eaten some butter, or even as the Nirguna Brahman beyond all manifestion. Hindus have no problem with the co-existence of these various aspects and do not reject the popular forms of worship.

When insisting on its faith in a personal God, the Catholic Church (in which I have been baptised as an infant) refers indirectly to the via negativa of the mystical theology in its catechism, insisting on the fact that the human mind cannot grasp what God is in himself, but only what he is not: "admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that "between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude"; and that "concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, IV. How can we speak about God?, paragraph 43).

Mahamudra is often defined as the union of emptiness and clarity. In Zen we call it the inseparability of the empty essence and luminous function of the mind.

What does it mean exacty and how is it related to practice.

As I see it, the practice of what Kenneth called 1st and 2nd gear (noting vipassana and self-inquiry) allows us to witness the impermanent nature or phenomena that are gradually seen as being dreamlike, impermanent and ungraspable. As a result, we disembed from our identification to phenomena and wake up to our existence as pure awareness, first as the silent witness untouched by thoughts, then as an impersonal presence-awareness somehow detached from phenomena (3rd path) and finally as a non-dual awareness [that is not a thing] that includes phenomena and manifests as phenomena (4th path).

Through this process, the witness crystalizes the *clarity* aspect of what is, while phenomena manifest the *emptiness* aspect of what is. When the separation is complete, empty phenomedna are seen as dreamlike apprearences within pure clarity apprehended as non-dual awareness.

In the Direct Mode (3rd gear?) some have noticed that phenomena become more alive, luminous, clear, in a way hyper-real, while the sense of an observing witness tends to dissolve.

Why? Because at this stage the direct mode shifts the our attention for the witnessing position beyond or behind phenomena towards phenomena and objects on the foreground. As a result phenomena (the seen, the heard, etc.) become more clear, alive, actual and hyper-real revealing its *clarity* aspect, while the sense of self, the witness, the observer or the sense of existing as a pure impersonal univolved awareness dissolves and fades away, revealing the *emptiness* aspect.

In both cases, *emptiness* and *clarity* are present but are somehow divided into two opposites sides:

a). The subject is the only reality: the all pervading witnessing non-dual awareness (clarity) on one side, and empty impermanent phenomena reflected within awareness on the other (emptiness), or

b.) The objects are the only reality in the absence of a knower: the "actual" world bright clear and luminous out there (clarity) and no self, witness or presence on the other side (emptiness).

Both states are valid point of views as long as we understand that everything is both *empty* and *luminous*. Then there is no opposion or conflict between cycling mode and direct mode, this or that. Gaining freedom from fixed views we gradually realize the union of emptiness and clarity.

Zen master Linji (Jap. Rinzai) illustrates a). and b). as the 1st and 2nd of his Four Positions:

1). Remove the objects, not the man (non-dual awareness that is both the source and substance of all things)
2). Remove the man, not the objects (no sense of self or agency, all that remains is the functioning of the six senses)
3). Remove both man and objects (emptiness of both self and phenomena)
4). Remove neither man, nor objects (traceless enlightenment beyond enlightenment)

What is nibbana?

"If we wish to go by the Buddha's words, there is an easy principle that the Buddha taught to a disciple named Bahiya. "O Bahiya, whenever you see a form, let there be just the seeing; whenever you hear a sound, let there be just the hearing; when you smell an odor, let there be just the smelling (...) When you practice like this, there will be no self, no "I". When there is no self, there will be no running that way and no coming this way and no stopping anywhere. Self does not exist. That is the end of dukkha. That itself is nibbana". Whenever life is like that, it's nibbana. If it's lasting, then it is lasting nibanna; if it is temporary, then it is temporary nibanna. In other words, there is just one principle to live by".

- Buddhdassa Bhikkhu, 'Heartwood of the bodhi Tree'

To my surprise, these recent posts found their way to the brilliant blog 'Awakening to Reality', which -as mentioned earlier- is and has been my main source of inspiration lately:

awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/

For those who are not yet familiar with this blog, the authors are very advanced practitioners from Singapore who's non-sectarian approach, while rooted in solid Buddhist scholarship, shares great similarities with the pragmatic dharma movement, taking the best from Advaita, Zen, Theravada, Mahamudra and Dzogchen to fine tune simple strait forward techniques and strategies oriented towards making the fastest progress within the shortest possible amount of time. The e-books and articles are simple excellent. Warmly recommended.

I've been checking that site out quite a bit as of late. I saw your picture on there last night. Highly recommended.

Yeah, I've been a subscriber to that blog for a long time now. I saw your posts from this thread there yesterday, Alex.

Alex, can you explain what you mean by "all phenomena are in themselves . . . self-aware" ? how can a phenomenon be aware of itself?

"Alex, can you explain what you mean by "all phenomena are in themselves . . . self-aware" ? how can a phenomenon be aware of itself?"


Hello Zyklops,

I know that it sounds strange and counter-intuitive. To bring it back to the reality of our direct experience of things as they are, let me try answer with the following questions:

- Have you noticed that no sunlight ever enters into the mind, nor even into the brain?

- Have you noticed that even in dreams, while sleeping in a dark room with our eyes closed, we experience bright vivid dreams?

- Have you noticed that when the sense of self fades away, everything becomes more vivid, bright and luminous?

- Have you noticed that when I am aware of something, this "I" is itself a thought and/or a feeling?

- Have you noticed that althought our sense of existence seems to imply the existence of a knower located somewhere behind the eyes, the sense of existence-presence-being is only the actualization of an ungoing impermanent flow of phenomena [coming into being], including what we had assumed to be the subject of all experiences?

When the self/Self is seen as an illusion, awareness is also revealed as a quality of phenomena. In other words, there is no Awareness out there aware of phenomena. Phenomena are themselves self-aware, empty and luminous.

This is also what Dogen means by "to study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away" (Genjokoan).

I realize that I have become unable to feel a sense of self that doesn't fall into one of the six sense doors. It is not that the sense of self is erradicated, but only that what used to be experienced as the sense of self is now only revealed as sensations, thoughts or perceptions. There is no need to make a selfless state permanent, simply because seeing clearly that there never was a self in the first place is all that matters.

There is somehow still a sense of agency, time and location, which must be due to the force self-referencing habits. This also should gradually dissolve.

"I realize that I have become unable to feel a sense of self that doesn't fall into one of the six sense doors. It is not that the sense of self is erradicated, but only that what used to be experienced as the sense of self is now only revealed as sensations, thoughts or perceptions."

What do you think about this in relation to Kenneth's model? It makes me think of stage 6, but perhaps you believe you have attained that previously, and this is something different.