Carrying on from my previous post where I criticized what Dainin Katagiri said in some concluding chapters of his book Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, here I’ll share some additional criticisms now that I’ve finished reading the book.
While naturally I’ll focus on what Katagiri said, his confusing, non-sensical statements are reflections of general problems I have with similar books about spirituality and religion.
I’m open to persuasive evidence and arguments for things that I used to believe in, but no longer do. Like, the existence of God, life after death. immaterial consciousness, reincarnation. But when an author simply makes assertions about supernatural phenomena without persuasive evidence and arguments, I get irritated, because he or she is wasting my time as a reader.
Understand: I used to do the same thing myself in several books I wrote about the Eastern form of religion that I practiced for 35 years. So in a way I’m criticizing the previous me when I criticize Katagiri — who compounds his credibility problem by contradicting himself so blatantly in just a few pages.
Here he is on page 217 of his 231 page book:
What is your life? It’s very complicated. Your intellect compels you to understand, but there is no perfect answer. All you can do is entrust yourself to the life that is given to you now. Live your own life as it really is.
I heartily agree. Live your life as it really is. No argument from me about that. I approvingly highlighted this passage. I also liked what Katagiri said on the next page, 218. This struck me as wonderfully honest.
You are alive now. Now, you can touch your life and feel it. But when you die, the opportunity to touch deeply and profoundly is gone. I always feel this. Now I am explaining Buddha’s teaching related to the past, present, and future. But in the future I have to die. I want to scream because there will be nothing left.
In the middle of death there is no sense of I, there is just death. So when I participate in death, I won’t know what death is because I am not there — my life is gone and I won’t feel anything. Even though I have experienced enlightenment, when I die all the enlightenment that I have experienced will be gone. The Zen Center and the people will be gone from me.
So I always think that I want to haunt the Zen center after my death. I want to know how people take care of the Zen center. I always laugh about it and say, “Watch out!” But finally, all I can do is face the fact that I have to die. All I can do now is practice Buddhas’s teaching day by day.
Katagiri has said that we should live life as it really is. Death obviously is part of life. No exceptions. Everyone who has ever lived, has died. That’s life as it really is. But then, on page 220, just two pages after he said that he wanted to scream because there will be nothing left after he dies, I read:
I think the purpose of spiritual life is just to go toward the future with great hope. Your life is not limited only to this life. Your life is going to the future: next life, life after next life, maybe life after next, next life. Maybe your life is going forever. When I say this, then you say that Katagiri believes in reincarnation.
Yes, I believe that way, but I don’t attach to it. Buddhism has unlimited hope about human life and the human world, so we believe in reincarnation or eternity, but we never attach to it. This is a key point.
Well, I’d be more inclined to accept that Katagiri, along with Buddhism in general, aren’t attached to a belief in reincarnation if they didn’t believe in reincarnation in the first place. It’s like saying “I’m not attached to ice cream,” when you’ve got three gallons of ice cream in your freezer. If you’re really not attached to ice cream, give those three gallons to a friend and never buy more ice cream in the future.
In pseudo-Zen, as in pseudo-spirituality, a supposed lack of attachment can function like a Get Out of Jail Free card. When someone plays it, they can defend an unfounded belief or worldly pursuit by saying, “While I have this belief and am doing this thing, I’m not attached to the belief and the thing.” You know, crazy wisdom.
It sure seems like one reason Katagiri believes in reincarnation is that he is afraid of dying and being gone forever. Totally understandable. That’s a main reason I also used to believe in reincarnation. I just wish Katagiri had clearly said that he has no convincing evidence of reincarnation, but believing in rebirth makes him feel better about dying, which is why he believes in it.
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As if reading another book before you die is going to intrude on your promising future.
Not often i resonate 100% with what someone writes. This time I did wholeheartedly. Thanks
“In pseudo-Zen, as in pseudo-spirituality, a supposed lack of attachment can function like a Get Out of Jail Free card. When someone plays it, they can defend an unfounded belief or worldly pursuit by saying, “While I have this belief and am doing this thing, I’m not attached to the belief and the thing.” You know, crazy wisdom.”
Psuedo is in the eye of the beholder.
Anything that detaches you from any belief is functioning in a helpful way. Because there is only the now, and when you are just imagining a future, imagining what death is, you aren’t in reality at all. No longer in the now.
But what if death is just like right now, just changing clothes but still being mostly, or to some degree, awake?
What if that is just like right now?
At least now is real. You wake up every day, experience a level of awareness, a level of wakefulness.
Like the full spectrum of light, only a portion is visible to you. If you want to see more, you don’t conjecture, you raise your capacity to see more of the spectrum. All of that is working in the now.
Let your concepts of death, God, existence and no-existence go. It’s a concept for most people, unless they have actually experienced it. Then they know something.
It’s dangerous to form beliefs on the absence of any experience. That would also be crazy poor wisdom. False entirely.
Acting in pure ignorance, conjecturing in pure ignorance, even taking opinions and conjectures as fact, is superstition. And superstition is the basis of harm. It’s like drinking poison thinking the other person’s false beliefs will die. But all that happens is our own tapestry of symbols closes out our little view of light, of the Now.
The greatest harm indulging in thinking like this is to ourselves. So, give it up. It’s an addiction. Work your way out, with help.
Long ago the problem was already cleanly communicated by the ancient Greeks, as my good friend Charles taught me:
All language, and therefore all thought, is synonym, antonym and hominem. We create symbols. The mind is a symbol making machine and presents these symbols as reality. By attending to them, they expsnd into infinite detail and permutation. They paint over our entire awareness with our own imaginings. But their basis is flawed perception, tainted by desire, anger, lust and avarice and these also just imagined symbols.
So that expanding detail becomes our reality.
To shrink that illusory curtain of symbols, and be in the now, see the light, work is needed.
To reverse our obsessive attention on these derived and artificial tspestries, which only feeds and fuels them, for that a good practice, a spiritual practice can help.
Because living in the now has nothing to do with synonym, antonym and hominem.
Maybe it’s not possible to find a spiritual teacher who fulfils all of ones criteria; and even if one did, at some point his/her failings will show up.
No doubt because, cutting through all the hype, even the most venerated, so- called perfect enlightened masters are – well, only human with all the paradoxes of all human primates.
Perhaps all one can do is to awaken to the reality that this, this ever-arising moment is all there ever is – and fill each moment with just being you.
@ MR. Tepper
>> It’s dangerous to form beliefs on the absence of any experience. That would also be crazy poor wisdom. False entirely.<<
Hahahahaha …. haharhahahaha.
It’s dangerous to form beliefs in the narrative of santmat on the absence of any experience /…OR … based upon the tale telling of a certain MR. Tepper …
THAT would also be crazy poor wisdom.
False entirely.
@ Mr Teppet
>> Acting in pure ignorance, conjecturing in pure ignorance, even taking opinions and conjectures as fact, is superstition<<
You should better have listened to your friend Claude
@ Mr. Tepper
Many of the Indiands I came to know had inner experiences as a kind of calling and raising the desire to ask for initiation.
But people like myself without even the slichtest bit of inner experience before and after are foolish and ignorant doing the same
By the way .. due to my bent on loyalty and respect for my own promises made I continued my practice for decades even when nothing of the motivation etc was left … and I did so for decades MR. Tepper …. and then my eyes were opened for the human, psychological ins and outs of it all.
Hahahaha … how ironic to read these contributions of yours today after all those words
Hi Um
As I wrote earlier, to a hammer, everything is a nail. So I fully understand how you see the world.
Take a closer look at the histories of mystics who struggled for enlightenment. Buddha is a great example. His awakening came after his firm determination to find an answer to suffering. He wasn’t handed an answer. It was the result of his persistence.
Now here is a most interesting thing, that you say you struggled and got nothing. Who struggles, really works hard at anything without at least learning something from it, like how to meditate better, like a greater knowledge of your own faults, like a bigger view of the world and people around you, not to judge, but to understand? These are all the benefits of putting oneself aside and contemplating something finer, devoting ourselves to something and someone we love more than ourselves.
But that hasn’t happened to you, yet.
Today you see the sorry human condition and only prefer your opinion about humanity’s weaknesses in preference to any ideal. That is where you are today. And your entire past brought you to this point. All the things you may believe were a waste of time, all the things that didn’t put one single penny in your bank account. At least the bank account you can see.
I’m not surprised. The path is not an overnight thing at all. I’m not going to change your view, Um. And you will not be changing mine.
Own your experience, but understand it is limited. What you see applies just to you.
When I see my own limits I turn to meditation to give me greater insight, companionship and vision. And I’ve learned different lessons than you. Every human being is God, in potential. And their struggles are all heroic, understood rightly. And any hope anyone can give encouraging the individual pursuit of truth and God, who is truth, only encourages self-improvement, which is the only justification for being here.
IMHO
Now, as for the vows you took, I cannot see any excuse to not giving it everything you have and learning to really live in the Now. If death is a thing, certainly learning to experience it more intimately makes sense, rather than conjecturing ad nauseum in fear, ignorance or some mix of the two. All this conjecture preferred to actual experience makes no sense to me at all.
@ Mr Repper
>>
I’m not going to change your view, Um.
And
you will not be changing mine.
<<
You see Mr. Tepper such an terminology would not even arise in my mind.
That strange preoccupation with "changing for the better" plays tricks on you and is an echo of how you were raised at home.
You raise your voice against others in ways you are not entitled to. No post was ever placed here where you did not make yourself seen as the one-up, called to lecture others.
Do you think YOU can do better than Maharaj Ji?
I am not blaming anybody or anything, neither myself, nor Maharaj ji or the many things he shared with me … I am not a frustrated, disillusioned person in need of help ….I woke up as a human being and do my best to let go of my conditioning and accept my life as it presents itself from within and from without.
After my experience with walking this path of the saints, I have realized that there is no path for me to walk …. and if others walk the path of the saints, or of the Buddha or even atheism, any they feel well, let them for all means continue as it is worthwhile to do so.
Everything else would be an repetition and not being a teacher I am not inclined to tell others what to do, think and feel ..let alone HAMER it into them. …and you mr Tepper .. You are free and will go on to attribute meaning and value to me as you have been doing before. ..that too is alright
You have no convincing evidence that free will doesn’t exist, or that God doesn’t exist, or that the universe has always existed, or that life spontaneously generated itself from the elements, or that the fine tuning of the universe is just an accident, so I guess you’re even. Or maybe the Roshi is ahead of you.
Hi Sant64
You wrote
…”You have no proof that…life spontaneously generated itself from the elements.”
Sure he does, if you understand that’spontaneous’ just means ‘I don’t know what the hell just happened!!.. It was ‘Spontaneous’ !!meaning it really did happen, but zero clue how. LOL
The whole creation is ‘Spontaneous’ every single moment, right?
Hi Um
You wrote
“I am not blaming anybody or anything”
Well that seems rather strange given the rest of your remarks. I wouldn’t call it praise.
LOL…
Synonym. Antonym, Homonym… Is a very nice description from good old Aristotle for how the human mind tries to dice up the world.
Synonym…
We recognize or label things that we think agrees with our beliefs, our which we want to agree. We see them as we wish, see them as in agreement, in support of our choices like your odd interpretations of what Maharaji actually said and wrote, even when he told you the answer was meditation.
Antonym..
We recognize or label things as the opposite of what we believe, our which we want to disagree with, such as your take on practically everything I have written and Brian’s take on anything that mentions divinity.
Homenym
Things you label as the same thing, lump together as the same that are actually completely different, like everyone who believes in self-improvement and or God.
These are the symbols mind gives, overly simplistic, to things and proceeds to tie up ego along with attention so that we feel injured when anyone doesn’t agree with our schema, and then comes the personal attacks. All useless.
No symbols are real, Um. They are just the mind at work…
And they are the cause of Duality and dualistic thinking, the very thing Zen works to help you destroy….
from Hermetics these synonyms, antonyms (and the homonyms we create to fit the rest of the world into them) form the basis of polarized thinking, and your view becomes limited to these poles. And you see the entire world as gradations, like the spectrum of light, between them.
These poles don’t actually exist Um. The spectrum of reality is far far more diverse, broader, and boundless.
But if you just live in your own created poles, then please place me right there with you, As your brother. You would be far closer to the truth print all humankind there.
Oops. Typo. Meant “You would be far closer to the truth putting all humankind there.”
If one is a satsangi then you want this to be the last life and don’t want reincarnation to exist.
Honestly Ron, it hardly matters in the company of our Master. That company is the greatest love we have known, so here or there hardly matters. Let me be reborn as the dust under his Sandles!
This has to be remembered while you are studying Zen —
the differences of context.
It is said:
To arrive at the truth,
the German adds,
the Frenchman subtracts,
and the Englishman changes the subject!
I have heard…
You can always tell a man’s nationality by introducing him to a beautiful woman.
An Englishman shakes her hand,
a Frenchman kisses her hand,
an American asks her for a date,
and a Russian wires Moscow for instructions!
-Osho