So enjoy being a Buddha. His influence has spread globally. Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the U. But practically, it risks reopening old wounds. Other Vietnamese exiles were infuriated by highly publicized visits Nhat Hanh made in and , when he toured the country and held well-attended services that made international headlines. To his critics, these tours gave legitimacy to the ruling Communist Party by creating the impression that there was freedom of worship in Vietnam, when in fact it is subject to strict state controls.
In November, the U. The meaning of his return, therefore, carries great freight here in Vietnam. If he lives out his life in peace, they can claim credit.
Nhat Hanh has always gone his own way. He studied science at Saigon University, edited a humanist magazine and established a commune. After teaching Buddhism at Columbia and Princeton universities from to , he returned to Vietnam to become an antiwar activist, risking his life with other volunteers to bring aid to war-torn communities.
He refused to take sides, making enemies of both North and South Vietnam. His commune was attacked by South Vietnamese troops, and an attempt was made on his life. In , as the war escalated, he left Vietnam to tour 19 countries to call for peace. This proved too much for the regime in Saigon, which viewed pacifism as tantamount to collaboration with the communists and prevented him from returning. The next time Nhat Hanh saw Vietnam was during a visit in His reputation grew in exile.
Hippies set his antiwar poetry to music. In , he was nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. He oversaw the translation of his books into more than 30 languages.
When Western interest in Buddhism went through a revival at the turn of the century, Nhat Hanh became one of its most influential practitioners. Learn more about the Fearless Living Academy. Previous post: The Magical Power of Focus. This rule and some of the others that follow will be familiar to long-time Zen Habits readers.
When eating, eat. You can do one task at a time, but also rush that task. Instead, take your time, and move slowly. Make your actions deliberate, not rushed and random.
It takes practice, but it helps you focus on the task. Do it completely. Put your mind completely on the task. If, for some reason, you have no choice but to move on to something else, try to at least put away the unfinished task and clean up after yourself.
Do less. If you do less, you can do those things more slowly, more completely and with more concentration. If you fill your day with tasks, you will be rushing from one thing to the next without stopping to think about what you do. Put space between things. That gives you a more relaxed schedule, and leaves space in case one task takes longer than you planned. Develop rituals. Zen monks have rituals for many things they do, from eating to cleaning to meditation. Anything you want, really.
In so doing, the monk relativizes Buddha-nature qua being, while contrasting and opposing it with non-being. Buddha-nature is not something that the dog can have or not have ; Buddha-nature is not something contingent. Nor do I expect you to reply that the dog both has and does not have buddha-nature.
Nor do I expect you to reply that the dog neither has nor does not have buddha-nature. How do you respond to this? An appeal to discriminatory thinking based on the standpoint of [ego-]consciousness is of no use either. It is also unacceptable to appeal to bodily action, let alone to engage in a mere verbal exchange.
Do not swallow it where something is generated. This is, no doubt, an existential challenge to Zen practitioners, and so they make an all-out effort, staking life and death, because it guarantees them an embodiment of truth and freedom. In order to get an idea of this experience from a contemporary point-of-view, or from outside of Zen tradition, one may also consider out-of-body experiences.
It points to a practical transcendence from the everyday either-or, ego-logical, dualistic standpoint. In light of the outer-inner distinction Zen interprets the non-dualistic experience to mean that the distinction has been epistemologically collapsed, as it arises in such a way to respond to the dualistic perspective from which the outer and the inner worlds appeared. Conceptually, Zen takes this holistic perspective to mean the de-substantialization and de-ontologization of any two polar concepts, such as one and many, being and non-being, universal and particular, absolute and relative, transcendence and immanence, and birth and death.
They are thrown into a holistic context of an interdependent causal series. For if thing-events designated by these terms are endowed with self-nature, they cannot enter into the series; what enters such a series is only an accidental attribute or property. According to the substantialistic or essentialistic ontology, nothing can really change.
For example, criminals who want to correct their criminal behavior cannot change themselves if being a criminal is the essential characterization of their being. This would pose an insurmountable challenge, if not impossibility, to a correction officer at a prison. This question points to an examination of the epistemic structure of how knowledge operates in Zen experience. Although it is lengthy, we quote it in full in order to provide a sense of how a Zen dialogue unfolds:.
Suppose that there is a clear, transparent mirror. If it does not face a thing, no image is reflected in it.
To say that it mirrors an image means that because it faces something, it just mirrors its image. The disciple asks: If it does not face any thing, is there or is there not a reflection in the mirror? The master replies: That the mirror reflects a thing means that it always mirrors regardless of whether it is facing or not facing a thing. The disciple asks: If there is no image and since you do not give an explanation, how can all beings and nonbeings become an issue? Now when you say that it always mirrors, how does it mirror?
The master replies: When I say that the mirror always mirrors, it is because a clear, transparent mirror possesses an original nature as its essential activity of always mirroring things. The master replies: it sees no-thing. That is the true seeing. It always sees. Yanagita, , —3. Jinne conceives of a mirror in terms of two modalities: the mirror in and of itself and the mirror as it engages an object other than itself.
It is important to keep in mind that both are understood in light of their activity. What makes a mirror what it is is its activity of always mirroring, and when considered in and of itself, it possesses no specific image to mirror.
There is no characteristic to it and hence no image appearing in it, i. In phenomenological terms, there is no thetic positing in this kind of seeing. When a mirror, for example, reflects an image of a beautiful object, it does not make any discriminatory value judgment that it is beautiful. And neither does it make any discriminatory value judgment when it mirrors an ugly object. It mirrors thing-events as they are.
Moreover, Zen observes that the nature of the mirror is such that it does not change due to the kind of object it mirrors. For example, it does not increase or decrease in size in virtue of the fact that it mirrors an object. Because equality is the characteristic of this seeing, Zen speaks of the activity of this seeing as nondiscriminatory. Through this mirror analogy, Zen wants to point out what the minds of people are like in their original nature and activity.
Zen would respond that this objection ignores the fact that the ground of seeing is the bottomless ground that is nothing.
What appears against mirror qua nothing is just an object. In such a seeing, the object alone shines forth. Below, we will explore further the structure of how things appear in Zen. Although it may sound paradoxical, Zen maintains that this ground is also a fount of creativity.
Because there is no determination in the ground, it is pregnant with many possibilities or meanings to be realized. Zen maintains, via the influences from philosophical Daoism, that this creativity is in the same order as that of nature, for the practitioner reaches the original source prior to the distinction between the outer world and the inner world.
However, Zen does not mean it to be a mindless state, much less losing the mind. Nor does it mean a disappearance of the mind. Rather it designates a dimension of experience in which the ego-logically discriminatory activity of the mind disappears. Zen adepts are said to acquire a power of meditation Jpn.
Once such a power becomes available to the meditators, they intentionally focus on seeing whatever they want to see. This is because the unconscious has an autonomous activity that works independent of conscious will. This occurs once the meditator eliminates or lessens the oppositional and conflicting relationship between the consciousness and unconscious. If, however, the meditator tries to see an image by relying on his or her ego-consciousness, the image which has surfaced in the field of meditative awareness immediately disappears, because the meditator slips back into a dualistic state from the non-dualistic state.
The meditator must remain in a non-dualistic state in order to see what appears in the field of meditative awareness. Philosophically speaking, we can characterize this experiential event that the Zen practitioner trans-descends into, and hence transcends, the ego-logically discriminatory activity of the mind. This transcendence results in a rejection of the belief that there is a reality corresponding to a name, or generally that there is a reality corresponding to a linguistic activity.
Through the state of no-mind, Zen observes that each individual thing that is mirrored is recognized for the first time to be individual qua the individual with a sense of equality that is due to other individual things. Are they significantly different from time and space as conceived by many other theories of time and space? Otherwise, it fears that if the practitioner remains in the stillness of meditation, while suspending judgment on action, it falls into one-sidedness, a source of prejudice and misunderstanding of reality.
Augustine, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty? There is in both cases a suggestion of involvement of the autonomous activity of the unconscious, of which Zen demands we must stand outside.
It points to a non-dualistic experiential dimension that is zero-time and zero-space, by which Zen means that neither time nor space is a delimiting condition for Zen-seeing.
One can also say that both time and space, experienced from the point-of-view of the everyday standpoint, is relativized when zero-time temporizes and zero-space spatializes, where zero time and zero space characterize the bottomless ground. Accordingly, Zen contends that zero-time and zero-space are the natural and primordial being of all things including human beings, for they are all grounded in it. Taking these points together, the Zen enlightenment experience suggests a leap from a causal temporal series.
This means that one time contains all times and one part contains the whole, as in the case of a holographic dry plate in which each part contains the whole. See the entry on Japanese Philosophy , Section 2. Caution must be exercised here, however. In other words, Zen does not understand time and space by imposing a formal category on them, by presupposing in advance a form-matter distinction, which indicates an operation of the discursive mode of reasoning by appealing to the either-or, dualistic, and ego-logical epistemological structure.
Just as importantly, Zen maintains that time and space are lived as integrated space-time in the interfusion of a concrete temporalization and spatialization. This is a concrete spatialization-temporalization that is lived without any intellectual abstraction, reflecting the Buddhist position that everything, without exception, is impermanent. Zen abhors an intellectual abstraction that merely thinks time and space. This is because the Zen person rides on the rhythm of living nature.
Nor does it conceive of it as a linear progression from past to future through the present, although it does not exclude them insofar as they are useful for everyday life. Zen understands time to be living. Rather it is a living space. To be more specific, nondiscriminatory awareness signifies that it is the foundational background, as articulated in the foregoing, that is bottomless or nothing, and as such does not participate in discriminatory activity. However, when a thing appears, a discrimination occurs on this foundational, though bottomless, background.
Because it occurs on this foundation, it does not distort the shape of things to appear along with its force. It may also be characterized as nondiscriminatory discrimination, in order to capture a sense of how things appear in meditational awareness.
In such awareness no ego is posited either as an active or a passive agent in constituting the things of experience, as this awareness renders useless the active-passive scheme as an explanatory model.
This awareness lets a thing announce itself as a thing. This is because the ego is turned into nothing in the state of nondiscriminatory discriminatory awareness, and hence no-ego, where this nothing is paradoxically a background that is not the background at all, because it is a bottomless background. Accordingly, the noematic object is allowed to announce iteself without an intentional constitution by the latter. It consequently opens up a bottomless horizon, on which a noematic object announces itself in toto as a phenomenon.
This opening up simultaneously accompanies, as mentioned in the foregoing, a de-substantialization and de-ontologization of the things of experience, because there is no act of the ego that substantializes and ontologizes them; substantialization and ontologization both arise as a consequense of anthropomorphic activity that is intricately tied to the discursive mode of reasoning.
Consequently, we are led to conclude that the things of experience announce themselves in toto without concealing anything behind them. This is because there is nothing in the bottomless background to determine or delimit how things appear. In order to see how the above-mentioned structure of appearing operates under the conditions of zero-time and zero-space, we must capture a sense of a temporal-spatial awareness reflective of the nondualistic experience.
Hence, neither time nor space is conceived to be a container. This thing-ing of things springs from zero-time and zero-space. It will deprive Zen, for example, of an opportunity to utilize Zen-seeing in the actions of everyday life.
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