In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;The Zen Approach,and#8221; Sangharakshita describes the individual schools in Zen Buddhism and offers three misunderstandings about Zen. From the talk and#8220;A Special Transmission Outside the Scripturesand#8221; given in 1965.
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The Zen Approach
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. The five spiritual faculties sometimes translated, as by Dr. Edward Conzer, as the five cardinal virtues can be rendered in English as faith, wisdom, energy or vigor, concentration, sometimes thought is as calm, mental tranquility, and mindfulness or awareness. These five. Now according to the traditional interpretation, the first and the second, the third and the fourth form or constitute two pairs. We might say that faith and wisdom represent, respectively, the devotional and the intellectual, or the devotional and the Gnostic aspects of the spiritual life. And according to the Buddhist tradition, the Buddhist teaching, these two must be balanced all the time. Very often we find that there are people whose emotions are very well developed, who are highly devotional, who are going to ecstasies over things like images and flowers and lights and candles and all the rest of it, but who are left cold by a more intellectual presentation. Such people, when they come into Buddhism or when they come to a Buddhist lecture for the first time, usually complain and say, "My life Buddhism, but it seems so cold." There's nothing warm, there's nothing as if we're devotional, emotional about it. Well of course there is, but people are this sort of feeling in that particular way. So you get this particular type of person. On the other hand we get to the intellectual. Sometimes intellectuals are very superior. Sometimes they think that they know everything, that they've understood it all. So they get down to their books and their studies and their doctors and their philosophers and their metaphysics and their systems and their theology in this, doesn't the other. And they cast a rather superior glance at the world of depression and the devotees. Let's hear you, I saw this puja and all this worship and all this depression. It's all right for these village people in them and the old states. I suppose it does them some sort of good. But as for me, that's quite a different matter. So you get these one-sided types developing. The emotional, devotional type excluding the intellectual element and the intellectual type excluding the devotional and the emotional. But Buddhism says that these two must be balanced. Both must be harmoniously cultivated and developed. Faith and wisdom. If you have faith, the Buddha says, without wisdom. If you have just the emotional and devotional side of the spiritual life, you'll tend to become perhaps a little superstitious. Attaching too much value to purely secondary things. Things which are not a primary importance. You might even become a bit, well might even say phonetic, a bit narrow, a bit dogmatic, a bit bigger-tiff. Spiritual vision is now intense, but now no breath, no witness to it. So you need to balance faith with wisdom, the intellectual understanding or the intellectual insight. If on the other hand you're all intellectual understanding or rationalism, if you interpret Buddhism and your spiritual life to exclusively in these terms, then you'll become what we usually call a dry as das rationalist. You know all the books, all the philosophers, all the sisters, but there won't be one spark as it were. No genuine religious or spiritual feeling or even aspiration in you. There'll just be a theologian or something like that sort, something rather dreadful. So just in the same way that faith has to be balanced by wisdom. Wisdom has to be balanced by faith. The devotional and the intellectual or the emotional and the intellectual elements in this spiritual life must be perfectly balanced, perfectly harmonised, not just its existing as it were side by side, not just a sort of coexistence, but an actual integration of the one into the other. One might say the wisdom aspect imparting as it relates to the faith aspect and the faith aspect imparting as it were warmth through the wisdom aspect. So you get a fusion, a beautiful fusion of the two. The faith and the wisdom, the wisdom, the faith becoming one faculty as it were. One clear, bright at the same time, warm insight, sympathy and so on. So this is the first pair, which has to be balanced. Secondly, we've got vigor or energy on the one hand and concentration or calm or tranquility on the other. Here again we have the same sort of thing. You know people are very vigorous, very active, but energetic, always bustling around, always doing things. But such people very often are not at peace with themselves and their activity is a sort of restlessness. Very often they get on other people's nerves. They do a lot of good, sometimes they do a lot of harm. That's why as I sometimes say, there is a very well-known saying in the east, that it takes all the wisdom of the wise to undo the harm done by the merely good. So by the merely good is that people with this excess, this a passage of energy and vigor, but no basis in themselves of calm or tranquility of which the vigor, the energy, is the external manifestation and expression. On the other hand, on the other hand you've got people of the opposite time. People, whereas it were quiet, gentle, passive, but they tend to be slow for lethargic, things to be overcome by inertia. Even sometimes you find in the religious life, in the spiritual life, people who in a sense technically are very good people, they didn't really quiet lives, or most some known lives one might say. People who do a lot of meditation, but their meditation, if they're not really careful, if it's not balanced by energy, by vigor, becomes a sort of mild daydreaming. And just to allow this as we can't do long and a sort of current fantasy, building all sorts of beautiful cloud castles, painting all sorts of beautiful pictures about what they'll be like when they're enlightened and how wonderful enlightenment is, but not really doing anything to achieve it, to gain it. So you've got these two opposite types in the same way, the restless type and the lethargic type. So therefore the Buddha says that vigor and calm meditation must be balanced. You must be active, you must be energetic. But the activity and the energy must spring as it were out of the depths of an inner calm and find its basis in the inner calm, if it is throughout any real meaning, or even any real value, not in for oneself, even for others. Otherwise you just spread restlessness. On the other hand, your inner calm and tranquility must find the expression externally in some type of activity. It doesn't mean that one must be bustling about and doing things in a much publicised sort of way, but it means there must be a certain quite steady expression externally of the inner peace, tranquility, and even spiritual realisation. So vigor and calm, tranquility, or energy and meditation if you like, extrovert and introvert, balancing, harmonising, and again integrated the one into the other. In the case we are told of a fully enlightened person, even the one who is not fully enlightened is very near to it, there is, as it were, no distinction between inner and outer. It's the same to him, whether he's meditating, whether he's active. His activity is a meditation, his meditation is activity. That was perfectly fused, harmonised, and integrated. So here we have these two sets of terms, faith and wisdom, energy and calm are meditation. The devotional and the intellectual, the extrovert and the intro all beautifully fused together, harmoniously integrated. And how is all this to be done? This is where the fifth faculty, the faculty of mindfulness are awareness kinds. This isn't just awareness or mindfulness in the sense of knowing what one is doing, but as you are a deep spiritual awareness, keeping the whole of one's being or one's aspects or one's faculties continually as it were in view, and harmonising and balancing them all in this way. You might even ask, well, what about the faculty of mindfulness? The faculty of awareness itself? What's preventing that from going to extremes? What is the to balance that? Shouldn't there be a sixth faculty to balance awareness from mindfulness? But the answer to that is, no, it isn't necessary. Mindfulness or awareness by its very nature is such that it cannot possibly go to extremes. Therefore in Buddhism it is in a sense the spiritual faculty par excellence. And it's that or the presence of that which keeps in harmony in balance, which keeps integrated or which makes integrated the other for spiritual faculties. You can't have too much mindfulness. You can talk about the person having too much devotion or too much intellect, too much activity or too much meditation even, but you can't speak of a person as having too much awareness, too much mindfulness, too much recollection. This by its very nature is a virtue which cannot go to extremes and therefore does not require any counter-balancing faculty. Through all these five, quite clearly, quite obviously, quite evidently, are to be cultivated according to Buddhism by the individual. In our spiritual life we must cultivate faith and devotion, we must cultivate intellectual insight and understanding, we must cultivate energy and vigor, we must cultivate also inner calm and strong cruelty. Above all we must cultivate and develop through the utmost of our ability, mindfulness or awareness, which makes in a sense all the others possible in that integrated thought. [music] We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]