Great Systems of Yoga: Chapter Eight. The Chinese Yoga
WHEN the Buddha wished to allude to the final achievement or attainment of human life he spoke of nirvāna, a "blowing-out." This means that in that experience, there will be an absence of our familiar limitations known as body and mind. Even the mind is for us an object of knowledge. The field of our knowledge can be divided into objective and subjective. Both are within the field—both the knower and the known, the subject and the object. Buddha's doctrine was that only in the presence of knowing are "subject and object" to be seen. Mind with its reasoning activity—its logic—generally considered as the subject, is in reality only an instrument. It does not know. 1 Behind or beyond this mind is
Man has something more than instinct. He has reason, When the dhyāna or meditation process was carried into China by the famous Indian "missionary" Bodhidharma, it came to be known as Chan, and a little later when it had found its way to Japan the word was further modified and became Zen. Zen is Japanese meditation-yoga. It is not to be thought that in either India or China the results of dhyāna were merely improved subjective experience. In India the fruit of samādhi was viveka or discrimination, which means a new valuation. This is stated emphatically by Patanjali in his In the case of Buddha we have exactly the same teaching, when avidyā, ignorance, is given as the final "fetter" to be cast off, as shown in our previous chapter. This was essentially ignorance or error about self or the subjective entity. It is natural that the method of practice of the Chan and the Zen should be somewhat different from that in India, as befits the racial types of China and Japan. The method is well described in The Sūtra of Wei Lang, translated by Wong Mou-Lam, 3 and in Christmas Humphreys' Zen Buddhism, 4 and in several books by Professor D. T. Suzuki.
From Tao come yang and yin, the active and passive sides of Nature, light and shadow. In man the two elements appear as intellect and instinct. The instinct-flow is natural, outward-going, but the intellect-flow, which is "backward-going, reversed, turned round," can become so pure that it gains release, when things are recognized but not desired. The Secret of
If we compare the art of China with that of Greece It is to be understood, of course, that while this rotary motion is the same for all sane minds, the standard or evolutionary status is individual. In the individual there is growth through use of exercise, whereby each of the three elements is advanced in ability. Taking this into consideration, it will be seen that the movement is spiral as well as rotary. Though many details are given in The Secret of the Golden Flower there is no room for them here; besides, the serious student will supply his own details. It is the body or focus of knowing (Confucius), of the heart-view (Buddha), of inward vision (Lao Tsu). The intuition will come; one must hardly ask for it, and certainly not presuppose its nature. The magical material side of it will be that the new "body" will be the intuition-vehicle for living free from the space-limitation of the body, and so, being concerned with seeing and doing remote from the body, giving what may be called a practical or objective side also to the intuition, which is not one-sided but concerns object as well as subject. Buddha said: "Nor sink the string of thought into the Fathomless." But men cannot leave it at that; they strive to realize the truth. Buddha does not object to that, but says it will not be done by thought. Intuition which is not thought will do it. But intuition comes to Three techniques have been specially prominent in the schools of Zen—the wall-gazing, the sudden question (mondo) and the enigmatic statement (koan). The first is not gazing at a wall, as one might think, but gazing like a wall. You are the wall, upright to the world, set by the plumb-line of your own nose, unaffected, intent on the Essence of Mind. Bodhidharma is said to have practiced this for nine years, avoiding commitments and desires, like an upright The teaching of meditation in the Diamond Sūtra prescribes sitting alone, erect, motionless, quieting the mind, with attention on no definite thing, excluding recollection and imagination, abandoning all notions of an external world, turning to inner intuitive consciousness, gradually entering samādhi, ideal tranquility, and thus passing from vagrant thinking and even intellectual activity into the realization of insight. It was especially among the Chinese and Japanese that the sudden enlightenment was brought about by
As an example, the teacher may say: "You have knees, you have feet. Come, let us fly." Or, a classical one, "The two hands clap with a noise; listen to the clap of one hand." There should be no agreed upon, His stanza said: The last two lines form a perfect koan. The resulting enlightenment is called a satori. This "goal" as well as the method is called Zen, just as in India yoga means both the practice and the attainment. Mr. Christmas Humphreys thus explains it: "Zen is not an escape from things but a new way of The mondo is question and answer. Here there is no continued wrestling as it were in terrible unmental attentiveness, as in the case of the koan. An immediate answer is required, without thought. It will be noticed that this is another way of side-stepping the thought process while maintaining the attentiveness. For example, a Zen master once held out a stick and said, "Call it not a stick; if you do you assert. Nor deny that it is a stick; if you do, you negate. Without affirmation or denial, speak, speak!" It is not recorded what the pupils said, but I tried this on myself and out came "On, on!" And this carried knowledge, like a dream. Life sets us koans and mondos all the time, for never do we know enough to act with full intelligence. As far as we ourselves are concerned:THE CHINESE YOGA
Our body is the Bodhi-tree,
And our mind a mirror bright.
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour,
And let no dust alight.There is no Bodhi-tree,
Nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?All things are rushing to their doom;
Trying to slow the rush
The mind preserves their death.
Footnotes
135:1 In my own terms: there is no such thing as body-consciousness, and no such thing as mind-consciousness, but only, in these cases, consciousness of the body and consciousness of the mind.
139:2 For the whole subject see my Practical Yoga: Ancient and Modern. This book gives a full translation of all the Patanjali Aphorisms with an explanation in modern terms. Published by E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., New York, Rider and Co., Ltd., London, Messrs. Payot, Paris, Editorial Orion, Mexico City.
139:3 Published for the Buddhist Society, London, by Luzac & Co., Ltd.
139:4 Published by William Heinemann Ltd., London.
140:5 See Prof. Wood's writings on The Secret Doctrine.
146:6 Published by E. P. Dutton and Co., New York.
149:7 Zen Buddhism, by Christmas Humphreys, p. 95.