What "enlightenment" is not

Kinfonet Discussion
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Weird experiences of altered consciousness, whether just due to neurological confusion or linked to some insight into experience itself, can actually accentuate the problem of the known.

We feel that we are privvy to special knowledge now, have been spiritually augmented - thus the authority of the known and the knower has been magically enhanced.

Some folks who speak as if they have just come down from the sacred mountain may be under this type of influence, some of course may just talk like that for some other psychological or neurological reason.

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The idea pointing to a brain emptying itself, being silent etc. is obviously not about any sort of ‘acquisition’, which is a description of ‘adding to’ or increasing…
Which acquisition,it seems, would not apply to practical technical prowess but only to acquisition by the illusory individual self?

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I was wondering if Mr. Robert Waldinger is aware that he is interpreting Shunryu Suzuki’s words (min 4:00 in the video) in order to justify his thesis; and also if all those who may accept his interpretation as if it were their own, as if they had thought it up themselves, are aware that they are simply accepting an interpretation without having looked at Shunryu Suzumi’s words themselves and finding out for themselves what he is saying :thinking:

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Thanks for posting this very interesting short article Dev.

For me, it brings up questions of accumulation and emptying, things we’ve often debated here. As far as I can see, an enlightened approach involves a kind of starting from zero, over and over again. Only in this way can there be the possibility of discovering something new. I have no idea if some kind of powerful experience can shake one up to such as degree that there is a re-set and there follows great clarity in seeing the limitations of the accumulation of knowledge. Perhaps this is the case for some people.

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Yes - either I am a fixed image, and what I know is perfect for each moment - or not.

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If you observed them, may I ask you what resonated with you when you yourself observed Shunryu Suzuki’s words without the influence/interference of Mr. Robert Waldinger?

Thank you!

There is no such thing as an enlightened person,
There is only enlightened activity.

Shunryu Suzuki (1904 - 1971)

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The enlightened person is the static image (eg. I am the person that had that insight into self last friday)
The enlightened activity is the moment to moment action of freedom from images via awareness.

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Hi Fraggle. Actually, I didn’t notice there was a video but just read the short article below it. I will now watch the video …

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Having now watched the video, I can only say that what Mr. Robert Waldinger says makes a lot of sense to me. I’m not sure what the issue is here Fraggle.

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Good. Now let’s try to look at it in another way where Mr. Robert Waldinger has no influence…

  1. How can there be such a thing as an enlightened person when so-called enlightenment supposedly dwells in the void?

  2. How can anyone say whether that enlightened activity that arises from voidness/emptiness exists all the time or only at times?

So, Mr. Robert Waldinger’s claim that Shunryu Suzuki’s words support his thesis is, at the very least, a mere speculation/interpretation of those words trying to make others believe that they actually support his thesis.

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See my previous post to @macdougdoug.

On the other hand, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to know what exactly “makes a lot of sense to me” means to you.

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Hi again Fraggle. I answered this on an earlier post in this thread when I said that for me, the article raised very interesting questions about accumulation and emptying. The whole issue of what enlightenment is and means is something which has generated a lot of debate here over the years. The video articulates a number of points which, according to what I have observed, seems to be true.

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We are claiming that the concept of the perfectly enlightened person is unhelpful - we say : does not exist. Agreed?
So hopefully “how can there be such a thing as an enlightened person?” is a rhetorical question

Also what do you mean by “enlightenement dwells in the void” ?
Do you mean something like “enlightenment is merely a concept” ?

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Zen is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism and, as such, is based on the realization of emptiness, that is, both the emptiness of the self and the emptiness of the reality that appears to that self.

Now, the Merriam-Webster dictionary, in section 2b on the word ‘rhetoric’, says: “a type or mode of language or speech; also: insincere or grandiloquent language”, which I imagine is what you mean when you say “hopefully your question is a rhetorical question” (correct me if that’s not the case).

If so, to see whether the question was rhetorical or not, the one who hopes it to be rhetorical should make it clear (before the other can say anything about it, either in form of agreement, disagreement, or neither of the two) whether for him there is no such thing as an enlightened person at all (just as there is no such thing as a frog with the head of a lion), or there is no such thing as an enlightened person because once enlightened (according to Zen Buddhist teaching), there is no longer any basis for imputing “here is an enlightened person” (as when one realizes that what appeared to be a snake in the distance is nothing more than a piece of coiled rope as one gets closer to it).

So, going back to Zen and its foundations – since the one who says the sentence was a Zen master – such a thing as an enlightened person (i.e., one who has realized the emptiness of himself and of the reality of everything around him) would not exist because there is no longer any basis on which to impute “I am an enlightened person” (although our ignorance continues to impute “he/she is actually an enlightened person” on the basis of that person’s apparent bodily expressions and ignorance’s belief that “I am one thing” and “he is another”).

Yes, just as “emptiness” is not emptiness. Or as Nagarjuna said in his “70 Stanzas on Emptiness (Sunyatasaptati)”:

‘Arising’, ‘enduring’ and ‘disintegrating’, ‘existing’ and ‘non-existing’, ‘inferior’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘superior’ have no true existence. The Buddha uses these terms according to worldly conventions.

Or put even more simply, in Krishnamurti’s way:

The word is not the thing.

There is an extensive corpus of Buddhist literature on what the true nature of a Buddha (or fully enlightened being/person) is, if you were interested in it. There are also 10 questions that Buddha never answered.

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A rhetorical question means we are making a statement in the form of a question as a figure of speech - we are not really asking about something in order to obtain an answer.

Like “how could you be so beautiful/stupid/clumsy ?!?”