Teaching You Zazen 28: Fundamentally, All Sentient Beings Are Ignorant
2008/3/22 8:25:33
Before the ultimate attainment of Buddhahood, fundamentally, all sentient beings are ignorant. Even a Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva, who can manifest as a great Māra king and perform all manner of inconceivable deeds, still has areas of ignorance.
If you do not acknowledge your own thorough ignorance, you have no qualification for zazen. Zazen essentially starts from ignorance, penetrating all levels of ignorance to achieve realization. All your knowledge is completely useless during zazen, because it is nothing but a farce of ignorance.
This knowledge—and more importantly, this includes all Buddhist knowledge—even if you bring ten trillion volumes of scripture, they are utterly meaningless during zazen. Because they are not yours; they have nothing to do with you. Your belief in those scriptures is fundamentally rooted in ignorance.
Ignorance has levels. Ignorance at the same level produces arguments. All arguments arise from ignorance at the same level. For example, "Is the world material or spiritual?"—the arguments about this question arise from ignorance at the same level. When you transcend that level, the very basis for the argument ceases to exist.
Another example: "Does life involve reincarnation?" Whether you say yes or no and argue endlessly about it, it all comes from ignorance. Because whether those who say yes or no, none of them have empirically verified the existence or non-existence of reincarnation—they are all just parroting hearsay. But when a practitioner has empirically verified reincarnation—directly witnessing how beings pass through birth and death—then the question of reincarnation is simply not worth arguing about. The key is not whether reincarnation exists, but how to reach the level of empirically verifying reincarnation. That is the crux of the matter.
All faith comes from ignorance; it is because of ignorance that there is faith. Empirical verification needs no faith. But all empirical verification is actually for the purpose of penetrating into even deeper and vaster ignorance—this is the crux of the crux.
One who has been through the journey knows all the traps and mechanisms along this path of ignorance, and therefore leaves markers along the way for those who are so called "destined." But this is ultimately not the ultimate way—markers can even become new traps, because under ignorance, everything becomes a trap.
Falling into traps, descending into hells—none of this can be reason for retreat. Moreover, the path of retreat is equally riddled with traps. A practitioner who cannot descend into hell does not deserve to be called a practitioner. In fact, every person, within the cycle of birth and death, has descended into hell countless times. Hell is merely one scene along the path of ignorance.
The key is to transcend this scenery—not just hell's scenery, but heaven's scenery must also be traversed. Any lingering attachment only sends you back into the cycle. One can only advance with fierce diligence, reaching the stage of non-retrogression, before there is even a partial resemblance.
But even at the stage of non-retrogression, one is still within ignorance. It is just that one has reached the very center of that ignorance. Non-retrogression is itself the root of retrogression—it must be uprooted completely.
缠中说禅 2008/3/22 18:29:02
Some things cannot stand the light of day.