Visionary Buddhism 

Sabbe sankhara anicca. These are the words of the World Honored One: “All conditioned things are impermanent.” The inescapable passing of our families, our friends, and our accomplishments—and everything else that we care about—the Buddha saw as a source of suffering. Yet I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that the moment we’re living through can’t pass fast enough.

Wherever you turn, it’s hard not to have that thought. At times our country looks a bit like Europe circa 1933, with ordinary citizens snatched off the street by masked agents in unmarked cars. Or like May 1963, when police in Birmingham, Alabama, turned firehoses on a peaceful crowd marching in support of civil rights.

It’s tempting, then, to close one’s eyes and wait for all of this to be over. Or to think that the wisest response is letting go. But impermanence doesn’t mean only that the things here now are bound to disappear. It also means that something new is always on the way. And so the Buddha’s path doesn’t end with serene acceptance. It also prepares us to respond creatively to emerging causes and conditions. Letting go can take you to the calm, thoughtless place that we in Zen refer to as mu-shin—“no mind” or just “emptiness.” But then, emerging conditions require something else, which I would like to call the visionary mode. Instead of revealing to us how things really are once we’ve cleared our expectations away, the visionary mode shows us how they can be. And right now, when our reality is crumbling, we need to rediscover this world-creating power.

It’s true that in order to achieve enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama had to let go of absolutely everything—even, as some Pali suttas say, of consciousness and perception (MN 26). Only then did he break through to what he described as the Unborn or the Deathless. But there are other suttas where he recalls the moment of his awakening quite differently:

When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, one birth, two, five, ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction and expansion: ‘There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there.’ (MN 19, trans. Thānissaro Bhikkhu)

Detailed as it is, the Buddha’s vision doesn’t stop with this first revelation. No sooner does he learn about his own past lives than he follows the trajectories of everyone who has ever lived, an unfolding skein of connections so complex that no one but a buddha could trace it out.

As a Zen priest, every time I read these words I’m surprised all over again by how much they differ from what I used to think about the Buddha’s enlightenment. Formless, timeless, without any qualities—my idea of that experience seems to me a million miles from the revelation presented here, so specific that the Buddha can identify the places he lived, the members of his family, and even what he looked like. When it comes to rebirth and many similar ideas, we Zen people much prefer to hurry by, but the problem isn’t just those particular beliefs. Affirming anything at all feels wrong because we understand buddha-mind to be absolutely transcendent. And the fact is, I agree 100 percent. But I’m no longer willing to dismiss the Buddha’s visionary mode as what we in Zen call “makyo”—hallucinations keeping us from going all the way to daikensho, or “complete awakening.”

Perhaps we need to take another look at passages like the one above, transcribed from oral sources many centuries before Zen ever arrived on the scene. Far from immersing us in fantasy or “superstition,” as many modern people say, the authors of the sutta might have meant to offer up some words of indispensable wisdom: Clinging to enlightenment’s formlessness can keep you from ever finding it. If you read the sutta for yourself, you’ll see that Siddhartha’s recollection of past lives isn’t an obstacle he has to overcome: Instead, it takes this vision to finally reveal the defiling mental habits (called asava) that have bound him to samsara’s wheel. Only after that discovery is he set free: “Birth is ended,” he declares, “the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is no further becoming.”

Whether you accept the sutta’s narrative as literally and historically true, as millions of Buddhists do, or you read it symbolically, the takeaways seem to me more or less the same. To the awakened Buddha it now becomes clear that no life ever stands alone; each exists only as one momentary link in a sequence reaching back to the remotest past. And the other takeaway might be this: If you want to meet the Absolute face-to-face, the relative here and now is where you need to start. But not just any random happening could have awakened Siddhartha. It had to be the one that pointed him in the right direction “skillfully,” to use one of the Buddha’s favorite words. This skillful pointing is what visions can do.

In fairness to my own tradition, I should say that we Zen people can feel quite at home with the world of form, the “ten thousand things.” And, of course, we dote on emptiness. But what’s in between the two often worries us, and I see myself as Exhibit A. From the formlessness of mu-shin I’m always relieved to hurry back to life’s immediate demands, much like the Chinese lay master Pang Yun, author of these famous lines:

My daily activities are not unusual,
I’m just naturally in harmony with them.
Grasping nothing, discarding nothing.
In every place there’s no hindrance, no conflict.
My supernatural power and marvelous activity:
Drawing water and chopping wood.

In part, I left Western religions behind because I couldn’t make my peace with chariots of fire, laws carved on stone, angels sleeping with the daughters of men, the empty tomb, and so on.  No, I’ve always much preferred Pang Yun’s shift from the transcendent back to the here and now without any intermediate steps, half true and, I thought, half fairy tales. Maybe, though, my preference for the here and now wasn’t a sign of my maturity, as I for so long preferred to think, but testified to a certain kind of poverty—a poverty of imagination, true, but also a poverty of spirit. And maybe we need those “intermediate steps” as things around us are crumbling and we have to put them together again. It’s worth reminding ourselves, too, that if we don’t assemble the world’s fragments in a way conducive to wisdom and compassion, then others with different commitments are eagerly waiting in the wings.

If we start with the Pali suttas and we cast a glance across the dharma’s many centuries, Zen’s austere “chopping wood” mentality turns out to be an outlier. I don’t expect much pushback if I say that the typical Mahayana style looks strikingly different from Pang Yun’s down-to-earth poem. Here is the very first paragraph from the Flower Ornament Sutra:

THUS HAVE I HEARD. At one time the Buddha was in the land of Magadha, in a state of purity, at the site of enlightenment, having just realized true awareness. The ground was solid and firm, made of diamond, adorned with exquisite jewel discs and myriad precious flowers, with pure clear crystals. The ocean of characteristics of the various colors appeared over an infinite extent. There were banners of precious stones, constantly emitting shining light and producing beautiful sounds. Nets of myriad gems and garlands of exquisitely scented flowers hung all around. The finest jewels appeared spontaneously, raining inexhaustible quantities of gems and beautiful flowers all over the earth. There were rows of jewel trees, their branches and foliage lustrous and luxuriant. By the Buddha’s spiritual power, he caused all the adornments of this enlightenment site to be reflected therein. (trans. Thomas Cleary)

I doubt that the authors of the Flower Ornament had read the Pali sutta I quote from above, but they definitely understood the visionary mode. They knew that deconstructing the status quo covers only half the distance you will need to go. Reassembling the pieces in a liberating way requires you to take another step—from emptiness back into a reimagined world. And so the Flower Ornament’s diamond floors, banners made of precious stones, rains of jewels, and all the rest don’t appear in that first paragraph just to pique your interest or to entertain credulous folk who might happen by. No, the authors intended to bring you face-to-face with the flexibility of the real.

Clinging to enlightenment’s formlessness can keep you from ever finding it.

What we experience, the authors were convinced, isn’t simply handed to us fully made: Instead, we participate actively in its continuous formation. Buddhists of all persuasions understand our multiverse to be svayambhu, or “self-creating,” rather than the finished work of a Creator. And I take the Flower Ornament’s point to be that, like it or not, in everything we do, we’re helping to create it. The problem with the “chopping wood” mentality is that it too easily lets us off the hook, as though the world of form has been here all along, but this is an illusion we fall into when we think of emptiness as somewhere else. As soon as you realize that this is empty, too, you see that at every moment you have the power to transform your sad, saha “reality” into a bodhimandala, a place of awakening.

The dharmakaya, or buddha-mind, is radiant and formless. We should never suppose that the Flower Ornament’s famous image of the cosmos as a net of jewels communicates the very highest truth. As the Ornament itself declares, “The enlightenment of the buddhas is inexpressible.” But still, between nirvana and samsara you will find a liminal space where the two of them interpenetrate, where the radiant screen of buddha-mind darkens into form and where form brightens back into the radiant screen. In his poem The Merging of Difference and Unity, the 8th-century master Shitou Xiqian writes about “branching streams” of light that gradually “flow into the darkness.” In my own Zen training I was taught to call this liminal place the “second chin of Tozan’s flax,” which I experienced as though I were looking through the fabric of my dark blue robe at the brilliant white of a summer sky. Nisargadatta Maharaj, the Vedanta master, compared this intermediate zone to pinholes letting in bright light though a black piece of paper.

A linen sleeve held up to the sky or a sheet of paper with holes—these describe only two of the ways that meditators can experience the in-between, which generations of Buddhist teachers have known about and routinely guided their students to. And that’s where the buddhas do the work of manifesting the inexpressible. It’s the home of Avalokiteshvara (Kwanyin), Manjushri, Samanta- bhadra, Vairochana, and the rest. You could also call it the Pure Land. Traditional Buddhist teaching draws a line between the Absolute and the relative, but maybe we need to coin another term to describe what I’m talking about. We should speak of the “relatively Absolute”: It’s not the dharmakaya, but it can skillfully point us in that direction.

In fact, you’ve probably encountered the in-between without realizing that you did. Sooner or later anyone who meditates will sit down to practice at the end of a hard day, haunted by some argument at work, a fender bender that was, sadly, your fault, a health crisis faced by a person you love, or a growing stack of bills, unpaid and for the moment unpayable. But then, you begin to count your breaths or you start reciting Namu Myoho Renge Kyo. Gradually you drop into emptiness, and when your hour of practice ends, you get up and turn on the lights. Now, when you look around, it’s a different world, somehow brighter, softer, and vibrantly alive. Everything’s the same but completely changed, infused with the energy of the ineffable Absolute. That’s what I mean by “interpenetrate,” and it’s what the Flower Ornament is describing, too, in its dazzling, exuberant, kaleidoscopic way.

The sutras themselves were created, I would say, to guide their hearers from the liminal middle zone to awakening, as were the stupas and pagodas you can see near most Buddhist temples. So, too, were the temple buildings themselves, like the serene Eihei-ji in Japan, the “Temple of Eternal Peace,” or the soaring Pure Land Donglin Si in China, or the majestic Potala Palace on its hill overlooking the valley of Lhasa in Tibet. The fierce guardian statues at the temple gates, the paintings and thangka, the calligraphy, the mandalas, and the sublime Zen gardens—these all gesture, you could say, to the dharmakaya from a middle place shimmering between form and formlessness. And, often enough, they do their work successfully, drawing you along the path by easing you gradually out of thought. One day, maybe, you were slowed in mid-step by the chanting of monks and nuns in a language you didn’t even know, or by Tibetan trumpets blaring on a video, or by the uncanny expression on an old monk’s face in some photograph of a trip to Myanmar. And even though you didn’t notice consciously, one part of your mind might have come to rest, while another part started lighting up. Later on, perhaps, you made yourself a promise, a vow, to learn how to meditate.

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These little openings into a place outside our normal “reality” are like snapshots of the multiverse found in the pages of the Flower Ornament. The problem is that once these openings take place, they can become a fading memory as we fall back into our old routines. It’s almost as though we live two lives at once, the first of these the life spent in conventional ways, playing our roles and following the script. But each of us also has a counterlife, the one we live in those moments when we see through the fabric of conventionality to that unbroken sky of enlightened mind. Until we’re buddhas, we will always live both lives, but sometimes we see through so unforgettably that we can’t fall completely back.

You’ve probably encountered the in-between without realizing that you did.

The challenge for everybody on the path is how to keep returning to your counterlife—your glimpses of buddha-mind—without dropping once again into the collective forgetfulness. And this task is harder than it sounds. Without a raft, you can’t cross over to the Other Shore. Without instructions, you can’t learn to meditate: sitting on the cushion with the spine held straight, directing your attention to the breath, turning away from the monkey mind and back to this very moment. We need the sutras, the stupas, the temples, and the rest, and without these devices from the realm in-between, few of us are likely to achieve enlightenment or reinvent the dharma singlehandedly. But when such devices become the goal instead of steps leading to the trackless place where awakening waits for us, their liberating strangeness drains away and they become distractions. The monasteries turn into tourist sites, and the sutras stiffen into philosophy binding you to fixed principles while the Other Shore disappears from view.

Every generation of the Buddha’s followers has had to find creative ways to infuse the dharma once again with a liberating strangeness. At the same time, they’ve needed to respond to changing conditions on the ground—wars and economic collapses, famines, floods, contagions, sectarian persecutions and political purges. One such moment was the 4th century in India, a golden age when the dharma flourished, by most accounts. But a few observers still foresaw that the essence had begun to disappear, maybe even owing to the dharma’s success, unparalleled in Indian history. One of these worriers was Asanga, the great philosopher and meditation master.

Asanga and others were convinced that emptiness had been misunderstood to be the final goal rather than just a step along the path. Instead of pursuing complete enlightenment, some of the Buddha’s followers were clinging to thoughtless serenity without going on to meet the dharmakaya face-to-face. A new bridge had to be built between the relative and the Absolute, but no one knew what that bridge might be, and so Asanga committed to a six-year retreat in pursuit of a solution. Tradition holds that he hoped to receive a vision from Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, and a new future for the dharma was indeed what he meant to find.

But at the end of the six years, he had nothing to show for his efforts, and, discouraged, he resolved to go back to his home monastery. On the way, though, he happened to pass by a metalworker who was furiously rubbing an iron bar with a cotton cloth. When Asanga politely asked what he was trying to do, the man explained that he was fashioning a needle using the only tool he had.

Asanga nodded and went on his way, but, as he walked, he thought to himself, “It will take that poor man an eternity to make a needle out of an iron bar. If he has such determination, my commitment shouldn’t be any less.” And then Asanga started to feel shame because he had given up so easily on his search for Maitreya’s guidance. With renewed confidence he returned to his hermitage for a second retreat. But after the next six years had passed, the insight he sought still eluded him. And for a second time he decided to give up until he ran into another man, who was sweeping a huge boulder, stroke after stroke, with a feather duster.

“What are you doing?” Asanga asked. Matter-of-factly the man explained that his little house was endangered by the rock, precariously tilting toward it. “I’m going to wear the boulder away,” he said, “and this duster is the only tool I have.”

Once again, Asanga was overcome by shame at his lack of persistence, and he immediately went back into a third retreat. But, incredibly, nothing happened even then. Now, feeling so totally defeated that even shame couldn’t make him try again, he resigned himself to failure.

But this time, as he made his way home, he saw crouching by the side of a road a female dog whining in distress, its rear legs motionless, covered with sores and teeming with wriggling maggots. Moved by compassion, he bent to help the dog, but each time he approached, the dog snapped at him and dragged herself away. Then Asanga is said to have sliced from his thigh a piece of his own flesh, and while the dog ate it, Asanga tried to remove the maggots from her oozing wounds. Whenever he touched her, though, she’d whine and writhe, and so he decided to use his tongue to clean her wounds more gently. As he removed the maggots one by one, the dog became calm and motionless, but then, when he looked up, she’d disappeared. Before him stood Maitreya.

The teachings that Maitreya revealed to him became the Yogacara, the “School of Only Mind,” which later inspired both Zen and Pure Land, as well as Mahamudra in Tibet. Much could be said about this development, but here I want to cut to the chase. As modern Westerners we might insist that Maitreya plainly isn’t real. Yet Maitreya’s unreality, it seems to me, is the story’s most important point.

At this moment, when our world is crumbling, it makes sense that we still might hold out for a return to our old “reality.” But that “reality” has manifestly failed, and we can stop our repetition of the past only by opening up to possibilities that remain for now unimagined and even inconceivable. And as Asanga’s quest was meant to show, inspiration never comes until you’ve let go. Then, glimpse by glimpse in the middle zone where form and emptiness oscillate, the next steps forward will reveal themselves. But as Asanga’s story also makes quite clear, a new world won’t arrive unless we roll up our sleeves and begin creating it. Buddhas and bodhisattvas don’t wait passively. They prepare the way.