Bancroft

Anne Bancroft

Drynachan, October 1998

 

There's a saying in Zen that before practising, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. During practice, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. After practice, mountains are again mountains and rivers again rivers.

I would like to explain this. When we live in our usual world it seems to be apparent that things are stable and real and that they have a beginning and an end. That's when mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers, things to be climbed or sailed on, put in maps and used in all sorts of ways. This applies to ideas too. To say, religions, which have forms and have beginnings and appear to be self--exisiting things in the world.

But when we look a little deeper, we find that nothing we have assumed is really like that at all. Everything physical is composed of particles - protons, electrons, neutrons and so on - travelling at enormous speeds in perpetual motion. There is no self-subsistent mountain or river, it's composed of all sorts of changing factors such as the atmosphere, the heat from the sun. Nothing can develop apart from the rest of life, things can only grow in interlocking patterns of mutual dependence. Just as the cells of our muscles are useless and senseless without our blood cells, as the shaped tongue of the bee makes no sense without the nectar of the flower, so the more you look at one bit of life the more you have to take into account everything else. One of the things the Buddha said was: 'when causes and conditions are sufficient, eyes are present. When causes and conditions are not sufficient, eyes are absent.' The same is true of mountains. And the same is true of each of us. The same is true of religions, which are dependent on the differing thoughts and intuitions of humankind.

So it doesn't look as though we're left with much. Mountains turn out to be no longer mountains and rivers no longer rivers. In the first stage we thought that everything was self-existing and had a beginning and an end. In the second, we've discovered that nothing is independently self-existing, all is made up of factors and conditions and therefore has no beginning and no end.

So where do we go from here? We go to the third, the transcendent stage, where mountains are mountains again and rivers are rivers. And there is the mountain, in all its wonder, magnificent and snow-capped, rising above the world. What a marvell. It is so extraordinary that it is there, in spite of not being there, that we can no longer take it for granted as we did at the beginning, we can no longer grasp it simply for our pleasure or use and we find that this is so with everything. We are living in a world of mirage where nothing can be grasped and yet everything is still there. How do we live in this world?

It is still an apparently solid world. If we bang our heads we feel pain. And yet, somehow, through our changed perception of it, our feelings have changed too and there is not the same dependence on events, nor quite the same involvement with thoughts and emotions. The grasping and the attachment has lessened and the more we realise this, the truer it gets.

So non-attachment and non-grasping can bring about a state of mind which is balanced and not at the mercy of desires and hatreds. Philosophically we all of us know this already but I think the contribution of Zen is to emphasise the change in perception which the third stage of seeing can bring about. Such new perception is a great help to the realisation of non-attachment. Many people experience occasional changes of perception, sometimes it seems like a change in consciousness even. I was interested to read the journalist Libby Purves, writing in the Times about her Catholic childhood, who frequently had instances of this. She describes one as 'the transformation of real things on my desk into miracles'. And I am particularly fond of William Blake's two sentences on this: 'if the doors of perception were cleansed , everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern'. He also said, 'he who sees the infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the ratio only (only that which is kown) sees himself only'.

The religions of the East - Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism - are based on the understanding that the world is not as we believe it to be. The Hindu term maya - illusion - describes what we think the world is - our individual and often deluded interpretation of all that surrounds us, of all that makes up our life and which we believe to be real and all there is. But the eastern understanding that things are not like that, that nothing is self-existing links entirely, it seems to me, with the scientific view, particularly that of modern physics. However it is easy to stop there - where mountains are no longer mountains - and leave it at that, which I think is what some scientists, such as the Richard Dawkins do. They remain satisfied with their understanding of reality based on concepts of particles, atoms and composites. And, in their turn, many religious people remain satisfied with their understanding of reality based on the supernatural. But I think that means that both of them are then stuck. Once we know that a concept is just a concept, a name is just a label whether it be the label mountain or the label God or the label physics, we can then go beyond the name and be free of it. Then we can go the third stage and begin to have a direct experience of the miraculous reality that is beyond names. This third stage of coming back to the ordinary world and seeing it in a different way, without attachment, is perhaps difficult and yet it's invaluable because it brings together and unites the rational and the infinite. In particular, Zen (always impatient with concepts) never leaves the ordinary world and yet it manages to convey its wonder and its infinity. It does this not only in the well-known teachings of masters to pupils, but also in its painting where, for instance, there will be a mountain with one particular pine tree or a lake with one small fishing boat, so that you will feel the significance of the infinite through the actual. Or in haiku, the same thing -

Among the grasses
An unknown flower
Blooming white.

Always the infinite significance of the actual.

Such a way of experiencing is referred to over and over again in Zen literature. When the master is asked 'What is Reality?', he replies, 'The cypress tree in the courtyard' or 'the babmoo grove at the foot of the hill'. The questioner must wake up to the true nature of the cypress tree, the bamboo, that which is there, that which it is if it had no name - the nature of the world when it is seen in its miraculousness, its beingness.

In some ways, what I'm talking about is the 'Ah' of wonder and delight - the seeing (as Libby Purves did ) of paradise in ordinary things,, perhaps the flight of a seagull or the glimpse of a rain-washed pebble. Such a spirituality may seem very slight to many people but I believe it has a long mystical tradition and one which may now enter a new phase as we leave behind the old myths of both religion and science that have governed us for centuries.

Carl Jung once made a pungent observation on the way in which people free themselves. 'All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble … they can never be solved but only outgrown. This "outgrowing" proves, on further investigation, to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wides interest appears on the patient's horizon and through this broadening of his or her outlook the indissoluble problem loses its urgency. It has not been solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge'.

We feel our bonds falling away, as he describes, each time we respond, for instance, wholly to beauty, and know in our response a wonderful completion of ourselves. Such response helps us to live fully in the present without too much attachment to the past. And I think we've reached a turning point in human existence where we are in fact reaching into and towards a new level of consciousness of this sort. pp What stands in our way is our attachments - to name and form, to definitions and labels, to the way in which we screen out those aspects of life which do not accord with out images.

Becoming open to the 'ah' of existence, learning however imperfectly to live openly, seeing the life about us as the appearance of a mystery beyond fathoming; learning to be still and to receive; surrendering to what is rather than to what we want it to be - and most willingly because it is what it is - this is the path of non-attachment.

And I hope I've described adequately, at least it - no attachment to label and concept - as one of the ways in which mystical experience can be of value to science.