[MUSIC]
 The Indian Buddhist Origins of Zen.
 [MUSIC]
 Fundamental to the life and thought of India from the very earliest times is
 the great mythological theme of self-sacrifice,
 whereby God gives birth to the world,
 and whereby men, following the divine pattern,
 reintegrate themselves with God.
 As Prajapati, Vishnu, or Brahma, the Lord under many names,
 creates the world by an act of self-dismemberment or self-forgetting,
 whereby the one becomes many, and the single actor plays innumerable parts.
 The thousand heads, eyes, and feet of the Purusha
 are the members of the human race and other beings,
 for the point is that that which knows in and through every individual
 is God himself, the Atman, or self of the world.
 Every life is a part or role in which the mind of God is absorbed,
 somewhat as an actor absorbs himself in being Hamlet
 and forgets that in real life he is Mr. Smith.
 By the act of self-abandonment, God becomes all beings.
 It is important to remember that this picture of the world
 as the play, lila, of God, is mythological in form.
 According to the myth, the divine play goes on
 through endless cycles of time,
 through periods of manifestation and withdrawal of the worlds.
 The foregoing myth is not the expression of a formal philosophy,
 but of an experience or state of consciousness
 which is called moksha, or liberation.
 It may be considered as the discovery of who or what I am
 when I am no longer identified with any role
 or conventional definition of my person.
 Indian philosophy does not describe the content of this discovery
 except in mythological terms, using the phrase "I am Brahman"
 or "that art thou" to suggest that self-knowledge
 is a realization of one's original identity with God.
 Moksha is also understood as liberation from maya,
 one of the most important words in Indian philosophy,
 both Hindu and Buddhist.
 The manifold world of facts and events is said to be maya.
 To say, then, that the world of facts and events is maya
 is to say that facts and events are terms of measurement
 rather than realities of nature.
 This point of view is somewhat startling,
 and even quite hard to understand for those long accustomed to think
 that things, facts, and events are the very building blocks of the world,
 the most solid of solid realities.
 Yet a proper understanding of the maya doctrine
 is one of the most essential prerequisites for the study of Buddhism.
 Buddhists prefer to speak of reality as non-dual rather than one,
 since the concept of one must always be in relation to that of many.
 The doctrine of maya is therefore a doctrine of relativity.
 It is saying that things, facts, and events
 are delineated not by nature but by human description,
 and that the way in which we describe or divide them
 is relative to our varying points of view.
 In summary, then, the maya doctrine points out first
 the impossibility of grasping the actual world
 in the mind's net of words and concepts,
 and second, the fluid character of those very forms
 which thought attempts to define.
 The world of facts and events is altogether nama, abstract names,
 and rupa, fluid form.
 It escapes both the comprehension of the philosopher
 and the grasp of the pleasure seeker like water from a clutching fist.
 It is precisely this realization of the total elusiveness of the world
 which lies at the root of Buddhism.
 This is the special shift of emphasis which, more than anything else,
 distinguishes the doctrine of the Buddha from the teaching of the Upanishads.
 Gautama, the awakened one or Buddha,
 lived at a time when the major Upanishads were already in existence.
 That was in the 6th century,
 and their philosophy must be seen as the point of departure for his own teaching.
 For seven years, Gautama had struggled by the traditional means
 of yoga and tapas, contemplation and asceticism,
 to penetrate the cause of man's enslavement to maya,
 to find release from the vicious circle of clinging to life,
 trishna, which is like trying to make the hand grasp itself.
 All his efforts had been in vain.
 The eternal Atman, the real self, was not to be found.
 However much he concentrated upon his own mind to find its root and ground,
 he found only his own effort to concentrate.
 The evening before his awakening he simply gave up,
 relaxed his ascetic diet and ate some nourishing food.
 Thereupon he felt at once that a profound change was coming over him.
 He sat beneath the bow tree,
 vowing never to rise until he had attained the supreme awakening,
 and according to a tradition sat all through the night
 until the first glimpse of the morning star
 suddenly provoked a state of perfect clarity and understanding.
 This was his Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,
 unexcelled, complete awakening,
 liberation from maya and from the everlasting round of birth and death,
 samsara, which goes on and on
 for as long as a man tries in any way whatsoever to grasp at his own life.
 The Buddha set forth his doctrine in the form of four noble truths.
 The first truth is concerned with the problematic word dukkha,
 loosely translatable as suffering,
 which designates the great disease of the world
 for which the Buddha's method, dharma, is the cure.
 This, however, cannot be compressed into the sweeping assertion that life is suffering.
 The point is rather that life as we usually live it is suffering,
 or more exactly is bedeviled by the peculiar frustration
 which comes from attempting the impossible.
 Perhaps then frustration is the best equivalent of dukkha.


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