Dual Vision (samasara and nirvana)
When I was a “dervish” (member) in a Sufi order years ago, one of the sheikhs characterized a dervish as one who stood on the threshold. This characterization meant that a dervish was waiting to step from his or her ordinary mind into the consciousness of God’s love. Later in my life when I was following Zen, a teacher said that a zazen practitioner eventually became aware of two worlds, the everyday one of likes and dislikes and the non-discriminating world of nirvana. It struck me that you could very well regard that image of a dervish on the threshold as indicating living in two worlds.
Ultimately, in Zen, there is just one world. Zen says that samsara, the ordinary world, is the same as nirvana, the world of enlightened consciousness. Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan teacher, says in a collection of talks called Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, that eventually a zazen practitioner develops this consciousness. He says, “Through the practice of meditation, we begin to find that within ourselves there is no fundamental complaint about anything or anyone at all.”[1]
Continued meditation may bring about in practitioners a kind of dual vision. On the one hand, they become aware practically daily, through news reports, of murders, robberies, injuries, misfortunes of all kinds, and respond with appropriate horror or compassion; and on the other, they feel that somehow everything is all right, that there’s no complaint to be made about any of this.
Within Buddhist belief, in my understanding, the activity of interdependent co-arising operates inevitably. Therefore, there is a strong strain of determinism in Buddhism. By observation and intelligence, it is possible to trace the causes of any event or condition back far enough to see that it could not have occurred any other way. In the dual vision spoken of above, however, the sense that everything is right and proper is not the product of reasoning. It is an intuition of nirvana that comes with practice.
Intuitive dual vision also manifests itself in the personal life of a practitioner. On a day when everything seems to go wrong, he or she may feel frustrated, irritated, impatient, and somehow all that internal hurly-burly is all right. On another day, everything may be fine, and that’s all right. Happiness and unhappiness become the same in a practitioner’s mind. He or she may experience the condition spoken of in The Platform Sutra by the sixth Zen patriarch, Hui-neng, who said, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” Then one sails along in Zen practice with acceptance of everything.
Footnotes
- Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Shambhala, 2007, p. 21