Zazen and the End of Suffering
Looking online, I see that there are many different explanations of what the Buddha thought ended suffering. To me there is a simple, all-embracing explanation, and that is the one that the Buddha gave in the Bahiya Sutta, which is that when the “you” is removed from consciousness, “This, just this, is the end of stress.”
I think that what the Buddha means by removing the “you” from consciousness is that the sense of “I” that we normally carry with us permanently disappears from the mind. In this way, the sutra continues, “in reference to the seen, there will be only the seen.” The sense “I am seeing” will have vanished. It is the same with “the heard,” “the sensed,” and “the cognized.” The sense that it is “I” doing these things will be absent.[1].
Is it possible for the sense of “I” to be erased from the mind like this? It seems to me that it certainly is or the Buddha wouldn’t have recommended it. The great Hindu teacher, Nisargadatta, thinks that deleting the sense of “I” from the mind can be worked at. When he was asked, “How is the person removed,” he replied, “By determination. Understand that it must go and wish it to go – it shall go if you are earnest about it.” [2]
The notion that removing the sense of “I” can be worked at is immensely important. Removal of “I” is the end of suffering. This is clear even with great discomfort. For example, if a person breaks his or her leg, that’s going to hurt a great deal. But the pain needn’t mean suffering. Suffering is self-referential. One must feel “I am in great pain,” “the world is treating me unjustly,” “I am in greater pain than anyone else has ever experienced,” and so on. Without the “I,” physical pain is just pain, sadness is just sadness, loneliness is just loneliness, and so on.
Any in-depth treatment of the skandhas (aggregates) in Buddhism will stress that we have no control over them and that they do not constitute who we are.[3] So the welter of thoughts, moods, likes and dislikes, physical sensations, and so on that course through our minds almost every minute of the day, they are not us. If a person clearly sees this fact, the part of him or her who sees it, it seems to me, is the “you” or “I” that the Buddha speaks of in the Bahiya Sutta. And the Buddha is saying that this “I” can be eliminated from the mind.
How is that done? According to Nisargadatta, as above, by wishing it to go. If zazen practitioners wish it to go, when they become aware of a sense of personal self within themselves, they can brush it away fairly easily. The mental action is the same as dropping thought or memory or fantasy when meditating and returning to breathing. Just brush the “I” away when you see it. Each brush is a step closer to the end of suffering.
Postscript: I am adding this postscript about a month after writing the above essay. Having experimented with the suggestion in the last paragraph to brush the “I” away, I have found that when I do that, I am firmly dropped into the spontaneous, unpredictable flow of the skandhas.
Reb Anderson, in Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains, describes this flow as a “fountain.” He says,
Moment by moment, I am a fountain, I am spontaneous creativity. I am not in control of this creativity, but I am its site: pure, universally connected creativity. Each one of us is such a site. Each one of us is a fountain of the universe. Each one of us is a place where the universe is expressing itself as a living location. . . . I can see the fountain; or, not see it so much as be it (because there is no ‘person’ here looking at a fountain). Just being a fountain, there is just the life of the fountain; there is just life.[4]
Being the fountain is the essence of mindfulness. With no “I” intervening between the experiencing consciousness and the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on that flow through the mind, there is just consciousness of this flow. As Reb Anderson says, “there is just life..”
Footnotes
- https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html
The words in the essay can be found in the 12th paragraph of the rather long Bahiya Sutta found in its entirety at this address. - Sri Nisargadatta Magharaj, I Am That, North Carolina, 1973, p. 441.
- For in-depth treatments, see Ajahn Chah’s Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002; or Reb Anderson’s Being Upright: Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts, Rodmell Press, Berkeley, 2001.
- Reb Anderson, Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation, Rodmell Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 42.