This is your more or less annual reminder that Monday, 20 March 2023 is Bodhisattva Day. Said day is observed by wearing the Okesa of Compassion, to wit, a cardigan sweater. (Fortunately for me, neither it nor I have to look as attractive as the photo at left.)
Full particulars here.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(Good eating while they last.)
So another visit to the annals of early Buddhism has yielded a further bit of provocative trivia: subitism is very old. Possibly as old as the religion itself.
This contentious point of Buddhist teaching, whose name draws on the French « subite » – "sudden" – asserts that enlightenment is a discrete event that occurs all at once in a blinding flash that explodes in your brain, changing both it and you forever. (The Christian adjective for this notion is "catastrophic", as in catastrophic conversion, the Evangelical ideal.)
The opposite view is gradualism, in which enlightenment slowly accrues over time through diligent practice, and only in turning back does one realise it has, at some point, been attained. (And Western Buddhism often implies that it may remain occult even to death.)
This is the main doctrinal difference between Rinzai and Soto, the two extant schools of Japanese Zen. (Seon, Korea's Chàn-descended tradition, also embraces sudden insight, but interestingly, has divided into parties over whether further practice afterward is required to "ripen" it, versus insistence that the bang itself is comprehensive; you're done.)
Rinzai students meditate to precipitate the long-awaited thunderbolt that strikes off the shackles of delusion – weakened beforehand by the crowbar of koanic logic – leaving a mind gleaming in perfect clarity.
Soto types sit for insight – a post-cognitive grasp of the koanic nature of existence, which, over a period of years or lives, eventually calibrates our minds to the universal frequency – though we may not apprehend for some time that our minds have inexplicably taken to gleaming in perfect clarity.
I'd always assumed subitism developed within Zen itself, and was surprised to learn that it actually came from the Southern School of Chàn, having been planted there by none other than 8th century founder and Huineng successor, Shenhui. Further study reveals that the two perspectives were already current in Bodhidharma's India, and may have touched off the first great theoretical debate in Buddhism
The topic isn't pedantic; it strikes at the very nature of enlightenment, and therefore Buddhism. Are we a religion, as subitism suggests, leading faithful practitioners to concrete, certifiable metaphysical transformation; or a philosophy, as gradualism would have it, shifting the adherent's perception by subtle and cumulative means?
History tends rather to support the first, though test cases are often ambiguous. Exhibit A would be the Buddha himself, said to attain enlightenment at an exact moment – upon seeing the morning star after eight days of intensive practice. The softness in that argument comes from his description of the phenomenon, devoid of fireworks, euphoria, or choirs of angels. He just… woke up. (The title we know him by translates as "The One Who Awakened".)
The legend of Bodhidharma also implies a sudden change – we're told he sat before a wall for nine years and "became enlightened", though we have even fewer particulars about the mechanism of that. To the best of my knowledge he never described it, or specified a time, date, or even season. Did he "become enlightened" in a flash, or did he just notice that it had happened, and get up?
And somewhat strangely, Dogen – founder of Soto – by his own detailed admission also received catastrophic illumination. According to the man himself, he was meditating up a storm when the jikijitsu suddenly whacked his dozing seatmate with the kyôsaku. At the crack of the cane, Dogen awakened as well.
Yet this is also the guy who told us enlightenment is gradual.
So clearly the distinction isn't simple. There are many Soto stories of enlightenment events like Dogen's – moments where the dam broke to the fall of a final raindrop, and nothing was the same again. What's common to both teachings is that getting to that point, whether it arrives with chirping birds or marching bands, is intricate, esoteric practice, demanding much zazen and maintenance of one's perceptual instrument.
And that makes the query a bit beside the point, though it does remain intellectually stimulating.
Rather a koan in its own right, really.
(Photo courtesy of Felix Mittermeier and Wikimedia Commons.)/span>
(Huge black cloud rolled in on a brilliant sunny day today, and suddenly we were being hammered with bean-sized hail. Not uncommon for late winter/early spring on the North Coast, though the size of the stones was notable. Open photo below in a new window to see the air filled with ice.)
"In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office."
Henry David Thoreau
(Photo courtesy of Jason Howie and Wikimedia Commons.)
(This was a hard photo to bag: a one-handed phone capture from a fixed position in near-total darkness. Rather a hail-Kanzeon shot, what.
What I've documented here is a demonic micro-tiger who stationed herself on my leg during the night sit, for the purpose of distracting me from my enlightenment practice.
In which ambition she succeeded.
So I got a ways to go before I become the Buddha.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
This is a good idea. The denial of universal human value implied by identity warring is, as Dr. King taught, backward and ultimately suicidal, and in my era at least, gender warriors have been most vocal and least corrected in this delusion.
(I should pause to point out that the Russians have observed International Women's Day since the Bolsheviks, which is why at some point they felt compelled to balance the equation in this fashion.)
So fair play to them. But I'm unsatisfied with glossing armed service with manhood. To begin with, Russia has famously employed large numbers of women in military combat roles for at least a hundred years. But the deeper issue is the unchallenged custom of pegging a man's intrinsic human worth to the presumed privilege of killing him at discretion. In wars, certainly, but also on the job, or in emergencies, or when non-men require defending, or to assuage collective rage, or basically any time we need more grist for Hollywood movies. Loudon Wainright III nailed this many years ago, and I haven't seen any progress on that front, to invoke an apt metaphor.
Like most men – virtually all; I've never heard one object – I accept this status implicitly. It doesn't annoy me, really, this notion that I might get a sword run through me at any time, whether protecting others or making a buck for the boss. We're all literally raised to die. And so it's always passed as the Way of All Things with me. It's just the pretexts arrogated by some non-men that make me grumble.
Life is hard all over. That's why everyone requires compassion.
And bodhisattvas are also all over. That's why everyone requires appreciation.
I respect the Russian people for understanding that – a vestige of their Communist past, perhaps. But the conflation of men with soldiers is disturbing. It's not true that soldiers are a gender – and to suggest otherwise devalues both.
It'd be great if we could receive every newborn as endless potential, promising everything and owing nothing.
But while we're waiting: С 23 февраля! to all my brothers and those who love them. The feast may be a little flawed, but it's a start.
(Photo of a US Navy corpsman in 1st Medical Battalion USMC, feeding his daughter at an on-base Father's Day event, courtesy of Lance Corporal Sarah Wolff, the United States Marine Corps, and Wikimedia Commons.)
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This is your more or less annual reminder that Monday, 20 March 2023 is Bodhisattva Day. Said day is observed by wearing the Okesa of Compassion, to wit, a cardigan sweater. (Fortunately for me, neither it nor I have to look as attractive as the photo at left.)
