13
Properties of Awakening Experiences
Buddhist literature often points out that the practices discussed in chapter 12 should be done for their own sake and not with the thought of attaining anything. Practicing without thought of gain definitely is the way to meditate, but practicing in this way will nevertheless lead somewhere. Where it led these eleven teachers is the subject of this chapter.
In their interviews the teachers described their insights into awakening in the best words they could find, a much appreciated effort. However, in trying to find the right vocabulary for describing an ineffable experience, the problem is not so much a lack of words as an overabundance. Here is a good example. In his interview, Shinzen Young said, “Then suddenly there was no boundary to me at all. I was so shocked I actually got up. And there was still no boundary to me. I was walking around, looking at things, and there was no border between me and anything else.”
When Shinzen first told me this story, I couldn’t relate to it at all. Did he mean that his senses had gotten so fuzzy that he couldn’t tell where his skin ended and the surface of objects began? After transcribing and editing the interview, I sent it to him, along with some questions, one of which asked him to say more about “no boundaries.” Here is his e-mailed reply:
I’ve found that over the years I go through different personal conceptual fads as to my favorite way of describing what I experience. First it was “no boundary,” then it was “no self,” then it was “no self and no world.” For the last few years, it’s been “expansion and contraction as a form of nondual awareness linking form and emptiness during daily life.”
That kind of flexibility in word choice can make textual analysis a bit tricky. When two teachers use quite different terminology, a lot of judgment is required to decide whether or not they were talking about the same thing. This is the core problem of ineffability: if both person A and person B have had the same experience, they probably can find words that evoke a shared meaning. Otherwise there is a problem, as Bernie Glassman noted when talking about his street retreats: “The people who go on the street are transformed. If they meet somebody who was on the street retreat in a completely different place, they both understand what they are talking about. They both felt the experience, in very similar ways. They have a harder time talking about it with people who haven’t done a street retreat, who haven’t experienced it.”
The absence of shared experience has never kept people from trying to communicate, however. Through the centuries Buddhists have used a number of strategies to convey at least an approximation of what awakening is like. One favorite approach is basically an operational definition—tantalize people with words that deliberately avoid a specific definition, like “impermanence,” “emptiness,” or “nirvana,” then tell them that in order to learn the meanings, they must go through the operations (practices) necessary to produce the experience in themselves. A second approach, used by Gautama himself, is to define awakening as the negation of more familiar words. In the Heart Sutra, for example, we learn many things that awakening is not.
There is no form, no sensation, no perception, no memory and no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body and no mind; no shape, no sound, no smell, no taste, no feeling and no thought; no element of perception, from eye to conceptual consciousness; no causal link, from ignorance to old age and death; no suffering, no source, no relief, no path: no knowledge, no attainment and no non-attainment.1
An apophatic definition like this asserts a relationship (negation) between the new term and an existing shared semantic system. However, “awakened consciousness” can also be defined in terms of its relationship with contemporary systems for understanding “ordinary consciousness.” In chapter 17 I take a stab at modifying existing conceptual theories of consciousness in a way that allows both ordinary and awakened consciousness to be included. Then both forms of consciousness can be defined relative to each other, so that at least a conceptual relationship between the two is established. Here, however, I work from the bottom up, examining what the teachers said in their interviews about insights into awakening and then sorting their statements into categories that describe the properties of awakened consciousness.2
Although the properties identified all involve positive features, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that awakening has its limitations. The final section confronts the accumulating evidence that awakening cannot be equated with saintliness because awakening without compassion sometimes occurs. Only by looking at both its positive and negative features can we really move toward an adequate understanding of awakened consciousness.
The Process of Awakening: Sudden or Gradual, Total or Incremental, Temporary or Permanent?
The legend is that Gautama had one huge awakening experience, which gave him perfect understanding and changed him completely and permanently for the rest of his life. No one knows if that legend is true, but it has had a strong, perhaps oppressive impact on the way people have thought about enlightenment for 2,500 years.3 In the interviews, none of the teachers reported an epic breakthrough of the kind the Buddha is said to have experienced. We do not find in their accounts anything resembling what Martine Batchelor referred to as “big bang” and Ajahn Amaro called “Shazam!” experiences. These may happen to some people sometimes, but future research will have to find them. For the teachers interviewed here, awakening unfolded in a series of experiences, usually over some period of time. I conclude that, at least in the Western world today, awakening usually occurs in incremental steps.
Given that an experience has occurred, do its effects on consciousness (and hence behavior) last and become permanent, or is there backsliding that then requires long periods of hard work to overcome if one is to master what one has learned? Joseph Goldstein said, on the basis of his experience and the words of his teachers, that a moment of sudden awakening typically is followed by a period of gradual cultivation. This fits a theme mentioned in other interviews. Gil Fronsdal, for example, said that during the earlier part of his training he would react to an experience with something on the order of “Wow! This is the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced,” but later on, after a particularly profound experience, his first thought was, “Oh my god, there is a lot of work still to do. It was as if now I truly understood what Buddhist practice is about, and I realized that I had much more work to do.” On the other hand, Shinzen Young said that his first experience of “no boundaries” never went away—it has always been with him. Therefore, I conclude that for some people, important experiences of awakening can have permanent effects. That does not mean that “full” and “perfect” awakening has been achieved. Rather, it means that one has climbed a step up and does not slip back. Shinzen continued his studies and training, on his own and then with a new teacher, Joshu Sasaki, even though his realization of “no boundaries” had remained permanent.
The final question to ask about awakening as a process is, Does awakening occur through sudden experiences or as a continuous, gradual transition? Are awakening experiences like climbing stair steps or like a walking up a ramp? The answer seems clear, both from the interviews and from reports by other people: awakening experiences are sudden. They happen in an instant, whether the change is subtle or profound. In that sense, awakening experiences are like other insights—they come in flashes and are usually preceded by a lot of work. So the key aspect to appreciate is that something, no matter how tiny, has changed qualitatively. What is it like when awareness feels qualitatively different even though nothing physical in the sensory field has changed? This quote from John Tarrant gets at the heart of the issue: “You get the figure-ground reversal: what you thought was foreground is not so important and what seemed like background comes forward. You and the trees and the people are not different.”
A good example of figure-ground reversal is the experience of looking at an Escher print—one’s perceptual awareness switches back and forth between two quite different views. A sudden change in perspective just happens, probably with all of the noise and fireworks of a soap bubble popping. This change can be extremely subtle and easy to overlook. In their interviews the teachers over and over again talked about how the new perspective provided by an awakening experience seems simple and ordinary, not complicated or esoteric in any way. So in examining the descriptions of awakening experiences, we need to be sensitive to sudden but subtle and ordinary-seeming changes in the perspective through which awareness is presented. Suddenness is a defining property—any sudden insight deserves careful attention, even if it seems minuscule on the surface.
Inferring the Properties of Awakened Consciousness
It is time to return to the interviews and review what the teachers had to say about awakening and its aftermath. The analytic method used for this is the same as in chapter 12. I selected from the interviews those passages that pertained to either an awakening experience or something about the teacher’s life after awakening, then looked for similarities in the reports of other teachers. These were qualitative judgments; I try to make the interpretive process explicit so that others can reach their own conclusions. Several of the teachers started out by denying that they had attained anything or experienced anything worth talking about, but in what they said later on there are nuggets scattered all along the way. With this as a warning that the task is not straightforward and the conclusions are not obvious, let us look more closely at what they said and try to trace some common themes.
The segments chosen from the interviews are numbered for ease in referring to them later. I begin with the full version of the Shinzen Young quote cited earlier to illustrate problems of ineffability:
1. I put down the zafu and sat down, and the instant I sat down, the koan was there: “Who am I?” Then suddenly there was no boundary to me at all. I was so shocked I actually got up. And there was still no boundary to me. I was walking around, looking at things, and there was no border between me and anything else…. There was a kind of intimacy between inside and outside…. [I thought,] There is just no boundary separating me and what is around me.
Ordinary consciousness is organized from the perspective of the self as central actor. That self is assumed to operate in the world autonomously and appears to be separate from people and objects in the environment. When Shinzen awakened to the fact that this construction is artificial (that is, when he perceived the world around him from a new perspective), he saw that he was actually just a part of what was going on, not separate from it. This realization came as a sudden shock. Everything felt different.
A similar experience was reported by Enkyo O’Hara:
2. This was a kind of opening of compassion. What it was was the dropping of the distance between me and the other, which one could say is the experience of awakening, when you realize there is no wall between you and the other. The opening of compassion just dissolved that sense of separation.
When we stop seeing things from the perspective of a self separated from other people, we instantly feel closer to them. Realizing the illusory nature of the separated self, we no longer need to protect it, which opens up a greater sense of empathy and compassion for others.
When I asked John Tarrant, “What is life like for you now compared with before you left Australia?” his answer also had to do with being free of walls:
3. Well, I had so much going on in my mind then. The simplest way to put it is, I was caught. I would have moments of freedom, and huge amounts of non-freedom. One easy way to describe “being present” is in terms of the interior decoration model. It’s like you’re in prison when you’re trying to just paint the walls, rather kick them down. Even if you’re trying to kick down the walls, you’re still in prison. When you’re free, you can’t find any walls.
Tarrant expresses the same idea without specifically referring to the self: ordinary consciousness brings with it barriers that not only separate us from what is going on around us but also prevent us from living life freely, as it can be lived.
Ajahn Amaro also used the metaphor of eliminating walls or boundaries. He related this experience to a specific aspect of self that cares about performing well and competing successfully with others. After many years of practice, he started to feel dull and constrained, as if trapped in a little gray box. Then he tried meditating on the classic question Buddhism uses for investigating the self: “Who am I?”
4. What happened with me was that the walls of the little gray box just fell open. It was like suddenly being in a field of flowers, and warm sunlight. Oh, this is different. It’s a whole different atmosphere. I’d had that experience early on, about how the inflated sense of self and ambition and competition can take over, but I’d never realized how insidious, pervasive an effect this more subtle kind of self, this “me, the doer” can have. . . . Its influence had been invisible, like gravity—I didn’t even notice it was there.
Amaro’s experience requires much less interpretation. When the sense of self as “me, the doer,” in charge of and responsible for his life and actions, disappeared, awakening could take place.
These four teachers all mention a disappearance of barriers, boundaries, or walls that had previously closed them in and created a sense of separation. They all point to the same cause—the sense of self and relation to others that, from the perspective of awakened consciousness, is artificial. Quotes 1–4 can therefore be summarized conceptually as one way awakened consciousness does not add anything but simply deletes a key feature of ordinary perception.
Property 1. No separation from one’s environment. Awakened consciousness arises from seeing the environment as a whole system, with the self as one more or less equal part of it. It is distinctly different from the perspective of a self that stands apart from the rest of the system. We experience ourselves as part of what is going on around us—not as the director or principal actor in that system, and not separate from it. As a consequence, we feel more intimately involved in our environment, freer, more connected with what is going on and more sensitive to the existence and feelings of those around us.
An awakening experience is described by James Austin, a neurologist and longtime Zen student, in the appendix. He had this particular experience while standing on the surface platform of a London subway station. I include his account because, as I have emphasized, different people describe what may be quite similar experiences in very different ways. Austin’s description is that of a scientist, and it has a distinctly clinical and objective quality. It centers on a sudden shift in perspective in which he is no longer the central actor, but simply one part of what is happening overall. Austin calls the perspective of ordinary consciousness the egocentric mode of processing, and the awakened mode the allocentric (other-centered) mode for organizing perception. His research on the neurological basis for these two modes is discussed more fully in the next chapter, but here his description of Property 1 clarifies the difference between a system-centered and a self-centered perspective.
There is a relationship between no separation and the feeling of more intimate involvement with people and other elements of our environment that was first noted in the discussion of compassion and empathy in chapter 12. It is clear now how development of empathy and compassion through meditation or through other events can make it easier for an awakening insight of no separation to break through in the mind. At the same time, when someone experiences no separation without having had any special experience with compassion, empathy and compassion may nevertheless appear. That is exactly what Joseph Goldstein said in his interview. Paraphrasing him slightly, “Compassion is the expression of awakening; compassion is the activity that accompanies awakening.”
The next few quotes report a rather different quality. Here is a story Gil Fronsdal told, from fairly early in his path, when he was sitting a Zen sesshin:
5. We would remain in our meditation posture while servers brought us tea and a cookie. I received the tea and held the cup in my hands. As I lifted the cup to my lips and the tea went into my mouth, the world stopped! This stopping was a remarkable experience for me that I have never been able to adequately convey in words. Part of the experience was my mind having the unusual thought, As the tea touches my tongue, I stop the sip. I was quite surprised that in the words and in the experience, there was no self. Without any of my usual self-referencing, it was as if everything stood still.
What was involved in Fronsdal’s sensation that the world stopped? My interpretation expands on what he said about self-referencing. It starts with the idea that ordinary awareness is generated, moment by moment, as sensory inputs are interpreted according to what is already in the mind. If all we have known previously is a somewhat distorted awareness that nevertheless flows along like a movie, then even a small change in perspective will feel like the movie has stopped—the frame4 used to process the sensory information has instantly changed too much for the awareness to feel continuous. When Fronsdal had his instant of awakening, ordinary consciousness was suspended, and during the moments that followed, nothing seemed to happen. But the movie projected by ordinary consciousness stopped. Without that storyline and drama, the world just is, quietly.
John Tarrant’s experience of that stopping, quoted in chapter 12, also took place during a sesshin: “That’s when everything stopped… I started just laughing. Then everything seemed filled with light, and all the people seemed wonderful.” Here is another quote from Tarrant’s interview that can be juxtaposed with Fronsdal’s, although it gets into some other issues as well:
6. Then I thought, Oh, that’s in a way how I’ve always experienced reality, as sort of a flash that shifts. So in some fundamental way, that’s why I like the systems that show you things changing in jumps, rather than a slow progression.
Shaila Catherine gave a rather lengthy description of an awakening. Because it includes several important details, I will take portions of that description in turn and add my comments in italics after each:
7. The experience… is beyond the relation of self and other, beyond the concept that “I am having an experience” or “I had an experience.” Awareness has ceased being organized from the perspective of the self.
Everything appeared as just concepts representing dynamic processes or changing things. I knew what my social responsibilities, commitments, and duties included, and I performed family and work tasks effectively. I could function well, because the concepts were clear. The scripts and role responsibilities of everyday life were still understood clearly, but as impersonal concepts without emotional attachments.
But each moment of seeing, hearing, feeling, and tasting was known right in the moment of contact, as ephemeral and completely devoid of any reference to me. Awareness expressed the action of each moment, without the background sense of past and future that awareness-as-a-movie provides, and without emotional loadings.
It was a surprisingly different way of being in the world. I felt light, buoyant, and unperturbed by any event. She no longer cared about how events in the world affected the self.
Feeling light and buoyant is a theme that often came up when the interviewees described an awakening. Metaphors of walking on air were used in two interviews, as when Gil Fronsdal described something that happened in India several years after the tea-sipping episode (5) related earlier:
8. The ripples of that experience, the momentum that was set in motion in terms of understanding and feelings lingered…. It was as if I were walking on clouds. Although the feelings faded, to this day the experience has remained a touchstone for me. In some way it is ever present, if I focus on it.
Here is another reference to walking on air. Ken McLeod reported having this conversation with an old friend, during which the friend asked him:
9. “Ken, what’s life like for you these days?” [I replied,] “Well, imagine that you’re walking over the Grand Canyon.” He said, “Walking into the Grand Canyon?” “No, over the Grand Canyon.” Now, it’s not the Wile E. Coyote thing, where if you look down you start to fall. You’re not sure what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, what’s back. That’s what life is for me today.
That seems to fit with “light, buoyant, and unperturbed,” although there is more going on here that will be taken up shortly. For now, quotes 5–9 can be summarized like this:
Property 2. No emotional attachments to the self. We can observe what is going on in the world and act appropriately, but emotional connections with the scripts that normally govern this activity have come unplugged and the flow of awareness that was organized around the self, playing the central role in the drama, “stops.” Because we no longer feel any responsibility for managing events or for protecting or advancing the interests of the self, we feel a sense of freedom and lightness, peace and equanimity.
However, McLeod’s story in quote 9 goes beyond this. He talked about proceeding through life without any conscious expectation about what was going to happen at each moment. That has some serious implications. Consider what Bernie Glassman said about “not knowing,” based on what he’d learned through a series of deepening realizations:
10. Koan study is set up to try to get you to experience… the state of not knowing, the state of complete openness, of being completely open to everything…. “Not knowing” is an essential part of Zen training—getting you to experience what we call the sauce from which everything comes. It’s a state where there are no attachments to any of your conditionings.
The requirement of having “no attachments to any of your conditionings” is not specific to “not knowing”; properties 1 and 2 also require detaching from conditionings. But quotes 9 and 10 together suggest an additional feature, emphasizing a more dynamic quality. Now, although the storyline of ordinary consciousness has stopped, a new kind of experience has begun. This is described vividly by Stephen Batchelor:
11. All of a sudden I found myself plunged into the intense, unraveling cascade of life itself. That opaque and sluggish sense of myself, which invariably greeted me each time I closed my eyes to meditate, had given way to something extraordinarily rich and fluid. It was as though someone had released a brake that had been preventing a motor from turning and suddenly the whole vehicle sprang into throbbing life. Yet it was utterly silent and still. I was collapsing and disintegrating, yet simultaneously emerging and reconstituting. There was an unmistakable sense of proceeding along a trajectory, but without any actual movement at all.5
“Collapsing and disintegrating, yet simultaneously emerging and reconstituting”—these qualities of Stephen’s experience echo Glassman’s “the sauce from which everything comes.” So the by-products of this ineffable experience include a new way of being alive, underscored by a fascination with how fluid and dynamic this feels.
Stephen went on to talk about obstacles that prevent experiencing life in this way, like our erroneous conviction that the permanent and autonomous self that we think we are truly exists. So long as we believe in that self, we are separating ourselves from the world around us. In different words, Shinzen Young referred to the same idea when he compared two states of awareness that he experiences alternately “hundreds, probably thousands of times during the day”:
12. [In the first, awakened state, at each moment] “my experience is the flow of expansion/contraction and zero. . . . [In the second, more ordinary state,] my experience is that of a fixated self encapsulated in rigid time and space. . . . And each time, I’m aware that myself and the surrounding scene are born from and return to [zero, nothingness].
The terms “expansion/contraction” and “zero” are a bit obscure outside of the special teaching system Shinzen uses, but the quote as a whole conveys the feeling of the idea that awareness, and action, burst forth in each moment and then disappear instantly as the awareness and action of the next moment appear. This contrasts with the way ordinary awareness feels, “encapsulated in rigid time and space.” Compare this with what Bernie Glassman called “the sauce from which everything comes” in note 10 above.
Taking quotes 9–12 all together, the best way to summarize is to observe that they point toward two conclusions. First, the sense that we are autonomous actors guided by our thoughts is replaced by a realization that our actions emerge in the moment, without our being aware of what we are going to do before we do it. Second, in order to understand how this way of being unfolds, we must start by understanding how awareness and action are generated, together, as different aspects of one process.
Property 3. Not knowing: Awareness co-arises with action, freely, at each moment. What we become aware of and what we find ourselves doing in each moment emerge together, as unconscious processing in our brains and bodies interacts with our environment. This way of living feels deliciously fluid and dynamic.
With each of these experiences of detaching from the self and from the stories in which it is implanted, we escape from ordinary consciousness to some extent. What happens during this process is discussed conceptually in chapter 17, but a homely illustration can be offered here. We know that when we feel self-conscious, we are very much out of touch with the moment. Property 3 points in the other direction—when we are free of self-consciousness, we know what it feels like to act spontaneously. As Ken McLeod remarked: “You’re not sure what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, what’s back.” The difficult part, of course, is arriving at a place where that is always the way life is.
Summary Remarks on Awakening Experiences
Although the analysis and interpretations carried out in this chapter are necessarily tentative, I am grateful that the material the teachers provided in their interviews has allowed me to proceed this far. The goal was to take “awakening” out of the obscure and somewhat opaque world of Buddhist teaching and cast it in a form that could be communicated to anyone (given the limits of working in strictly conceptual terms).
That goal was accomplished in several ways. First, the interviews spoke for themselves in showing what can happen if people work at their practice intelligently and diligently. Second, statements from the interviews that seemed to refer to similar qualities were grouped together into three clusters, and the similarities within and differences between these clusters added qualitative meaning to the analysis. Third, the properties implicit in each cluster were given explicit conceptual definitions.
Finally—if all of this analysis and conceptualizing has made awakening sound complicated and esoteric, that is misleading. Here are two quotes as reminders that when it actually happens, awakening feels perfectly simple, obvious, and ordinary, as well as wonderful. After all, it is simply a matter of being free of attachments.
JOHN TARRANT: What do you call an awakening? It’s just a matter of, can you step into reality?”
ENKYO O’HARA: Now everything is just actually joyful all the time. Even when I’m with someone who is dying, there is some way to understand that it’s all interconnected and that there is a time when we are alive and there is a time when we die…. It is just so beautiful now. I feel kind of joyful all the time.
Comments by the Teachers on My Interpretations of Their Interviews
When chapter 12 and the preceding sections of the present chapter were ready, digital files were sent to each of the teachers, along with a note warning them that excerpts from their interviews had been used, sometimes with considerable interpretation, as the “data” from which the conclusions reached in these chapters were derived. I asked them to let me know, first, if they had any problems with the way I had interpreted the material from their interview, and second, if they wanted to make any additional comments.
Eight of the eleven responded, and no one complained about my interpretations. Hopefully this means that my qualitative analysis did not bias or distort the conclusions significantly. No one suggested any refinements or additions to the properties induced, which may only mean that they had better things to do than fuss with conceptual abstractions. Aside from some friendly exchanges, therefore, only a few comments were substantive enough to be included here.
Referring to what he had said about using different terms at different times to describe his experience of no separation, Shinzen Young said that recently he has been toying with calling the experience “True Love,” which resonates with what Enkyo O’Hara reported. Ajahn Amaro commented on my gratitude to the teachers for the awakening insight I experienced during the interview process: “I am delighted that the process of writing the book is proving so illuminating to you—it’s rare that the act of verbal creation can have such a liberating effect, although one of the Buddha’s disciples (Ven. Khemaka) became enlightened by listening to his own Dhamma talk.”
But the most extensive comments came from Ken McLeod, with whom I’d had several long and illuminating discussions when he passed through Albuquerque. My wife, who sat in on one, calls them arguments. But we think they are just good examples of how debates between a lumper (me) and a splitter (him) can be both animated and productive. As you might guess from that introduction, McLeod does not particularly like the fact that in chapter 12 I lumped quotes from eleven different interviews into three capacities that Buddhist training seeks to develop, and in chapter 13, into three properties of awakened awareness. He worries especially about
the human tendency to regard similar descriptions of experiences as indicating that the experiences are the same. From my perspective, I think this is not only impossible to determine but also probably unlikely in fact. [My] point . . . is to raise the question or possibility that each person’s experience is unique and has been arrived at by a unique path.
This is more than a warning of the need to be very careful when making the kinds of inductive leaps I engage in here. McLeod is concerned that people may not remember to look critically at the process and skeptically at the conclusions. Particularly with an exploratory effort like the present project, both scientific and Buddhist detachment are required: “The danger, as I see it, is that when a path is described or defined, whether through observation, measurement, or patient reflection, everyone else’s experience is then appraised by the criteria that were developed, a rather Procrustian approach, perhaps.”
I said I would include a warning to readers about this, to which he added: “The warning won’t always be heeded, but it should be there, all the same. Maps such as these can be helpful, but then, just as some people go to the ‘or’ with distinctions, others try to fit their experience into other people’s classifications and maps.”
Two final comments by McLeod: first, “the relation between awakening and compassion is, I think, quite complex,” and we should not reduce it to one or the other. Second, he thought it was important, at some point, to consider another question: “how people of considerable awakening can visit great suffering on others (I’m talking about sexual, power, or financial abuse). This question is, of course, outside the scope of your current research, but perhaps it lurks in the background.” That remark pushed me to add the next section.
What Is Awakening Not?
There has been a tendency, at least in contemporary Western Buddhism, to conflate awakening with saintliness. The evidence on that is now conclusive—neither meditating, nor being on the path to awakening, nor having an awakening experience or two, nor being officially accredited as having attained enlightenment guarantees moral perfection. History tells us that Gautama, and the many others who have awakened since him, lived inspiring and morally impeccable lives, but the recent record of Buddhism, both in the West and in Asia, contains many blatant exceptions. The well-publicized scandals reported both for Buddhist teachers who came to the West from Asia and for Westerners who became Buddhist teachers themselves leave most Buddhists scratching our heads and wondering what is going on. If they were awakened, and if awakening produces wise, caring, and morally elevated people, then why did they do those things? So at this point we need to answer the question pursued through the last two chapters. Is compassion a necessary part of awakening or simply a correlate, something that usually, but not always, accompanies awakening?
Proving that something is not a necessary condition requires only finding one solid case as an exception. However, determining the truth of that exception beyond the shadow of a doubt sets high standards for investigation. The scandals I am familiar with have usually have involved sex, drugs, or alcohol (mostly sex).6 (In the background is the strong support by the Japanese Zen establishment for the Japanese military effort during World War II, which was blatantly counter to the teachings of Gautama.7) The sex scandals make for sensational reading and have been documented in books, reported in many newspapers and magazines, and covered at length on the Internet (see especially sweepingzen.com. This makes for a lot of material to sort through, first to find cases in which a presumably awakened person is reported to have deliberately and consciously behaved in a way that is hurtful to others, and second to make sure that that person was truly awakened, that some other person was truly caused to suffer, and that no extenuating circumstances were involved.
Of the many well-documented cases in which certified Buddhist masters used their authority and the trust placed in them to impose sexual activity on their students, I feel most comfortable examining that of my first teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi.8 Besides having personal experience with him, I have been able to talk with some of the women involved and to communicate about this with another of his students, Shinzen Young.
Sasaki’s history of alleged abuse extends back at least seventy years.9 His story can be read in detail in the special file Sweeping Zen has maintained on the website sasakiarchive.com. Here is an excerpt from the original posting on that site, by a former monk:
[Sasaki] has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interviews, to sexually coercive after hours “tea” meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students.10
So there are four key questions. First, was Joshu Sasaki truly awakened? Second, did the women truly suffer? Third, was Sasaki aware that he was inflicting pain? And fourth, were there extenuating circumstances that might excuse his behavior? With respect to the first question, Sasaki was granted inka as a Zen master in the Rinzai lineage in 1947, so he had the credentials. Looking back over the ten years I studied with him, I have no reason to doubt that he had fully experienced awakened consciousness as defined by the properties discussed in this chapter. His speech always seemed to convey, implicitly but confidently, that he was a fully enlightened being. My remaining question, which I would ask of all people who have had deep experiences of awakening, is whether he was operating within awakened consciousness all of the time, 24/7. I suspect that a good part of the time he was pretending, acting out superbly his role of the modern Japanese Zen master.
Shinzen Young says in his interview, and added in recent e-mail correspondence, that although he is “hugely, hugely upset” by the Sweeping Zen revelations, he still considers Sasaki a paradigm for spiritual creativity and profound realization. And as far as I know, all of his other students, including those who resigned and rejected him for his sexual abuse, currently express only the deepest conviction that he was an awakened person.
The second question is whether the women involved truly suffered. Apparently there were hundreds of cases, mostly involving breast fondling. However, only a smaller number say they experienced suffering. Two of the three women I talked with found the touching curious and questionable, but benign. Shinzen Young commented,
When I started to check with my students to find out what their experiences were, the result I got back from most of my women students was just, “Yes, I was touched, but I just considered it part of the practice, and I got so much out of the practice that I kept going back.”
On the other hand, most of these women were only attending retreats. Those who lived full-time in Sasaki’s centers and monasteries had more intense stories, particularly those who served as his inji (personal attendant). While there are a number to choose from in the personal accounts at hand, this poem by someone I knew, Chizuko Karen Tasaka, gets to the heart of the issue most directly and poignantly. Karen wrote this in 1988 and tried to get it to Sasaki (whether she succeeded or not is uncertain—his staff was very protective). She died in 2010 after a long illness; here are portions of the poem.11
Roshi, you are a sexual abuser
“Come” you say as you pull me from a handshake onto your lap
“Open” you say as you push your hands between my knees, up my thighs
fondle my breasts
rub my genitals
french kiss me
you put my hand on your genitals
stroke your penis
jack you off?
this is sanzen?
my friend—she was inji
sex with roshi
she tried to say no
you demanded, demanded, demanded
demon demand the force of a tornado
sex with roshi
for whose best interest?
I told you I don’t like it.
I asked you why you do this?
You said, “nonattachment, nonattachment, you nonattachment”
I told you as shoji, “women very angry, very upset”
I asked you why you do this.
You said: “Be good daughter to roshi, and good wife to G. [her husband].
Roshi, that is incest. So many women trying to shake the shame from their
voices of
Sex with roshi
We came to you with the trust of a student
You were our teacher
You betrayed us
You violated our bodies
You rape our souls
You betrayed our previous student-teacher relationship
You abuse us as women
You emasculate our husbands and boyfriends
Roshi, you are a sexual abuser
Your nuns you make your sexual servants
Your monks and oshos are crippled with denial
Roshi, Sexual Abuser.
So I conclude that the case of Joshu Sasaki shows that it is possible to achieve awakened consciousness (full- or part-time) and yet consciously inflict suffering on other people. This leaves the fourth question: Were there extenuating circumstances that might excuse his behavior? The usual answer given by his monks and nuns about the breast fondling (the only form of sexual abuse we lay students knew about during the time I was involved) was that he felt this helped loosen attachments caused by sexual hang-ups. Since it was hard for me to imagine the women I knew who reported breast fondling having any sexual hang-ups, this seems a rather flimsy excuse. Sasaki may have believed it, however. For male students he sometimes recommended pornography because he felt it had helped him with his hang-ups (see the posting by Bob O’Hearn on sasakiarchive.com).
Shinzen Young suggests a more nuanced rationale, sort of a “tough love” approach to compassion: “In Sasaki’s way of thinking, the most compassionate thing to do for any human being is to utterly destroy them while truly coming from a place of emptiness and unconditional acceptance of them just as they are. This represents an extreme case of a certain style of Zen that is adopted by certain Zen teachers.”
Shinzen added that this strategy might occasionally work, but “if you combine it with an authoritarian social structure and a personality style that discourages ordinary communication and feedback, you’ve got a prescription for disaster.”
The compassion Shinzen suggests might have been guiding Sasaki is conceptual, in that it can be put into words that describe a pedagogical technique. In that sense it is similar to conceptual models for behavior, such as the Buddha’s teachings about moral behavior. Although such conceptual systems are important, when we think of compassion in relation to awakening, we are really focusing on feelings. Shinzen concluded in his e-mail that the important thing Sasaki lacked was empathy. Now empathy, in turn, is a somewhat complex word. It requires sensitivity to the feelings of others, which has been shown to vary considerably over human populations. According to author and activist Temple Grandin, total lack of this sensitivity is the defining characteristic of autism. Empathy also assumes caring, as in “I feel your pain” rather than “I sense that you are experiencing pain.” Lack of empathic caring is the defining characteristic of psychopathy; psychopaths show almost no sense of caring, and the rest of the population is spread out along a continuum from low to high.12 At the same time, psychopaths score well above average on sensitivity to what others are feeling (a skill that, according to Kevin Dutton in his study The Wisdom of Psychopaths, they then use to manipulate).
Therefore, if we require a compassion that includes both aspects of empathy, Shinzen and I agree that Joshu Sasaki did not have it. The conclusion therefore must be that it is possible for awakening to exist without compassion. That may make a lot of Buddhists unhappy, but I think its implications are healthy and long overdue. If “awakened consciousness” does not guarantee compassion, then we are better off thinking of it as merely a radical change in perspective, one whose potential exists, albeit in a dormant state, in all humans. Several of the teachers made a similar distinction. Gil Fronsdal, for example, talked about becoming awakened and becoming compassioned as separate processes. The theoretical relationship between them is clear: awakening is a rearranging of the mind to provide a completely different perspective for awareness; compassion is an opening of the heart, a primordial feeling that opens up a new dimension of experience.13 Awakening provides a new platform for mental operations, while compassion provides feeling that brings it to life. Buddhists, or anyone else seeking to realize all the potentials that being born as a human being provides, need to work on developing both.
However, if awakening is possible without compassion in the sense of empathy, then we still have to account for why that combination is not particularly rare. As a sociologist, I have to ask, What are the social conditions that have produced so many Buddhist teachers who apparently lack true empathy? One clue provided by the rich record of recent Buddhist scandals is that most of these men come from Japanese Zen traditions and almost none from the South Asian Theravada or vipassana traditions. So the next question, therefore, is, Are there differences between these two Buddhist traditions that could be responsible for the glaring disparity in cases of sexual abuse?
To begin answering this, we have to look at differences in the training and teaching offered by each tradition. Traditional Japanese Zen has long been known for revering the samurai tradition, and Japanese Zen teachers strongly supported the Japanese war effort during World War II.14 Some sixty years after Pearl Harbor, the head temple of the Rinzai Zen tradition, Myoshin-ji, finally issued an apology for supporting a war that destroyed twenty million lives (the support went beyond words—for example, Zen temples had conducted fund-raising drives to purchase military aircraft).15 Sasaki was in his thirties during World War II, and he apparently absorbed the samurai attitude—I remember him making derogatory remarks about the anti-Vietnam War peace movement back in the early 1970s.
As for compassion, some years ago I did a careful study of the Zen, Sufi, and Christian mystical literature, collecting quotes as I read the books and putting the quotes into categories (just as I have done here). I was very surprised that the category I had labeled “Love/compassion” was full of things Sufi or Christian mystics had said, but absolutely empty of anything from Zen. A similar comparison of Zen and vipassana teachings today would almost certainly reach the same conclusion. Traditions like vipassana that emphasize compassion in their training may succeed in two ways: by increasing levels of compassion in students who stay with the program and by discouraging and selecting out students who don’t know what compassion is and don’t want to waste time with it. In traditions like Japanese Zen, however, students without compassion might feel quite at home. Here I am talking about special cases—the contemporary Zen priest Ittetsu Nemoto is one inspiring example of dedicated compassion.16 Most Zen students who become awakened probably have and value compassion whatever their training, and the American Zen teachers interviewed for this book have all found ways to build an emphasis on compassion into their own teaching programs.
But the issue is not whether most Zen masters have compassion, but how it is that a small but substantial number show no evidence of caring about the suffering their behavior inflicts on students. The clinical definition of psychopathic personality disorder (which fits roughly 4 percent of the contemporary American population) offers some clues. While they show an almost total lack of caring about the suffering of others, psychopaths rank well above average on personality characteristics associated with awakening (e.g., mindfulness, ability to focus, and control of attention). In The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Dutton argues that a large proportion are nonviolent, stay out of prison, and are highly successful in their chosen careers—he cites Steve Jobs as a good example. So a psychopath would make a good Zen student, would probably enjoy doing things he is good at, and might be motivated to develop these skills further. As such a student rose in the Zen hierarchy and became a teacher, other traits characteristic of psychopaths would help: charm, charisma, and ability to manipulate. And as a Zen master, another set of psychopathic characteristics—fearlessness, mental toughness, and ruthlessness—would allow him to use his status, personal power, and lack of compassion to pursue and get away with (for a while) the abusive behaviors in question here.17 If one doubts that psychopaths would pursue a “spiritual” calling, it is relevant that in his study of successful men in Great Britain, Dutton found that members of the clergy ranked seventh from the top on psychopathic traits.18
The argument, in other words, is that there is an almost perfect fit between psychopathic tendencies and the requirements of traditional Japanese Zen, and almost nothing to prevent psychopaths from becoming Zen masters. So what has been happening in the United States over the past thirty or forty years should come as no surprise—it is the kind of outcome that would be expected. That is where conceptual morality enters to reinforce experiential development. In the Buddhist tradition, sila are the precepts setting forth Gautama’s teachings about morality.19 Vipassana groups, but not the Zen tradition I knew, study and meditate on the precepts, discussing them among themselves and holding them in mind as they meditate. This seems to provide an important and realistic safeguard against awakening without compassion. As Ajahn Amaro has said, “Life without sila is like a car without brakes.”20
Some American Zen teachers know this too. Bernie Glassman’s whole teaching is built around the theme of “socially engaged Buddhism.” Members of the sangha vow to live a life that manifests the Three Tenets (listed on www.zenpeacemakers.org):
Not-Knowing, by giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe Bearing Witness to the joy and suffering of the world Taking Action that arises from Not-Knowing and Bearing Witness
Only the first reflects the properties of awakening derived in this chapter. The second and third show the importance that Glassman assigns to compassion. And he is not alone—I cite him only as one example of the growing emphasis in Western Zen on becoming compassioned as well as becoming awakened.
May all people who are interested in awakening remember the parallel importance of compassion, and may all people who are attracted to a teacher they feel is awakened remember that awakening does not necessarily guarantee compassion.