The Impurity of Purity
by
Dr. Francis H. Cook
Buddhism shares with other world religions a concern
with purity. The Buddhism of the first few centuries of its existence saw the
whole spiritual path that culminates in clear insight and liberation as a process
of self-purification of consciousness, thus betraying the influence of Hindu society
which was its milieu. A text such as Buddhaghosha's Path of Purification shows
that meditation practices were designed to first tranquilize or "anesthetize"
(shamatha) the defilements that cause impurity and then, in a second phase, to
utterly destroy forever these troublesome things. This phase was the practice
of awareness or mindfulness (vipashyana). When the last defilement was gone and
could no longer obstruct clear insight, the truth appeared before one and one
was liberated.
A later form of Buddhism, the Mahayana, took a much less realistic
approach to such qualities as I purity, an approach some Western specialists have
called "idealistic." The various traditions such as Zen all agree that
the primary obstacle to spiritual progress is not such things as impurity but
rather is the way we perceive things. The problem, that is, is cognitive and epistemological
. Instead of trying to eliminate character flaws one by one, what we need to do
is purify our perceptor apparatus and realize that all dualisms such as pure and
impure, Buddhas and ordinary folk, sacred and profane, and so on, are delusions
that do not really exist. The source of this hew approach to the religious life
was the doctrine of "emptiness" (shunyata), which mainly criticized
all dualisms as false and nonexistent in reality but also denied the ultimacy
of any datum of experience. This new perception was the outcome of a radical transformation
of personality, and the only way this metanoia could take place is through those
mental technologies that we in the West call "meditation" (an inadequate
translation of such terms as dhyana, samadi and bhavana).
Zen is probably the
one form of Mahayana that stresses meditation above all, as its very name indicates.
The focus is on the practical aspect of meditation rather than philosophy or moral
cultivation. Consequently, there is comparatively very little discussion of purity
in Zen literature .When it is encountered it is in the form of a brief encounter
between master and disciple where the whole issue of purity is dealt with in a
very highhanded , dismissive way. The disciple will be reminded that his real
problem is his tendency to see differences such as self and other, sacred and
profane, and is and is not, as real things, not character flaws that need to be
laboriously eliminated.
One of the gifts that Buddhism can offer in its dialogue
with members of other religions is its meditation practices, which are the most
sophisticated of all meditation practices. Zen sitting meditation can be practiced
by anyone, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, or atheist, because the meditation has nothing
to do with creeds, doctrinal positions, loyalties, allegiances, or commitments.
Pace Cardinal Ratzinger! 