Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama

Author:Kosho Uchiyama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

Delusion and Zazen

The zazen taught in Zen Buddhism is the actualization of the Middle Way that is at the very quick of life; it is life as life—that is, life as interdependence. Zazen enables life to be life by letting it be.

One might well ask: Whether we exert ourselves or not, aren’t we always living life as it is? Isn’t it nonsense to speak of living apart from life? This is indeed so, and it is the basis of the Buddhist teaching that all beings have buddha nature. That is, actualizing life is our very nature.

Nevertheless, it is also true that we aren’t always living fully, we aren’t always actualizing our life. This is because unlike the flowers in the fields, human beings bear the burden of thought. Thought has a dual nature: thought springs from life, and yet it has the ability to think of things totally ungrounded and detached from the fact of life. This is delusion and it leads to some strange consequences.

A politician says to herself, “I’ve got to whip Tanaka in the election,” and her heart races—though she is alone in her room talking to herself and not in the midst of any competition. A man goads himself deliriously with thoughts of “I’m going to get my hands on that mine and make myself a fortune,” though he is not within reach of it and there is no price tag hanging from pieces of the ore.

Being detached by our thoughts from reality, we fabricate seemingly substantial and accumulable entities such as money, position, or power right in the middle of this insubstantial world. This is the view of existence. In order to possess these things, we become greedy and deceitful, hating and injuring each other, or else we hold on to feelings of inferiority that develop into neuroses in the course of our struggle. Delusion is this very view of myself as an independent substantial entity.

Even though this world of interdependence is not substantial, provisionally it has a certain order. Yet we ignore that order—taking up the view of nonexistence—and pursue selfish desires, throwing all our energy into killing one another and destroying the things around us, living for the moment and in the end short-circuiting our lives.

In other words our thought, whether through the view of existence or of nonexistence, becomes the basis for the distortions of our lives that prevent life from manifesting in a straightforward way as it truly is. In Buddhism, thought as the foundation of these views of existence and nonexistence is referred to as ego-attachment. Ego-attachment is our clinging to “substance” and calling it I, which in our ignorance we have falsely constructed in the constantly shifting world of interdependence.

In other words, egocentricity lies at the basis of whatever we see or do. It tags along with us. Being dragged around by egocentric thought, our life cannot manifest directly and winds up pushed out of shape and disabled. This being dragged about by egocentric thought has been committed by humankind since its beginning.

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