The God Gene by Dean H. Hamer

Author:Dean H. Hamer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307276933
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Seven

How the Brain

Sees God

The faith state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content.

—William James

One afternoon while we were weeding the vegetable garden at the Hosenji monastery, I asked Tenkai how he meditates. He answered in two words: “I sit.”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, rubbing my posterior. After sitting for several hours every day on a hard wooden floor, it was difficult to forget. “But how do you keep your mind clear and focused? How do you not think?”

“I sit,” Tenkai said.

Not satisfied with his simple answer, I asked, “Should I focus on my breathing, or is it better to try to be completely passive?” I asked.

“Try just sitting,” Tenkai said. And with that, he flashed his spiritual smile and went back to weeding.

The meditation technique practiced by Tenkai is known as zazen. It was developed 1,600 years ago by Bodhidharma, a devout monk who was the twenty-eighth in a series of masters said to reach back to Siddhartha himself. Bodhidharma traveled from his native India to China, where, according to legend, he spent nine years facing a monastery wall in continuous meditation. His Ch’an school of Buddhism was exported in the eleventh century to Japan, where it became known as Zen.

Zen holds that there is a fundamental unity underlying all experiences and phenomena. It differs from other Buddhist schools and sects in that it teaches that the way to perceive that underlying reality is through pure intuition, not scripture or intellectual learning. The focus is on quiet contemplation rather than ritual, on meditation rather than book learning. “If you wish to seek the Buddha,” according to Zen thought, “you ought to see into your own nature, for this nature is the Buddha himself.”

The ultimate aim of zazen is to discipline the mind to the point where the practitioner can achieve enlightenment, or satori—a sort of mystical intoxication in which one escapes consciousness of the self and enters into a sense of oneness with all reality. Satori represents a complete reordering of the relationship between self and surroundings. It typically requires a long period of intense preparation, but it may be triggered by a chance occurrence: an accidental splash of hot tea on the hand, the sound of a crow’s caw, the sudden fragrance of plum blossoms. Zen annals record that Daigu reached enlightenment on a hot summer day when he chose to perform zazen on a bench suspended over a cooling well. The plank broke, he fell into the well, and he experienced—nirvana.

Although I have never experienced satori, the descriptions from Zen adepts are enticing. Tenkai speaks of a peacefulness beyond imagination. Others find boundless joy. The most common feature is a radical form of self-transcendence. One Zen practitioner reported:

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