Quite representatively of popular Zen writings and teachings, Sobun Katherine Thanas is recorded, in her The Truth of This Life: Zen Teaching on Loving the World as It Is, as saying:

I’ve been thinking with renewed interest how difficult it is to see or hear clearly. Settling the mind allows us to see things as they really are, relatively free of emotional or intellectual biases. Clear seeing may not happen the first time we sit, but maybe it will. Our chances increase with repeated sitting and continuous effort to calm the mind. The question becomes what is seeing clearly? What do we see? How do things actually exist? (39)

Yes! This passage is wonderful in its desire to interrogate, and open up to, reality! And it is difficult to see clearly. We are often distracted, our minds elsewhere, and our feelings and valuations often mislead our perceptions of things, animals, people, and situations. But what does it mean to say that we see reality free of “emotional or intellectual biases”? Of course, reality does not itself have any biases (!), unless we are speaking of that aspect of reality that is persons with biases! The point, however, is that her way of talking is misleading. And this is particularly the case when it is paired with the idea of the mind’s “being calm.” We get: Mind is calm; perception has no emotional or intellectual biases.

—Biases are, of course, problematic and we do well to be aware of them and to understand and remove, or let go of, them. For example, there are cases where someone feels angry, thinks they are justified, but after looking more deeply into the situation, they realize that their anger was misplaced, that they had misunderstood the other person’s intentions and had been projecting their own insecurities onto things. Wonderful sleuthing! However, when combining the warning about emotional biases with the goal of the mind being calm, it can sound as though one should not be responsive to real value-laden situations. While it is all-too-easy to be all-too-human and live oblivious to one’s own biases and distortions, it is also all-too-easy to project a kind of fact/value dichotomy onto the world such that there is no value in the world.

Indeed, elsewhere Thanas writes:

…the other day someone asked me just as I was going to dinner, “What is the meaning of life?” The person asking was a thirteen year old, and so I hesitated to tell her what came up at that moment, which was, There isn’t any meaning. She’s only thirteen. Can I say that? After more thought, I realized I had to say that we create meaning in our lives—we ascribe meaning to things, to relationships, to circumstances. (30-31)

And further:

What is the meaning of a rose, fish in the stream, the family dog? Things just are. We are the ones who say this is valuable: I like it and I want more, or this is bad and I don’t want it. But the moment before we say yes or no to things, they just are. Every moment, again and again, we have a fresh opportunity to see this clearly. The meaning of things is that they exist. Their existence is their meaning. (31)

On this view, value seems to be a mere projection. And what we end with on this take of things is both a relativism of value and the removal of value and meaning from the world. Things just are, at least until we say “yes or no to things.” But that saying “yes or no” is clearly being challenged by Thanas. Is the clear seeing, calm mind not only free of emotional and intellectual biases but also free of valuations, free of seeing value in the world?

I have long been confounded at this point, for then what motivation can there be for Zen practice? What motivation can there be for compassionate activity? If suffering “just is,” then it is neither good nor bad, neither should be nor shouldn’t be—it just is! The response, of course is: “Exactly! But when you’re unenlightened and deluded, you experience the suffering, i.e., the pain as bad and that is why the pain becomes suffering. Once you see the pain isn’t good or bad, it ceases to become suffering and you experience reality as it is. This is why Dōgen, for example, must insist that we not practice for some reason or goal but simply practice. In reality suffering is neither good nor bad, it just is.”

—But which is it that is neither good nor bad? Suffering or pain? If suffering is to be distinguished from pain, and we then say that pain is neither good nor bad, it just is, and that it only becomes suffering when seen as bad, then what do we say about the suffering itself? Let’s say that we see another in pain and we are an enlightened Zen practitioner (or even an earnest practitioner who has made some “progress” on the Way). We see them lamenting their pain, feeling sorry for themselves, and they are suffering. Like the one sutra, there are two arrows here, the pain and the lamenting of it, the latter of which produces or constitutes the suffering. Both exist, both depend on the mind, so to speak (one for the experience of pain the other for the judgments about the pain and the situation); thus, from that standpoint (their both being “mental”), we cannot say either is more real than the other (though I’m guessing some Buddhists might try). Are we not to be compassionate at this point and try to help the sufferer? But why? We cannot say that the suffering is either good or bad. It just is. Isn’t the only answer that the sufferer sees both the pain and suffering as bad (and indeed they suffer from their suffering), and that is why we are moved to compassion? To the sufferer things are bad and we seek to relieve that suffering, that “badness” that is perceived from their perspective.

But can we say that? Mustn’t we not say that there is i) the sufferer, ii) the pain, iii) the lamenting/suffering the pain, and the iv) the valuation by the sufferer that the situation is bad, and, lastly, that v) as i)-iv) are all reality, and reality is neither good nor bad, then i)-iv) are neither good nor bad? In other words, even though the other person “dislikes” their situation, that disliking itself has no value unless I myself dislike it; seeing clearly means seeing this lack of value in the world. And since we see this as an enlightened practitioner, we realize there is nothing to do and we fall into quietism, our minds quite calm and free of emotional and intellectual biases. How is this not the conclusion to such talk about reality?

Is there not a better way to talk about value and meaning in the context of Zen? Even if we are to say that value and meaning are not in the world as they might be if Platonic Forms or the Christian God existed? Moreover, if we so flatfootedly claim that values are created, then we have a hard pill to swallow when faced with the valuations of others that disagree with our own.

“I perceive it as bad, but it really isn’t bad in reality as reality is in itself. I practice Zen to remove not something real but something unreal, namely the suffering. I am trying to see reality as it is.”—But you’re motivated because you dislike the pain and suffering. There are two “dislikings” going on. You don’t like the pain, and so you suffer. You don’t like the suffering produced by the disliking of the pain. Hence, you are motivated to practice. Doesn’t it come down to this: Zen requires you to use your delusion to motivate practice until you see that there is no reason for practice, and at that point, one practices out of the desire to have an authentic relationship with reality? But where is the compassion here? That is, isn’t the motivation for practice really, in Zen at least, to be a Bodhisattva and save others from their suffering? But, again, now why? We can use our delusion, when deluded, to motivate our own practice; but from the third person perspective looking at the delusion and suffering of the other, we can have no motivation if we are free of delusion. We can’t simply say, can we, that since we know, since we remember, what it is like to be deluded and suffer, and we know how bad that feels, we are moved to help them?

Shouldn’t we say rather: I see this pain, I see its nature, and how it is, indeed, painful—after all, it is pain. However, I also see its interdependent and transitory nature, and I see the suffering of others and of the world (I do not suffer alone), and I know that if I attach to the idea of not being in pain, I will increase the pain and it will turn into even worse suffering. Thus, I do what I can to mitigate the pain in a responsible way (in line, for example, with the Serenity Prayer in Christianity), but otherwise let go of it, and let it be, not because it is not bad, but because that is all that can be done; and as bad as it is, I recognize that the suffering of resisting it would be far worse.

True, if we do learn to see the pain as neither good nor bad, such “seeing” will facilitate letting go. It all comes down, doesn’t it, to what it means “to see the pain as neither good nor bad.” Does that mean to let go of such valuations while still being willing to acknowledge the reality of their foundations? Or does it mean, as Thanas seems to say, that we insist that such valuations are mere projections and that is why they should be let go of?

 

Perhaps I misunderstand (this is quite likely); perhaps Thanas’s way of talking is merely skillful means? As long as it works to get people in the right place!—But what is the right place, then?

Moreover, this seeming rejection of good and bad as aspects of reality gives credence to Nietzsche’s concerns—voiced, for example, in the Genealogy of Morality— about Hinduism’s and Buddhism’s, for example, advocating a kind of self-hypnosis: One is to repeat to oneself often enough that nothing is either good or bad. Eventually, one comes to believe it and experiences relief.—But is such relief a mark of truth or only a psychological receptivity?

Further, in line with certain aspects of Aristotle, I want to say: when my loved one is now nothing but ashes in a box in my lap as we drive to her memorial, this situation is bad in itself, deserving of sadness in itself, warranting a rich emotional response in itself, one that does not amount to bias, one that does not warrant a calm mind if by calm one means undisturbed by emotion.

Lastly, we might say that Thanas’s way of talking takes the self/other, empty/non-empty, and related, distinctions that should be navigated together, thereby transcending their duality, and instead leans heavily in the direction of emptiness and no-self.

Thus we have Shohaku Okumura’s explaining that we have to express both “sides” of reality (unity/oneness and difference) in a single action (in his Realizing Genjōkōan: the key to Dōgens Shōbōgenzō), and Nishiari Bokusan’s saying, “There is a point in which you jump off both form and emptiness, and do not abide there” (In his “Commentary on Dogen’s Genjo Koan”). Here “form” means particularity, and “emptiness” the transitory and interdependent nature of that particularity. The enlightened activity of a Buddha is one of expressing both sides in each particular action they perform; this is jumping off both sides. In practical terms this comes to the wisdom of being able to navigate this paradoxical affirmation and denial of particularity, of self and other. In this way the duality is taken up and simultaneously transcended. We do not escape the pain, nor do we fail to see its nature as pain. We should be careful here, too, not to confuse the inherent “badness” of pain with claims about whether being in pain at a given time is good or bad. We can, more or less with Nietzsche, recognize that pain is inherently bad, at least phenomenologically, while still acknowledging that there are times when it is beneficial to be in pain or that pain and suffering contribute to the value of certain things and activities, e.g., creativity.