u/flyingaxe

Sorry the post is long; I am trying to lay out my argument carefully and fully.

Direct realism, also know as "naive realism" (naive not in a pejorative sense, but in "everyday perception" sense) is a description of how we intuitively understand our perception. The assumption is that when you look at some object, you're actually seeing the object itself. For example, when I sit and look at a tree, it's as if there was some self inside me that looked at a tree through my eyes as if they were windows. My mind somehow "grabs onto" the tree and fuses with it.

(This is based on an ancient idea of extramission: that the way we see the world is by our vision coming out through the eyes and interacting with the world.)

Oftentimes, when a person achieves non-dual awakening, either the sense of self drops, or it fuses with the tree, and people conclude there is non-duality of subject and object. There is non-separation of the "me" and the "world", or there was never a "me" to begin with, just the world. Thoughts without a thinker and a tree without a watcher. Also, the "tree" itself starts feeling like a thought or a vibrant mind-presence leading to a conclusion that everything is actually some form of consciousness.

But there was a mistake from the beginning that affected the whole process.

You never were looking at the "actual" or "objective" tree. Let's assume for the sake of the argument there is some reality in the universe that is what we call "tree". It could be a physical object, or it could be code in the Matrix, or it could be God's thought. You never directly see that. You see an arising in your mind that is the product of your brain activity. You retina has no "treeness" in it. There is no green, no shapes, no outlines or contours. There are just salt ions going in and out through a fat membrane, generating current. And the same is true for thalamus, to which retinal neurons project. Same is true for primary visual cortex, V1. And V2, V3, V4. There are just fat bags pushing salts in and out of themselves. But we know that if we record activity in V4, the person whose V4 it is will be seeing color. There is no color in V4 itself, and modern science has no idea how the experience of color arises in response to V4 neurons firing (because modern science doesn't know what consciousness is; it can just record the person's report).

But the simple point is that the color, shape, contours, space around, background/foreground, etc., of the tree were fabricated by the brain. We're living in a controlled hallucination created by the brain. I'm not saying the objects of perception are themselves in the brain, but somehow brain activity is necessary for them to appear. Every single aspect of your perception and cognition is constructed by brain activity. If there is a stroke, God forbid, in one of those steps, the patient will stop being able to see colors, or specific aspects of shapes, or left side of everything (it won't be darkness, he just won't be aware of the left side). Also, stimulating of the V4 with an electrode will by itself produce colors. No outside world necessary.

If you follow this thread back, you can conclude that the real world probably does not have colors. Colors are our private experiences fabricated by neural activity that then consciousness somehow "reads out" and turns into "color experience". But the same is probably true about shapes. And before/after, here/there, etc. All aspects of our perception are fabricated maps. They do map onto some logic of the universe, but the universe itself doesn't "look" anything like them; in fact, it probably doesn't look like anything.

A simple example is looking at CCTV footage of a man. Or seeing the man in a mirror reflected by a mirror reflected by a mirror, reflected by a mirror. Colloquially we say we're looking at the man, but really we're just looking at the TV screen or a mirror that replicated the original image. Well, you're directly "looking" not at a tree but your brain activity. And it didn't replicate the original reality; it actually constructed something completely new to represent it.

So, when you experienced non-dual awakening, you never experienced oneness with the "tree" outside your mind. The tree you were seeing all along was a controlled hallucination inside your mind. And then you stopped reifying/projecting it outside of yourself and felt like it's a part of your mind or part of you, or the program called "self" stopped running and there was just the conscious experience of the tree.

That's right. That's a valid experience. The tree-you-experienced *was* always a part of your mind. Just like all your mind states are. You are now like a sentient GPS that realized that "it" is not just the blue arrow in the center but the entire screen and objects rendered on it. But if the GPS thinks it's also the physical street, it's wrong. The GPS never saw the physical street. There *is* a physical street "out there", but the GPS was never one with it. So, there is some aspect of reality out there, but it's not the tree you experienced either before or after non-dual awakening.

So... Coming back to Kashmiri Shaivism. From what I understand, KS states oneness of conscious experience with the object of experience.

If that means that my "self" and my internal "tree" are one, that makes sense. But if that means that my "self" and the "real tree" are one, that seems to contradict modern science since we never see the "real tree". Unfortunately, to me it seems like the latter. Other non-dual systems seem to say something similar. Yogacara, Advaita Vedanta, forms of Sufism, etc. That's because ancient people all assumed direct realism. And many, both Indian and Greeks, actually explicitly posited the idea of extramission: sight coming out of the eyes to fuse with an object so that the mind can experience it directly. (Actually the idea of "evil eye" is tied to extramission. If I look at your harvest or your goat, and I am jealous, I could harm them. How? Because my mind is fused with them, so if bad thoughts arise in it, they can harm the object.)

So, in Kashmiri Shaivism, a tree first arises as phenomenon one with Shiva. Then Shiva splits Himself internally into "jiva" and "tree", and "jiva" now experiences "itself" as something separate from its supposed object of perception, while it has always been one with the tree.

But that assumes that the mind object of the tree and the "real tree" are the same, and as I explained above, they're not.

So, I don't know how to resolve this contradiction between modern understanding of perception and nonduality.

I am sharing this because it actually bothers me, and I am curious if there is a resolution, or if the above has an error, etc.

Thanks! 🙏🏻

Looking for an academic analysis of Dogen's Bussho. Not just a restatement of the ideas and the author's personal experiential understanding of it (as most commentary that I've encountered so far seems to be). But looking at it in the context of the Buddha Nature literature going back to India (does Dogen contradict the concept of Buddha Nature from Mahaparanirvana Suttra and others?.. etc....), in the context of Dogen's own views, and in the context of Sino-Japanese Buddhist scholarship of his time.

Looking for explanation of Buddha Nature by Keizan. Specifically: which available translations of which works are the best?

Below I have a quote I transcribed from the introduction to Zen Sand by Victor Sogen Hori. It was recommended by Meido Moore in his own book, Hidden Zen, in the chapter of how to work on Mu. MM argues that the usual Western understanding of the koans in the 20th century was wrong, and Hori's intro (from which I am quoting below) is one of the few examples of getting it right.

In particular, both Moore and Hori argue that koans are not just meaningless riddles and psychological devices. They are not to be analyzed intellectually, but they have real meaning. Hence the dozens to probably hundreds of teishos on Mu, for example.

The problem is that the version of Mu we have is anachronistic. It's an artificially truncated invented account of exchange. For example, when you go on YouTube and search for teishos on Mu, the teachers will say that Joshu did not really answer yes or no as a statement of the fact. He just negated the whole dualistic question. Or he pointed at the Dharmakaya. Or created a doubt in the monk's mind because his answer contradicted the sutras about Buddha Nature. Or something similar. Likewise, the monk expected to hear yes, or he was worried whether he has Buddha Nature, and so on.

But that's based on a truncated version popularized by Dahui.

In the original version (present in the Gate of Serenity), first of all, this is the full text:

'A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha-nature or not?"

Zhaozhou said, "Yes" (u).

The monk said, "Since it has, why is it then in this skin bag?"

Zhaozhou said, "Because he knows yet deliberately transgresses."

Another monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha-nature or not?"

Zhaozhou said, "No" (mu).

The monk said, "All sentient beings have buddha-nature — why does a dog have none, then?"

Zhaozhou said, "Because he still has karmic consciousness."'

So, first of all, Joshu did not just give a nondualistic answer. He gave a real "yes" and a real "no". Second, he explained why not. And while doing so, for the "no" version, he used the term 業識 (yèshí).

Cleary translates it as "impulsive consciousness." Others render it "karmic consciousness." The term itself is a standard Yogācāra-adjacent concept — consciousness (shí 識) conditioned by or driven by karma (yè 業). It points to the discriminating, reactive mind that operates through habitual patterns. That mind is the reason why the dog has no Buddha Nature.

[Some earlier versions of the recorded saying include an additional character, reading 業識性 (yèshí xìng) — "karmic consciousness nature" — but the Cóngróng lù drops the 性. With 性 it points toward an inherent nature of karmic consciousness; without it, Zhaozhou is just saying the dog (or the monk) is still operating from karmic consciousness — still caught in a reactive, discriminating mind.]

All these concepts comes from Yogacara and the Treatise on Awakening to the Mahayana, which was the foundation of all East Asian Buddhism. People who heard the koan would have been familiar with these metaphysical frameworks. They wouldn't just take Mu as a mantra to scream into the night on a mountain.

Second point is that the monk wasn't asking about himself or the dog or whatever interpretation modern teachers give. He was asking about a sutra. In Mahaparanirvana Sutra, it says in one version that Icchantikas have severed themselves from the Buddha Nature and have no chance of awakening. Another version says that even they do have BN and can awaken. So, the monk was clarifying the discrepancy. Joshu responded in one case yes and another case no, because there could be two different reasons for being in samsara.

All of this nuance is lost with the modern version of Mu that most people hear about and practice in Rinzai and the lineages it inspired. Note that I am not saying you have to approach Mu intellectually. You can still approach it with the Great Doubt. But the real Mu is not the Mu addressed by the hundreds of teishos you will encounter.

I can hear some of you saying: None of this matters. Just Mu. Make it into a hot-iron ball of doubt in your hara. Breath in, breath out, Mu.

But that *alone* turns Mu into some sort of a mantra. And both Meido Moore's and Victor Sogen Hori's approach is to say, No, the koan is not just a meaningless mantra. It has real meaning, but you need to grasp it experientially, by exploring the tension in the koan.

But which koan? The koan they are practicing was exactly a truncated version popularized by Dahui as a mantra. Any kind of speculation as to why Joshu said Mu, and a Great Doubt generated from it is all a contrived anachronism!

I am now going to quote from Hori's book's intro:

'KŌAN: INSTRUMENT OR REALIZATION?

Most commentators take the approach that the kōan is an *upāya*, an instrument, that deliberately poses a problem unsolvable by the rational mind in order to drive the mind beyond the limits of rationality and intellectual cognition. This approach views the kōan as a psychological technique cunningly designed to cause the rational and intellectual functions of mind to self-destruct, thus liberating the mind to the vast realm of the nonrational and the intuitive. Powerful personal accounts of spiritual quest make it seem that the kōan is not a text to be studied for its meaning as one would study an essay or a poem, but rather an existential explosive device with language merely serving as the fuse.

Part of the problem with many such instrumentalist approaches is that it deprives the kōan itself of meaning. The kōan, it is said, cannot be understood intellectually; it gives the appearance of being meaningful only to seduce the meaning-seeking mind to engage with it (ROSEMONT 1970). This interpretation ignores the mass of evidence contradicting the idea that the kōan is no more than a meaningless, blunt psychological instrument. It is hard to think that the shelves of heavy volumes of kōan commentary produced through the centuries and the lectures in which Zen teachers expound at length on the kōan are all occupied with a technique that is in itself nonsense. It is much more sensible to begin from the assumption that kōan disclose their own meaning (though not necessarily an intellectual one), once they have been properly understood.

A second difficulty is that in trying to demonstrate how the kōan overcomes the dualisms and false dichotomies created by the conventional mind, the instrumental approach introduces dualism and dichotomy back into the picture again. The awakened mind, it is said, has transcended the dualistic dichotomizing of conventional mind and resides in a state of nonduality. The awakened person is thus freer than the average person in being able to choose to act either in the conventional dualistic way or in the awakened nondual way. But the dichotomy between duality and nonduality, conventional thinking and awakened mind, is itself a duality. Rather than being free from dualistic thinking, the awakened mind ends up more tightly locked into dualistic thinking, incessantly forced to choose between being conventional or being awakened.

A much better way of approaching the kōan is by way of the “realizational” model, a term I have borrowed from HEE-JIN KIM (1985). The practitioner does not solve the kōan by grasping intellectually the meaning of “the sound of one hand” or “original face before father and mother were born.” Rather, in the crisis of self-doubt referred to above, one experiences the kōan not as an object standing before the mind that investigates it, but as the seeking mind itself. As long as consciousness and kōan oppose each other as subject and object, there are still two hands clapping, mother and father have already been born. But when the kōan has overwhelmed the mind so that it is no longer the object but the seeking subject itself, subject and object are no longer two. This is “one hand clapping,” the point “before father and mother have been born.” This entails a “realization” in the two senses of the term.

By making real, i.e., by actually *becoming* an example of, the nonduality of subject and object, the practitioner also realizes, i.e., *cognitively understands*, the kōan. The realization of understanding depends on the realization of making actual.

This realizational account of the kōan solves several problems. On the one hand, it helps explain how the solution to a kōan requires the personal experience of “the sound of one hand” or of “one’s original face.” On the other, it allows us to see the kōan as not merely a blunt and meaningless instrument, useful only as means to some further end, but as possessed of a meaningful content of its own which can be apprehended intellectually.'

P.S. There is a lot ink spilled on why the Fox koan is next to the Mu koan. Maybe the compiler liked animals? But go and reread the full answer to why the dog doesn't have Buddha Nature. Because it has karmic consciousness! So, it seems like once you're awakened, you are no longer aware of karma... Now, go read the second koan about the fox. :)