END GAMES

I recommend that you all pay attention to this book because it is written by John Crook, who is the first European Dharma Heir of the Master and Teacher of the Western Chan Fellowship. He has done intensive Zen practice with the venerable Chan Master Sheng-Yen of Dharma Drum Mountain, Taiwan and New York. John is also a PhD and DSc and is Emeritus in the Department of Psychology, Bristol University, and a pioneer of socio-ecology and evolutionary psychology. Who better qualified to write a book on the contribution that Buddhist humanism could make to the current mess we have got ourselves into? But that is not all. John is a wonderfully accessible person. He runs Zen sesshins (retreats) on the top of a Welsh mountain (not really on top of a mountain, just metaphorically so, actually at a wonderful retreat in the Welsh hills). The path to the hut in the winter is covered in snow and the heat is provided by a wood-burning stove. If any of you are interested in the delights of John's sesshins to hammer your Ego then see Sue Blackmore's Ten Zen Questions. So what does John have to say? In the early part of the book he describes the origin of Buddhism in Asia and its spread through China to Japan. What I found most interesting, mainly because I had not fully understood it, were the social factors and religious pressures existing in India at the time the Buddha was enlightened. At that time the Brahmin class were the holders of the religious rights, ceremonies and priestly hierarchies. Those who were not born into the Brahmin class or who had rejected it, left society and went into the forest. These forest dwellers then set out to investigate and develop their own spirituality, practising, often intensively, the techniques of meditation that were available. The Buddha Siddhartha, who was the son of a king, brought up in the palace with little contact with the outside world, finally rejected his upbringing and went out to seek his true nature. It is not surprising that he went through a phase of being an outcast, associated with forest dwellers and was taught by a number of highly experienced meditators, amongst whom was Arada Kalama. Here he learned profound Yoga meditation which he studied with great vigour. The aim was to practise the purification of the self, elements of which transmigrate to merge with the greater self, the Absolute or Brahman. His teacher told him he had reached the meditative plane of nothingness but, having achieved this and pleased his teacher, Siddhartha did not feel that this led to an ending of desire and so left this teacher and journeyed on. His next teacher had reached the meditative plane of 'neither perception nor non-perception' and after periods of intensive meditation Siddhartha also achieved this plane but found that this too was unsatisfactory, as it did not lead to dispassion and the ending of desire. These were the planes of absorption. He argues that if this was not the way and these planes were dependent on states of mind then what was the mind doing? So he used the technique of passive watching of the mind, vipassana, a technique he is reputed to have used as a child in the palace. We have now to imagine Siddhartha wandering through the hills and forests of India, practising this technique, and John quotes a wonderful statement which may make us cancel our tickets to Northern India and remain in England, when he quotes the Buddha remembering 'It is hard to respond adequately to these remote abodes, the woods and hills of the forests. Solitude is hard. It is hard to enjoy being alone. It is as if the woods steal the mind of the monk who does not concentrate.' So back onto your zen cushion and your sitting practice right here in the unforested UK. Siddhartha continued with his searches. There is short section on his difficulties with different techniques until, finally realising that through the forest practices and self-denial he was committing suicide, he came to a small village in a beautiful grove near a river. Here a young woman took pity on his condition and gave him rice and gruel as he sat on freshly spread grass beneath a large Bo tree (as can be seen in Kew gardens). For 49 days he sat there practising his focused watching . John says nothing in the book about the temptations of the Buddha, but it is now argued in some quarters that before the ego is destroyed and finally gives itself up, the seeker will encounter very vivid and strong hallucinations, as did Jesus in his 40 days in the Wilderness. At the final break-through, when his ego disappeared and he came into enlightenment, the Buddha is said to have cried 'Ah! The morning star. When the morning star first shone, there was I,' a reference to his universal and timeless nature which he now perceived. Then, finally recognising that the ego was all illusion and had fallen away from him, he said 'Oh house builder, you have now been seen! You shall build a house no longer. All your rafters have been broken, your ridge pole shattered. My mind has attained unconditional freedom and the end of craving is achieved.' Now I have spent some time on this, because the tensions that were present in the Buddha's time are still apparent today. Although it is not John's purpose in this book to look at modern tensions underlying the struggle for enlightenment, the ideas of gradually purifying the mind through meditation or the sudden deconstruction of the ego allowing enlightenment to arise are still the same today. Is the search for enlightenment a gradual purification of the mind or, in special circumstances, will the ego shatter suddenly with little prior work and a true view of the cosmic nature of mind suddenly break through? Such people as Merrel Wolff and Wei Wu Wei, and indeed even Shankara, seem to suggest that both are needed and that the final deconstruction of the ego is always sudden and not approached by stealth as the grace of final ego dissolution is given from outside. For how can the ego being deconstructed cause its own death and the vast expansion of mind that follows? John discusses Proto-Chan 500-600 AD and how these ideas spread out through the Silk Route into China, the arising of Early Chan in 600-900 AD, the differentiation of these schools in the Song Dynasty Chan, 950-1300 AD and the spreading out of the Soto and Rinzi Schools and finally, modern and post-modern Chan-zen. There is a wonderful section on the Self and consciousness, as seen from a modern perspective, and he uses the device of asking how the present world would seem to the returning Buddha. The Buddha does return and meets Jim, a highly intelligent waiter in a café in Soho, and they have lengthy discussions about the current views of the Self, a thorough review of modern philosophy and psychotherapy (a psychotherapist is included in this discussion|). The device works well and those of us who are uncertain of our Kants, Descartes, Wittgensteins, Schopenhauers, Sartres etc will enjoy this section. Finally John looks at the search for a future which is able to overcome the mess that we are in. John is very clear about the nature of the current crisis, which is related to the overweening demand of the self for security. This results in much of the over-consumption of today. The ungroundedness of the self affects all areas of our lives. John comments 'The economy is essentially an area for illusory solutions to ungroundedness then the whole of the consumerist world view is anchored in a fundamental but unacknowledged anxiety. Consumerism has a hidden spiritual objective, albeit an illusory one, in the attempts to compensate for ungroundedness. It is our modern religion and it has spread world-wide through a globalisation that has proved irresistible. The notion of a secular world is actually mistaken. Beneath the secular veneer spiritual needs dominate but in largely unconscious ways.' He quotes Loy as saying that 'God has actually not disappeared, but rather reappeared as the functioning of the Nation State, the market economy and our scientific projects, as if they were a source for grounding our activities in an objectified reality.' John suggests that education is the best, if not the only way forward, and that what is now formally entitled Religious Education be replaced by courses called Humanity, or Science and Ethics, and perhaps sub-titled World Renewal. He gives a number of headings indicating how we might change our education and points out that 'Such a course would enable a trained teacher to integrate objective and subjective approaches to knowledge and understanding, so that a holistic post-Cartesian perspective can arise, giving an appropriate broad picture of the human dilemma.' It has been impossible in a short review such as this to give a full or even adequate account of the wisdom and knowledge that is in this book. John is a very special person with a wonderfully wide training, vision and understanding of the projections of the ego that we all make and call reality. A wide and different form of education is his solution so that the anxieties of the ego can be tamed and world renewal begun. Perhaps then, like Siddhartha, some of us will even be able to claim that we have seen and destroyed the house-builder and have been present when the morning star was first created, living cosmically. Please get on to your Zen cushion, possibly even set aside time for a sesshin in Wales and please get this book and read it. You won't be disappointed.