Grasping none yet bearing all
How wondrous—
this all-bearing ocean is none other than the empty sea!In this poem Hisamatsu summarized, and clarified, the crux of his discussion with
Jung.
But there is no need to rely on Hisamatsu. To tie together what has been said so
far, I will draw out the implications of ‘awakening’ as a metaphor and present it as a
living model of the human self—of our selves.
In the Pali canon, Shakyamuni is asked if he is a god (deva). No, he replies. Are
you a spirit, then? No. A demon? No. Are you a human being? No. (Note that
Shakyamuni even denies this category—at least as the questioner intended it.) What
then are you? I am awake (Buddha) (see Kalupahana 1992: 122–3). Buddha means
‘an awakened one.’ Keep in mind that, the ‘dream’ or ‘sleep’ from which we awaken
is the dukkha of life-death in its entirety, including our ordinary dreaming, sleeping,
and waking states—conscious and the unconscious. Let us now consider what this
metaphor really means.
Can I wake up in a dream? I can dream that I woke up—but I’m still in the dream.
Within the dream there is nothing I can do to get out of the dream. I am the one
dreaming, yet within the dream I become caught, entangled in the dream and cannot
get out of it. This shows the universal and inescapable aspect of dukkha. Recall the
crystal-clear, razor-sharp challenge to directly break free and wake up expressed by
Hisamatsu’s fundamental koan: As I am—however I am—will not do. Now what do
I do?
Is suffering in a dream real? Within the dream it sure as hell is! Dukkha is real,
seemingly the only reality, while I am dreaming. Once I wake up, however, where is
dukkha?
What happens when I wake up? I awaken to the fact that the whole complex—for
example, in a nightmare, the scary figure chasing me and myself scared—was all just
a dream. Everything in the dream, including myself in the dream, was just a dream.
The entire dream world was just a dream, including rivers and mountains, space-time,
life-death, health-illness. Now awake, it is all gone without remainder.
Nothing remains? Nothing of the dream, and yet everything! The whole world
and I myself are still here and yet, unlike in the dream, all is now unbound,
unrestrained, formless-form. Everything is still here—really here for the first time in
their original nature, wondrously transformed. Not one thing has been added, yet all
is fundamentally transformed from the ground up.
What about ‘myself’? Is the self that awakens the same as the self in the dream? Or
is it different? The same, except for one tiny difference: Now it’s awake. And that
makes all the difference in the world. But I do not become another self; on the
contrary, I become truly myself. Unencumbered by the entire dream complex, I ‘come
back’ to my original, formless self. No more, no less.
36 A BUDDHIST MODEL OF THE HUMAN SELF