Chapter
Eighteen
Waking up
Hua-tous are the head, or final words or questions, of a
Zen story. A famous example forms the basis of Korean
Zen (s. Batchelor, 1990; m. Batchelor, 2001). It comes
from the turn of the eighth century, when it was common
for teachers to point to a house, or the sky, or a leaf,
and demand ‘What is that?’ As the story goes, a young
monk walked for many days to find the Zen patriarch Hui
neng at his mountain monastery. the ragged monk who
met him at the gate chatted politely about his journey and
then demanded, ‘What is this thing and how did it get
here?’ not realising this was indeed Hui neng himself,
the monk was speechless and decided to stay and devote
himself to this question.
After eight years of practice he finally went to Hui neng
again and said, ‘I have experienced some awakening’.
‘What is it?’ asked Hui neng. the monk replied, ‘to say
it is like something is not to the point. But still it can be
cultivated’.
Using this koan means that when walking, standing,
sitting, or lying down, you repeatedly ask the question
‘What is this?’, meaning ‘What is walking?’, ‘What tastes
the tea?’, or ‘What is it before you even taste the tea?’
With practice you do not need to repeat the words; it is the
doubt or perplexity that matters. so the question hangs
there, always being asked. Your whole body and mind
become the question. You don’t know.
Here is a different view. Hofstadter (2007) has strange
Loop #641 (‘a somewhat churlish proxy for the author’,
p. 277) describe a koan:A master was asked the question, ‘What is the Way?’
by a curious monk. ‘It is right before your eyes’,
said the master. ‘Why do I not see it for myself?’
‘Because you are thinking of yourself.’ ‘What about
you – do you see it?’ ‘So long as you see double, say-
ing “I don’t” and “you do” and so on, your eyes are
clouded.’ ‘When there is neither “I” nor “You”, can one
see it?’ The master replied, ‘When there is neither “I”
nor “You”, who is the one that wants to see it?’strange Loop #641 calls it ‘Just a bunch of non sequiturs
posing as something that should be taken with the
utmost gravity’ (p. 300).thinking about the future. Pain became more of an
interesting warning sensation than a form of suffer-
ing. His sleep changed from a previously rich dream
life to a state of ‘conscious sleep’ in which he was
still aware of lying in bed, and the fifty-nine years of
his former life seemed like a kind of waking dream.
He was no longer living with an illusion of separate
selfhood; rather, everything had become ‘just the
universe John Wren-Lewising’ (2004).
His original experience might be classed as an NDE
(Chapter 15), yet Wren-Lewis came to precisely the
opposite conclusion from that of most NDE research-
ers. Rather than leaping to ideas about consciousness
existing apart from the brain or notions of ‘end-
less consciousness’ or overthrowing reductionism
(Haesler and Beauregard, 2013; van Lommel, 2013;
Parnia et al., 2014), he concluded that his personal
consciousness was ‘snuffed out’ and then recreated
from the radiant dark.
This is more reminiscent of Dan Dennett’s (1991) sug-
gestion that self and consciousness can always be
snuffed out like a candle flame and rekindled later,
or of James’s passing Thoughts, or Galen Strawson’s
sense that consciousness is continually restarting.
Wren-Lewis was acutely aware of that snuffing out
and re-creation going on all the time. This is the same
idea as the Buddhist notion of the wheel of death
and rebirth – the constant re-creation of new selves
moment-to-moment from the prevailing conditions
that we mistake for a continuing self. Our problem
is that we don’t tend to see it that way; instead, we
want our self to be permanent.
As for the spiritual path, Wren-Lewis claimed that
the very idea is necessarily self-defeating, because
the process of seeking implies a preoccupation with
time, and so makes a goal out of what is already here
and now. In this, he is expressing the paradox of the
path to no-path found so often in Zen. He is partic-
ularly scathing about those philosophies which are
based on schemes of spiritual growth or conscious
evolution. Awakening is not the culmination of a
journey but the realisation that you never left home
and never could.These examples show, unequivocally, that awaken-
ing does not have to be the culmination of a long
process of training. Harding woke up through lone
questioning and happenstance, and Wren-Lewis
through a poisoned brain. Research suggests that‘This is just the universe
. . . . . . . . . . . ing’
(write in your own name)