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The Thick-Headed Monk

There is a fairly common Zen story about the ‘thick-headed’ monk who, no matter what his master tried to do, seemed incapable of grasping the nature of his mind. He just didn’t get it. One day, his master got him to carry a sack of barley up to the top of the mountain without stopping. By the time he reached the top, he was so overcome with exhaustion that his everyday mind completely relaxed and he understood the nature of his true mind.

This simple story is interesting in a number of ways. In the first place, it shows us that you don’t have to be brilliant to achieve enlightenment — you have be able to let go of your ego, attachments, expectations and cravings. Second, it shows us that the point of Buddhism is not the understanding of dogma or doctrine but to break through to a completely different level of awareness. Third, it illuminates the critical importance of the Zen master who has achieved a certain measure of enlightenment and who knows how to guide and occasionally push a person into this new comprehension.

What is easy to overlook in the story is the archetypic nature of the ‘thick-headed’ monk. There’s a tendency for us to think of him as stupid. If only he were a little more intelligent, we suspect, he’d probably get the message. The Zen master had to resort to extreme measures to drum some sense into his head. But when we think this way, we are missing the point. The monk could be ‘thick-headed’ and be an intellectual. The ‘thick-headed’ monk could be someone who was capable of elucidating all the intricate metaphysics of Buddhism and still ‘not get it’. The ‘thick-headed monk’ could especially be someone like me who has been asked to talk to you about the dangers of intellectualizing Buddhism. ‘Thick-headed’ people can often have interesting, impressive, and practical things to say. What they often lack is the authentic insight and the practiced discipline that give there words authority.

So let’s admit up front that I’m not enlightened, have only arrived at short glimmers of understanding that have certainly not transformed my usual perceptions let along my life. I speak with absolutely no sense of authority. What I hope that I can provide in what follows is a certain ‘authenticity’ and perhaps some ‘insights’ into the problems the westerners who confront Buddhism may have.

Intellectualization and Buddhism

Intellectualization is something that seems to happen in all sophisticated cultures and the culture that gave rise to Buddhism is no exception. You all may have heard of dueling dharmas where clever Hindus or Buddhists vied with one another in order to attract disciples. There’s one story about a monk who had an inflated idea of his own learning. He confronted a Dzogchen yogi who had no intellectual training but had acquired a large following because of his teaching. He scorned the yogi for meditating too much rather than teaching the dharma. The yogi replied in the form of a question “What is there to meditate on?” The monk thought he now had him in his intellectual grasp and said “See, you don’t even meditate.” To this the yogi answered “But when am I ever distracted?”

I think that the religious point of the story is that, while intellectualization can serve as a tool to help us to arrive at a state of concentration and ‘no thought’, it can be a real hindrance if it detracts us from the purpose of our search. The yogi had achieved a state of profound wisdom and clarity, the scholarly monk was still driven by ego. The yogi had a deep intuitive awareness of spiritual practice while the scholarly monk was obsessed with competing and humiliating others. To put it in a somewhat deeper language, the yogi knew that ultimately all dharmas are empty while the scholarly monk was piling dharma upon dharma as a measure of his own brilliance.

When we say something like all dharmas are empty, many of you immediately recognize that we are speaking the language of the very famous Prajnaparamita Texts and particularly the relatively short Heart Sutra that is so often chanted in this temple. Those of you who have sturdy constitutions might want to try reading some of the longer Prajnaparamita Texts if only to see just how intellectually sophisticated Buddhism can be. Those who have philosophical training, in particular, will soon realize that Buddhist metaphysics rivals anything that Western philosophy has to offer. It is an intellectual system of considerable subtlety and almost impossible to refute on is own grounds. The description of perfect wisdom as something that goes beyond any system that can be incorporated in symbols shows a sophistication that is lacking in most religious tracts and even seems to anticipate our modern philosophical ideas that symbols, signs and texts can never tell us what philosophy really is. And Buddhism is the most self-critical and self-negating system that I have ever encountered. The Buddha explains, for example, that the ‘cutting off’ of any outflows or conceptual categories that prevent us connecting with the absolute is simple a convenient phrase. No teaching, Buddhist or otherwise, can really describe an experience that completely beyond categorization. Hence the saying, if you are enlightened and you see the Buddha in the street kill him. With true enlightenment, all conventional categorizations cease.

It’s tempting to look for philosophical parallels then you read the Prajnaparamita Texts. I found many, including links to Plato, to Nietzsche, to Postmodernism, to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and even to chaos theory. Being a publishing academic, I felt the immediate temptation to work up some of these things as articles in scholarly journals. I’ve notice that the magazine Tricycle likes to do this sort of thing occasionally too. But I think that it’s dangerous to intellectualize Buddhism in these ways. It focuses on the wrong aspects of Buddhism and leaves us open to all of the egoism displayed by the scholarly monk. Even when generated within a traditional Buddhist culture, intellectualization needs to follow, rather than precessed, realization. It is always counterproductive when the intellectual wagon precedes the spiritual horse.

What I’d like to do now is to talk for a few minutes about the relationship between spirit and intellect in Buddhist teaching and to make it more clear why I view intellectualization as a dangerous process if not carefully contained. Then I’d like to say why I think it is that intellectualization is a particular problem for those of us living in the West and something that we really need to come to grips with if Buddhism is to make strides within our culture.

The Spirit and the Intellect

The nature of human intellect, no matter how refined, is spiritually problematic. In fact, the human mind is crowded with all kinds of thoughts that interfere with the attainment of spiritual wisdom. Whereas intellectual training might conceivably get rid of some of the rubbishy thoughts that we carry around, it ain’t necessarily so. Many so-called intellect’s minds are crowded with philosophical notions, ideas and assertions. And even when people of real intelligence work hard to come up with a few ideas or an idea that is more cogent, they fall into another kind of trap. They become so attached to those ideas and so egotistical about their ownership that they often interfere with their own spiritual growth. To put it in Buddhist terms, they are no closer to understanding their own nature.

The more sophisticated an intellect is in conventional terms, the more it can be an enemy to spiritual development. The well-honed intellect is taught to distrust, to be suspicious and to hold back. Religion, on the other hand, always calls for a leap of faith, a movement based upon trust and a putting aside of doubt.

In Zen Buddhism, the problem of intellect is confounded for several reasons. First, Zen Buddhism calls for a training of the mind that allows it to see itself as it really is. Our intellects often try to sabotage this process and, the more sophisticated the intellect, the more capable it will be of sabotaging a process — a process, remember, that seriously threatens to eradicate its hegemony. This is why we see so many smart people being attracted to Buddhism but having greater difficulty making progress within it.

Second, the concept of concentrating in a state of no-thought , complete emptiness or the “self-nature of immaculate thought” is much more threatening for those who have learned to control their environment and their fellows through the use of intellect. ‘Letting-go’ of our intellectual controls is like being completely naked and defenseless.

Third, those who like to intellectualize typically view rational thought as the very height of human abilities. They find it the most difficult to let go of reason, will and memory. Even when they meditate and begin to get in touch with emptiness, they have a naturally tendency to begin reflecting upon and deconstructing the process.

Fourth, those who like to intellectualize are usually the same people who have lost a great deal of their ability to understand things intuitively and common sensically. We all know stories about absent minded professors who are completely out of touch with the obvious or who feel that they have to analyze everything. And yet Zen Buddhism is largely about knowing the intrinsic nature of ourselves and reality directly.

Zen in the West

All of this leads me to the particular historical experiences and associated problems that we Westerners have when we are introduced to Zen Buddhism. Buddhism has a considerable attraction for westerners but especially for western intellectuals. Many of us are beginning to realize that we live in a society that has done serious damage to our psyches and our sense of inter connectedness to nature and the universe. We therefore have begun to look to our own past — for example, in the Celtic Revival and the New Age Movement — in order to get back part of what we have lost. Many of us also feel that modern life is far too rational, bureaucratic and disenchanting. So we have begun to explore the spiritual worlds of other cultures — particularly Eastern cultures — in order to see whether there are alternative ways of looking at ourselves and the cosmos.

For the longest time Buddhism’s appeal in the West was largely confined to intellectuals. In the early decades of the nineteenth-century it appealed to those who felt that all their values had been rendered meaningless by philosophy, war and the inability of western civilization to provide people with meaning. In Buddhism they discovered a philosophy that was not merely exotic but very deep, and one that allowed sensitive people to make sense of change, destruction and death. They found Buddhism compelling because to a certain degree at least it looked to the individual to explore himself and his own mind as a path out of alienation and despair. This jived with the ever increasing emphasis on ‘self’ that had become a part of the western tradition and the exploration of the unconscious that had been begun by Freud.

For nearly a century, the crucible of Western Buddhism has been the Universities. I certainly remember being introduced to some Buddhist concepts in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, a book written by a German intellectual looking for his soul in a soulless world. We were impressed, to say the least, and Buddhism had and still has a cachet at the universities.

But if Buddhism is to grow and prosper in the West, it really needs to understand the limitations of the environment that encouraged its development and of the kind of people who continue to be attracted to it. Western scholars have tended to intellectualize Buddhism in such a way as to rob it of a great deal of its spiritual value. Let’s look at each of the types in turn:

Zen Scholars

These either play the role of the ‘scholarly monk’ who is proud of his specialized knowledge of Buddhism and its metaphysics, that they are not inclined to share with the great unwashed. Or they go to the other extreme and attempt to usurp the role of the Zen Master, by composing books that explain what Buddhism is all about complete with directions for attaining the nirvana that they themselves have never reached.

The problem with this point of view is either that it confines an appreciation for Zen Buddhism to an elite and makes it more difficult to disseminate to the wider community, or it runs the risk of reducing Buddhism to a set of rules or self-help strategies.

Zen Freelancers

These find Zen Buddhism attractive to the degree that it allows them to focus on themselves, but they remain highly egotistic and individualistic. They are primarily interested in Zen as a form of “psychic masturbation”, as a compensation for the inadequacies and unhappiness that they find in modern life. But they are rarely interested in being a part of a scholarly community. Their ethos is still highly rationalistic and their way of approaching issues overwhelmingly logical and critical.

The problem with this point of view is that it is far to selfish and egotistical to ever contribute to the creation of a living Zen Buddhist community, and it is interesting to note how reluctant these Zen ‘intellectuals’ are to take part in communal activities unless they are permitted to adopt a position of status or leadership.

The New Christian Mystics

The Christian Mystics are those religious academics and thinkers who want to revitalize the exceedingly rationalistic and increasingly individualistic religion of the west by introducing a mystical element. Rather than returning to the more primitive mysticism of early and medieval Christianity, they have discovered in Zen Buddhism a path to a more intuitive form of spiritual realization and a more direct appreciation of God, emptiness, silence or any of the words that they like to use.

The problem with this point of view is that, while it acknowledges the spirituality of Zen Buddhism, it uses it a very calculating fashion. Zen becomes an add-on for a conventional and highly bureaucratic Christianity of the kind that destroyed the passion and authenticity of mysticism.

Everyday Life and Everyday People

Reason, memory and the human will serve valuable purposes in everyday life, and I am certainly not saying that we should jettison them. What Zen Buddhism can do is to prevent us from being unnecessarily distracted by these capacities and instincts. It transforms everyday life by allowing us to perform necessary actions without any craving or attachment. But all of this requires considerable discipline. Intellectuals in the West have gravitated towards Buddhism because it fulfils certain needs, but, past a certain stage, they are bound to find Zen difficult because it requires that they let go of some of their most cherished beliefs in logic, professional status and the pursuit of the icon that is the self.

But it would be misleading if it was to concentrate my criticism only on academics and intellectuals — the people who some might call ‘eggheads’. These individuals are interesting because they were first attracted to Zen and have helped it spread to a certain degree in the west. Nowadays, however, there are a lot of other kinds of westerners who are attracted to Zen and we are beginning to witness the creation of a small cohort of western Zen practitioners.

Many westerners may not always be professional ‘thinkers’ but they demonstrate many of the same tendencies as the ‘eggheads’. They have a tendency to value logic and to place an inordinate emphasis upon Zen as a rational system rather than an religion. Many people use Zen as a substitute for Psychology Today or as a device for exploring their personality and feelings and creating a separate identity. They have lots of thoughts banging around in their heads and are constantly analyzing and reconstructing them, with Zen only being part of the mix rather than a spiritual way of life. This kind of intellectualizing may not be as pompous as that practiced by ‘eggheads’ but it seems to me to be just as much an obstacle to enlightenment.

In fact, given the historical emphasis on superficial cleverness and fashionable scepticism in the west, our intelligence may be more of an obstacle to lasting spiritual growth than craving or attachment. Sogyal Rinpoche puts it very well when he says that:

Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely ‘sophisticated’ and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is noting more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge.”

True knowledge, however, lies elsewhere. If westerners are to attain it they need to work extra hard to counter the effects of historical development and to ‘train’ their minds to grow a different way. They need to tame their minds, make them more receptive and eventually master them. That’s not done by reading or intellectualizing in the way that I’ve described it above; it’s done by meditation.

I hope that I’ve explained why meditation, at least past a certain stage, is so difficult for westerners. It requires that we block tendencies that are not merely powerful but that have taken on some of the connotation of the ‘sacred’ for us — for example, logic, doubt and the search for the self. But it also hope that I’ve at least hinted at the kind of liberation that we can expect if we persevere.

Its a well-known fact that individuals are attracted to Buddhism when they are in pain. For almost a century, western culture has been breeding a great deal of pain. Zen can help to relieve that pain if it is not allowed to become the grist for scholarly cleverness, a fashionable cultural ‘add on, or a form of ‘psychic masturbation. It is as a living breathing religion rather than as an intellectual construction that Zen will have its greatest success.

These lectures are based on Stephen Batchelor’s book ‘The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture’.