So, today I want to talk about demons (or yokai, in Japanese).
You might have heard me refer to the threshold to the dojo as the demon-tripper. This is a traditional way of describing the purpose of the raised piece of wood that separates the dojo from the rest of the temple.
Of course, we are not referring to pesky little grimacing gremlin-like creatures who are so clumsy as to be tripped up by a symbolic boundary less than an inch high.
These demons are not tangible; they are in your mind.
Muso Kokushi, who lived in Japan around 1300 (1275-1351), was an influential Rinzai master. His famous collection of mondo, called Dream Conversations or Dream Dialogues, has some helpful guidance about the pitfalls of Zen practice.
For example, he talks about the inner “demons” or “devils” that are actually “mental phenomena and mental postures that obstruct the potential for understanding.” These are the demons we leave outside the dojo with our shoes and our cell phones.
These demons include the usual poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance, not only indulging in them but also in fearing them. There are also the problems of hubris such as conceit and opinionated views, or pride in one’s knowledge of the sutras. Then we have issues associated with practice, such as addiction to meditation states, practicing for oneself instead of for others, doing zazen too little out of laziness, or doing zazen too much out of impatience for satori, idealizing teachers [some to the point of eating their excrement or drinking their urine, literally or figuratively], rejecting the teaching because of finding fault with teachers’ personal behavior. He also includes what he calls “sentimental compassion.”
Sometimes we experience these demons because we are not sincere in our practice, but sometimes they arise because we are too sincere, too eager, too pious. Muso goes on to say: “Anyone who wants to realize Buddhist enlightenment is obliged to examine his or her mind and heart for these devils.”
Many of these demons are familiar. But seeing them as demons in our own minds helps to animate them, gives them some agency and some personality — our personality. They are not some abstract noun like greed, or something outside ourselves that we ingest. They are already internal to us; not something we drink but something we think. Or feel.
Muso concentrates on those demons that are particular to religious practice because even advanced students can fall into these traps, or should I say, even advanced students can look in the mirror and see these demons in their reflection.
But I want to concentrate on Muso’s singling out of “sentimental compassion,” one of two limited forms of compassion, as opposed to the limitless kind which he calls“objectless compassion.”
This reminds me of Katagiri’s distinction in the Lectures on Lay Ordination between “relative repentance” and “absolute repentance,” or “formless repentance in suchness.” It might be the most difficult concept to grasp in Katagiri’s remarks on taking the bodhisattva precepts. Relative repentance occurs when we seek forgiveness for a particular act from some person or some entity like the Buddha, while absolute or formless repentance in suchness is objectless.
Absolute repentance is also subjectless. We have to ask: who is this “I” who asks forgiveness, or that “other” from whom forgiveness is supposed to be given? Absolute repentance includes all of our actual and potential transgressions (bonno are endless, I vow to drop them all), even though there is no one to blame and no one to give forgiveness. We are at one with our repentance, objectless and subjectless. Or seen another way, the repenting subject and the object of repentance merge into one.
Sentimental compassion is similar to relative repentance in that it is a limited sort of compassion, the sort that is directed toward living or sentient beings. Muso puts it even more precisely: “The compassion whose object is living beings as such is the compassion of one who thinks beings are real and their delusions are real, and who wishes to liberate these real beings from their real delusions. This is sentimental compassion, which is limited by feelings. It is still just emotion and desire, not real liberative compassion.” (He says this is the compassion of Hinayana Buddhism.)
The second form of compassion is an objective compassion that is based on the teachings of the Dharma, specifically the Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, which sees all beings as conditional productions of causal relations (that is, of karma). But this merely sees beings and their sufferings as illusory instead of real: this second kind of compassion is “illusory compassion for illusory beings, using illusory means to liberate illusory beings from illusory delusions.” (This is Mahayana compassion, free of the “sticky emotions of sentimental compassion” but it is still not liberated compassion.)
We often see these two limited forms of compassion at work in the world. They are not evil, but they are incomplete. And when they are at work in us, they can become demons. There is, Muso says, some element of “contamination” in sentimental compassion, just as there is in Katagiri's relative repentance. By contamination, he means that there is a sense of purpose, a goal that is incompatible with mushotoku mind, free of intention.
How do we achieve “objectless compassion”? By entering the dojo, by leaving the demons behind. By stepping over the threshold that trips up the mental demons of “sentimental compassion” which sees suffering as real, as well as the “objective” compassion which sees suffering as illusory, allowing us to practice absolute, objectless compassion, just as we practice absolute, objectless repentance. By doing zazen without haste or reluctance — automatically, spontaneously, naturally — without fearing or falling prey to the demons that wait for us on the other side of the threshold.
— Richard Collins
