Sheng Yen on Making Distinctions

Read another chapter of Sik Sheng Yen (釋聖嚴)'s Zen (Chán) and Enlightenment (禪與悟) last night. During the process, something very peculiar happened. Before reading it, I was thinking that I would like to read something on the tendency our mind to always valorise things and for that purpose always to try to distinguish between different phenomena and classify them under  appropriate thought categories. When I opened the book at random, my eyes were met with the words " 有分別與無分別" on page 197 of the book, precisely on that subject! It's another example of what Jung describes as serendipity! Does our mind have the ability to subconsciously motivate our body to do precisely what we truly desire without our being conscious of it? Whatever the truth may be, I carried on reading and got some helpful guidance.

Sheng Yen started by saying that "making distinctions" is a kind of knowledge and an ability without which the world may appear to be confused but that the aim of the Buddhist Dharma is to lead us from a tendency to make distinctions of every phenomena towards a state of mind free or liberated from such a tendency and to have what he calls a "liberated mind" (解脫心).

To the Buddha, our troubles and distresses (煩惱) start from our tendency to always make distinctions and to focus on the differences between things and because of this, we are trapped within samsara or the endless cycles of life and death. (輪廻) and that is why we endlessly think either that others owe us or we them and thus create numberless relationships of gratefulness (恩) and hatred, enmity or resentment (怨) or karmic debt (業賬). Thus when some say that there are more unhappy events than happy ones in this life, they think that that is because there is less good nidanas (善緣) and more bad nidana (惡緣) such that when we encounter each other, we do more things to harm each other than in helping one another. To Sheng Yen, the more fundamental cause of such bad relations can be found in our habit or tendency to make distinctions between what is good and what is bad. 

However, our tendency or habit of making fine distinctions between things and phenomena is not necessarily all bad because all the progress we make in our material welfare starts from this ability to classify and categorize things to enable us to isolate them and to study them more closely and to trace and discover various chains of cause and effect between them. The trouble is that for the ordinary folk, everything starts from a particular concept of our "self". We do everything which we think will advance our personal interest. This is the source of our suffering. We also need to think of the interests of the others too. Here the term "others" refer to everything which is "not self" ie. other people and things (family, community, nations, other plants and animals and the universe in a hierarchy of categories of different scale). We must realize that everything we find in this world is the result of the interaction of a huge number of causes and effects in a network of causal relationships (因緣和合) some of which we know and can control and some of which we are ignorant and cannot control.

According to the Diamond Sutra (金剛經), the aim of Buddhism is to arrive at a state in which we no longer make any further distinctions between what is "me", what is "human", what is "everything" and what is "age". (無我相，無人相，無眾生相，無壽者相), the first three relating to space, the last relating to time. To the Buddha, once we start to distinguish between and within space and time, we start getting attached to such distinctions becasue so often they are helpful but once we get attached to them, we invite trouble at a deeper level. Once we get attached to anything, whether big or small, whether in whole or in part, whether we get attached to being or to nothingness, whether we get attached to what we regard as the truth or as falsehood, we fall into the trap of making distinctions within the realms of space and time and we start getting into trouble and we shall suffer accordingly.

Often, worldly wisdom and even some religions or secular moral philosophy get stuck at the level of urging us to take care of the interests of others: our family, our group, our society, our nation, the world etc., thinking that doing so is better than not doing so. We cannot say that that is wrong. But according to Buddhism, that is not going far enough. If we wish to radically banish all sufferings, we must start to root out the source of such sufferings at an even more fundamental or basic level ie. at the level of our tendency or habit of wanting to make distinctions in the first place. Even if we think more about the interest of others, we are still attached to the hidden or unspoken assumption that there is a distinction between "us" and "not us" or "them" or the "not-self". To Sheng Yen, the "big/greater-self" (大我) is a concept to philosophers, an identification experience (認同和經驗) to an artist or a religious thinker and still falls within the world of "being",whether in the material, psychological or spiritual realm. To the Buddha, to be truly liberated, we must detach ourselves from attachment to this tendency to make a distinction between the "self" and the "non-self" and abolish, destroy and annihilate such a distinction. Only then shall we be truly liberated and can then freely and comfortably move in and out of the world of phenomena without suffering (離開分別執著的自在解脫).

To Sheng Yen, some practitioners think that they have arrived at the state of the abolition of the "self" when in reality they still make a distinction between what is "self" and what is "non-self" . They think that since they feel that they are at one with the others, with the universe, they have arrived at the state of nirvana. They have not. To the Buddha, there are two levels of "no-self" (無我). To the Hinayana/Theravada Buddhist, if they have succeeded in emptying the "other/self" and left the three realms and entered into the realm of nirvana, leaving behind their "self" and ignoring the "big self" and regard every phneomenon in the world as illusions of arising from the operation of the principles of co-dependent origination and enter the world of no-birth, no destruction and treat or identify the state or law of nirvana with their "self". (以世間一切現象為因緣生滅的虛幻, 以出世間的湼槃境界為不生不滅的真實。他們不執大我為我，卻以不生不滅的湼槃法為我). But to the Mahayana Buddhist, we must not get attached even to the dharma of nirvana and get rid and detach ourselves even from the need to make any distinction between the nirvana state and the non-nirvana state and detach ourselves even from the relationship beteween the self and the nirvana (法我空) and not treat the operation of the law of co-dependent origination in the secular world as true or real nor treat the dharma of nirvana as true or real either. That is the ultimate state or stage. To the Mahayana Buddhist, there is no need to avoid having to face the secular world and all that happens within that world and deal with them as they come so long as we do not get attached to any anything that happens in that world nor to any particular view of all that happens in that world  including even the need to avoid getting into the world of samsara and abiding always in the world of nirvana. If so, we can freely move inside and outside of that world of samsara because we realize that in the end, nothing matters that much! Only then can we arrive at the state of true buddhahood or enlightenment!

In my opinion, whilst the Buddha may be right in analyzing the tendency or habit of man to make distinctions as one of the most important causes of human suffering, I do not think there is very much we can do about it except to be constantly aware of that tendency through prolonged training in "mindfulness" through meditation practices and hope that in the process we will get less "attached" to such distinctions in the control of our emotions at all times when we are engaged in doing so.