Daisetz Suzuki on Satori

((Satori has been my critical interest. I read books, met people, and practiced various ways. Yet, again and again, I come back to Daisetz for clarification. His most appealing quotes are posted here from the book called, A Zen Life, D.T. Suzuki Remembered. Without practice, knowledge, and experiential wisdom, words may be misunderstood. Still, these may point a way. Wishing the best!! My comments (intuitive interpretation) are in the parenthesis ((..)) - Kio Suzaki (5/23/03) ))

- To understand Zen, it is essential to have an experience known as Satori. (p.27) ((However, to seek for satori will not lead to satori. Seeking mind is (the cause of) delusion.))

- When satori is attained the irrationalities ((and paradoxical nature of koan for example)) cease to be such, they fall back to the level of logic and common sense. The hunter is said not to know the mountains because he is right in them. He is to be up in the air if he wishes to see the whole range of the mountains. Satori achieves this feat, it detaches a man from the environment, and makes him survey the entire field. (p.27-28)

- But this does not mean that satori keeps him always away from the field where it operates. This is a dualistic way of interpreting satori, for genuine satori is at once transcendental and immanental. It becomes really operative at the point where subject ((observer)) is object ((observed)) and object is subject. (p.28) ((i.e., inequality is equality, form is emptiness,…you are me,… vice versa))

- To us ((those without satori)) therefore, God is not an object of immediate experience. He is inferred by logical process. He is thought of, he is not seen ((experienced)). From thinking to seeing is not a continuous process, it is a leap. …The concrete whole is to be intuited as such. The whole is not to be prehended by accumulation.

- An all-embracing whole must be directly grasped as a whole complete in itself. (p.28)

- It is thus seen that satori is the apprehending of the continuum as such, as not subject to differentiation and determination. But the continuum thus apprehended as the object, as it were, of satori, experience ought not be judged as standing against particular objects of our daily experience. When this way of thinking is cherished, satori is no more satori, it turns to be one of sense-experience, and creates a new continuum over the one we already have, and we shall have to repeat this process indefinitely. (p.29) ((Daisetz may be cautioning us to differentiate Zen and, for instance, absorption here.))

- When it ((satori)) declares that the spade is in my hands and yet I am empty-handed, it does not mean to contradict the fact of the spade’s actually being in the hands. But it only means that each single fact of experience is to be related to the totality of things, for thereby, it gains for the first time its meaning. (p.29) ((i.e., the person who comment as such is in the awakened state, possibly him not knowing that. Or, in prajna’s immediate denial logic: spade is not a spade but Spade. Here, Spade expresses the Buddha nature in its totality. I am living and I am lived - as if the whole universe is alive.))

- The negating by satori of our everyday facts of experience is to make us thereby realize that God’s hands are also holding the spade….Hence…”Let thy will be done, not mine.” (p.29)

- The prajna begins its thinking with denying everything; the idea however, is not to build up a system of philosophy, but to free us from all our egotistic impulses and the idea of permanency, for these are the source of human miseries and not at all intellectually tenable and spiritually altogether unsound. (p.29) ((Re: prajna/heart sutra))

- Enlightenment consists in spiritually elucidating facts of experience and not in denying or abnegating them. The light whereby satori illuminates the continuum also illuminates the world of divisions and multitude. (p.30)

- ..when you have satori, these miracles will be what you are performing at every moment of life. (p.30)

- Satori is the continuum becoming conscious of itself. When it perceives itself as it is in itself there is a satori. … there is only an absolute state of self-identity. Silence is probably a most eloquent way of indicating or suggesting it. But silence from the human point of view lends itself most readily to all kinds of misinterpretation, hence of falsification. It is for this reason that Zen resort to … paradoxes.. (p.31)

- The Zen expressions are….the most natural utterances of satori. (p.31)

- Satori is no stopping the flow of consciousness as it is sometimes erroneously contended. This error comes from taking Samadhi as preliminary to the experience of satori and the confusing Samadhi with the suspension of thoughts – a psychological state of utter blankness, which is another words for death. (p.34)

- Eternity to be alive must come down into the order of time where it can work out as possibilities, whereas time left to itself has no field of operation. Time must be merged into eternity when it gains its meaning. (p.34)

- Time by itself is non-existent very much in the way eternity is impotent without time. It is in our actual living of eternity that the notion of time is possible. Each moment of living marks the steps of eternity. To take hold of eternity, therefore, consciousness must be awakened just at the very moment when eternity lifts its feet to step into time. This moment is what is known as the “absolute present” or “eternal now.” (p.34)

- Satori does not come out of death, it is at the very moment of actualization, it is in fact the moment itself, which means that it is Life as it lives itself. (p.34)

- The bifurcation of reality is the work of the intellect, indeed it is the way we try to understand it in order to make use of it in our practical life…. At the beginning of the intellectual awakening we thought we achieved a grand feat in arranging reality within the frame of time and space. We never thought this was really preparing for a spiritual tragedy. (p.34)

- …We are thus kept prisoners in the system of our own fabrication. And we are the most discontented prisoners, knocking furiously against the fates. .. We crave for something eternal and yet we are forever subject to states of transience. (p.35)

- Men of satori are not, however, at all worried about all these things. For satori stands firmly on the Absolute Present, Eternal Now, where time and space are coalesced and yet begin to get differentiated. (p.35)

- He may be in the midst of a blazing fire, and is not hurt; he may be swallowed up by the waves of the ocean, and is not drowned. Why? Because he is now Life itself – Life out of which time and space are woven. (p.38) ((Note that he is not he but He; he is hurt but not hurt.))

- (Satori) ought never to be identified with Emptiness (sunyata) inert and contentless. Hence the weeds are luxuriantly growing and clouds heavily overhanging. Satori is to thrive in differentiation. As it transcends time and space and their determinations, it is also with them. When thoroughly immersed in them and identified with them, satori becomes meaningful. (p.39)

- We may remark that the Christian view of the world starts with “the tree of knowledge,” whereas the Buddhist view of the world is the outcome of Ignorance. Buddhists, therefore, negate the world, as the thing most needed for reaching the final abode of rest. Ignorance is conquered only when the state of things prior to Ignorance is realized, which is satori…. Ignorance is the beginning of knowledge, and the truth of things is not to be attained by piling knowledge upon knowledge… (p.48) ((So, before the knowledge was born…))

- Logic and rationality are all well.., but the real spiritual abode …is found only where logic and rationality have not yet made their start.. (p.48)

- In the satori… there is neither subject nor object, …; that which is seen is that which sees, and vice versa. .. it is not seeing in the ordinary sense. And this has led many superficially-minded people to imagine that Zen’s seeing is seeing into the Void, being absorbed in contemplation, and not producing anything useful for practical life. (p.49)

- Zen.. has opened for us the way to see into suchness of things; this is to have an insight into “the originally pure in essence and form which is the ocean of transcendental prajna-knowledge.” … In a sense, “the originally pure” is emptiness but an emptiness charged with vitality. Suchness is, therefore, the two contradictory concepts, emptiness and not-emptiness, in a state of self-identity….as concretely realized in our everyday experience. (p.48)

- Zen sees with its satori-eye things as they are in themselves, i.e., they are seen ((experienced)) as such – such as they are, no more, no less. (p.50)

- Gensha…hearing the swallows twittering said; “They are indeed deeply discoursing on reality of things, they are indeed talking well on the essence of dharma.” So saying, he descended the platform. ((this was his sermon)) (p.51)

- Aspirants for [satori] have to evolve it somehow from within themselves. As long as they endeavor to catch a glimpse of it merely from words or acts of the master, it can never be attained. (p.53) ((It is the experience of jumping off…))

- Inasmuch as we are endowed with the body, with the tongue, with the hands, all of which are meant to be organs of intelligence and communication, we must be able to make use of them; under proper management they are indeed eloquent and understandable. (p.53)

- “when you know it you have it.” (p.54)

- What Zen masters wish to have us see into is that unconscious consciousness accompanying our ordinary dualistically determined consciousness. (p.55)

- …With Zen people, nothing [is] trivial, [is] a matter of grave concern; for even the lifting of a figure, or the opening of the mouth, the eyebrows raised, or the shepherd singing [is] pregnant with Zen significance. (p.58)

- Every moment we live is…. eternity itself. Eternity is no other than this instant. They are mutually merged and identical, This state of perfect interpenetration is the content of satori. (p.62)

- Satori may be defined as dynamic intuition…. It is the cosmic Unconscious. This Unconscious is a metaphysical concept, and it is through satori that we become conscious of Unconscious. (p.62)

* As a final note, here is Shunryu Suzuki on Satori: “It’s not that satori is unimportant, but it’s not the part of Zen that needs to be stressed.” (p.9, Zen mind, Beginner’s mind) Correspondingly, here is another good one: “There is a treasure in the deep mountains; He who has no desire for it finds it.” (p.203, Blyth – Zen and Zen Classics, ed. Franck)

Good day, Good life!

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