Interview with the Author - Part 4

This last section of the manuscript for The Book of Chen Jen is broken down into several posts. To see all the posts in chronological order, go to the Book of Chen Jen Index Page (scroll down to Section 3). For the sake of these posts, the questions posed by the interviewer, Sue-tzu, will be in bold and the answers by the author will appear as regular text.

I think I will just jump into the deep-end and ask you: Are you enlightened?

What?! What a question! I don’t even know what ‘enlightenment’ is, so how could I answer the question? But let me ask you the same question: Are you enlightened?

No.

If, then, you are not enlightened — have not had this theoretical experience of enlightenment — how can you ask about it? Where did this idea come from? Who put it in your mind and gave you a concept which has no basis in your experience but in which you have now invested belief and, most likely, have created a goal to achieve? Whoever he was, might he not have done you the greatest disservice? He gave you something to believe. And, believing, you now can strive to achieve. Are believing and achieving the means by which we might realize harmony with what IS? How could this be the case if this harmony is the absence of belief and striving? And how could anyone who had this experience turn it into the object of a teaching? Does this not betray the very claim to enlightenment?

Then the Buddha was not enlightened?

I have no idea whether such a person ever was, had an experience of enlightenment, or, should he have had such an experience, immediately went about turning it into a mess of doctrines and beliefs. But I would suggest that if Gautama did have this experience it was not he, but the un-experienced who betrayed it. Let’s examine the message for a moment — consider what this experience of enlightenment purportedly entails. Is it not, in part, the cessation of all desire? What possible motivation, then, could Gautama have for gathering about himself a bunch of devotees and spinning out a system whereby he leads the world to enlightenment? I have no doubt that there are great ‘enlightened masters’ who can explain it all to us. And, hey, what do I know? I have not studied the sutras, sat at the feet of the enlightened, put in the obligatory years in a Zen monastery in Asia, learned a vast lexicon of Sanskrit and Pali terminology, or read the plethora of literature about the how to’s and how not’s of enlightenment.

You’re a radical iconoclast.

Iconoclast: ‘one who breaks idols.’ Yes, I guess that expresses my way, in part. Every belief is an idol. Every belief. But I don’t care about your idols — you’re welcome to them — it’s only my idols which I break.

Judging from the Book of Chen Jen, that’s at the heart of your ‘way’.

That belief, you mean?

(Laughs). Yes. Is it a belief?

Everything is an idol if you make it so. But that is a very difficult question to answer and one which cuts to the quick of the entire enterprise: Do I believe in something — whether a hypothetical state of being or a method to achieve it? And my answer will answer your original question. No.

No, you do not believe . . . ?

Correct.

Then, ‘yes’, you are enlightened?

I cannot answer that question. What was it that Hawkins called that event beyond all physics? The ‘event horizon’? The ‘singularity’? Not that I understand him any more than I understand all this about ‘enlightenment’. It is an event beyond all knowing and comment. In any case, I am going to fall back on Lao-tzu: “Those who know do not speak.”