Unscrewing Avijja Part One
The brilliant Buddhist monk, Nanavira Thera, crafted the words “unscrewing avijja” in his monumental work “Clearing the Path,” a razor-sharp investigation and critique of what he concluded to be commonly accepted distortions and mistranslations in the early Pali scriptures. It is important to add a caveat here. Nanavira’s focus is almost exclusively directed toward Theravada Buddhism, the tradition based on the ancient Pali scriptures, from which have come the practice of Vipassana and Mindfulness meditation. Although so many of us sincerely wish to change, whether through meditation, through other spiritual traditions, or psychological work, Nanavira suggests that most of us are, at least initially, screwed, however crude or inelegant that may sound. Auden says that we would rather be ruined than changed, and one’s tendency to shrink from the hard and lonely inner work of meaningful change is precisely why Buddha doubted that we humans could bear to hear what he had to teach. But when an otherworldly being showed him that there were a few humans who had only a little dust covering their eyes, he took heart and willingly spent forty-five years of his life and energy to give Dharma a human voice. The dust that covers our eyes is Avijja.
Aside from differences in meditation techniques (Tibetan, Zen or Vipassana) hundreds of thousands of Buddhist scholars, monks, teachers and students have emphasized various aspects of Buddha’s remarkable teaching ever since he traveled from village to village in ancient India. Depending on the tradition, some Buddhists stress his teaching of the Four Noble truths, others stress the Eightfold Path; some focus on the teaching of the Five Hindrances, while others emphasize the Seven Factors of Awakening. Some students and teachers stress the stages of Stream Entry, which I have described in three previous essays, while many in the West emphasize the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. According to Nanavira, the most concise teaching is the Fundamental Triad: “all formations are impermanent, without self, and are the cause of suffering.” We will revisit “formations” later. My favorite teaching is the Doctrine of Dependent Origination, more commonly known as the Twelve Nidanas, twelve dependent links that are a step-by-step outline of an out of control train hurtling toward its inevitable wreak. Please note that, if your mind started glazing over while you were reading these well-known Buddhist lists, you are now officially a normal human being!
Buddha said that dependent origination is so profound that one who understands it has actually seen Dharma. He also said that the twelve nidanas become immediately visible (sandittaka) to one who understands them, and the process is not sequential or time-based, because they are akalika, or beyond time. How can one see a blueprint that covers an entire life span in one sterling moment? How can something so astonishingly complex be grasped at once? And how can anything not have a past, present or future? The Indian sage, Nisargadatta, once said that “what takes time is false,” and I assume that is precisely what Buddha meant by saying that the twelve nidanas are akalika. As best I could, I pondered that question for quite a while, during the time I was teaching dependent origination at Long Beach Meditation. One image that came to me was a huge bolt of lightening flashing across a dark sky. You see it instantly and completely. Here is how our illustrator, Andrew Reitsma, drew that bolt of lightening depicting the twelve nidanas.
Let us go very slowly here. Each link in the chain of dependent origination depends, rises out of, and is inextricably connected to its previous link. For instance, the third nidana, so utterly unique to our species, is vinnana, the Pali word for consciousness. According to Buddha’s vision, consciousness enters a mother’s womb at the precise moment of conception, but what scientist or philosopher ever indicated that he or she could “see” consciousness entering the entity at conception? Has the incredible progress in neuroscience allowed us to image consciousness, let alone image it’s entering a mother’s womb at conception? Such a thing remains completely beyond the power of scientific investigation, and it takes us willingly or begrudgingly to a realm of metaphysics, and, dare I say, religion. This presents our Western minds, so conditioned to “trust in science”, as we heard so frequently during the recent Covid pandemic, with the problem of belief or faith from the get-go. We either take it on faith that Buddha actually saw what he said he saw, or we waver on shifting sand with a fuzzy, ”Well, maybe what he saw was true.”
Buddha’s startling assertion is this: Consciousness enters “vertically” (descends) into a mother’s womb) from something previous to it. What could be previous to consciousness? We do not conceptualize anything prior to consciousness do we? A body and mind are born together as a human baby. Viola! But Buddha asserted something completely radical to our Western mentality. In his vision of Reality, he saw that consciousness rises out of nidana number two, which, in the Pali language, is named, sankhara, a pivotal concept in all the major Buddhist traditions, perhaps particularly in the “Consciousness Only” school of Chinese Buddhism called Yogacara. In the Pali scriptural language, sankhara is translated as “karmic formations.”
We cannot see karma formations with our physical eyes or brains, nor touch them with our hands. We cannot inspect them in our incredibly precise electron microscopes or view them from the James Webb Space Telescope. So what are they? Tendencies, Leanings, Urges, perhaps, even “Wildings,” that have accumulated, not as a static thing, but as dynamic activities. Think of karma formations, not as a noun but as a verb. Amazingly, we, in the twenty-first century, have a metaphor to help us, at least, in conceptualizing something so mysterious. Apple has created the ICloud, where vast amounts of data from our computers and smart phones is stored. So, imagine karma formations as “Cloud,” a dynamic activity or movement from an unknowable source that enters vertically into each human mind at conception. I have no doubt that, had he waded through this essay, Carl Jung would have smiled and suggested that the Great Receiver from Cloud is none other than what he and Freud imagined as the Unconscious. Remove the “the” from unconscious and perhaps “Unconscious” is the most extraordinary verb in the English language. God knows it is endlessly active! Perhaps Joni Mitchell was a Dharma teacher as she described the metaphor of Cloud perfectly in her lyric, singing: “It’s cloud formations I recall. I really don’t know clouds at all.”
Through the pioneer work of Darwin, biologists and geneticists, we have come to understand and slowly accept the fact that every human baby inherits a genetic code, and it is no longer shocking to say that our DNA stretches back thousands of years or, even more remarkably, hundreds of thousands of years. A child will have some of the physical appearances of its mother or father, grandfather or grandmother, and it may exhibit certain similar talents or personality traits. Even at conception it may inherit psychological traits such as introversion or extroversion, and other tendencies or leanings from its genetic thread stretching back for untold generations. But Buddha’s doctrine of dependent origination posits a vertical karmic connection as well as the horizontal - biological one. He suggests a transmission of tendencies, leanings urges and wildings that can come not only from our biological ancestors but as the result of karmic energies still active from previous human minds, including the karmic merits of Saints and the destructive karma of Tyrants, and as far back as one can possibly imagine. “Karma” means “action” in the Pali language, action coming from intention. In other words, the doctrine of dependent origination adds a vertical thread of unfinished intentional action to our Western concept of horizontal reality. It points to something beyond what Western science has shown little interest in considering. Churches from a simple wood frame building to massive Cathedrals, Temples from Synagogues to Mosques all point upward. How far from vertical reality we have strayed! There are glimmers of an indication that Quantum Physics has now opened our minds to a vertical conceptualization of Reality that Buddha saw twenty six hundred years ago.
But even karmic formations, (nidana number two) depend on a previous condition! That previous condition is the first nidana which is named avijja. As mentioned earlier, avijja is the little dust in our eyes. But according to the scriptures, the dust is not necessarily little: “Some with a little dust in their eyes, and some with much dust in their eyes; with keen faculties, with weak faculties, with good qualities and with bad qualities, easy to teach and hard to teach.” (Ayacana Sutta: SN 6.1)
It is said that just as the ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt, Dharma also has but one taste, the taste of freedom.That’s really good news, isn’t it? But Reality must also include the really bad news (small wonder we do not like reality) and without a doubt, the other “taste” of Dharma is avijja. In the Pali scriptural language, avijja means delusion. It has many synonyms. Some Zen teachers call it “folly,” and some call it “stupidity.” Many teachers translate it as “ignorance.” It’s safe to say that no one would like to have much of it, but there is surely a lot of it going around! If our human consciousness is conditioned by karma formations (tendencies) from the very moment of conception, and if karmic formations, are conditioned by delusion, one might reasonably conclude “I’m screwed” which was Nanavira Thera’s conclusion, at least for those of us who have not been able to clear the path to Dharma.
I trust that you will forgive the mixed metaphor of “unscrewing” a little dust. Removing a little dust as cataracts are done surgically might seem more appropriate, but there is much we can gain in staying with Nanavira’s metaphor.
In “The Matter with Things,” Iain McGilchrist quotes an amazing passage from Evelyn Underhill.
“The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession of the conscious field, has grown strong and cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious . . . building up from a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of ‘fixed ideas’. It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end.”
I’m not sure I would have wanted Evelyn Underhill to be my mother! Using “main force” to detach our little clingy-limpet-surface-self off the rock of the obvious does not seem to include loving kindness. It’s “useless to speak kindly of it,” she says.” Never mind that being forced into the “living waters” of the sea could include dangerous currents pulling in every direction, crashing waves, torrential winds, and the greedy, gaping mouths of terrifying (and huge) animals lurking nearby. One must assume that using “main force” on our little limpet which is clinging to a rock for all it’s worth, implies that Evelyn Underhill assumed that it knows how to swim.
But it was when I read a remark by Iain McGilchrist in “The Matter with Things” that my mind remembered Nanavira’s statement. Near the end of his truly mind-opening description of the power struggle going on between the two hemisphere’s of our brain, McGilchrist almost apologetically says, “we must prize the limpet off the rock of the obvious,” and he suggests that “prizing” it off the rock is what he was attempting to do in the preceding chapters of “The Matter with Things.” “Prizing it” sounds less invasive than detaching it by main force, don’t you think? My thought was, McGilchrist surely has not read Nanavira’s “Clearing the Path.”
I know of no Buddhist scholar who understands our little clinging-frightened-surface-self-limpet as profoundly as does Nanavira Thera. And, yes, I believe that he would recognize in Underhill’s metaphor of the little limpet none other than the first nidana, avijja, which clings to its host, the human mind, like a parasite. But here’s the thing, how does one separate a parasite (delusion) from its host? “Very carefully” Nanavira would say. And with loving kindness, Buddha would add. We cannot pull it out like a nail; it is embedded far too deeply in the “body” of its host, and an unskillful, not to mention, unloving, removal could easily be psychologically disastrous. The best we can do, according to Nanavira, is unscrew it: Turn by turn, by turn. But each turn is not actually a circle, which takes us back to where we began (sadly the way so many of us have lived our lives.) Each turn of the screw is a spiral movement, and when the screw comes back to the similar position where it began, it has slightly changed in an upward direction. To use McGilchrist’s wonderful metaphor, in a spiral, we meet ourselves at each turn, but at a higher (or deeper) level. According to McGilchrist, spirals, not circles, reflect the profound process of our soul’s movement. Perhaps this is why I so love the lyrics to the Quaker Hymn “The Gift to be Simple.” “To turn, turn will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come down right.”
“So what can I do about it?” I think almost every therapist physician, meditation teacher, spiritual friend or mentor has heard that question at one time or another, when a person has finally recognized that he or she has a real problem.
“So what can I do about it?” Clearly, without recognition of a problem, nothing can ever be done. Circles do not lead to recognition. But Krishnamurti says,”You are the problem.” How tirelessly we all run from this stark diagnosis! Nanavira says that avijja is “the Judge, the Jury; and the verdict is “Guilty!” So the beginning of the journey of clearing a path to Dharma is Recognition. In a talk, I once suggested that, while brushing our teeth or combing our hair, we might look squarely into the mirror and, with humor, (definitely with humor!), kindness, compassion and acceptance, say, “hello Stupid.” If we are to change, acceptance must become a verb.
To be continued.
