Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.

A couple of weeks ago, when we discussed the Hindu concept of Moksha, students in the class asked a series of good questions: How can we achieve Moksha? Who can judge one has already achieved Moksha? What shall we do if we do achieve Moksha? As we know, “Moksha” is the religious goal of ancient Hinduism, a goal of final release from the suffering cycle of reincarnation into another divine realm of being, which is thought of by the Upanishads as being achievable via one’s ascetic practice in the forest, and by the Bhagavad Gita as being achievable via fulfilling one’s social duty in an inner state of pure equanimity. In tandem, these texts also give us many beautiful descriptions about how one feels when “Moksha” is achieved. Words such as non-duality, union, equanimity, peace, joy, non-attachment are all used for the descriptions. Using these descriptions, together with some guidance from one’s spiritual mentor such as those Hindu gurus, one can confirm whether and to what extent one has achieved Moksha. Nevertheless, among all the asked questions, we cannot find a clear and easy answer from the texts to the last one: what shall we do if we can safely claim we do achieve Moksha (at least to a certain extent) ?

Interestingly, you can actually replace “Moksha” with any other religious goal envisioned by other religious traditions, ask the same questions, and then, you will find the asked questions actually have addressed a common and crucial aspect of human religious life across virtually all traditions.

For instance, if we replace “Moksha” with “Salvation,” we will find a Christian may be struggled with how she can make sure she will achieve salvation, at least to a certain extent, in this or afterlife, and what she should do if she does make sure of achieving it. The same can be said to the Buddhist goal of “nirvana,” the Ruist/Confucian goal of “obtaining one’s conscientious awareness,” and the Daoist goal of “achieving immortality,” etc. In a word, all major traditions are struggling with understanding a cluster of questions surrounding the tension of “ideal” vs “reality” that is so tangible to one’s spiritual life on a daily basis.

To indicate my general view on this issue, let’s use the two competitive poems written respectively by the founders of the Northern and Southern schools of the Chinese Chan Buddhism, Shen Xiu (606-706 C.E.) and Hui Neng (638-713 C.E.), as an illuminating example.

Shen Xiu was a very educated monk, who was versed in ancient Chinese and Buddhist texts from a very young age, and he was therefore acclaimed by his peers as the most probable person to become the Sixth Patriarch of the Chan school. To prove he had achieved the Buddhist enlightenment and thus compete for the recognition of the Fifth Patriarch as the legitimate heir, Shen Xiu writes:

The body is the bodhi tree
The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand.
At all times we must strive to polish it
and must not let dust collect.

In contrast, Hui Neng was illiterate and could not write any single word when he was put into a position by the Fifth Patriarch to grind rice in the monastery. Hearing what Shen Xiu wrote, Hui Neng responded that:

Bodhi originally has no tree.
The bright mirror also has no stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing.
Where could dust arise?

According to the legend recorded by the Platform Sutra, one canonical text of Chinese Chan Buddhism, Hui Neng was confirmed as the really enlightened human being, and he thus inherited the lineage of Chan and became the sixth Patriarch.

So, let’s ask the aforementioned three questions to these two poets, and see which one answers each of them well.

For Shen Xiu, one reaches enlightenment, which is the Buddhist religious goal of being aware of the true reality called “sunyata” (emptiness), through the so-called “gradual realization”: you need to do all sorts of daily practices and disciplines to rid of all dusts on your originally bright Buddha nature; if you continually do so, one day, you will eventually get there. However, for Hui Neng, the spiritual state of being aware of Sunyata is all encompassing. Since Sunyata refers to the interconnection of all beings in the universe, it has its potential “infinite” quality as well. Understood as such, no matter how hard we discipline ourselves according to the method suggested by Shen Xiu, the accumulation of finite means cannot lead to an infinite enlightenment. Therefore, Hui Neng’s poem essentially tells us that all means, though alleged as being able to lead to enlightenment, are by no means the condition of the enlightenment. They are best thought of as a certain kind of “trigger” or “stimulus,” rather than “premise,” and the genuine foundation for one to achieve enlightenment is that our bright Buddha nature is originally and already there. As Hui Neng’s poem says, there is originally no single thing to be attached to, and no dust can blur the original Buddha nature. Therefore, in reliance upon the so-called “sudden” enlightenment, one can achieve her religious goal in any place at any time while getting triggered by any circumstance.

So, for the first question, how can one achieve enlightenment, Hui Neng seems to have given a better answer.

Secondly, who can tell whether one has achieved enlightenment? In the legend, it was the Fifth Patriarch, Hong Ren, who discerned the more enlightened state of Hui Neng from the different poems, and this tells us that only enlightened humans can discern enlightened ones. However, the poems themselves do not address this question, and we can use our best to judge that Shen Xiu’s and Hui Neng’s poems get a tie under this question. The discernment provided by the Fifth Patriarch also speaks to one notable characteristic of Chan Buddhism: the state of enlightenment is deeply experiential, and ultimately beyond any human language can describe. Therefore, the handing-over of Buddhist teaching among generations will mainly rely upon a method called the heart-to-heart transmission, which at least contains two components: a practitioner needs to “get” the Buddhist teaching into her heart by herself at first; and then, she can seek convenient and practical means to inspire other practitioners also to “get” there by themselves. What gets transmitted eventually is not any reified form of Buddhist teachings in any material evidence such as words. Instead, it is the experience of the genuine reality of the world in reliance upon the rediscovery of one’s originally bright Buddha nature.

Finally, what shall we do once we achieve the enlightenment? I have to say, in my view, Shen Xiu’s poem is much better than Hui Neng’s to answer this question. If we more realistically evaluate the everyday condition of human living, we would find that even if we can claim to reach that enlightened state of experiencing something that is infinite, we cannot be so confident to aver that there is a possibility for ordinary human beings to stay in the same state forever. Human life is deeply ambiguous and changing: one enlightened state at one moment may be conducive to ignorance and obscurity at the next, and one seeming setback may be just a sign of another triumph. So, it may be true that we can achieve our religious goal, at least to a certain extent, at a certain moment of our life as it is triggered by a variety of factors, but we still need to diligently do something to maintain that enlightened state. Hui Neng’s poem tells us very little about how to maintain it, while Sheng Xiu’s says that in order to keep our awareness of our originally bright Buddha nature, we need to “strive to polish it and must not let dust collect,” which, in my view, makes a lot of sense.

Therefore, since Shen Xiu and Hui Neng are eventually on a tie regarding their competitive answers to the three important questions, if I am the Fifth Patriarch, I would not just simply appoint Hui Neng as my heir. I may need to wait for some time to see whether they, or a third person, can write a better poem to incorporate the insights from both sides.

In general, my own view on the tension of ideal vs reality in religious matters can be summarized as follows: In order to live a good spiritual human life, we need to balance the two aspects of ideal vs reality in any adopted spiritual lifestyle. On the one hand, we need a goal that can be so sublime that no real human situation can ever fully capture it. In this way, the goal will continually motivate ourselves to better ourselves so that our life never lacks its momentum to move forward. However, the so-envisioned spiritual goal cannot be so high and ethereal that no actual human effort can capture it in any substantial way. In other words, we need some methods, such as meditation, ritual performance, daily human interaction, etc., to taste the sweetness of the spiritual goal to a certain extent in real moments of human life. In this way, the spiritual goal would not have been made completely out of human reach, because otherwise, what is the point for us to practice religion or spirituality at all? However, given the first condition about the sublimity of a spiritual goal, whenever we feel we get there and hence have good reasons to believe that we enjoy the realization of the goal to a certain extent, we also need to constantly remind ourselves that this is a just partial and momentary realization, which is by no means the full manifestation of the ideal in reality. So, eventually, the spiritual state of a human being who has reached the desirable balance would be like this: she would constantly discipline herself to realize her spiritual goal in real life; however, whenever she reaches it, she would tell herself: yes, I realize you, at least to a certain extent, but I just want more.

(A more elaborated discussion of mine on this topic of religious goal vs realities can be checked via my essay on “perfectionism.”)