Finally out of reach-
No bondage, no dependency.
How calm the ocean,
Towering the void.
–Zen poem
There was something formless and perfect
Before the universe was born.
–Tao te Ching
My immediate reaction upon arriving in India was, “This is chaos.” There was no predictability to sensory experience. Bodh Gaya is a pilgrimage town much like any other in India—roads congested with bicycle rickshaws, motorcycles, cows and pedestrians, a layer of dust covering everything. Having lived in a Buddhist monastery here in North-east India for three months, I have become increasingly aware of and fascinated by the relationship between chaos and order and the roles they play in our understanding of the world.
Each individual attempts to bring order to his or her world in some way: to categorize knowledge and to make sense of experience. We each assume a basic ontology, a means of naming and understanding what exists. This is usually achieved using empirical information—but how do chaos and order help or hinder this process? Often people create stability for themselves through a personal faith. Religion is a lens through which experience can be filtered and comprehended. By viewing my recent travels in India and Japan through a Buddhist lens I can now understand what the writer G.K. Chesterton meant when he wrote that “the poet delights in disorder only.” Before these experiences in Asia I was certain that order should be the more remarkable for being the rarer state of affairs.
Prior to the scientific discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton the cosmos was perceived to be an essentially unpredictable place in which events occurred at random. With Newton’s work it became apparent that some phenomena of the world are not only explainable, but also predictable. Such predictions introduce the possibility of a mathematically objective truth, of intrinsic laws of nature that govern the physical world. However, such a notion of scientific predictability seems incongruent with human behavior and the perception of free will.
According to Buddhist tradition, all beings are caught in the chaos of samsara: the cyclical process of death and rebirth, which is characterized by suffering. The soteriological (liberating) goal of Buddhism is to reach nirvana—the cessation of desire, ignorance and hatred. So it would seem that order is then the ultimately “natural” condition of the world, it is just obscured by defilements such as ignorance. Samsara is utter chaos, a churning sea of conditioned, impermanent appearances, the products of an unenlightened, misinformed mind. Order is the natural state of perfect calm, the still ocean that, despite all of the samsaric chaos on its surface, is never disturbed in any profound way. Order is therefore the way of things, although it also clearly provides a basis for all of the agitation on the surface. That life is suffering is the first of the Four Noble Truths that are central to Buddhism, as are a number of practices (most notably meditation practices) that aim to eradicate desire in the individual.
As a crucial part of their morning meditation rituals the monks in the monastery sweep the courtyards and balconies, dirt and dust building up in neat piles all over the monastic complex. I often wondered what drives them to do this every day, when the dust never ceases to resettle, when it cannot be controlled. But this is one of the strongest tools that Buddhism offers for realizing enlightenment in a cluttered and apparently unpredictable world—chaos is predictable, and it can be transcended. Many Buddhist schools consider the world as we know it to exist only of appearances. The mind-only school of Buddhism posits that nothing exists independently of the mind. There is no duality: no self and no other. Everything exists in unity. Thus the dualistic states of chaos and order do not exist, but are rather tools that can be utilized in order to more fully realize the truth of interdependent existence. Yet rather than scrap completely terms such as “chaos” and “order”, the Buddhist will enter himself fully into these states in order to unite them and therefore rid his mind of dualistic concepts. My daily practice of Vipassana, insight meditation, trained my mind to be more aware of the manner in which all things appear and disappear. There were days that left me unsure of whether I was going insane or reaching enlightenment, as at times even the most hectic elements of Indian life would seem empty of substance.
The Ancient Greek definition of chaos is “gaping void”, a designation that is compatible with Buddhist scripture. A key Buddhist teaching, the Heart Sutra, posits the following: Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form; emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness. Vipassana encourages the ordering of the mind and the regulation of thoughts, the development of ‘”full awareness”. This involves letting go of one’s thoughts and perceptions, thus ceasing to view them as concrete or unchanging.
After having lived in India I spent some time on a Zen retreat at a temple in Kōya-san in the Kansai region of Japan. This non-duality is also emphasized in the Zen Buddhism of Japan, which teaches that before something happens to disturb the realm of calmness we do not feel the calmness: it is only when something happens that we find the calmness. Zen Buddhists cherish such disturbances, as they allow them to better understand complete calmness. Zen claims that each and every individual is already enlightened—we are born with “Buddha mind” and need only to acknowledge it—as the Zen saying goes: “Clear light will come to recognize its own face.” In Zen the emphasis is placed on bringing Zazen—its form of meditation—into everything one does. Initially I was incredibly frustrated with Zen, as I would ask “What is Zazen?” and my teacher would reply: “Zen is order, Zen is the process of gaining the greatest amount of control over the mind by giving it the greatest possible space in which to roam.” But how does one go about this? I was instructed to sit with a straight back, my hands held against my abdomen, and to maintain this position for the duration of the meditation. The idea is that by bringing structure to the body one can bring order to everything in and around it, a contrasting tradition to the mind-orientated practice of Vipassana. A greater contrast than with the culture of India could not be found. During my weeks in Japan I observed how a Zen mentality pervades the land, defining and giving structure to the way in which the Japanese lead their lives.
For a train to be late in Japan is out of the ordinary and cause for concern; for a train to be on time in India is a miracle (and almost unheard of). It is no overstatement to say that everything runs like clockwork in Japan; the country seems to be unnaturally clean. However, is this only because I have spent so much time in a place that is perhaps unnaturally dirty? Can order exist without chaos to oppose and thus define it? How can Buddhism exist and even flourish in two countries with such different traditions and values? Meditation is of utmost importance to all practicing Buddhists regardless of background and nationality, but methods of meditation vary greatly. Meditation encourages one to “bring everything on to the path”—that is, not to overlook or ignore one’s environment but to use it in order to further one’s spiritual development. Meditation brings order to chaos through insight, mindfulness and discipline.
I have certainly found meditation fascinating as well as useful, and have been interested in exploring its many forms. Even if the dualistic concepts of chaos and order do not exist to the enlightened mind, the apparent chaos that was a consistent theme of my life in India gave me something on which to focus my meditative energies. Likewise, in the order of Japan I was more able to pinpoint the disorder within me, lurking in the recesses of my mind. But rather than fight to dispel such disorder, I have learned to delight in it—it seems real but it is not. I now see chaos and order as tools that can be used in meditation to bring everything together to form a single whole: one united consciousness that shall one day come to recognize its own enlightenment. If disorder did not occur we would be at a loss, unable to appreciate with such profundity the depths of the calm ocean, troubled only on the surface but ultimately still.
