The word “kensho”, like so many Japanese words, is a compound of two Chinese characters, meaning “see” (ken) and “nature” (sho), as in “see the nature of things”. So to have a kensho experience means to see into your own essential nature, to see who and what you really are. To do so is to see that you and the entire universe are one; you yourself are mountains, rivers and stars.
The corollary of this condition of being one with the universe is that what we normally take to be the substantial, concrete “reality” of myriads of separate phenomena in an objective world of time and space, all confronting “me” as a subjective ego: all of that is an illusion, or at least only the surface layer of reality, what the Japanese call ukiyo, “the floating world”, like a reflection on the surface of a pond. It’s real in a sense, but unreal in that there is a Fundamental Reality that underlies it and that is beyond time and space. As it is beyond time and space we call it “nothing” or “empty”. To have kensho is to experience this as your own underlying Reality.
So… why should we want to experience kensho if to do so is to experience oneself as “nothing”? Who would want to be nothing?
Apart from the pure, existential answer to this question, that is, the experience of kensho itself, the key to addressing this fear conceptually lies in the Heart Sutra’s “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.”
By form, we’re not talking about abstractions. We mean your everyday world: the world of cats and couches, walls, trees, laughter and tears. These themselves are emptiness itself. It’s as if at the heart of the universe there were a great bell, and everything that we see, hear, feel, taste, touch, think — all space and time — were just the ringing reverberations of that great bell, ringing with pure joy in the fundamental reality that transcends being and nothingness. It’s this that we’re calling “nothing” and “empty”. How totally inadequate! How utterly misleading! On attaining kensho, Sr. Elaine McInnis exclaimed, “It’s alive! And it’s sacred!”. And again, “That’s not ’empty’; that’s Full!”
This is our essential nature, our miraculous heritage. As Mumon asks in his instructions on Mu, who would not want to experience this wonderful joy?
What stands in the way of our claiming it? The answer, in short, is our ego delusion, that is, the delusion that our ego, our “I”, is a permanent entity, separate from and in opposition to the rest of the universe, a subject confronting an objective world.
The ego has been called by some, “the false self”. As I’ve said before, I object to this term, as it suggests that the ego is somehow bad, or not real, and that’s not so. The ego has its own reality. It is crucial for navigating this world. The problem is that in our delusion we take the ego as our fundamental self, and its subjective opposition to an objective world to be the last word on reality.
When we think about it we know intellectually that this can’t be true, that what we call “I” is really a construct of ideas, images, concepts, memories, emotions, likes and dislikes, and not a permanent and separate entity, but our unquestioned identification with it as our “self” is so deeply rooted that we cling to it, feeling that to lose it is to die, and so we live with the constant tension between the reality that we intuit and the delusion that we cling to, fearing to let go. It’s this tension that we call dukkha, or suffering.
The thing is, in kensho we don’t lose anything except delusion. Rather than lose the ego, we see through it. We’re suddenly struck with the realization that something and nothing are the same thing, that the “vast and void” that Bodhidharma spoke of is nothing but this world: the couch in the living room, the patch of sun on the carpet, the rain on the roof, newspapers blown down the street from a neighbour’s blue box, the doll that you loved as a kid. Nothing at all is lost except the delusion that these are all separate from us.
Again, “It’s alive, and it’s sacred.”
The realization of this reality in a kensho experience is not at all uncommon. Through a variety of religious practices — meditation for us, prayer for the Christian mystics, dance for the Sufis — millions have come to this experience to one degree or another.
We can too.
Finally, what is the relation of kensho to “satori”, or to “enlightenment”? “Satori”, as a term meaning sudden enlightenment, has had a lot of currency in the West, to the point that it has been adopted into our languages. With usage in English it has developed a grander, broader meaning than the word, “kensho”, which is why among Zen practitioners the preference is to use the latter term as being more specific, more realistic, and more down to earth. As I’ve said in a previous talk, the term, “enlightenment”, while it’s often used in translations of Zen literature as an equivalent for a profound kensho experience, is in my opinion better reserved for how and to what degree we bring our experience of essential nature into our lives following a kensho. The koan curriculum that follows kensho is intended not only to deepen one’s experience, but also to impress upon us the importance of making it the foundation of our lives, i.e. the importance of living an enlightened life.
Is it possible to lead an enlightened life without kensho? As the term is used broadly in English, the answer would have to be yes. We speak of the Age of Enlightenment, and of wise individuals as being enlightened. As for our context, the context of Zen Buddhism, I think that all of us practitioners, whether we’ve had a kensho or not, are on the road to living an enlightened life, the life of a bodhisattva or a buddha, and it’s pretty clear that we often begin to experience and express in our lives the fruits of our Zen practice and the characteristics of that life well before we arrive at kensho: fruits such as a calmer spirit, greater openness, loving kindness and generosity, a firmer sense of one’s self, greater confidence, and so on, and these developing qualities of character have in time a discernable effect on the world around us. Kensho can be considered a particularly important step on this road, and the foundation of further steps on the way to what Yamada Kôun Roshi called “the perfection of character”, bodhisattva-hood. When we study koans, reading the exchanges of Zen masters of old, we are catching glimpses of figures well ahead of us on exactly the same road.
