The Six Worlds of Samsara, Cont.

Inevitably they are published. But it does not matter whether they make a best seller list or merely have an occasional byline in newsletters or other in-house publications. The printed acknowledgement of their erudition is proof to them that their strategy is working.

A person who does Angel Chan believes that knowing about something is the same as being something, as, knowing about grammar makes one a grammarian or knowing about snakes makes one a herpetologist, so, he reasons, knowing about the Dao makes one an Immortal. His knowledge is so precise and exhaustive that he feels justified in dismissing whatever is beyond it (the actual spiritual experience) as spurious or defective. Affecting an expression of deep insightfulness and an air of benign condescension, an Angel, who has not personally experienced so much as five minutes of true meditation, will try to present himself as an enlightened being. But if taken for anything other than window dressing, he can be spiritually dangerous. For should some poor fool (someone who does not know the ontological argument when he sees it) seek to discuss the ecstatic vision of Buddha he has just had during an hour's worth of deep samadhi, the Angel is likely to assure him that he has been hallucinating and only thinks he has had a spiritual experience. Further, he will warn the fool that such flights of imagination are quite pernicious and must be guarded against. Incredible as it seems, in Japanese Zen but not in Tibetan or Chinese, Angels have succeeded in standardizing their advice: "If while meditating you should see the Buddha, spit in his face and he will go away." Well, I guess.....

Hungry Ghost Chan. A Hungry Ghost is a person who fervently desires things that he is constitutionally unable to use. If he were to haunt a Smorgasbord to satisfy his hunger, he would discover at the very first dish that he could not consume it; but that would not deter him from haunting the second dish and then the third and so on. In looking for a cause of his failure to ingest the food, he would never investigate himself. He would simply fault the recipe, ingredients or chef and flutter on to the next offering. This type of person is often depicted as having a belly that is swollen with cravings and a neck too narrow to allow satisfaction to pass.

Just as a numismatist may possess a thousand coins none of which he can use to buy a morning paper or a philatelist may possess a thousand stamps none of which he can stick on his mortgage payment, so, in Chan, the Hungry Ghost collects techniques for achieving exalted states of consciousness none of which has ever served to raise his own one centimeter above its present notch.

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