Tracking Bodhidharma by Andy Ferguson

part of the “self” that is thought to exist in our body, or “other,” things that are outside of us. Naturally, our biological evolution demanded that we recognize what needed to be preserved and protected so procreation could happen. The teaching here is that the division between the “self” and “other” is, despite our attachment to it, a fiction created by our brain. At this point I won’t go into all the ramifications or a detailed explanation of this. Traditionally, Zen regards meditation as the main way for people to see and understand this “nature,” the mind.
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    FIGURE 8. Buddha Hall Typical Layout.

    Of course, the idea that the “self” is a fiction created by our brains is not at all unique to Buddhist thinking. Innumerable religious books and figures, plus countless philosophers of East and West, have taught this idea for a very long time. For example, in a college philosophy class, I studied a book by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre entitled The
Transcendence of the Ego. In the book Sartre argued that the ego was a creation of the brain’s flowing consciousness. He said individuals are deluded into believing in the self by looking back on their stream of consciousness and projecting the existence of an “ego” onto the stored sensory data. Perhaps the most famous expounder of this idea in the West was the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who brilliantly expounded this idea in his Treatise on Human Nature in the eighteenth century. But while many other religions and philosophical schools have talked about the illusory nature of the “self,” it’s probably the Buddhists who, over many centuries, have refined and defined this point of view most carefully and, in the case of Zen, most metaphorically and poetically.
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    FIGURE 9. Dharma Hall Typical Layout.

THE DHARMA HALL: THE “PERFECTED NATURE” OF CONSCIOUSNESS
    The third main hall of the traditional Zen temple, lying behind the Buddha Hall, is the Dharma Hall. The Dharma can be translated as the “Law,” which broadly means both Buddhist teachings and the underlying moral component of life, the nature of the “wheel of birth and death.” This hall symbolizes the third “nature” of conscious activity, the “Perfected True Nature” (Sanskrit: Parinispanna ).This refers to normal consciousness that, having understood the “dependent co-arising nature” taught in the Buddha Hall, is no longer overly attached to ideas of an inherent “self” and “other.”
    In the Dharma Hall, there were typically no statues or symbols of devotion. In this hall of Zen’s highest teaching, it’s the nature of one’s own mind that is honored, not outward symbols of religiosity. This
absence of symbols or icons is connected to the idea of signlessness, an important idea that underlies Zen Buddhism. It equates Zen with people’s “ordinary mind,” the mind that doesn’t seek any salvation beyond what is revealed by examining one’s “self.”
    The founding myth of the Zen tradition is a story of the Buddha giving a teaching at a place called Vulture Peak in ancient India. What the Buddha said emphasizes the importance of the “signless” idea very clearly. According to the story, the Buddha held up a flower before his followers and said, “I have the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the sublime mind of nirvana, whose true sign is signlessness, the sublime Dharma Gate, which without words or phrases, is transmitted outside of the [standard] teachings, and which I bestow upon Mahakasyapa.” Mahakasyapa was Buddha’s disciple credited with understanding this teaching by the Buddha, where an upheld flower was the “signless” symbol of the teaching. I translate the Chinese wu xiang used in this and other Zen passages as “signless” instead of the more