Question
The strongest, most reliable, strongest, most lasting bond I have had in this world was with an animal. Today this being is no more. Others too, humans in particular, have ceased to live around me, but they left, eventually "drifted away." For him, still in one way, and for me, still in another, time no longer passes. It is in the anguishing light of painful moments that we sometimes acquire an understanding of what zazen is: this turning of the light inward, this entering the coffin, this particular silence that leaves happy and unhappy things at the same distance. As for my departed friend, in my memory he seems to blend the brightest moments with the darkest. There is only a step from one thing to its opposite. So for a long time, I have sometimes searched this mondo for remarks about animals, but I am always disappointed. In fact, I almost know all those questions and answers by heart.
So once again I retraced the path. "Certainly, what distinguishes human beings from animals is the awareness of being." This is a view that tells us humans are not like animals. But from this viewpoint, are all animals, from amoebas to whales, the same? And what distinguishes all human beings from one another?... No, that is not the question I intuitively sense within myself, the one addressed to the Zen master. That is food for a university hallway discussion. A kind of joke, like "A psychiatrist, a philosopher, and a sociologist walk into a brothel..."
"But this consciousness unique to humans is a double-edged sword. It becomes harmful and turns against them if they cannot awaken to their true calling as human beings." At first glance, that is rather Freudian: the neurotic conflict between the id and the superego expressed in metaphysical language. A question comes to mind: Why would this consciousness become harmful? How would being able to awaken to one's true calling as a Human Being make this distinctive consciousness turn against oneself? Why wouldn't being unable to awaken to one's true calling as a Human Being allow the human species to live its life as a species until, through extinction or successive mutations, it ceased to be human and became another species? In this impermanent world, could we be immortal and eternal, if not as individuals, then as a species?... No, that is the neurotic version of the connection between the life drive and the death drive, and I still don't feel I have reached the question I sense pushing within me. (There is clearly no getting away from drives.)
Among the mondos, there is the guy who trains dogs, and he is troubled by the constraint: that constraining an animal could be an obstacle to his spiritual life. Besides the fact that, as you say in another mondo, doubt can help us grow as much as faith, we can ask what the animal's reason for existing is. Is it to serve me as food, a tool, a toy, entertainment, cheap labor? Why does it exist? And the human being, what is their reason for existing? Is it to serve as food, a tool, a toy, entertainment, cheap labor? Why do they exist? Here too, are all those in the same camp alike? Before the fundamental, there is the sensory, the particular, experience in reality, right? That is where we must build our house, not on sand, much less on smoke.
Then there is the question not of why humans exist or why animals exist, but of their destiny, their calling, where their respective slopes (identical or different, who knows...) lead them (upward or downward on the same path?).
That was when the light appeared (so to speak), all at once, as always. The question that gives me the feeling of discovery, the signal I have learned to recognize, is this:
It is not about distinguishing animality from humanity, nor the calling of one from the other. All these mondos present the following question: In Zen, what does it mean for an individual (human or otherwise) to encounter another, whoever that other may be, human or nonhuman? That is the question, MY question, which I address to the Zen master Kosen.
Have a good day!
....... Gassho. (Machin)
machin
Answer from Master Kosen
For an individual to encounter another, whoever that other may be (human or nonhuman), is simply the opening of their heart—"shin" in Japanese, also translated as "mind."
Opening the heart means accessing the universal consciousness that has existed since the creation of the universe, which is precisely this encounter with mind, expressed as love. It is God meeting God, and God has always been love and always will be.
Kosen