Plotinus and Zen

“(Plotinus) builds the soul a fairy palace. Enchanted, you follow him through the lovely labyrinthine structure; you mount, breathless, by successive stairways of the spirit, each more pure, more tenuous, more aspiring than the last – but sooner or later comes a time when you ask yourself where the WC is”

Thus wrote Stephen Mac Kenna, the Irish scholar and translator, of the Enneads of Plotinus, the great (neo) Platonist philosopher and mystic.

Reading the Enneads again, which I am currently in the process of, I can see his point well enough! When I first encountered the work, I was coming from a period of immersion in Advaita Vedanta theosophy and found Plotinus’s description of a tiered reality wherein a super-existent One radiated downwards through the world of the mind into the soul which thence animated and perceived itself in the sensible world (what is usually called the material universe) both incredibly profound and excessively attractive to my admittedly rather “geometrical” and visual way of understanding things. My countryman did the world a great service with his beautiful translation (I don’t hold with any of the, now popular, identity politics, including the so-called national identity variety. I think it’s vacuous and intentionally misleading, however just citing a coincidence of facts, Irish philosophers do seem to have quite a few Platonists or Platonist adjacents – Eriugena, Berkeley, Toland, Dillon- among their number).

One can see in the Enneads a Hellenistic parallel to certain of the Upanishads (Mandukya and Mundaka). It’s a textual yoga, or meditation manual for the return of the scattered consciousness inwards and thence to an ascent through contemplation towards the ultimate reality which can only be encountered through experience and which itself defies verbal description. Even to say of the One that it is one (in fact, even to say it is) is to merely approximate through objectifying language that which is beyond words.

When I encountered Zen though, and it’s considerable body of adjacent philosophy, I abandoned the loftiness and visionary majesty of the Vedanta – Plotinian way, not because I thought or think it wrong (quite the opposite) but that, like Mac Kenna, I found it too rarefied and ‘pure’ for my consciousness, shaped as it has been by a series of painful circumstances.  But Zen and Plotinus are not mutually contradictory -being expressions of the same truth – as I believe all genuine spiritual traditions are.

What both reveal is that “surface consciousness is only one of several levels of awareness” as R.T Wallis says of Plotinus’s philosophy. The aim, or telos , of both is to return to the real Self which in Plotinus is the Nous, or intellect, in Zen, the Buddha-nature. And a, or perhaps the, stumbling block in the way of this return is the ego, the Cartesian cogito ergo sum.

The difference of approaches may be considerable in terms of aesthetics and practice on a very material level, but essentially it’s all about withdrawing from belief in the multiplicities and dualities and thus splintered identities of the world of convention. While Plotinus makes a rather grandiose inner ascent through dialectical thinking, on to contemplation beyond discursive thinking and towards a visionary state, Zen, in earthy fashion goes about this by looking right at the illusion of the ego-world duality and seeing it as such.

The ego, as a subjective phenomenon, according to Nishitani Keiji, the Kyoto school (Zen influenced) philosopher, cannot be reduced to anything that appears objectively, since both subject and object presuppose each other and can never appear separately. Therefore, we cannot say of the thinking subject that it “springs from the organism” as Schopenhauer had it (not that Schopenhauer was far away from seeing the truth as Keiji saw it; it just a case I think of emphasis in detail). Rather the ground of the subjective consciousness, including it’s phenomenon of the ego, as well as that of the objective world as it appears to the subjective consciousness, must be neither subjective nor objective, but a unified reality, or reality as a unity, where all subject/object cleavage, and so, where all dualities and contradictions are dissolved. In Schopenhauer’s terms then, we should say that the thinking subject and the organism are co-immanent and appear as mutually conditioning aspects of the same phenomenal nature.

Since the world as it appears to us (including the appearance of our ‘selves’ as locii of individuated consciousness) is conditioned by the functions of the senses and the brain, of which time and space – and so, plurality – are among the most immediate – the true reality, the noumenon, must be outside of these conditions which our brains impose. Outside, yet in a sense, enveloping all.

So whether the method is the ‘down to earth’ realising of the illusory nature of the world and the ego (and practicing to actually see through it) of Zen, or the inner ascent of the soul, withdrawing from the surface world towards the One, which emanates as Nous/Intellect Divine Mind of the Forms, which is our true home and from which all that we normally consider of the world and our self is suspended, the project is essentially the same.