Hubert Benoit, like several ancient Presocratic Greek philosophers and other thinkers before him, was a philosopher dedicated to the study of reality in its totality. Often such thinkers who study the totality of what is choose to conduct such a study through a single aspect of reality. The Greeks used, among other things, Logos or philosophic atoms. Modern physicists often use forces (messenger particles) and subatomic particles. The Greek atomist Democritus, used the "interplay" of nonbeing and "Parmenidean atoms". For some modern mathematicians, the fractal, the ultrafilter, or topology is used. In many ways, these areas overlap one another. Mental reality itself is an entity that can be adopted for the study of reality in its totality, and it is the entity Benoit used to study the totality of what is. To Benoit, the mind is—at first glance—merely another entity within the whole of nature: a system within and closed off from the universe (an atomic or material system within a larger atomic or material system). Benoit, in Zen and the Psychology of Transformation page 19, discusses that individual person is accurately observed when considered as part of the overall concatenation of nature. This perspective reveals that the person is little more than an infinitesimal flash, an insignificant and fleeting form of nature. This model—that a human exists within, but allegedly distinct from, the titanic causal chain—vanishes, however, from the view of what Benoit calls the informal, and upon one's undertaking of Zen practice, as outlined by Benoit. The metaphysics of causation and individual objects are replaced by a metaphysics of presentism, metaphysical nihilism (the position that there are no individual objects, a position sometimes associated with the Indian concepts of Sāksin or Brahman), ineffable feeling, and perhaps egolessness (i.e. no-self). Benoit's vehicle for investigating the mind—and therefore morphology of reality—was not biology, math, psychology, or physics—which are all concerned with the (alleged) separateness of so-called individual from the causal series—but rather Ch'an Buddhism, an early form of Zen Buddhism. Upon being trained with this technique called Ch'an, one finds that the forms of nature are not reality, and what reality really is, is what Benoit calls "the in-formal" (but which could be called the non-formal, or attribute-less, or some might permit the label of Brahman). (Interestingly, many atomists of the past and present, also hold that such objects of everyday experience do not exist, and rather what exists is just one class of items: one class of atoms that are indistinguishable from one another except for their being at different locations.) Discovery of the ineffable in-formal nature of reality, and of the vacuousness of formal reality, is the metaphysical conclusion of Zen philosophy.[1] It is the realization that follows when one studies reality-as-a-whole by way of the vehicle of phenomenology.   

It is very important to note that Benoit's work and writing, which stems from Hui Neng, has nearly nothing to do with the popular, mostly degenerate forms of Buddhism, commonly known as "American Zen" or "Western Buddhism," which are popular in the New Age Movement. Unlike such religions, the philosophy of Ch'an is unconcerned with happiness, existence, society, friendship with those of similar interests, and Ch'an does not involve the existence of a creator God (or any sort of divine entity), or with spiritual forces, oneness, the alleged interconnectedness of all things, or the so-called "chi". Ch'an, perhaps the original form of Zen, is nearly unrecognizable to the rest of the contemporary, socially-oriented varieties of Buddhist popular in the Western world today. Benoit's work is quite special in that it is impervious to the modern religious Buddhisms, and Benoit's writing is concerned with the experiential aspects and sources of original Ch'an (Zen) philosophy.

Ch'an, in its ancient form, is bent on enlightenment. Yet ancient Ch'an philosophers told us that enlightenment does not exist. Prima facie, contradictions such as this abound in Ch'an; and to the outsider, initially, Ch'an will appear to be a wholly nihilistic, anti-social philosophy replete with allegorical tales of violence and destructive insanity, self-mutilation and self-torment, and monks lambasting each other even to the point of death. These elements are of no consequence to the serious student of Ch'an.

Jeffrey Grupp, 2003

Comparative Religion, Western Michigan University

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