Emperor Wu of Liang asked Bodhidharma, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching?” Bodhidharma said, “Really empty, nothing holy.”
The Emperor said, “Who is this accosting me?”
Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know.” The Emperor could not reach accord.
Bodhidharma then crossed the river and went on to the kingdom of Wei.
(Blue Cliff Record Case 1)1
Do you wrestle with the business of being human, doing the right thing, looking for truth or transcendence? I think I have failed miserably in this endeavor. Of course, that’s the old familiar voice of the inner critic speaking. It served a purpose when I was younger and couldn’t afford to offend the powers that be. But now? I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m old, and I’m not going to learn much by continuing in my accustomed patterns. The original function of following the voice of the critic was to avoid punishment. But these days, following the old rules makes me experience more discomfort than ever. So I’ve set about a sort of archaeological dig for the truth of my experience.
Once I discover the rules I have lived by, shall I throw them away, or turn away from them? Well, that’s why we practice, isn’t it? The practice both presents the possibility of change and protects us from transgression. This edge between knowing and not knowing, between trying to be in control and do the right thing and putting it all on hold to ask what “the right thing” means to me, since I don’t have a clue—is a perilous edge. Sooner or later in our practice here, we reach a moment when we sense the impossibility of it, sense that we are failing. That’s when questions will serve us well.
For example, I hear, in the voice of the critic, “You have failed miserably in your search for transcendence.” “You have failed” is a judgment, spoken as though by an impartial observer embodying some kind of maturity or experience. I tend to hear it in my father’s voice. But my father is no longer alive. So what is this statement? An imagining of my mind, verbalizing something I’m feeling. Oh, wait—so there is a feeling? Well, your dad isn’t here, you heard the phrase in his voice, which is just an old habit. Is there anything else going on?
The only other thing in me, deep in the body, is this sensation that shows up when I sense “failure.” And I habitually ignore it. It feels dangerous. But this is all habit. Since it originates in my history, my brain and body, I can question it, examine it, look at it differently. This is exactly the business of meditation, the business of discerning truth from falsehood and delusion. And significantly (for me, anyway), my father is no longer here to fear. So, what is this experience, this sensation before words? I reach inside, opening to whatever is there. I’d say it is fear. Let’s try that on for size . . . Yup, fear. If I attend to it, it tells me there is danger on every side, and that there is no escape, though there is a strong impulse to run. I generally ignore that impulse—where would I run to? The impossibility of escape from my dad led me to ignore this warning. I had to work around it. Imagine! Loads of adrenaline have shot through my body and were ignored whenever I experienced criticism. Not terribly healthy. If I dare to observe now, it seems I usually choose the option to freeze when I am afraid. At least, in interactions with my father, or people like him. Later, I learned to ignore the fear of criticism when it showed up, as though my internal advisor said, “Oh yeah, that. It’s not important. What is important is keeping things on an even keel. Distract yourself, attend to something else. Wait for the danger to pass.” I became so good at this that it generalized: all feelings were mostly ignored. So I didn’t really know the experiential difference between “what’s not important” and what was important. Threatening situations were kept at arm’s length, and if a feeling wasn’t fear, it didn’t need my attention, even the attention of the deliberate ignoring of fear. I also did not attend to positive feelings—instead, looking for what people around me expected, and reporting that as my feeling. Note that I thereby lost the ability to know or attend to my own reactions at all. Further, I had to inhibit objections to the utter falsehood of my statements. My truest reports were “I don’t know.” However, this is not Bodhidharma’s “don’t know,” but almost a true statement of my mental activity: “It’s what I do: I don’t-know.”
While pursuing this inquiry I recently had the opportunity to consult my feelings about going to kettlebell class while experiencing an uncomfortable amount of lower back and leg pain. And despite a lifetime of cautious behavior, I decided to go, promising that if the pain acted up, I would just stop and go home. After class, where I had participated fully (though with lighter weights) for the first time in a year, I looked for feelings again. (This had to be done deliberately, since as I’ve said, I habitually close off access to feelings.) To my surprise, I noticed that in the presence of random passing thoughts about a garden project I had planned, I felt something: that project would be fun and I looked forward to doing it! I thought there would be negative judgments about excess physical activity, anticipation of the next day’s pain, the usual boring stuff. But no, I’m happy to say, there was none of the usual self-criticism. This self-criticism is one of the annoying things about me. Though it has no doubt saved me through exposure from some of the pain of other people’s criticism, it has turned into a prominent, unwelcome feature of my mental space.
In an excerpt from his book Zen in the Vernacular Peter Coyote observes this:
. . . all our known characteristics, obstacles, and impulses, which we might not appreciate about ourselves—shyness, second-guessing, self-doubt, longing, aggression, habits, and learned responses that we duck responsibility for—are not permanently fixed anywhere in our bodies or psyches. The self is not like the fixed armature in a clay sculpture with fixed qualities that we might be tempted to assess as wounded, broken, insufficient, or damaged. These are all learned habits and responses held in place by repetition and belief in a fixed self. We are not inexorably bound to them.2
In fact, seeking out the disorienting experience of questioning our assumptions is exactly what can be done here on these cushions. These learned habits and responses are nearly undetectable at first, because we believe “that’s just the way things are.” But undertaking to notice them may lead us to discover their foundation in the assumption of a “fixed self.”
For example, my habit of self-criticism, the thing that leads me to be dissatisfied and to find fault with anything that I produce—had its roots in the fact that my father would criticize or dismiss anything that I made. When I was five years old, I thought I would please him by writing a tune for the piano. So I wrote a melody that I thought would work, and showed it to him. He received it gently and then proceeded to let me know that the melody just went up and down, going nowhere, “pump-handling,” he called it. No further instruction in the art of melody-writing was forthcoming. At the other end of the spectrum, when a bunch of years later I brought home my dissertation in musicology and showed it to him, he glanced at the title3 and flung it down, saying he didn’t understand it. Further, on that occasion, he said, “I hope you don’t become an academic,” with that very sarcastic inflection. I was shocked, and thought, “Here all my life, I thought you valued school, that you wanted us to succeed, that becoming an academic would please you.” This was an instance of being angry with my father and not expressing it, a pattern I adopted very young and continued until he died in 2022.
Now that fits right in with our topic here. I’ve been told that this is a fault, a personality defect. But what if it isn’t? What if my mental/physical system just used the pattern of non-response to save itself? What happens if I become aware of anger and acknowledge it as a passing phenomenon? Or consider acting using that energy? I don’t know. Not offending important people has served me well—I think. Still, there is the rumor that this is erroneously based on the notion of a fixed self.
Okay, if I’m not a fixed self, what am I then? Now this is Bodhidharma’s “Don’t know.” Because if we look carefully, any characteristic that we may claim to be “me” had its source in experience and response. Check it out for yourself—even the word “me” is a learned response. What are you before you talk about yourself? What is right here, now?
Emperor Wu of Liang asked Bodhidharma, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching?” Bodhidharma said, “Really empty, nothing holy.”1
We flinch when hearing the words “nothing holy” . . . because the mind supplies the rest: no good, no bad, no rules? Do all our most precious concepts go out the window, then? Murder around every corner? Women raped and damaged forever? Children tortured and hurt? Senseless aggression, selfishness unrestrained? Gunfire in schools and businesses? Oh—wait, this sounds like today’s headlines.
But Bodhidharma said, “Really empty, nothing holy.” He was not calling for anarchy. He was pointing to the fundamental truth about this world: there is no essential, unchanging identity in anything. If there is no essential, unchanging identity, we are fooled constantly by thoughts. All things, all people, and all phenomena are the result of constantly changing, interacting causes, and thus great instability: everything—everything!—is subject to change. Most importantly, that “everything” includes thinking. We are fooled by words. Words may appear to be unchanging, so we believe that the thing named is unchanging. This is not the case.
This is a delicious turn of events, really. If our fundamentally dualistic view of the world is not true; if there is no stream of holiness, what is left? It does not mean that only unholiness exists! If ‘nothing holy’ then there must be no unholiness either. Try it on for size: we are so accustomed to yes/no, dark/light, good/evil and the like, that to suggest that these dichotomies don’t exist—well, it’s hard to wrap the mind around it. And it is most useful. All thinking is made of these opposites. We are often admonished to cut off thinking, and it seems so impossible. But that’s largely due to the fact that we try to use thinking to cut off thinking. I believe that unhooking from the firm belief in unchangingness, in permanence, constitutes unhooking from thought.
Yuan-wu said:
When one cuts off all streams of thought, one is free to appear in the east and disappear in the west, to rebel or conform, to go through the world or to rise above it, free to give and to take away. But say, at just such a time, whose actions are these? 4
For instance, from my stories about my father, a person would be tempted to say he was a mean jerk, a son-of-a-gun. But what if I’d told other stories—how he was utterly reliable, and never shirked his duties to the family, for instance. If he said he’d pick us up at 4:15, he would absolutely be there, every time, at 4:15. When I was eight, I broke my arm from standing on a board balanced like a teeter-totter, slipped and fell, landing on my back with my arm under me—Dad came immediately, didn’t fuss or fret and didn’t even scold me for unsafe behavior. But he must have made arrangements for his work to be covered, and taken the afternoon off to get me to the hospital in a neighboring town in what seemed like no time at all. Neither mean nor overly concerned, he just did what had to be done. There is nothing holy, nothing unholy, just—what happens, happens—I can do this, I can’t do that.5 It is like that always, right here, right now.
“What is the first principle of the holy teaching?
Bodhidharma said, “Really empty, nothing holy.”
1 Blue Cliff Record. Honolulu Diamond Sangha, 2008.
2 Peter Coyote, “Welcome to Delusionville” From Zen in the Vernacular by Peter Coyote © 2024 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from Inner Traditions International in Tricycle online Fall 2024.
3 University of California, Santa Barbara. Logos and Melos: On the Ontological Interdependence of Word and Music.
4 Thomas Cleary, tr.. Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record, p.1. (Boston & London, Shambala Publications, 2002)
5 From a conversation with Lee Shields.
Talk given at Dharma Gate Sept. 2024 Autumn hybrid sesshin