Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn always told us:
Put it all down.
And:
Only go straight, don’t know.
Dahui Zong-gau has been quoted as saying:
If you truly wish to practice, just let go of everything. Know nothing, understand nothing. (Attributed to Dahui, loc inconnu).
And then in Andy Ferguson’s Zen’s Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings, we find:
Zen master Shishuang entered the hall and addressed the monks, saying,
Each of you has what is fundamental. There’s no point in searching for it. It’s not to be found in right or wrong, nor in anything you can talk about. (p. 211)
PSC
But what does it mean? –why in the world is there all this advice about doing nothing — for that matter, what exactly does it mean to “do nothing”? I have certainly struggled to meditate. If you struggle to meditate, thinking I should be doing (x), concentrating more or (y), more single-pointedly, then it may be helpful to reconsider, dare to look a little more closely. Because those “should be” statements are doing something: choosing a direction, choosing some action by which we can measure success or failure, later on. Now look at Shishuang’s advice: “It’s not to be found in right or wrong, nor in anything you can talk about.”
After all, it is said that buddha-nature is already ours.
What if we put our energy to work instead to noticing, observing what’s going on. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time noticing on purpose. Or so I thought. At first I thought it was useful to notice the breath, or sounds, or thoughts, or to notice the darkness behind the eyelids, the numbness of my feet or the ache in a shoulder. But there’s one thing I steadfastly ignored. This may be elementary to you all. If so, please just continue your practice as it is.
Anyhow, when sitting I tried to stay with the present moment—notice and let go, let everything pass through. The one thing I neglected was feeling-states. I would notice “feeling sad” for instance, and let it go, or let it go on, as the case may be. But lately it occurred to me that much of the time what I was really doing was avoiding certain experiences, under the guise of “letting go.” There is a specific sensation (a fleeting rising sensation in my chest and inside the upper arms)–related to fear– that my mind pushed away or stepped past without even a label—because I was sitting quietly, so fear wasn’t relevant right then, right? No stranger had entered the room, nothing had fallen through the roof, there were no sounds of guns, no yelling, no uncontrolled fire, no thunder, and no snakes in the area. I didn’t label the experience, just stepped around it, and kept sitting. But that unvoiced judgment—that the experience was irrelevant—was a mistake. It was, after all, a judgment, an excluding. Note that “excluding” is a judgement, a “nope, not this,” very binary in nature. For years, I’ve done that sidestepping until it is so automatic, I almost can’t perceive it. I was amazed to notice it at other times, too.
At two or three in the morning, for instance, just getting back to sleep after visiting the bathroom. Or during waking hours, here and there. It was as though a switch clicked, saying, “Oh, that again. Don’t even go there, everything’s OK.” Only now there was a little more awareness. “Oh, that again . . .” called for a double-take. First, I had to admit that it actually was something to be noticed. Then try staying in its presence a little longer. Just noticing that sensation was a job in itself. Wait! That was it again. This has to do with the non-binary nature of experience.
Then I gradually and intermittently discovered that the sensation carried a rider: a you have to clause, usually something about managing the opinions of other people. And there you have it: an elementary error. That is, the you have to clause is there, and it indicates resistance to, and involvement with, phenomena. Something I’ve got to fix to suit some idea of what should be. Sometimes it’s about others’ opinions, sometimes it’s more concrete—Tom left the cupboard door ajar; I’ll have to close it next time I go past. Or, have to trim that rhody shrub in the front: it’s way too gangly. It’s a problem: fix it. Even tiny little things, like closing the cupboard door, or oops I forgot to thaw the green beans for a dish I planned on making. These tiny objections and reflexive, automatic plans to fix them run in the background constantly. For years I ignored them thinking they’re irrelevant -–but they’re really anything but. Instead of being irrelevant, like leaves on the lawn, these thoughts are the very stuff of meditation practice. What should I do with them, then?
Maybe–nothing. Nothing except catch them early in the process—Oh! It’s the problem-fixer. Full stop. (In other words, don’t fix this problem solving as a problem, either!) Why do I automatically prepare a “fix” for any situation? This is the question. In fact fixing is a hook to involve people in the world of things. Maybe doing nothing is the answer. Full and radical acceptance of what is, opening ourselves to it. Now, it could be said that even acceptance is a “fix-it” response, but that depends on the attitude of the sitter: if I notice a fix-it response, then I have to let it be, not do anything about it: it is another manifestation, that’s all. Well, wasn’t I doing that when I noticed some discomfort and said: Oh, there’s that again? And ignored it? Depends on the flavor of ignoring: really it has to be an open accepting that lets a phenomenon be.
A thorough acceptance, in other words, allows the phenomenon to be, without backtracking, explaining, adding conditions or subtracting them. We can thoroughly accept a phenomenon when we clearly see the dark side or drawbacks to it, without the “rejecting” that is implied in saying “the dark side” or “drawbacks.” Theoretically it’s easy, but seeing the whole of a phenomenon without generalizing is not. Consider for instance, watching a predator kill and consume one of your household pets. Can you feel the horror and still appreciate the triumph of the aggressor involved? Feel your own ambivalence? And know what it would be like to intervene or not. A thorough acceptance might be to enter the fray ourselves, willing to live with whatever the outcome may be.
Qinglin was a student of Dongshan Liangjie.
A monk asked, “The path diverges and twists. What about sudden enlightenment?”
Qinglin said, “You face away from the black jewel beneath your feet toward a sky filled to the moon with anxiety
Qinglin’s statement here, “You face away from the black jewel beneath your feet” is mysterious; I take it this way: black is dark to the eye or perceiving sense, implying that what little information there is to be gathered is difficult to access by ordinary means. Yet it is called a “jewel,” something unusually valuable. Not only that, but it’s right “beneath your feet.” Close and accessible indeed! if only we attend to how it feels beneath our feet, a tactile experience we normally take for granted. Attend to the experience we ordinarily ignore? What? Otherwise. we face “toward a sky filled to the moon with anxiety.” We can relate to the (unwanted), to the anxiety. And our normal response to anxiety? “Don’t want it! Get rid of it!” how? DO something, fix it! Change it! Change the circumstances, the personnel, the consequences; blame somebody else for them, then get them out of there. Bottom line: make it (this unacceptable state of affairs) go away. Whether this refers to the weather, the state of a road, the itch on your shoulder, the way your cat meows at the door when you have company, the way your clarinet student’s tone changes uncomfortably when she changes register, it does not matter. Something bothers you? Fix it!
Well, what’s the matter with that? Nothing, really, if you don’t mind staying in the tangle of anxious control–“Filled to the moon with anxiety,” as Qinglin said. What is anxiety, I might ask at this point. Well, did I do it or not? Did I do it well enough to prevent recurrence? What recurrence? Did you trim that rhody bush or not? You know—it’s our mind getting on our case. There are many anxiety-producing situations in life, much more serious than a shrub to be trimmed, but the outline is the same: something is “wrong” in our situation: what are you going to do about it? The worst kind of anxiety in my opinion, comes from those situations over which we have little or no control. “Control” is the matter of having a choice about what happens. And choice is a matter of perception.
Zen master Shishuang entered the hall and addressed the monks, saying, “Each of you has what is fundamental. There’s no point in searching for it. It’s not to be found in right or wrong, nor in anything you can talk about.” (Ferguson, p. 211)
The entire source of the teaching of a lifetime, capable of setting people’s lives to order, all comes down to this very moment, directly to the fact that the Dharma body has no body.
This is a puzzling statement: The Dharma body has no body. But what is a body, after all? In a sense, it’s a set of opinions. That is an ankle, not a hand, for instance, clearly it’s a face, not an ear. That seems simplistic, but think for a minute, of the sense of “a body”—it’s an opinion firmly based on what “is or is not.”
Shishuang said: This is the ultimate teaching of our school.
We monks have no set path. If we have partiality then we’ve strayed. We just impartially sit in the mud.(Ferguson, p. 211)
Partiality in this context is having an opinion, such as right or wrong, good or bad. And impartiality? Right in there with the mix of dirt and water. “If we have partiality then we’ve strayed (from treating things as they are).”
Thank you.