Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Good Advice

My Zen teacher frequently sends out emails to the entire disciple list answering a question that he was asked by one. In one excellent message, he pointed out that it is not possible to completely empty the mind during zazen, nor desirable as a goal. We only imagine that we have done so through a kind of self-hypnosis. This is what Master Huineng was warning about when he wrote, “One should make one’s nature genuinely empty, yet not cling to emptiness. If you completely empty your mind while meditating it will be just foolish emptiness, dead and withered.” The 50 Warnings in the Sarangama Sutra are also along these same lines.

Sensei points out that the mind (citta) is very powerful and can readily reinforce foolish ego-centric notions of enlightenment and meditation, allowing us to fantasize that we have accomplished something. "It is important to remember that zazen is about non-thinking and non-doing." he writes. "First we have to come to the end of our usual way of knowing and doing (and this requires some jaundice-eyed self-skepticism) and only then will it be possible to wake up to genuine emptiness."

We can neither empty the mind nor make the mind emptiness. Making one's nature genuinely emptiness is not emptying the mind. It is not doing anything. One's nature can become empty only because it is already so; making it so means relinquishing all those ideas we are clinging to (like "emptiness") until the true nature is all that is left. The process is more a subtractive one than an additive one.

This is not something we can do, sensei tells us, but is what is already the case. It is already happening. The exchange of Zen Master Dogen with Master Nyojo began with "dropping off body-mind" (shinjin-datsuraku) but ended with "dropping off dropping off" (datsuraku-datsuraku). So this again is a matter of subtraction - waking up to the nature of our nature, not having to do anything about it (other than dropping off our misconceptions and misdirections).

Elsewhere Dogen related the process of awakening being to that of a snake continuously molting its skin - the true self is emergent, continuously, moment-by-moment.

Movement in the right direction is inevitable; even when we make a mistake, we learn not to do that again - but only if we are paying dispassionate attention.

1 comment:

GreenSmile said...

I may just be quiet.
I may just ask my self "what am I" and the only effort I make there after is to not attempt, to forestall or to abandon any mentation toward answering the question but just wait to hear if any echo comes back to me from the dark and the quiet. The trick to it, for me, is holding the sense that all of "me" that I am aware of is but a fraction, a faction that should shut up now and then and listen in case there is more to know.