Green’s Zhaozhou Case 22.
The master entered the hall to address the assembly and said, “Brothers, don’t stand around so long. If you have some problem, let’s discuss it. If you have no problem, then go sit and delve into the Truth. When I was on my own pilgrimages, I went without the two meals; they are a place of confusion for the mind’s energy to go. If you are not like that, you are a long way from being a monk who has ‘left home’.”
Zen vs Secular Mindfulness
Secular mindfulness is different from religious faith. It generally engages in less obfuscation and fewer transcendental claims than its new age predecessors. But it does make some pretty big assumptions about what people want:
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Practice now for reward later. While dogenism has a mildly masochistic quality, sitting in time-out and making yourself uncomfortable on purpose, mindfulness implies that the practice/meditation itself ought to be relatively pleasant, but requires effort and focus. Application of this leads to the acquisition of a certain skill or state of mind that can then be ‘used’ to enjoy experiences more, or accomplish certain tasks more effectively.
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What rewards are promised? This can vary but what’s implied tends to be some variant of mental clarity, calmness, focus, and positivity. Zen does not make such claims, but many of us are still attracted to zen with such outcomes in mind.
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Relationship to time. Despite promising rewards in the future, SM demands ‘focus on the present.’ A typical unintended consequence of this is that when we’re experiencing a particularly beautiful moment, e.g. looking at a landscape during a hike, the mind is hard at work trying to be as present as possible, which unfortunately can reduce the overall enjoyment of the experience. I also wonder if perhaps it can even hamper memory formation.
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Slave mind, Mastermind. SM at its best encourages its adherents to stop forming negative judgments about their own mental activity. That can certainly be clarifying. But it struggles to drop the implication that certain thoughts originate in a kind of ‘lesser’ mind, and with sufficient discipline these will be eliminated and replaced with higher thoughts from the true mind. I think this assumption is incompatible with Zen study.
Let’s compare the practice of secular mindfulness to what Zhaozhou is saying:
Sit and delve into the truth
There are superficial similarities between this instruction and the SM practice of paying attention to your thoughts and sensations without judgement. But I feel there are serious differences that can be tricky to discuss with practitioners of SM, partially due to those underlying assumptions we discussed earlier.
One way to try and tackle this is to consider what ‘skill’ and ‘application’ mean in SM v.s. in Zen. In SM, intention or determination to improve leads to attentive practice, which results in the development of skill over time. Better SM teachers tend to relate this skill to something like focus, and they may speak of concrete benefits such as improved memory.
Where it gets messy is when we believe there to be some relationship between this cognitive exercise and the search for truth.
Serious epistemologists don’t believe that smart people have better access to reality than simple people. I think it’s reasonable to assume that calmness and attention span don’t affect that either.
I believe that what zhaozhou means by ‘sit and delve into the truth’ is more like asking yourself questions while trusting in mind. No knowledge is acquired from the process, but false knowledge is eliminated. It is not a contemplative practice, and there is no exertion of control over mind.
But zen also has a concept of ‘skillful application.’ I propose that this is less relevant to ‘delving into the truth’ and more so to the preceding instruction:
If you have some problem, let’s discuss it.
SM at its best doesn’t claim that meditation will give you answers. Rather, it hopes that with additional calmness and confidence you will go elsewhere and have better conversations, from which you might get answers.
That’s a big difference from zen, where conversation itself is central. What kind of problem does zhaozhou think you might have that could prevent you from being able to ‘Sit and delve into the truth’?
- Beliefs or doubts about your value relative to other sentient beings
- Beliefs or doubts about whether the truth would be too painful to bear
- Beliefs or doubts about what happens when you die
- Beliefs or doubts about how similar your experience is to other experiences
- Beliefs or doubts about the validity of your own feelings and observations
I think those are the big ones. Why would having beliefs or doubts like that prevent you from accessing the truth?
The way I think about this is that all of these eventually point back to #2. Regardless of any effort, we cannot eliminate the possibility that the truth might harm us. For the same reason, suicide is not that easy to accomplish.
I propose that’s why 3P Sengcan instructs us not to have preferences and not to know gain and loss. A ‘preference for the truth’ will always be obstructed by the possibility that ‘there could be something more preferable than the truth,’ or that you’re not ready for the truth for whatever reason, and knowing it too early might prevent you from being able to hold onto it.
This is the part I think requires skillful application. And also the part that invites the most interesting comparison with SM.
See, what is it to neither believe nor doubt something? Is is perhaps… simply not to think about it at all? ‘Don’t think about pink elephants.’ Mind control is only gonna work for a short time, certainly not long enough to sit and delve into the truth. We’re gonna have to try something else.
That’s where conversation comes in, and especially q&a with someone who already gets it. The claim seems to be that identifying and eliminating your sources of confusion can get you somewhere where ‘what happens when we die?’ is more of an open question rather than a question secretly loaded with threatening concepts like hell and nothingness.
And the great thing about open questions is they don’t bully you into forming beliefs and doubts. Instead you can just contemplate them, and more importantly take a break from contemplating them.
So what are these sources of confusion?
Part of the inspiration for this post was Ewk’s What do I do now (that I'm originally a Buddha)?
Here’s the part I found particularly interesting:
The five lay precepts are a guide to how to keep a clear head. It turns out that lying, stealing, murdering, raping, and taking drugs/alchohol confuse you, and hoping to do these things in the future confuses you in the present.
The dark room you're in is just going to be a series of painful experiences of falling down and running into things if you think murder-drugging-lie-stealing-rapering is going to solve your problems.
Of course, some monks take way more than 5 precepts.
Zhaozhou himself seems to be an extreme case:
When I was on my own pilgrimages, I went without the two meals; they are a place of confusion for the mind’s energy to go.
But of course not as extreme as losing an arm.
What are the commonalities between:
- Eating regular meals
- Deceiving people
- Intending to do harm
- Standing around without overwhelmingly intense application
We should be careful here not to centre the moral question. Lazy students don’t belong to the same category as murderers. But half-heartedness and evil both cause confusion.
Secular mindfulness almost always encourages people to practise at their own pace. You’d be hard-pressed to get a SM teacher to tell a car crash survivor who just lost their entire family to immediately apply themselves to meditation. A religious guru might try that if they thought they could get away with it. These two characters experience the same ‘doubt’ about their ideas, but one of them values being good and moral more highly than those ideas.
A zen adept by contrast won’t stop preaching the dharma for anything, because there’s nothing to doubt.
How do you arrive there? Well let’s go back to the central question:
- What if knowing the truth is too painful to bear?
Either alone or with help, I think you can make progress on this question by asking:
- Which possible truths, if truths, would hurt?
- In such a case, what might I do to deal with that truth?
- How would it affect me if I categorically knew that such possibilities were untrue?
- Which possible truths, if truths, would soothe or uplift me?
- In such a case, what might I do to celebrate?
- How would it affect me if I discovered that such things were not possible?
And similar questions.
A note on the skill of Zen Masters
This is a long post. It’s well known that you can’t share the truth through words and you can’t help people. Any act of speech, best case, just piles mud on top of dirt.
By posting this I’m making work for someone who knows better than me, who has to come in here and point out my errors so others don’t get confused.
Zen masters are able to cover their tracks, which means they can cut off pathways of confusion as they speak. I do not have that skill but I am obliged to try and clean up after myself, which I’d like to do with the following addendum:
Throughout this post we’ve talked about confusion as if it’s something to be eliminated in order to attain enlightenment, but Dahui points out that confusion and enlightenment are interdependent. In Surska0's fantastic Nanquan translation yesterday we also heard how “Not understanding is actually good.”
That’s all. Thanks for reading. Feel free to AMA.
Submitted April 26, 2023 at 09:08PM by jeowy https://ift.tt/eVsbLlM
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