Here we come to a major point of contention between interpretations by sectarian ideologues and the overwhelming consensus of the greater Zen and academic communities. This lie has been carefully constructed from snippets gleaned from so many sayings of Chan masters rebuking people who become attached to sitting practice and desire an outcome. It relies not only on selective quotation and omission of context, but also on whitewashing the hundreds of references to and clear instructions for meditation littered throughout the record. The lie requires a lack of nuance in understanding how meditation not only fits into Chan teachings, but ultimately is itself Zen.
Let’s start with Foyan:
If you do not see the ease, then sit for a while and examine the principle.
Simple enough, but he also had admonitions for people who are doing it wrong:
In recent days there are those who just sit there as they are. At first they are alert, but after a while they doze. Nine out of ten sit there snoozing. How miserable! If you do not know how to do the inner work, how can you expect to understand by sitting rigidly? This is not the way it is. How can you see?
It's not about the form of sitting...it's about the inner work. It has to be done correctly, without attachment to form. It has to be done with effort and attention, not just dozing. According to Foyan, correct inner work will lead to awakening:
When you have come to me and I see it as soon as you try to focus on anything, that means your inner work has not yet reached the point of flavorlessness. If you stay here five or ten years and manage to perfect your inner work, then you will awaken.
It takes five or ten years perfecting inner work with a master like Foyan to awaken. Why do some people think they get it just by reading his words? Maybe they do. But here is where subtlety is sacrificed by ideologues. Inner work/meditation is constant whether sitting or doing anything else:
Once the ancients realized the principle, they adapted to phenomena in accord with principle. Have you not read how someone once clapped his hands and laughed on hearing a signal sounded, saying, "I understand! I understand!" Is this not following principle to learn? Why not observe in this way twenty-four hours a day, doing inner work like this? Eventually it will ripen, and you will naturally harmonize the principle.
The sitting meditation practice is just that...practice. It has to be applied at all times, until all flavor is lost.
Dahui:
Right in the midst of the hubbub, you mustn't forget the business of the bamboo chair and reed cushion.
When it “ripens,” according to Foyan, the student will harmonize with the principle. This is the business of Zen. So what is this "inner work" he talks about?
Baizhang gets into it:
Chan study is like washing a dirty garment. The garment is originally there; the dirt comes from outside. The process of purification is to strip away influences of habit. If people in the process of purification cannot get rid of the diseases of greed and hostility they are as yet unhearing worldlings and still have to be taught to practice meditation and cultivate insight.
It's stripping away influences of habit. If people are unable to put down greed or hostility they have to be taught to practice and cultivate. Can aversion to practice explain some of the hostility on display here in r/zen? The concept of regularly recognizing habit and reining it in is repeated by Chan masters consistently. Mazu called it defilement:
The Way does not require cultivation; just don’t defile it. What is defilement? As long as you have a fluctuating mind, artificiality, or compulsive tendencies, all of this is defilement.
The work is to keep the mind from fluctuating...to not cede control of attention to compulsive tendencies. It’s not about stopping thought. It's an act of constant awareness and use of concentration techniques to rein in the roaming mind. It’s grabbing the ox by the nose and pulling it back, not letting it trample the crops. Koans became very popular in the Song dynasty because they were effective for that purpose.
Dahui:
When you want to sit quietly, just light a stick of incense and sit quietly. Don’t let yourself become oblivious or excited. Oblivion and excitement have been condemned by past sages; as soon as you sense these two kinds of sickness appear, just bring up the saying that a dog has no Buddha-nature, and the two kinds of sickness will be banished without using effort, and you will calm down at once. Eventually, as soon as you sense you’re saving energy, this is where you gain strength. You won’t even be attached to doing work in quietude—just this itself is work.
Dahui is careful here to instruct this person to not become attached to either stillness or activity…to not become immersed in quietude and mistake it for the way. He says that preventing ourselves from becoming attached is the work itself. He’s using koan meditation as a device to help people harmonize. He’s giving medicine for sickness. That's what Zen teaching is for.
Wumen agreed. He talked of untold numbers of people who awakened by practicing with a koan:
A monk asked Zhaozhou if dogs have Buddha nature or not. Zhouzhou said, “No.” Very many bring this up, and not a few keep it in mind. This one word “no” is brought up alone; those who have attained enlightenment by getting into this one word “no” are as numerous as raindrops, while those who do not completely trust waste their time. Chan study has no special art but just requires rousing a mass of doubt through one’s whole being; day and night, don’t let it be interrupted, and eventually it ripens completely, so inside and outside naturally become one, and you become one with space, become one with mountains, rivers and the whole earth, become one with the four quarters and the zenith and nadir.
According to Wumen, Chan study requires this process. It needs to be practiced without interruption and fully ripened. If we don’t completely trust, we are wasting our time. As he famously said, "It's imperative to pass through the barrier." Then he told us how.
So then what's with all of these ancient Chan masters criticizing people who meditate? There are plenty of sayings denouncing "sitting in ghost caves," etc. An oft cited example is the story of Mazu sitting in meditation to "become a Buddha," and Nanyue polishing a tile to demonstrate the futility of such a goal. I notice that usually when this story is cited for the purpose of criticizing meditation, the most important lesson of the story is left out:
Nanyue said:
Are you trying to learn sitting meditation, or are you trying to learn sitting buddhahood? If you are learning sitting meditation, meditation is not sitting or reclining; if you are learning sitting buddhahood, buddhahood is not a fixed form. You should not grasp or reject things that do not abide. If you keep the Buddha seated, this is killing the Buddha; if you cling to the form of sitting, you do not attain the principle.
This is what makes Zen understanding so subtle. He wasn’t admonishing Mazu for meditating. He was admonishing his attachment to the form of sitting as a vehicle to achieve Buddhahood. Meditation is not sitting. Sitting is just a comfortable and efficient position to practice. True meditation is constant. Ripened.
Here’s another quote often used by sectarians to denounce meditation, from Linchi:
There are a bunch of blind baldheads who, having stuffed themselves with rice, sit doing Ch'an-style meditation practice, trying to arrest the flow of thoughts and stop them from arising, hating clamor, demanding silence—but these aren't Buddhist ways!
He’s rebuking the conscious shutting off of thoughts, and the avoidance of clamor. (Note that he’s also rebuking indulgence.) He’s not criticizing the meditation practice. He’s criticizing doing it wrong. Proper meditation isn’t forceful, and it isn’t a matter of stopping. But it isn't effortless either, at least not until it’s fully integrated. As Yuanwu describes:
You should spend twenty or thirty years doing dispassionate and tranquil meditation work, sweeping away any conditioned knowledge and interpretive understanding as soon as it arises, and not letting the traces of the sweeping itself remain either. Let go on that side, abandon your whole body, and go on rigorously correcting yourself until you attain great joyous life. The only fear is that in knowing about this strategy, the very act of knowing will lead to disaster. Only when you proceed like this will it be real and genuine practice.
Yuanwu is very deliberate with his warning here: "The very act of knowing will lead to disaster." That was Mazu's affliction. He had an outcome in mind: to become a Buddha. That’s disaster. It's not sitting mediation that Chan masters criticized. It's using it as a means of seeking. They criticized attachment to the form of sitting as a path to enlightenment. This is grave error and was rightly called out. There’s a sect who gloms onto these critiques of attachment to form and spins them into an interpreted rejection of any practice. This is also disaster. People who buy into this narrative settle into the nest of complacency of interpretation.
The founder of Tiantai, Chih-i, compiled a vast record of lectures on meditation in the 6th century called the Mo-ho Chih-kuan. In it he characterized meditation practice identically to the masters quoted above:
in all activities, whenever the mind acts and thinks; do not let polluted states of mind arise, or if they arise, then extinguish them right away.
Is this not Yuanwu’s “rigorously correcting yourself?” Chih-i also set out 4 distinct forms of meditation: sitting, walking, half walking and half sitting, and neither sitting nor walking. Chan utilizes them all.
From Dahui's Treasury:
Yunmen held up his staff and cited the teachings, saying, "Ordinary people actually consider this existent, the two vehicles analyze it and call it nonexistent, those awakened to conditionality call it illusory existence, bodhisattvas identify its essence with emptiness, and patchrobed monks see a staff and just call it a staff - when they walk they just walk, and when they sit they just sit, totally unshakable.”
Here Yunmen is illustrating an objectless approach to meditation. When we walk we just walk. When we sit, we just sit. This is the definition of shikantaza. It's just sitting, absent of seeking, absent of any goal-oriented motivation, and absent of attachment. Just sitting, “like a dead tree or a withered stump,” in Yuanwu’s words.
Linchi used this device too:
Just get so you can follow along with circumstances and use up your old karma. When the time comes to do so, put on your clothes. If you want to walk, walk. If you want to sit, sit. But never for a moment set your mind on seeking Buddhahood. Why do this way? A man of old said, 'If you try to create good karma and seek to be a buddha, then Buddha will become a sure sign you will remain in the realm of birth and death.'
It's not the sitting where people go wrong. It's the seeking. It’s the attachment. Almost a thousand years later Bankei was saying the same thing about zazen:
For several hundred years now, both China and Japan have misunderstood the Zen teaching, trying to attain enlightenment by doing zazen or trying to find ‘the one who sees and hears,’ all of which is a great mistake. Zazen is just another name for original mind, and means to sit in tranquility with a tranquil mind. When you do sitting meditation, you’re simply sitting, just as you are; when you do walking meditation, you’re walking, just as you are.
Zen masters didn't reject meditation, they used mediation techniques as devices and knew firsthand of their efficacy. They were expedient means like any other. A skillful master was needed to guide people, and to know how and when to apply what devices.
Here Wumen relates the story of Qian:
As for master Qian, he followed Dahui for fourteen or fifteen years without having any initiatory experience at all. One day he asked the librarian for help: “I have had no initiatory experience at all—please be so kind as to tell me what to do.” The librarian said, “Why do you come to try to find out the depth of the water? Study Chan with a true heart.” Qian said, “I really consider the matter of birth and death important—how could I talk nonsense?” The librarian said, “If you want to do the work, you should treat everything you’ve ever written as if you’d taken castor oil, crapping it all out to make your gut empty. For now come and sit in meditation with me; when your conditioned consciousness stops for a while, then I’ll talk to you. So they both sat for over half a month, and his state of mind was peaceful and pleasant. Then suddenly one day Dahui told him to deliver a letter to prime minister Zhang. Qian was very vexed; just when he had attained a bit of a good state, now he was to be sent on a mission. The librarian said, “Just accept it; I’ll go with you and help you with everything on the way. But there are five things I can’t do for you.” Qian asked what those five things were that he couldn’t do for him. The librarian said he’d tell him along the way. On the way Qian asked again what five things the librarian couldn’t help him with. The librarian said, “Dressing, eating, defecating, and urinating.” Qian said, “That’s four things—what’s the other one?” The librarian said, “Your riding this corpse on the road—I can’t do that for you.” From this Qian awakened. The librarian said, “Now go by yourself to deliver the letter.” The librarian then went back. Qian met the prime minister, and they had a meeting of minds. The minister said, “Your face-to-face conversation is not the same as before.” Then when he went back, on seeing him Dahui said, “I’m glad you’ve finished the great task.”
The practice of meditation prepared his mind for awakening. The librarian here skillfully applied it as a preparation for awakening. It's the same in so many Chan stories...awakening upon seeing peach blossoms, awakening upon hearing a rock strike bamboo, etc...by people who had been practicing for a long time and suddenly realized the subtle function. Their conditioned consciousness needed to stop. They had ripened, as described in the quotes above. It requires the aid of a skillful teacher to prevent students from attaching to the form, and using it to seek. Nanyue saw Mazu seeking, and freed him from that bond. People who attach to the form of sitting by being averse to it share in this affliction.
Chan masters had no apparent aversion to meditation. They taught people how to do it. They used devices to help them, and they rightly criticized people for clinging to those devices. The meditation practices of Chan are evident throughout the record, but became particularly structured throughout the Song dynasty. It’s all there in the text.
Foyan:
At first, the mind is noisy and unruly;
there is still no choice but to shift it back.
That is why there are many methods
to teach it quiet observation.
When you sit up and gather your spirit,
at first it scatters helter-skelter;
over a period of time, eventually it calms down,
opening and freeing the six senses.
That is meditation practice; sitting, standing, walking, lying down…it’s all the same. When the mind is calm, the six senses are free and open. At first there is no choice but to rein it in. Eventually it ripens and is integrated into all aspects of living. That’s Dhyana; it’s Chan, it’s Seon, it’s Thien, and it’s Zen. It’s constant in stillness or activity.
Yuanwu:
Just make your mind and thoughts clarify and become still. A fine place to do active meditation work is amid confusion and disturbances. When you do active meditation, you must penetrate through the heights and the depths, without omitting anything. The whole essential being appears ready-made before you, and it no longer arises from anywhere else. It is just this one Great Potential, turning smoothly and steadily. Why talk any more about "worldly phenomena" and "enlightened truth”? If you maintain a uniform equilibrium over months and years, naturally your stand will be true and solid. You will experience realization, like water being poured into water, like gold being traded for gold. Everything will be equalized in One Suchness, profoundly clear, real, and pure.
This is knowing how to live.
Submitted May 12, 2023 at 08:04PM by RobePatch https://ift.tt/97d0LPb
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