Natural Freedom

We saw that the I ching had given the Chinese Mind some experience in arriving at decisions spontaneously, decisions which are effective to the degree that one knows how to one’s mind alone, trusting it to work by itself…when we need to see the details of a distant object, such as a clock, the eyes must be relaxed, not staring, not trying to see. So, too, no amount of working with the muscles of the mouth and tongue will enable us to taste our food acutely. The eyes and tongue must be trusted to do the work by themselves.

It is not simply calmness of mind, but “non-graspingness” of the mind. In Chuang-tzu’s words, “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.”

“Brushing off thought which arise is just like washing off blood with blood. We remain impure…if we take second thought for an effective reality, we keep going on and on around the wheel of birth-and-death. You should realize that such thought is just a temporary mental construction, and not try to hold or to reject it. Let it alone just as it occurs and just as it ceases. It is like an image reflected in a mirror. The mirror is clear and reflects anything which comes before it, and yet no image sticks in the mirror.

Hui-k’o to Bodhidharma
“I have no peace of mind,” said Hui-k’o. “Please pacify my mind.”
“Bring out your mind here before me,” replied Bodhidharma, “and I will pacify it!”
“But when I seek my own mind,” said Hui-k’o, “I cannot find it.”
“There!” snapped Bodhidharma, “I have pacified your mind!”

Zen life to his disciples with the saying, “Don’t cling; don’t seek”. For when asked about seeking for the Buddha nature he answered, “It’s much like riding an ox in search of the ox.”

Ma-tsu and Po-chang were out for a walk, when they saw some wild geese flying past.
“What are they?” asked Ma-tsu.
“They’re wild geese,” said Po-chang.
“Where are they going?” demanded Ma-tsu.
Po-chang replied, “They’ve already flown away.”
Suddenly Ma-tsu grabbed Po-chang by the nose and twisted it so that he cried out in pain.
“How,” shouted Ma-tsu, “could they ever have flown away?”
This was the moment of Po-chang’s awakening.

…the empty page upon which words can be written, the empty jar into which liquid can be poured, the empty window through which light can be admitted, and the empty pipe through which water can flow. Obviously the value of emptiness lies in the movements it permits or in the substance which it mediates and contains. But the emptiness must come first.

The perfect Way [Tao] is without difficult,
Save that it avoids picking and choosing.
Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood.
A split hair’s difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart!
I you want to get the plain truth.
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.

Zen is liberation from this pattern, and its apparently dismal starting point is to understand the absurdity of choosing, of the whole feeling that life may be significantly improved by a constant selection of the “good”. One must start by “getting the feel” of relativity, and by knowing that life is not a situation from which there is anything to be grasped or gained- as if it were something which one approached from the outside, like a pie or barrel of beer. To succeed is always to fail- in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.

Zenrin Kushu:
To receive trouble is to receive good fortune;
To receive agreement is to receive opposition.

Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. Social convention encourages the fixity of the idea because the very usefulness of symbols depends upon their stability. Convention therefore encourages him to associate his idea of himself with equally abstract and symbolic roles and stereotypes, since these will help him to form an idea of himself which will be definitive and intelligible But to the degree that he identifies himself with the fixed idea, he becomes aware of “life” as something which flows past him-faster and faster as he grows older, as his ideas becomes more rigid, more bolstered with memories. The more he attempts to clutch the world, the more he feels it as a process in motion.

The Zenrin says:
Entering the forest he moves not the grass;
Entering the water he makes not a ripple.

No one notices him because he does not notice himself…it is often said that clinging to oneself is like having a thorn in the skin, and that Buddhism is a second thorn to extract the first. When it is out, both thorns are thrown away…in the moment when Buddhism, when philosophy or religion, becomes another way of clinign to oneself through seeking a spiritual security, the two thorns become one – and how is it to be take out?

Zenrin says:
To save life it must be destroyed.
When utterly destroyed, one dwells for the first time in peace.

This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.

The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist – the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes. For all of these things are a deception of symbols pretending to be realities, and to seek after them is like walking straight into a wall upon which some painter has, by the convention of perspective, suggested an open passage…Zen begins at the time where there is nothing further to seek, nothing to be gained…In the words of Lin-chi, “If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha.”

This is the first principle in the study of Zen and of any Far Eastern art: hurry, and all that involves, is fatal. For there is no goal to be attained. The moment a goal is conceived it becomes impossible to practice the discipline…a gardener watches the growth of a tree, and wants his student to have the attitude of the tree – the attitude of purposeless growth in which there are no short cuts because every stage of the way is both beginning and end…Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and missed everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

Philosophers do not easily recognize that there is a point where thinking – like boiling an egg – must come to a stop. To try to formulate the Zen experience as a proposition – “Everything is the Tao” – and then to analyze it and draw conclusions from it is to miss it completely.

The difficulty of Zen is, of course, to shift one’s attention from the abstract to the concrete, from the symbolic self to one’s true nature. So long as we merely talk about it, so long as we turn over ideas in our minds about “symbol” and “reality” or keep repeating, “I am not my idea of myself,” this is still mere abstractions.

Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant and spiritually, empty and marvelous.

For a man rings like a cracked bell when he thinks and acts with a split mind – one part standing aside to interfere with the other, to control, to condemn, or to admire. But the mind…cannot actually be split.
Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself;
Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.
The illusion of the split comes from mind’s attempt to be both itself and its idea of itself….the mind is: like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.

The identification of the mind with its own image is, therefore, paralyzing because the image is fixed – it is past and finished. But it is fixed image of oneself in motion! To cling to it is thus to be in constant contradiction and conflict.

Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the realm of the Dharma…it cannot be looked for or sought, comprehended by wisdom or knowledge, explained in words, contacted materially or reached by meritorious achievement.

The real meaning of “attachment” in Buddhism, as when it is said that a Buddha is free from worldly attachments. It does not mean that he is a “stone Buddha” with no feelings, no emotions, and no sensations of hunger or pain. It means that he does not block at anything.

From the Buddhist point of view, reality itself has no meaning since it is not a sign, pointing to something beyond itself.…Yet to Zen and Taoism alike this is the very life of the universe, which is complete at every moment and does not need to justify itself by aiming at something beyond.

Zen is not merely a cult of impulsive action. The point of chic ch’u is not to eliminate reflective thought but to eliminate “blocking” in both action and thought, so that the response of the mind is always like a ball in the a mountain stream – “one thought after another without hesitation”…When one starts falling to the left, one does not resist the fall (ie, the block) by turning to the right. One turns the wheel to the left – and the balance is restored. The principle here is, of course, the same as getting out of the contradiction of “trying to be spontaneous” through accepting the “trying” as “spontaneous”, through not resisting the block.

To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity. To put it in another way one does not practice Zen to become Buddha; one practices it because one is Buddha from the beginning – and this “original realization” is the starting point of Zen life.

the art is most difficult for those who have developed the sensitive intellect to such a point that they cannot help making predictions about the future, and so must be kept in a constant whirl of activity to forestall them…it would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions.

To see the world as it is concretely, undivided by categories and abstractions, one must certainly look at it with a mind which is not thinking – which is to say, forming symbols – about it.

Za-zen is not, therefore, sitting with a blank mind which excludes all impressions of the inner and outer senses. It is not “concentration” in the usual sense of restricting the attention to a single sense object, such as a point of light or the tip of one’s nose. It is simply quiet awareness, without comment, of whatever happens to be here and now.

This awareness is attended by the most vivid sensation of “nondifference” between oneself and the external world…this sensation does not arise by trying to acquire it; it just comes by itself when one is sitting and watching without any purpose in the mind – even the purpose of getting rid of purpose.

In Za-zen there must be no thought either of aiming at satori or of avoiding birth-and-death, no striving for anything in the future time.

If life comes, this is life. If death comes, this is death. There is no reason for your being under their control. Don’t put any hope in them. This life and death are the life of the Buddha. If you try to throw them away in denial, you lose the life of the Buddha.

Satori really designates the sudden and intuitive way of seeing into anything, whether it be remembering a forgotten name or seeing into the deepest principle of Buddhism. One seeks and seeks, but cannot find. One then give’s up, and the answer comes by itself.

There are several references to the idea that prolonged sitting is much better than being dead. There is, of course, a proper place for sitting – along with standing, walking, and lying – but to imagine that sitting contains some speical virtue is “attachment to form.”

Thus in the T’an-ching Hui-neng says:
The living man who sits and does not lie down;
A dead man who lies down and does not sit!
After all these are just dirty skeletons.

Awakening almost necessarily involves sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cram of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses.

Awakening is not to know what this reality is…awakening is to know what reality is not. It is to cease identifying oneself with any object of knowledge whatsoever.

So long as one thinks about trying or not trying to let go of oneself, one cannot let go. Yet whether one thinks of about listening or not, the ears are hearing just the same, and nothing can stop the sound from reaching them.

Subjectively, a gnat doubtless feels that it’s span of a few days is a reasonably long lifetime. A tortoise, with its span of several hundred years, would feel subjectively the same as the gnat. Not so long ago the life expectancy of the average man was about forty-five years. Today it is from sixty-five to seventy years, but subjectively the years are faster, an death, when it comes, is always all too soon.

As Dogen said:
The flowers depart when we hate to lose them;
The weeds arrive while we hate to watch them grow.

For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality…Until this has become clearer, it seems that our life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the sensation of having “no time”…but through “awakening to the instant” one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it is rather the past and future which are fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally now.

Awareness of the “eternal now” comes about by the same principle as the clarity of hearing and seeing…clear sight has nothing to do with trying to see; it is just realization that the eyes will take in every detail all by themselves, for so long as they are open one can hardly prevent the light from reaching them. In the same way, there is no difficulty in being fully aware of the eternal present as soon as it is seen that one cannot possible be aware of anything else- that in concrete fact there is no past or future. Making an effort to concentrate on the instantaneous moment implies at once that there are other moments. But they are nowhere to be found, and in truth one rests as easily in the eternal present as the eyes and ears respond to light and sound.