I’m stuck. I don’t just mean stuck in some detailed area of life, as if performing some tricky or critical task and suddenly realizing I need three hands. That would be exciting enough.
I mean globally stuck: my “I” suddenly immobilized whilst grappling with the entire universe. It’s one of those situations where we say “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”, as when being slowly sucked into quicksand, where all attempts to try and get out only suck you in faster; yet keeping still doesn’t stop you from sinking down slowly. You need three hands, preferably four, but the extra hands must belong to somebody else anchored in a solid place, stretching them out to you, within reach of your grasp.
There’s no panic, only adventure. The quicksands will get me, for they are sands of time running out—that’s mortality for you. But there’s still something to do; and I don’t expect to remain stuck much longer.
All this stems from reading The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, by D. T. Suzuki (d. 1966), whose book is inspired by the teachings of Hui-Neng (d. 713) Till I read it, I was content to spend my remaining days in quiet retirement. But now…
What is Zen? Here’s a very old definition, from another book*:
A special teaching without scriptures, beyond words and letters, pointing to the mind-essence of man, seeing directly into one’s own nature, attaining enlightenment.
It’s been weeks since my last. I feel silenced by this stuff. I wrote in a recent post (“Presence…”) that “I’d spent a few minutes in a wilderness early on that damp morning, a nature reserve on a hillside behind some factories, and noticed how it instantly swept my head clean.”
Merely being outdoors always tends to sweep my head clean, but today the ice and snow penetrate to my bones. There must be an indoor way of “seeing directly into one’s own nature”. And of course there is, but I’m usually too restless to see it.
Later, at 4am: I lie thinking about “the mind-essence of man, seeing directly into one’s own nature”. They also call it Buddha-nature. The early Zen masters stressed the importance of meditation to uncover it, as in this gāthā of Shen-Hsiu:
This body is the Bodhi-tree.
The mind is like a mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean
And let not dust collect upon it.
To which Hui-Neng responded:
There is no Bodhi-tree.
Nor stand of mirror bright;
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?
I know, it doesn’t compute. Our modern minds can’t squeeze insight from “all is void”. To us, all is noise: everyone telling us what to think. We even tell ourselves what to think, delivering ourselves pagan sermons daily to paper over the void with meaning, any meaning; which leaves us unable to discover the meaning of void.
What shook me into wakefulness at this early hour was an idea that gnaws at the vitals: “seeing directly into one’s own nature”. As I’ve said often enough, I write to discover what I really think. The quest has got harder, because I find myself needing to say more difficult things.
What I saw this morning wasn’t a direct vision of my own nature, but a reflection of it, that struck me with dramatic force: something poignantly persistent, that I can trace back throughout my life, a yearning that never got satisfied. Almost always, it was rebuffed. And thus I became a solitary wayfarer. I had reached out to the world, the not-me, seeing something precious there, shining through the crassness of ordinary consciousness, so to speak, and hoping the not-me would also recognize something precious in me. My deeper instinct never seemed to give up, despite understanding intellectually that the world doesn’t work this way. Humans in particular are too hungry for self-advantage, too insulated with protective layers, to linger and dwell in this recognition. There are sparks, there are glances, there are brief encounters, perhaps on Christmas Eve in the street; perhaps when the landscape is transformed by a shared hazard (flood, heavy snowfall, minor earthquake); or where the miracle of All This, “in [which] we live and move and have our being” shines like a mirror bright for two or three gathered together to see.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be perceived as it is, infinite.
After thirty years of dusting that mirror through meditation, it was still cloudy. It’s ten years now since I got up from sitting under that Bodhi-tree, looked outwards, saw the Presence in Nature—in simple fresh air. But I think there’s more.
Seeing into nothingness—this is true seeing and eternal seeing.
* From the Preface to the English translation of the Shaseki-Shu (Collection of Stone and Sand), quoted in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps.
a wayfarer’s notes 