Words are provisional, words
are imprecise, words are subject to interpretation, choice s of words are
subject to causes and conditions, words that I use to convey what I'm thinking,
when you hear them may have a totally different meaning to you than my intent.
And that's fine, it's just the way things are. But given all that, when using
words, it is important that they convey as accurate a picture as they can, even
though most likely they'll fall woefully short. But, they’re the best we’ve
got.
I may be called a heretic, I
may be taken to task, because I dare to say that a lot of what is written and
said in Buddhist teaching can fall a little short of conveying the true
message. Given that any number of times these words have gone through a number
of translations, and “thus have I heard” that there was no tape recordings of
the Buddha's actual words, I take it as a given that while he may have been
precise, over the years, that they maybe it got little imprecise. And maybe
this is all just an attachment of mine to using what I perceive to be the more
correct word, and I willingly submit that may be the case. But I believe there
is a difference between, “Let's eat, grandma,” versus, “Let's eat Grandma.”
What I am taking issue with is
the seemingly interchangeability of “thinking” and “mind.” If one uses the
words of Huangbo, the Chan Master who died in 850 CE, and from whose writings I
took the name of the sangha (One Mind Zen Sangha), he uses the word “Mind” as
the unconditioned:
“It is not green
nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the
categories of things which
exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is
neither long nor short, big
nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and
comparisons. All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are
nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is
unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong
to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old.
It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and
comparisons....The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and
sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By
their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to
grasp Mind.”
I'm good with that approach.
The one thing I might take issue with is the last sentence where he says “using
mind to grasp Mind.” But I'll let it slide, because “mind” in the first case is
lowercase, and in the second case “Mind” is capitalized. The word he would have
used would be shin, which translates as “heart/mind,” which is akin to
the Sanskrit word “Citta.” But if I wanted to be picky about it, I might
say “use thinking to grasp Mind,” which in English at least, doesn't flow quite
as smoothly or as poetically.
The Yogacara school of
Buddhism, the “Mind-Only” school teaches that the entire world is dependent
upon “mind.” In this case, what they're referring to might be where “thinking”
and “mind” dovetail. They're sometimes also referred to as the
“Consciousness-only” (Skt: Citta-matra) school, and that's upon which I
base this opinion about where thinking and Mind overlap. The deepest level of
this consciousness is the “storehouse consciousness” (Skt: alaya vijnana),
which contains both the individual residue of thought, but also universal
consciousness, what Huangbo refers to as “Mind”.
The Lankavatara Sutra also
speaks of this:
“:..The doing away
with the notion of cause and condition, the giving up of a causal agency, the establishment of the Mind-only--this
I state to be no-birth....There is just one truth...it has nothing to do with intellection...Of neither
existence nor non-existence do I speak, but of Mind-only which has nothing to do with existence and
non-existence, and which is thus free from intellection....Suchness, emptiness, Absolute Truth...these I call
Mind-only.”
We can use “thinking,”
especially intellectualizing thoughts, in place of “intellection,” if you like.
So we've got both the Buddha and Huangbo using the word “mind” as different
from “thinking.”
Of course, where the rub is,
is when Huineng tells his monks that neither the flag nor the wind is moving,
“Mind is moving.” I'm not so sure it's mind that's moving. The Korean monk
Wonhyo, awakened when he saw that the “cup” of delirious “water” he drunk in
the night, turned out to have been a skull filled with brackish rain water (and
brackish may be an understatement). What he thought of as wonderful in the dark
caused him to vomit when he saw what it actually was in the light of day.
“Ah-ha” he realized between bouts of vomiting, “Everything is create only mind
alone!” Third Zen Patriarch Sengcan in the Xinxin Ming, his great poem whose
title is often translated as “Faith-Mind Inscription,”
“When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way, nothing in the
world can offend, and when a thing can no longer
offend, it ceases to exist in the old way.”
Zen Master Seung
Sahn refers to “Clear Mind” as “Moment-to-moment, what are you doing now?”
Whatever we are doing we do it 100%, be it driving, cooking, operating on a
patient, teaching, writing, or whatever. When we interject “I, Me, Mine” into
the equation, then we create a subject/object duality, and then we have a
problem.
If you were to go
to the Buddha Dharma University website, which is the “seminary without walls”
for the Five Mountain Zen Order, the URL is “www.beforethought.com” This refers
to that natural state, our True Nature, where thinking is not required to take
correct action. I will often put it in terms of the rests between the musical
notes, the spaces between the words, the space between thoughts. When a fish is
in water, no name for “water” is required. If the air were always still, no
name for air would be necessary. But as there is wind, as Huineng's monks
noted, there is differentiation between still air and moving air. If a fish is
out of water, then water becomes water, and air becomes something different,
resulting in the judgments that thinking brings along with it. If there were no
“off,” would we need a word for “on?” If there were no “dark,” would we notice
“light?” If the sine wave were always above the zero line, it would no longer
be a sine wave. It would just be on at all times. When looking at binary code,
if there were no “0” there would be no use for “1.”
But when we create
duality out of these things, one being “better” than the “other,” that's when
we get into dangerous territory. Yes, there is dark and light, but they are
mutually dependent upon each other, two sides of the same coin, where no “coin”
has sides. Same with 1 & 0, same with all things that can potentially
thought of as “this” or “that.” Thinking creates subject/object, where neither
is necessary. Sengcan says, “The Great Way is easy for those who do not pick
and choose.” And that's why for most of us, it isn't easy at all. We constantly
pick and choose, sometimes by way of discerning what is wholesome, or helpful
in a situation, versus when something would do harm.
The Bodhisattva
path is one where we save all beings, not just some. Given that there is no
“picking and choosing” in “all,” then we are free to act according to our True
Nature, before thought comes in to make opposites. “The foolish reject what
they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they
see,” as the Buddha states in the Lankavatara Sutra. When driving, just drive,
when teaching, just teach, when planning, just plan.
Observe the space
between words, the rests between the notes, observe the space between thoughts,
even though this observation may just be thinking. That is our True Nature.
It really is easy
if you think about it. But that's just what I think.
Oh, the irony!
Thanks to Dōshim Dharma for his Original Mind Zen Sangha Dharma talk
called, “Mind the Gap.”
Click below for the Dharma talk:
https://soundcloud.com/onemindzen/mind-the-gap
