The Restless Mind
When the mind wanders, bring it back. Back to the sensation of each breath. To uprightness. To letting go.
The human mind is intrinsically restless. Even when it’s given nothing to do, it still finds plenty. Ironically, it probably finds more to do when given nothing. In Zen, we call it ‘the monkey mind’: always grasping, chattering, exploring, running around. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna says to Krishna, ‘the mind is unsteady like the wind’.
This chattering mind is driven by duhkha (dissatisfaction), a natural and inevitable part of being human. It’s not something to feel bad about. Or to feel like a failure because your mind keeps chattering when you practice.
Nonetheless, the chattering can keep us trapped in the relative ego with all its wants and needs. This distances us from reality as it is, from experiencing how things are now, from being truly present. It distances us from existence, from relationship to all beings.
So Zen calls us to go beyond the monkey mind; to find the experience of emptiness between and beyond that chattering. Not by desperately trying to stop it – which is always, in the end, destined to fail though you might succeed for a second, a minute, an hour, maybe even longer – but rather to open the awareness, giving space to the chattering without letting it fill the mind. This allows what is between and beyond to enter into our everyday consciousness, refreshing us.
In practice, this means bringing our awareness back to the present moment – the posture and the breath, but not limiting it. As Master Wanshi says: ‘Open to the vast luminous field of awareness in which the weeds of the chattering mind can grow and fade.’
Even when the weeds fill that chattering field, then just simply accept that’s how it is today. And once more, come back.
Open.
Be.
Appreciate the beauty of being human in this moment.
Contemplating Buddha
If the mind is wandering, then come back. Let each breath return your awareness to the present moment; opening to what Master Wanshi calls the ‘vast luminous field’.
This is not something cosmic or mystical. It’s quite ordinary and natural, always present in the human condition, just often lost in the clouds of thought.
Master Wanshi was a Chinese Chan master who lived shortly before the time of Dogen. His teachings are poetic, but at the same time, to the point. I would like to share a taste of them with you now.
‘Contemplating your own authentic form is how to contemplate Buddha. If you can experience yourself without distractions, simply go beyond partiality and go beyond conceptualising. All Buddhas and all minds reach the essential without duality.’
‘Contemplating your own authentic form is how to contemplate Buddha’. The inner fundamental sense of being, shared with all, always already within each of us.
This is found by, as Master Wanshi says, ‘going beyond conceptualising’; letting go of the structures, thoughts, judgments, emotions, that arise in the ego.
This isn’t something special that only some of us attain. He says that ‘all Buddhas and all minds reach the essential without duality’. It’s something that is always already present, in every being: it is shared by us all.
Master Wanshi goes on to say, ‘Passing through the world, responding to situations, illumination is without striving, and functions without leaving traces.’ So, as Master Deshimaru puts it, it’s expressed in the world naturally, unconsciously and automatically.
There’s no need to try with the ego to make a situation better. Simply open and respond to what is in front of each one of us, responding without striving, without desperately trying to change the world to be how we want it: whether for selfish reasons or selfless ones, they are nonetheless egoic.
‘The direct teaching is pure and steady. Immediately, without allowing past conditions to turn you, genuinely enact it.’
Let go of the ego. Let go of the patterns within us, the causes and conditions which shape us. Letting go is not escaping, but acknowledging and opening beyond.
Strip Everything Back
Let personal stories pass. Once more, allow the awareness to open. The gaze wide, receiving the whole visual field. Receiving passing sensations, emotions, thoughts. Receiving and letting go. Grounded in the solidness of the posture. Steady, accepting and open: right now, nothing more is necessary.
The dojo is a place where, to the extent it is possible, we let go of the personal self. We do that symbolically, partly by wearing simple, dark and plain clothes and avoiding wearing jewellery or beads. We leave all symbols of our everyday busyness outside: money, watches, phones.
Milan Kundera writes that there are two attitudes to the self. One is that we create the self by decorating, adding and putting things on, in order to create a personal image. This self may be fun, but is also, in some sense, artificial – an artifice. The other way, he says, is to strip away: to strip everything back to find what is essential. What is notourself, but what is Self, the fundamental ground of being. That second way, of course, is the way of spiritual practice in many forms. Stripping away, coming back, letting go. Not decorating the self – not even with the toys and games of Zen.