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How does thought arise? Excerpt from Chapter 5 of Ten Zen Questions |
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(Note: the chapters vary a lot in length. This question is not one I set for myself, but one that took hold of me on a retreat at Maenllwyd in March 1993. The question itself was embedded in a series of questions, and these were embedded in a yet longer series of exercises. Though I struggled with them, I loved these questions, and returned to them on later formal retreats, on a solitary retreat at the Maenllwyd, and finally at home in the winter of 2007 in my shed in the garden. I describe here just the first (now fifteen years ago) of these attempts. Called “Introducing Tantra to the Path”, this retreat was not one of John’s usual Western Zen or Chan retreats, but was intended for Zen practitioners to get a taste of a different approach, one derived from Tibetan Buddhism rather than Chinese or Japanese Buddhism. The five days of structured meditation were based on a notebook compiled by a Tibetan master and brought back from India by John himself some years before. …
On the first day of our retreat, as we all sat round the hall on our cushions, John told us this story, and entrusted us with a few photocopied pages from “Tipun’s notebook”. But we were not to read them yet. First we had to calm the mind. The first day was horrible. At 5.30 a.m. someone banged together two pieces of wood, the usual rising signal at Maenllwyd, and we had to be dressed and outside within ten minutes. There, in the farmyard, in the dark, John led us in a few vigorous physical exercises, gave us some simple instructions for the day, and then sent us off for tea before the first long sit began. It was cold, I was sleepy, and I did not like having to sit still for hours on end. As the sessions of calming the mind proceeded I wondered why on earth I had come. My mind drifted off into fantasy, wild speculations, and thoughts of how long it was until the next meal; I felt my head jolting as I dropped into microsleeps, and full blown hallucinations attacked me. Then I jerked myself awake, angry with myself for drifting off. Great meditation! But I got through it. The next day was quite different. I grabbed every chance I could to sleep, even for a few minutes, and began to feel better. … It was later on this second day that John gave us the first of the questions. He read slowly from Tipun’s notebook. To examine the basis of the mind abiding (in tranquillity) and the mind moving (with thought) it is necessary to look into the following questions: When abiding in tranquillity what is the nature of such abiding? What is the manner whereby it is maintained? How does the movement of thought arise within tranquillity? Is there an essential difference between abiding in tranquillity and moving in thought? I had never done anything like this before. The questions were so strange. But I loved being given something concrete to do instead of the usual “Make your minds bright, 30 minutes” of John’s Zen instructions. So I set to work to observe the tranquillity and the moving in thought. The trouble was, there was a lot more of the latter than the former. I persevered. Another hour long session went by. And another. Now I began to notice gaps. Is this the tranquillity between the thoughts? Am I abiding in it? If so, what is the nature of such abiding? It seemed to mean sitting in a world full of sights and sounds that changed, and came and went, while nothing really moved. The idea of moving in thought then made sense. The tranquillity itself seemed to be maintained by attention to the birds singing, or to the floor in front of me, or to the silence between. A phrase came to mind from a famous Zen story in which a man asked the Zen master Ikkyu to write down some words of great wisdom. Ikkyu wrote “attention”. Not satisfied, the man asked for more, so Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention”. Still not satisfied, he demanded more, and Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention, attention”. This seemed, however, to be a rather special kind of attention;
something like paying attention equally to everything without making any
choices. As for the thoughts arising within tranquillity, that was a bit
harder. They came all right but I could not see from where. So I sat and
watched as thoughts came apparently out of nowhere, repetitive thoughts,
thoughts set off by sounds around me, thoughts induced by people
coughing or sneezing, irritating thoughts of the “aren’t I doing well?”
kind followed by “No I’m not. Oh stop it! Pay attention!”. Still, for
all my failures, this task made thoughts something to be observed rather
than criticised, and I began to see thought as one aspect and abiding in
tranquillity as another. So I had the answer! They are both the
same.Someone tapped me on the shoulder. My turn. My heart beat faster. I
stood up, bowed to the cushion, and slipped out of the meditation hall.
A traditional part of many Buddhist retreats is an interview with the Master; either a formal interview following set rules, or an informal one more like a normal conversation. I climbed the creaky stairs to the bedroom at the back of the house, stooped under the ornate curtain hanging over the door, and found John sitting directly ahead, facing an empty chair. I bowed, sat down in the empty chair, and blurted out how hard I’d been finding the retreat. He kindly suggested that my tales of tiredness and hallucination might contain a hint of self pity, and suggested how to combat them. Then I told him my answer to the question. “Yes” he said “That is the classic Mahamudra answer. Still, there is a difference. Do you know what it is?” I didn’t. I said I’d try to think about what it was. “Not now” he said “I just thought you might have noticed”. I felt deflated. But I went back to work determined to find out. That night I drifted into sleep very alert. Something observed something else falling asleep. Something heard the boards clapped together at half past five in the morning, and seemed to be still awake, though quite refreshed. I was quickly up and out into the rain. All that day I stared into the moving mind and the tranquil mind and had no idea what the difference was, except that one was still and one was moving. Ah. But what is moving? That might help. I thought it might be the self. Of course. Yes. It’s the self that moves. I wanted to rush back to John and tell him proudly that I had an answer. But there were no interviews that day. I could put myself on the list for one the following day, but I felt embarrassed to be the first person to do so. So I set myself to exploring every change to see whether my hypothesis worked. And then somehow I got angry. I don’t know why, or how, but I seemed to be angry at everyone and everything; at people who made too much noise, at the stupid chanting and visualisations that we had to do between the sessions of meditation, at the cold, at John, at the lack of sleep, and at myself. I was angry that I was angry, and angry that I couldn’t get on with the task. Everything seemed foggy and unreal. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be like this. Curiously, it was one of the Tibetan visualisations that dispelled the anger. We had to visualise an extremely complicated series of actions involving becoming a creature with four arms; the arms representing emptiness, love, countless beings, and compassion. I followed the instructions obediently, although I’d always thought these intricate Tibetan practices rather silly. Yet somehow this exercise undermined all the anger and swept it away. In Buddhism it is often stressed that compassion and insight must go together, and although I am writing here almost entirely about insight, this practice was one of many that showed me the importance of balance. It seems that anger can’t survive much compassion. … This clarity was soon gone, and I was back to worrying about that interview, my answer to the question, and what John would say. I had finally put my name on the list and was impatient for the time to come. But now John gave us a new question from the notebook. We had to inquire into whether the awareness that observes the states of abiding and moving is the same or different from the states themselves. This, he said (perhaps by way of encouragement), was preparation for seeing everything as having “one taste” and finally to step into “non-meditation”. What? The idea of everything having one taste seemed abhorrent – even though he described it as “the refreshing taste of emptiness”. Differences and contrasts are what make life worth living. And what about non-meditation? If that’s the goal then why are we spending all these years learning to meditate? … The next day dawned bright and clear. We took one of the meditation sessions outside, looking out over the wide valley with its interminable heather and bleating sheep. A deep calm came over me. The time for my interview came and I found myself saying I did not need it any more. Everything seemed the same now. I realised that it wouldn’t have mattered whether John said I was right (in which case I’d have thought “good goody, clever me”) or wrong (in which case I’d have thought “Oh no, I’m a failure, stupid me”). His question had dissolved in the next question and was gone. As I sat under a wind-stunted hawthorn tree, in my three shirts, two jumpers, two coats and a blanket, everything had the same taste and there was nothing to be done. The others were dotted around the hill. John was at the door of his room. The tiny cars moved silently far away down the valley, and the clouds drifted across the wide sky. When the bell rang I unwrapped my blanket and stumbled down the hill through the vivid rough grass, and back to the meditation hall.
I am back in my garden shed. It’s fourteen years since that first Mahamudra retreat; ten years since I last spent a week all alone at the farmhouse in the Welsh hills, working my way yet again through Tipun’s series of questions, reading just one or two each morning and then spending all day inquiring into them. It’s January. It’s windy. It’s wet. I lay the tattered old photocopy from all those years ago carefully in front of my cushion and read the familiar words. Insight meditation is established through examining the root of (both) abiding and moving and then meditating within the experience of non-elaboration. To examine the basis of the mind abiding (in tranquillity) and the mind moving (with thought) it is necessary to look into the following questions: When abiding in tranquillity what is the nature of such abiding? What is the manner whereby it is maintained? How does the movement of thought arise within tranquillity? Is there an essential difference between abiding in tranquillity and moving in thought? I begin with the first question. “When abiding in tranquillity …” Ha. It’s all a trick. How many times have I thought that. The only point of these questions is to lure you into tranquillity. The answers don’t matter. But maybe that’s OK. I sit. The wind blows. In a brief lull in the rain, the cat creeps in and sleeps for an hour next to me. It’s too windy for birds.
It’s the fourth day. I’ve been working hard these past three days, but today is not good. There was a terrible storm in the night. The banging and crashing woke me many times. I am tired and sleepy. I don’t know how a fog can be made of thoughts but it is. There seems to be no gap between them, no space into which to peek even to look for tranquillity. I sit with it. I don’t get angry. I accept the irritation. Years ago I might have raged against my own mind, but now I know the fog will either clear or it will not. I want to work with the question but if I can’t, I can’t. I sit. I take a break and run up and down the steps by the garage, a simple way of getting warm; ten times up and down, then round the apple trees and back to sitting again. Another session passes. I am outside again. This time I smash some wood for the fire and get hot with the exertion, damp leaves blowing past me in the fierce wind. I go back to the hut and slowly light some incense sticks. It’s clear. There it is. Tranquillity. Where did that come from? Keep steady, and ask “What is the nature of abiding?” I sit for a while. It’s something like this, I think. The attention is steady – or at least it leans only slightly from this to that. Something – the space around me, the ground before my eyes – stays steady. Leaves are scudding past my door, getting stuck on the small puddles and then freeing themselves and scudding on again; the fence behind is crashing with sudden force as it flips against a tree. But if I think of them that way then the bare attention is lost. Once they become leaves and fence, attention is all gathered up into objects and the tranquillity is gone. So I stop asking and keep practising. I see and hear and feel but name nothing. So it goes on. Stuff happens. And how is tranquillity maintained? By paying attention. But this is not the kind of focussed attention that brings out details or applies concentration to one thing. In fact it is just the reverse. It is something like paying attention equally to everything. … I take a few steadying breaths, and pay attention. It gets easier. It stabilises.
Ready? Yes. How do thoughts arise within tranquillity? This seems too easy. Here I am sitting peacefully, alert, paying attention. Everything is steady and in balance. It’s easy and natural. Surely when a thought appears I will see it coming and I’ll be able to answer the question. I go on sitting. Stuff happens, paying attention.
Oooops. What? To my astonishment I find I’m half way through a great long line of thought about how the bird table fell over in the wind and whether it would be better to pick it up now or leave it until the wind has died down in case …. Someone had been having all those thoughts and I didn’t notice! Who didn’t notice? The one who was supposed to be asking the question? Who’s she? Oh dear. Stop and begin again. You know this happens. You know that thoughts do that. But I want to see where they come from, and how they arise in tranquillity. That train of thought was presumably provoked by the sound of a bird, or a gust of wind, but I was watching for it wasn’t I? How could I have failed to notice all those thoughts for so long? I’m reminded of the parallel threads. There was someone sitting in tranquillity, waiting for a thought to come along so that she could see how it arose, but she didn’t see it. Meanwhile a great long complicated thought started up and suddenly the two collided. Oooops. Did the one asking the question carry on while another one had started thinking? Or did the thought think itself, or ? I’m not supposed to be asking a thousand supplementary questions. Get back to work. How do thoughts arise in tranquillity? As the day wears on the tranquillity stabilises. A headless body sits calmly in the garden shed. Stuff happens.
I sit down again, slowly, and pay attention. … It’s maddeningly difficult to do this after spending so long watching for thoughts to arise as though they were the enemy. I pick on a theme, set it going, and then try to watch. The odd thing is that when I do this I’m still paying open attention, and so nothing seems to move. I wonder how to let the mind move and examine its moving without holding it back. I seed some thoughts and let them loose, and watch, and hope to catch them out again after they’ve gone, and round and round. It reminds me of William James trying to catch hold of the flights between the perchings in the ‘bird’s life’ of the mind. At least I have something to do. In experimenting this way I find there are two different kinds of thought. First there are those that happen right here, in the midst of tranquillity, like asking the question and watching for an answer. … Then there are those protracted streams of complicated thoughts that seem to catch me out. They move all right. But it’s more than that. It’s as though they start without me. They drag part of the mind away and then, since I’m so bad at catching them out, the mind seems split in two before I even notice. In a flash of thought that seems to take no time at all I can see all this laid out as a theory about what is happening in the brain, with groups of neurons organising themselves in different places, their patterns arising and falling away, though with no experiencing self. But if I try to put it into words it seems fiercely complicated and the attempt is distracting. It doesn’t matter. I won’t forget the vivid wordless mental image summoned up. I can think about it later.
It’s my last break of today. So I take up the notes and read the same page over again. I read the now familiar questions slowly, letting the words well up within tranquillity. I come to the next line, which I have not read so far this week. It then becomes important to examine whether the awareness that does the looking into these matters is separate from the abiding and moving states or whether it is the same. There are three ways of investigating the experience of non-elaboration. This is done through inquiring into the reality of contrasts between (i) the three times of past, present and future, (ii) I laugh. No. It’s too much. I haven’t even begun to think about time. How amazing this notebook is. That’s enough for today. I settle down again on my stool and abide in tranquillity. Or do I? There’s always some little movement isn’t there? Now slightly towards the bird song, just started up as the wind begins to ease; now slightly towards the gloss of rain on the flagstones in front my eyes; now just a tiny shift towards the feel of the cushion beneath me. What if my mind does not move at all? What if attention is completely steady, completely without elaboration? Is there anything at all left when nothing is leant towards, nothing away from. I look. It’s ……
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23 March 2009 |
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