An Emptying Mind
We hold a monthly "introduction to Zen" evening at the Milwaukee Zen Center and those who attend often make interesting comments.
On a recent evening, a young woman who had done a bit of meditation practice here and there commented, "I have difficulty achieving an empty mind. I can't seem to do it." By expressing her understanding that the goal of zazen is to empty the mind completely, she was touching on what I feel is a widespread misunderstanding concerning the nature of zazen. There is an all too common notion that the goal of zazen is to empty our mind of all thought. Against our very nature, we struggle to quell the workings of our brain.
In some ways, this concept of an empty mind seems enticing. We would be free of all anxieties and unsettling memories. Still, setting aside for a moment the physical impossibility of killing all thought this side of death, what would we have achieved? Is blankness desirable? Do we confuse the absence of thought and feeling with the presence of peace? How can absence be identified with anything at all?
In truth, an effort to achieve an empty mind seems to run counter to the earliest teaching of the Buddha that we suffer because we cling to things and crave conditions. (Indeed our group agreed that trying too hard to achieve this empty mind, produces an attachment to this goal; indeed, an attachment to something that is an impossibility. In Buddhism, we know that attachments produce suffering and this attachement to an empty mind can produce suffereing for us also.)
Our unease derives from our attempts to stop the free-flowing life within which we exist. And is not attempting to eliminate all thought just another attempt at control? Another attempt to achieve a situation of our ego's choosing?
How different is the practice of shikantaza or "just sitting" as taught by Dogen, in which we sit quietly in an upright posture, allowing everything -- sounds, sensations and above all, thoughts -- to come and go. We do not try to eradicate thoughts, we merely relinquish our grasp and let them go by.
So, in this case, is our mind empty or filled? I think that it is simultaneously empty of fixed notions and full of the evanescent flow of thoughts. In itself, it is an empty space that is always open to the fresh flow of thoughts. When you examine this, it makes sense. While we can perhaps do two things at once, we cannot think of two things at once. Each thought fills our mind and it must flow away before it can be replaced by a new thought.
It is a mistake to think, "I must have a mind empty of all thought," for this in itself becomes a huge thougtht squatting right there in our mind, a thought we cannot let go of. On the other hand, as we sit quietly in shikantaza, thoughts may come and go, unforced, and our practice is to leave them alone rather than trying to obliterate them by force of will.
Life itself demands the free flow of thoughts and images.To be at peace is to allow this free flow, yet be untouched by it ...no need to grasp, hold, or fear. When we do not control our thoughts and they do not control us, that is shikantaza.
In the Shobogenzo fascicle, Zenki (Total Function) Dogen uses the iimage of a person and a boat as a metaphor for the way in which we and our life define each other; the boat is the boat because it carries a person, the person is a person because he sails the boat. The interaction of cause and condition is what creates a "being" or a "thing." They themselves are empty of any fixed nature, for if they were not, they could not become what life is making them.
In a somewhat similar way, our minds frunction as the causes and conditions for the conception of things. It is we who give them names and functions. Something before me rests upon something else, which in turn rests upon something else. My mind tells me it is my empty coffee cup holding open my copy of Shobogenzo, which rests upon my desk. For me to understand this, my mind must be empty enough to allow the concepts "cup, "book" and "desk" to enter it. And at times there is something else in the way. We are all familiar with those moments when we realize we haven't heard a word our friend is saying and say in apology, "Oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking of something else."
So to have an empty mind can be thought of as having a mind open to whatever ideas arise, not stuffed with so many preconceived notions that no further thinking is possible. Most of us are familiar with the story of the professor who visited a Zen master, ostensibly to receive teachings, but who talked incessantly about his own ideas. The Zen master, pouring tea, allowed the professor's cup to overflow and when the professor asked him to stop, said mildly, "The cup is like your mind. It is too full for me to add anything."
In some Zen literature the working of true reality is called Mind. I've always struggle a bit with that designation, since there is a background implication in the word "Mind" of a will behind its activity, but this is, I think, an unintended consequene of the use of the word. Rather, Mind, sometimes described as like space, is the emptiness within which the fullness of causes and conditions come together through the workings of impermanence and interdependence. We call it Mind, because, like our small minds, its process is endlessly creative, although our small minds often operate with intention and Mind does not. We busily fabricate ideas, while Mind simply is what is, a space that enables the process of the universe.
Rather than an empty mind, I would like to have a spacious mind, a mind as boundless as the blue sky within which clouds ceaselessly form, unhindered. Rather than an empty mind, I would rather have a mind in which thoughts come and go unhindered. An emptying mind.
Some discussion followed in the group of some techniques of meditation. In our meditation in this group, we often use focus on the breath to help reduce the thought burden. But some schools of meditation do not even teach using the breath. They just sit, ie just zazen. They teach that if you just sit quietly eventually the universe, the Mind will find you. It has to. There was a consensus in our group that the focus on breath perhaps helps to speed the goal of reaching peacefulness by enabling us to focus more easily. And the breath is always available and helps us leave the world behind us and outside of our meditation space.
We liked the image of the blue sky being the absolute Mind, and the clouds being thoughts. Even if the sky is totally overcast, the blue sky is always there. We must expand the Mind in order to see the blue sky.
We can come to meditation with our mind full of negative or even racing positive thoughts and find it difficult to focus or concentrate due to the heavy burden of racing worldly thoughts. We are in a funk; our blue sky is totally socked in with clouds, perhaps even fog down to ground level. We can use the meditation to lighten the clouds, break them up, and expand our horizons to the blue sky. On member said our mind is a "funk-seeking" device. It is constantly too full of thoughts. We have to learn how to take the K our of funk.
I think the group could identify with some of these images and conceptions of the peacefulness that should arise with the practice of meditation; yet this peacefulness probably will not be a thoughless state. We should not strive for such an impossible state. Yet with practice there will be fewer clouds and more blue sky.
Note: The photos are taken during a River Cruise on the Volga River, traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg. I thought they represented our discussion of blue sky, and thought clouds, quite nicely.
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