There's a certain type of precious character that infests usenet and other venues in the online Zen landscape. He - and it's always males - arrogates superiority over practitioners who meditate and receive precepts, claiming such students misunderstand the Chan ancestors. He mocks the efforts of those who spend hours on the zafu seeking to realize their Buddha-nature. Quoting the Sixth Patriarch and Vimalakirti, he declares that we are already enlightened, and so meditation is worse than useless, keeping one in the delusion of being deluded by trying to quit delusion. Does he demean sincere practitioners as a means to proclaim his own lofty realization? Does he just want to excuse his own laziness? Most annoyingly, could he be right?Those who vaunt this view like to cite this Public Case:
Ma-tsu Tries to Become a Buddha
Huai-jang asked [Ma-tsu], "Why are you sitting in meditation?"
[Ma-tsu] replied, "Because I want to become a Buddha."
Thereupon Huai-jang took a brick and started to polish it in front of [Ma-tsu's] hermitage.
[Ma-tsu] asked him, "Why are you polishing that brick?"
Huai-jang replied, "Because I want to make a mirror."
[Ma-tsu] asked, "How can you make a mirror by polishing a brick?"
Huai-jang said, "If I cannot make a mirror by polishing a brick, how can you become a Buddha by sitting in meditation?" [1]
Huai-jang implies, pretty clearly, that you cannot become a Buddha by meditating. So how do you become a Buddha?
In Mahayana Buddhism, the teaching is that in your nature you already are Buddha, along with all other beings. How can you become what you are? How can you find something that not only is closer than your breath, more intimate than your life, but the very whatever you are searching with? It's like a fish asking the fish-sage to tell it how to find the ocean, or a bird flying up, thinking it never reaches the sky.
Furthermore, methodology itself is a hindrance. If Buddha is at the core of being, if Buddha is the core of being, any activity at all may divert the attention of awareness away from the actuality that awareness is precisely the functioning of Buddha. Any intention to change anything at all instantly alienates you from full participation in this instant, wherein alone may Buddha be sought.
And further yet, to speak of what by nature is beyond words is obviously a problem. To convey information, words must be defined, their meaning walled off from what they do not mean, so that they may function in a matrix of logic and order. How can you define what all things come from and which has no boundaries, not excluding anything at all? Words cannot contain that which contains them.
At least, not ordinary words. Language has means to transcend itself. Poetry can mean much more than it says, and questions can open to vast spaces. Though no verbal instruction in how to proceed into that realm beyond words can be other than hint and suggestion, just a finger pointing to the Moon, the Zen ancestors got rather good at verbal devices that point beyond the limits of language. Since words mislead, they appreciated contradictions, even in the scriptures. Especially in the scriptures! The Zen School revels in self-refuting formulations, helping people to take no literal teachings too seriously. Such formulae as "Zen can be summed up in two words: Not Always So!" and "Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise" are very dear to the heart of the lineage. Turning the meanings of words and phrases around into deeper teachings is a revered tradition.
The Sixth Patriarch said,
"Learned Audience, what is sitting for meditation? In our School, to sit means to gain absolute freedom and to be mentally unperturbed in all outward circumstances, be they good or otherwise. To meditate means to realize inwardly the imperturbability of the Essence of Mind." [2]
So "sitting" and "meditation" are here given meanings that sound other than calming the mind with a still body in a cross-legged posture. Is that right? Let's make sure!
The Sixth Patriarch also said,
"The one-act samadhi (meditative state of concentration) is to keep the mind straightforward at all times, whether walking, standing, sitting or lying down. The Vimalakirti Sutra says, 'The straightforward mind is the site of enlightenment, and the straightforward mind is the Pure Land.' . . . Just practice the straightforward mind and refrain from clinging to any dharma (i.e., thing, object): It is this that is called the one-act samadhi. The deluded cling to the characteristics of dharmas and the name of the one-act samadhi, simply saying that sitting in a motionless posture and eliminating deluded thoughts without invoking a false mind is exactly the practice of the one-act samadhi. If it is so, it would be no different from being an inanimate object, [thus hindering] the Way, however. The Way (tao) must circulate freely; why has it become blocked and stagnant? When the mind does not dwell in any dharma, then the Way flows freely. To dwell anywhere is to be shackled. If the point were just to sit motionlessly, Vimalakirti should not have scolded Shariputra for sitting quietly in the woods."[3]
What happened between Shariputra and Vimalakirti? A juicy encounter worth repeating:
When Shariputra was sitting at the foot of a tree in the forest, absorbed in contemplation,Vimalakirti said to him,
"Shariputra, this is not the way to absorb yourself in contemplation. You should absorb yourself in contemplation so that neither body nor mind appear anywhere in the triple world. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you can manifest all ordinary behavior without forsaking cessation. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you can manifest the nature of an ordinary person without abandoning your cultivated spiritual nature. You should absorb yourself in contemplation so that the mind neither settles within nor moves without toward external forms. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment are manifest without deviation toward any convictions. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you are released in liberation without abandoning the passions that are the province of the world."[4]
There you have it! In no uncertain terms, the Sixth Patriarch, Bodhisattva Vimalakirti, and Master Huai-jang all say one should not practice seated meditation! Our obnoxious fellow is correct, much as admitting it may hurt our stomachs. But why have generations of monks, nuns, and laypeople in Asia ignored this teaching, to sit many hours each day for year after year?
What form of meditation is best for cultivating a straightforward mind that does not depend on sitting or any other form? Experience shows it easiest to develop in a crosslegged sitting posture in one of the lotus poses, still and quiet. Because it is so much easier to develop in a crosslegged posture, and because there is a danger of addiction to blissful states, a little warning to beware of dependence was and still is called for.
Let's hear from the Sixth Patriarch again:
"I will now teach you how to explain the Dharma without deviating from the tradition of our school. . . . Should someone . . . ask you about a dharma (i.e., teaching or principle), answer him with its opposite. If you always answer with the opposite, both will be eliminated and nothing will be left, since each depends on the other for existence."[5]
The Patriarch seems to have tailored his answers depending on the listener, and suggested his successors do the same. In this he was not different from the Buddha, who spoke to individuals in the context of their history and understanding, thus providing all those delicious contradictions in the surviving records of his speech. This habit of teaching according to the needs and abilities of the student even has it's own term - upaya, usually translated as "skillful means."
From the Buddha on, a teacher's tactic was to look into the questioner's views, which are what keep them (and us) in delusion. Whatever view we cherish, the teacher's job is to deny it and affirm its opposite, until all our views crumble.[6]
In the time of the Sixth Patriarch and Ma-tzu - and also our own - monks and lay practitioners often had the tendency to believe awakening would come from meditation. Such a view, with meditation and awakening as cause and effect, sets up a duality that perpetuates the problem. The solution is to realize there is no problem, best done by sitting for many hours to learn purposeless meditation, where awakening is no different from meditation or any other activity.
Our gadfly friend, who mocks our sitting practice as brick-polishing does us a great favor, and we owe him immense gratitude. But anyone derisively using quotes from ancient worthies in some literal and authoritative way had better be ready for derisive counter-quoting.[7]
Is there a way Ma-tzu could have answered Huai-jang's question that Huai-jang would not have disapproved of? Within a long walking distance of the monastery where Ma-tsu became teacher of multitudinous disciples, another master, the illustrious Shitou, also lived and taught. Sometimes Ma even sent students to him, and Shitou returned the favor. Among Shitou's best disciples was an interesting man named Yaoshan, who was asked the same question when meditating.
Yaoshan Does Nothing
One day, as Yaoshan was sitting, Shitou asked him, "What are you doing here?"
Yaoshan said, "I'm not doing a thing."
Shitou said, "Then you're just sitting leisurely."
Yaoshan said, "If I were sitting leisurely, I'd be doing something."
Shitou said, "You say you're not doing anything. What is it that you're not doing?"
Yaoshan said, "A thousand sages don't know."[8]
[1]From Sun Face Buddha
by Cheng Chien Bhikshu
Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1992
[2]From Sutra of Hui Neng, Chapter Five,
translated by C. Humphreys and Wong Mou-Lam
http://www.sinc.stonybrook.edu/Clubs/buddhism/huineng/huineng5.html
[3]From The Mandala Sutra and its English Translation, Section 14
Revised by Prof. Yang Zengwen
Taipei: Mantra Publishers 2004
[4]From The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, Chapter Three,
translated by Robert A. F. Thurman
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/Vimalakirti.htm
[5]From The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra, Chapter Ten
English translation by the Buddhist Text Translation Society,
Commentary of Tripitaka Master Hsuan Hua
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/Platform%20Sutra.pdf
[6]For another example, old Lin-ji (Rinzai) gives his game away:
Master Lin-ji said,
"Students flock to me from all parts. I sort them out according to three kinds of root-ability. If a middling to low one comes, I snatch away the circumstance but leave him the Dharma. If one with a middling to high ability comes, I snatch away both the circumstance and the Dharma. If one with an exceptionally high ability comes, I snatch neither the circumstance nor the Dharma nor the man. And if there should come one whose understanding is outside the norm, I act from the wholeness without bothering about the root-ability."
From The Zen Teaching of Rinzai, Section 28
by Irmgard Schloegl
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/zenrinzai.pdf
[7]Such people have been around a long time. Master Bassui Tokusho (1327-1387) decribed some in the Fourteenth Century, saying that, after they thought they had attained enlightenment, they "behave haughtily through lack of wisdom; engage eagerly in debates on religion, taking delight in cornering their opponents but becoming angry when cornered themselves; appear perpetually discontented while no longer believing in the law of causation; go about telling jokes in a loud, jabbering voice; deliberately disturb and ridicule those who study and strive earnestly, calling them clods whose practice is not Zen."
From "Bassui's Sermon on One-Mind and Letters to His Disciples"
Chapter IV of The Three Pillars of Zen
compiled and edited by Philip Kapleau
Boston: Beacon Press 1967
[8]From Zen's Chinese Heritage_
by Andrew E. Ferguson
Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2000
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