A Dharma talk from a 10-day intensive Silent Illumination retreat at the Dharma Drum Retreat Center, May 23 to June 1, 2014
Common misunderstandings
Yesterday everybody had an interview. One of the purposes of interview is to respond to your questions. Perhaps we also need to respond to the questions you didn’t think of asking because you thought you knew (but you were wrong.) We [the interviewing teachers] were looking out for some common misunderstandings. Some of them are so common we don’t really have to look for them; we can just assume they’re there, and yesterday you didn’t let us down.
There are two common misunderstandings I want to mention. One is, those who’ve read perhaps too much (or maybe they’ve not read quite enough) have not understood what they’ve read, but have picked up ideas and pointers, and then they think they know, and they follow this sense of knowing and delude themselves further. We hear people saying things like: “The task of my practice is to get rid of myself. I am a delusion, I am not here” or “You are a delusion, you’re not there” or “I don’t need to face this problem, it’s all imaginary.” This is a person who’s read something about emptiness and thinks they know what it’s about, but they are making themselves more confused.
There is actually quite an easy remedy for someone who believes they don’t exist. You say, “Oh, that’s great! So please now stop taking your share of the food; there will be more for others to eat.” Some try and brave that out, and pretend it’s OK, because it’s in the future. They don’t actually have to commit to it until the next meal; they’ve got thinking time left. Another approach is: I can pick up the stick and say “I’ve seen a delusion on that chair and I want to beat it away. You don’t mind, do you?”
Certainly there is a teaching about no self, no mind, emptiness. But it’s one that is easy to misunderstand. So be wary of being caught in your own cleverness. You’ve read something; you believe you’ve understood it but you haven’t, and you are creating difficulties for yourself. For example if you believe that situations in your life don’t need to be confronted because they’re delusions, you are setting yourself up for a life that’s more painful than necessary. We need to respond to the demands of life.
Awareness of thought
Another common misunderstanding is: how we handle thought in the practice. This is revealed by people who state that the purpose of their practice is to empty the mind and get rid of thought, to have a blank mind. Some people take this to quite an extreme. Yesterday somebody told me their strategy was to have an axe ready for each time a thought appeared: cut off the thought. On a previous retreat, someone gave me a very clear image of his practice. He was watching a rabbit hole waiting for the thought to appear, and the moment the thought appeared, he was ready – with his machine gun. That’s a true story. This wasn’t a teaching he got from me, though.
This reveals an attitude that thought is somehow bad; it’s in the way; it shouldn’t be there. “It’s rather a nuisance, it’s disturbing my mind!” It’s easy to see where this mistake comes from; again it’s really just being a victim of our own cleverness. When we start off with practice we are taught methods of calming the mind. We experience for ourselves how a mind which has very many thoughts tumbling over each other can indeed, through training, become a mind with much fewer thoughts. So it’s natural that we extrapolate, and think “obviously the objective is to have no thought! So I will get myself there! I will get rid of the remaining thoughts!”
We might hear people talk of experiences of indeed having no thoughts, and this confirms our sense that “to be a better practitioner we must get rid of every thought.” No. That’s too extreme an extrapolation. Indeed we do have practices to calm the mind, and they may involve cutting thought off to some extent by limiting the awareness, focusing on a single point. We narrow the awareness and thereby cut off “awareness of ” the thoughts. Do we really cut off the thoughts? Or do we just cut off awareness of them? See, there is maybe the first trap – if we narrow the mind down, it can seem as though there are no thoughts. But maybe we’re just overlooking them, because we’re not looking at where they are. We’ve trained ourselves to focus intently on our object of practice, and we get good at it, so we’re training ourselves to overlook what else is going on.
This is a very useful start to practice, when you have a mind that is so wild, full of thoughts and videos of all sorts – you know that experience. You can’t really engage in much practice until it’s calmed down to some extent. So there are various methods to help it calm down. But the extrapolation was incorrect. Even though people may have the experience of no thought (and some of you have had that experience) that doesn’t mean that’s your destination. Here is a somewhat different interpretation: the purpose of calming the mind is so that you can become very clearly aware of what is there. And that’s a different endpoint, isn’t it? It’s not cutting off, denying, overlooking or avoiding. It’s saying “this mind is somewhat calmer now; I can really see what’s going on. Before, I couldn’t see the beginning, middle, and end of a thought; they overlapped too much, and crowded each other out. And now, with this mind that is somewhat calmer, I can observe the process of thought. I can see indeed how a thought has a beginning, a presence, and an end. I can see that thoughts are transient” and so on.
Investigate the mind
So you can investigate the nature of thought, the nature of mind, when the mind is calmer. This is not something you can do if you’ve cut the mind off, trained yourself to ignore it. You then don’t have that opportunity to observe the mind and see how it works. So these are two different ways of developing the understanding of practice, and the first one, the extrapolation “my task is to get rid of thoughts as completely and as quickly as possible” is a misunderstanding. I would put forward the alternative which is: when you’ve calmed the mind sufficiently, you’re in a position to investigate the mind.
Remember again these two aspects of practice, presented to us by the Buddha. Often we need to do samatha (calming the mind) first, because of the state our minds start in. Then we investigate the mind (vipassana). In silent illumination, we’re doing both. But the calming of silent illumination is not a cutting-off sort of calming, it’s rather different from that. So how does that work?
It’s worth bearing in mind that if you compare practices, you could say that the two main methods of Chan (huatou and silent illumination) are more advanced than the other methods which can help to prepare the mind. The other methods can help illustrate different aspects of mind, while silent illumination and huatou can take us all the way to enlightenment. The advanced methods don’t have these built-in limitations of awareness, constricting the mind in that sense. Being a more advanced method therefore gives us different challenges.
One of these challenges is how we handle thought. It can be particularly challenging because maybe, until picking up this advanced method, you trained yourself to this attitude that thought is something “in the way”, the enemy of your practice, a disturbance, a distraction. And now you’re being told that’s not quite so. This is confusing for people; it’s counterintuitive. It even feels almost dangerous sometimes in the sense that you’ve put in a lot of effort, long hours of painful legs, to develop a certain calmness of mind and now it seems at risk of being disturbed by a shift in the method. You feel a sense of “this is not right, I don’t believe this, I disagree” and you resist opening the awareness. But if you’re going to be moving yourself forward along the path towards enlightenment, at some point you need to be able to have a mind which is wide open.
If I want to paint a caricature of the Buddha, do you imagine him as someone who had a rather narrow attention? Someone who didn’t dare open his attention wide in case it disturbed his practice? That’s not my image of the Buddha. So you could say you’re preparing yourself, testing it out. You’re finding out what the difficulties are, and through practice you find ways of handling these difficulties, and indeed you find it is possible to have the mind open wider. Ah! Hmm, that’s interesting. You could say you’re nudging yourself towards enlightenment. Still, in silent illumination we talk about sudden enlightenment, we don’t talk about gradual enlightenment. But certainly we talk about gradual cultivation; that would be reasonable. We’re gradually exploring and getting to know the mind, getting to know its obstructions, getting to know how to handle them, and finding that indeed we can! There are ways forward. We find that, yes, we can keep the attention wide open, confront an obstruction, and keep the mind open and handle it. We don’t have to retreat into our rabbit burrow. That’s a dangerous place, a rabbit burrow, isn’t it?
Opening the awareness
So we’re exploring the capacity of our own mind, our own awareness and, yes, we are challenging it. Opening the awareness is challenging: it makes it more likely that the mind wanders away because you are giving it more things to be interested in and attach to. If you are sitting here with a very narrow focus, very intensely concentrated, you’re not so distracted. People walking around the room, traffic outside, birdsong – you’re not paying any attention to that, it can’t disturb you. You hardly perceive it. But then if you open the awareness and you perceive the richness all around you, it can be almost overwhelming and you immediately attach to something, start having a discussion with yourself about it. So opening the awareness is tricky and challenging but also crucially important.
In terms of this practice of silent illumination we can trace the origins of it, in some ways, back through history. We can also find the basis of it in the sutras. In Shifu’s book Hoofprint of the Ox, when he is talking about silent illumination, he uses the Diamond Sutra as an illustration of the approach to practice. There is a famous line in the Diamond Sutra from which Hui Neng the sixth patriarch became enlightened:
Without dwelling in anything whatsoever, allow this mind to arise.
“Without dwelling in anything” points toward silence, towards nonattachment. “Allow this mind to arise” points towards illumination, towards the mind being fully awake and present. It doesn’t say, “without dwelling in anything whatsoever, make sure the mind doesn’t arise.” It doesn’t say, “without dwelling in anything whatsoever, be very careful as the mind arises.” Just: allow the mind to arise. Brighten the mind, be fully awake. Be fully attentive without dwelling in anything whatsoever.
That phrase “without dwelling”, that’s pointing to nonattachment, brings up another area which people find difficult sometimes. Nonattachment is perhaps a little bit difficult to describe. But if we think of attachment, it’s becoming over-involved, over-identified, over-immersed in a particular thought and it’s drawn you off-centre. You’ve lost your wide-open awareness, you’re preoccupied with something. The other extreme is avoidance of attachment, and this is where the phrase non-Buddhists often use about Buddhists comes from: “Buddhist detachment.” Detachment is not quite the same as nonattachment. Detachment has a negative quality about it, an avoidance, a dualism. So it’s not about avoiding, and it’s not about attaching. It’s somewhere in between. We can call it nonattachment. To put it another way: you’re not so concerned whether you end up involved or not involved; there is no strong preference, there’s just an acceptance. “Yeah, this is in the mind, or this isn’t in the mind. I’m really open to either possibility.” If you are attached, you want to keep it in the mind. And if you’re detached, you’re trying to keep it out of the mind. But nonattached means, well if it’s there, it’s there, and if it’s not it’s not. No big deal. I’m not shaken by its presence or its absence.
So without dwelling in anything, without being concerned about what’s there, nevertheless let awareness arise and inform you what’s there. It’s tricky; it’s finding a balance, and we easily lean one way or the other. Of course our personal histories lead us to have certain avoiding behaviours and certain attaching behaviours. We feel safety in certain objects and circumstances and we don’t want to let them go. Then we feel risk and danger in other situations and we put effort into avoiding them. The mind which is not dwelling, the mind of nonattachment, allows itself to experience all that is present. Now that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t respond to dangers; of course it does. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t respond to need. It can go and eat that food that the other person is no longer eating. That’s not attachment; attachment is when you get obsessed with food. The Diamond Sutra is pointing towards us having a mind functioning in awareness. It’s not telling us to restrict the mind, to only allow certain types of mental activity to occur. It’s just saying, be present with the mind.
Trains of thought
For another way of looking at the issue of attachment and nonattachment I’ve made up a variation on the metaphor of the host and the guest that Master Hsu Yun used to talk about. We can look at this way, if we are aware of the phenomenon of a thought becoming a train of thoughts. A thought arises in the mind and there’s no particular problem with that. But thoughts link to other thoughts. They create ideas and another thought joins them and maybe these become problems, or solutions, or opportunities. Images are painted in the mind by thoughts congregating. A common phrase in English is “a train of thought”; one thought leads to another. Sometimes it’s interesting to reflect, when you find yourself thinking about something: how did you get there? Often we have no idea because we’ve not been paying attention. I once caught myself out and I thought “How on earth did I find myself thinking about this?” I was able to trace it back; maybe 15 thoughts had linked together and ended up at a completely different place to where it started.
Now, there’s no problem with thoughts doing this. They create these trains and it’s okay. We can just let these trains of thought pass through the mind and show themselves to us. But we don’t attach to them; we’re not engaging with them. The problem is our tendency to board the train and follow it to its destination. We hop on the train and it takes us away to some future fantasy, or back in time to something that we want to fix (even though it’s already happened). We get tangled up in these trains of thoughts. The image that works for me (rather than Hsu Yun’s host and guest) is: you are the railway station master, and the trains are your guests. There’s no problem with trains coming and going in a railway station. But it is a problem if you hop on one and travel off 300 miles; then you’ve abandoned your duty. So by all means have thoughts coming and going through the mind, forming trains of thoughts, congregating. But don’t jump on them. Observe them, but don’t board them.
There is another example from the sutras, of how we can handle thoughts during our practice. This is from the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, and is also taken as one of the gongan in the Book of Serenity (Case 45).
At all times do not produce delusive thoughts,
Also don’t try to stop or annihilate delusive states of thought.
Now, we don’t have any great difficulty agreeing with the first line: “At all times do not produce delusive thoughts.” That’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it? The challenge comes after the comma: “also don’t try to stop or annihilate delusive states of thought.” That’s a bit more challenging, if you have the idea that your task is to purify the mind by ejecting unwholesome thoughts. But the sutra tells us, “Put away your machine gun, put away your axe. Don’t annihilate deluded states of mind.” Hmmmm. So that means that if a deluded state arises, you don’t stop it. Huh! Maybe that’s a rather different idea of practice to what you thought you were doing. Sitting there with a deluded state of mind – that actually makes practice easier, doesn’t it? Sitting there deluded is quite easy, and quite a common experience really. Maybe we’re better at practice than we thought…
No, it’s not quite meaning that either. If you have deluded states of mind, and they are held within awareness, it’s not saying that you should be deluded. But if there’s an obstruction in the mind based on a misunderstanding of some situation, maybe provoking an anxiety, don’t annihilate that. Use it as an opportunity to investigate how you create your own delusion, a sort of case study. The mind is holding this painful idea, this anxiety, fear, or grief. Positive feelings, negative feelings, whatever has arisen in the mind, here is your opportunity to investigate it. This word “investigate” is a little bit difficult to understand, so let’s look at how this might work. Investigate, illuminate, floodlight – we’re not in denial about this thought, because we’re clearly aware of it. We don’t regard it as an aberration that shouldn’t be there, or should be got rid of. We just say “Oh, yes that’s what’s in my mind; I’m feeling anxious, sad, negative, confused. I’m feeling happy, joyful, free.” Anything. Any state of mind, don’t annihilate it – investigate it.
Silently investigate
Master Hongzhi was the one who gave the name to the practice “silent illumination”. These phrases like “silently investigate” come from his writings. How do we “silently investigate,” what does that mean? When we find ourselves holding one of these states of mind, we silently investigate, which means we illuminate it; we allow the light to shine on it. We allow it to be seen, felt, tasted. There’s no aversion or avoidance; we fully experience it. Rather than our usual habit of trying to shy away from some experiences and pull towards others, we just continue sitting in the presence of the state. No avoidance, no denial. Here it is; I’m experiencing it. At this moment, I’m feeling this way. It is so. No running away. To investigate “non-silently” would be to start a wordy, intellectual analysis, a review of past experiences and personal history (which can also be useful, because it can sometimes illustrate the origins of some of these states). But a silent investigation is just sitting there with it, no deliberate delving back in history, no deliberate classification.
Indeed, classification and naming can actually get in the way; here’s an example of how the sheep pen exercise I mentioned a couple of days ago has its limitations. Some of you have found that a useful exercise, and it is useful. That’s why I mentioned it to you. But the reason that sort of approach is useful is because of its limitation. What it does is take a number of thoughts about the same topic and put them together to make it more manageable for you. But that loses some subtlety. If the thoughts were about your boss at work there are probably overlapping issues, different examples and problems. Since they all have a common theme of “problems with your boss at work”, the sheep pen method worked to help concentrate the mind. But now with a silent investigation, if you just label it as “boss at work” it sort of turns off the investigation. You have no incentive to pay any attention. “Oh I know what that is.” You’ve categorized it, labelled it, put it in the cupboard and forgotten about it.
“Silently investigate” means not applying words and labels, because these are limiting. It is simply “being with”, and maybe noticing, the mixture of feelings. Maybe the complexity of memories arising is not just one incident; maybe there are various similar things jumbled together. But if you jump quickly to saying “I know what that is” and you name it, you are in a sense detaching from it. You are shutting it away. So, silently investigating is just “being with”. A thought arises in the mind and you are just with it. A feeling moves through the body and you are with it. A sound touches the eardrum and you just let it do that. If you jump to naming the species of bird because you are a birdwatcher, in a sense you’ve lost contact with the bird—it’s just become something in your tick list of “birds I’ve heard”. You’ve distanced yourself from the actual hearing experience.
So, to “silently investigate” is just “being with”, and being with as it changes. A more analytical investigation would be looking back in history deliberately. Silent investigation might include some awareness of the history of the situation, because it just comes to mind. That’s the way the mind works; thoughts get triggered and thought trains form themselves, you don’t have to go and create them. You’re sitting, something has arisen, something else arises, and then something else arises. There may or may not be a connection between them. You’re not trying to make connections; sometimes the connections are obvious. You just continue sitting. This full awareness, this openness to what’s arising, is the silent investigation. Disconnecting from experience means there’s no investigation. Controlling the experiencing; labelling it, categorising it – is not silent.
So you are bringing yourself to just “sitting with” whatever is there. You’ve been starting that off by sitting with the body; every sensation it gives you, you experience it. You don’t start saying “Hmmm, I need more of this sensation and less of that; I wonder why that one is gone.” You simply sit with whatever the body is bringing you at this moment. This extends to whatever the wider awareness is bringing you. It’s arrived, it’s with you and you accept it. The sound of bird song that is so prominent here. The sunlight coming through the windows at different angles. Brightness, shadow. A memory. A sadness. A joy. All of these things just present themselves to our awareness, and we remain silent but we also remain present and bright, which is the investigation.
Constructs of mind
If you are cutting off thoughts, you are missing the chance to get to know the constructs of your mind. Because what’s presenting itself to you is partly the direct perception of a sound, but it’s also the construct of the mind that gives a name to the sound. It’s also the construct of the mind that joins the sensations together, creating objects, creating stories. We don’t need to do this deliberately, it’s doing itself out of habit. And by watching the mind you are watching your own habits in play. You’re watching how you construct your own experience of the world, you are watching it happening and you remain silent and you continue watching. This watching is a very deep investigation. It can be quite challenging; watching yourself displaying your habits, you begin to feel embarrassed about them, uncomfortable for some of the ways that you think and behave. But here they are playing themselves out in front of you. You remain silent. The video of “me” can be quite uncomfortable, can’t it? But we don’t switch it off – watching it is the investigation. We make sure the projector for this video is on full brightness, fully illuminated. We don’t want to miss anything.
This points to the value of this investigation process. It’s teaching us about how we view, react to, and actually construct our own world. Because we have habitual patterns of behaviour, certain perceptions become something wonderful and we attach to them. Certain other perceptions become something frightening and we shy away. We create our own world to a very large extent as the Avatamsaka Sutra tells us, in the opening verse of the evening service:
To know all the Buddhas of the past present and future, [i.e. to become enlightened] perceive that all worlds of experience are created by the mind.
You are creating your own world of experience, and if you practise silent illumination you can observe it happening. Mind grows more still and you actually observe this process from beginning to end. You observe, for example, a direct perception of sound, but you notice how you name it; the sound is coming from a person or an animal, or from the building. Then an attitude attaches itself, an attitude of joy or irritation or judgment. This usually happens in a flash, unseen. Because you’ve cultivated a habit of watching the mind, of observing and being present with whatever the mind presents to you, you find yourself noticing far more than just body sensations. You notice the activity of mind. You notice how you are creating your own sense of irritation from simply the perception of a certain type of sound. Well, it’s not that that particular sound is inherently irritating, because twenty other people around you are hearing the same sound and they are not irritated. So it’s something about you.
Silent and non-silent
There may be another slight point for confusion here: with silent illumination, I’m telling you that “silence” is you not adding anything to it, but then here you are finding yourself adding something. You’re adding an interpretation, a reaction. So does that mean you should cut off these things? No. What it means is, you take them as something to be observed. What you don’t do is react by cutting it off. The deliberate action of “cutting off ” would be non-silent. Allowing the mind to show you how it behaves and acts, is silent. It’s the interfering which is non-silent. I hope that’s not too confusing. But the point is, you stay with whatever the mind presents you. There’s no plan to steer the mind a certain way, no plan to avoid negative, unwholesome, deluded thoughts. And there’s no plan to amplify pleasant, happy, generous thoughts. You observe what the mind brings, you observe how it reacts.
You are investigating the nature of your mind in quite a deep and challenging way. Sometimes it takes you to difficult areas, but then, that’s very useful. Because if you investigate a difficult area, you can begin to understand the nature of why you find that difficult, and this can be very important. If you habitually shy away from difficulty, you’re limiting yourself. There are certain things in life that you don’t do, that you avoid. You may shape your life so that you are not confronted by these things. But in silent investigation you may find that something you’ve always assumed is challenging or frightening turns out to be a mistake. You drew a conclusion in the past from some particular event, and it got stuck in the mind and you haven’t challenged it. Now as you sit there you find yourself challenged by the circumstance arising in the mind and you also find, “Oh, that’s why I feel challenged.” That presents itself to you, and you find, “Oh, that isn’t challenging any more. My life has changed; I see things differently.” You can release this rather stale, habitual reaction and find freedom from fear of that particular situation which always led you to avoidance before.
This type of practice takes you deeply into some of the dark corners of the mind, and this is very useful. It’s useful in the sense of your worldly life-experience because it can free you from some restrictions you’ve put on yourself. And it’s useful in terms of your meditation practice because it frees you from some obstructions. Certain obstructions to your practice have to do with fears and anxieties and the way you build yourself to be safe from them, keeping the mind closed. But actually if you dissolve these away by confronting them, you find that practice flows more freely. The mind takes one more step toward stillness – one of the guards has gone off-duty permanently, he’s retired. So there’s less noise in the mind; the mind is more open and freer. Clarifying the mind in this way has benefits in terms both of your personal life and of your practice; they go together. It’s useful either way.
I’m saying these things to point you towards why it is that we say “allow the mind to arise”. Allow yourself to experience whatever arises. There is no editing, no filtering. There’s no judgment on whether this is an appropriate thought to be here now or not. It’s already here; it’s in the mind. Watch the process triggered by that thought. Watch how you react. Get to know yourself, and get to know how you limit yourself. Find your own way towards freedom.
Having no obstructions
Since this is somewhat stepwise as you move through different obstructions, we can call it “gradual cultivation.” Hopefully you can see how it is leading you towards a mind which is ready for enlightenment; a mind which is ready to become totally open and not waver, not retreat or be afraid – because it’s already dealt with all its fears, there’s no longer any obstruction. But at the moment, obstructions are there. They’re waiting for you to investigate them by simply allowing them to be there in full awareness. Allow them to show themselves and tell you about themselves, if you are willing and have the strength and focus to stay there with them. They are often not at all what you assume. We live by assumptions, habits of thinking. But when we confront our obstructions we are very surprised by what’s going on. They’re often actually quite minor concerns which have become amplified and fossilized. They’ve become stale and outdated and no longer relate to our current situation. So actually it’s safe to investigate these even when it feels scary.
Commit yourself to your practice. Commit yourself to a fully open mind. Commit yourself to confront what the practice presents you with, and in that confrontation, rather like the Buddha confronting Mara, be present with what is there. The Buddha didn’t close his eyes and pretend that Mara wasn’t there. He just said “Oh, Mara, this is what you've brought me now, is it? Okay, what’s next? Bring me some more.” Take that attitude. Don’t be fixed on the idea of closing the mind down, having a sort of limited silence and a dull mind. Commit to opening the mind, letting whatever arises be fully experienced, and whatever follows that to be fully experienced, and whatever follows that to be fully experienced. If they link themselves together you will see those links. If they don’t, that’s OK too. You have no programme here, no expectations. You are just watching the mind, investigating the mind, and it is a very deep practice. So see where it takes you.
