A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No-Method
This book feels familiar, like a homecoming, with its frequent references to Masters Sheng Yen, John Crook and Simon Child – Rebecca Li’s three teachers to whom she dedicates it. It is also simultaneously very challenging.
Rebecca’s background, born in Hong Kong and then studying in America while being the regular translator for Master Sheng Yen over many years, gives the book a western sensibility with an underlying deep appreciation of Chan’s Chinese roots.
Throughout the book, the English is plain and so lucid. No retreating into technical language or philosophical musings: the phrase “causes and conditions” appears on almost every page; the word “karma” is nowhere to be seen. Other Sanskrit words are only used at the first reference to the relevant English translation. While her core phrase – total clear awareness – speaks to it at many levels, there is only a single, passing, appearance of “mindfulness”!
The scene-setting frontispiece texts are the first six lines of Hongzhi’s Silent Illumination poem and the Hongzhi quote “Stay with that just as that; stay with this just as this” which she references as a leitmotif throughout.
Rebecca is very clear that Silent Illumination is an experiential whole of life practice: “the natural state of being fully human” or perhaps, to use Fiona Nuttall’s phrase, the honest dance of common humanity. It can start on the cushion but is not limited to the cushion. It requires paying attention, moment to moment, to every aspect of one’s life.
The book is suffused with several repeated themes, starting with the one-line quote from Hongzhi above. Silence and Illumination are not separate but two sides of the same coin. Silence is not emptying or silencing the mind; it is non-reactivity to the activity of our minds rather than the absence of activity itself. John Crook’s “let through, let be, let go” becomes a mantra throughout. Our vexations are our habitual reactivity to events and so activate suffering in a very simple equation – experience of the present moment + vexation = suffering. Recognising vexations every time they surface and then, with clarity, changing one’s reactivity is the task of Silent Illumination practice.
It all comes down to her signature phrase “total clear awareness” which seems to be analogous to paying attention to every moment, each such moment being the unique coming together of particular causes and conditions.
It is structurally clear and well thought through. After a personal introduction and three introductory chapters, she lucidly summarises the four noble truths and the eightfold path followed by seven chapters on what she calls, in relation to vexations, modes of operation, namely craving, aversion and then five types of delusion – trance, problem-solving, intellectualising, quietism, and forgetting-emptiness. These chapters constantly challenge one’s habits and then provide ways of countering those same habits or modes of operation. I finished none of these chapters unchallenged! As you would expect, the final chapter brings everything together beautifully and concisely.
This book is a remarkable manifesto for the relevance of Silent Illumination in avoiding suffering and living in the world with Wisdom and Compassion. Highly Recommended.
P.S. Jeremy has nearly finished reading this book for the second time!
Rebecca is a Dharma heir of Simon Child. Her other two teachers were Chan Masters Sheng Yen and John Crook. The book is available from all good bookshops and also from Amazon.
