Chan Brushwork Retreat 2019

The image that comes to mind when I try to sum up the retreat is of a triple: a three-legged stool, a tripod, a triptych. This represents what were for me the three components of the retreat: the huatou, the brushwork, and the sitting. Each locked into the other.

I can’t remember the exact words of the huatou but in essence Joshu asks Nansen how to pursue The Way. Nansen tells him that making efforts to pursue the way will not work – that will drive it further off. What then is to be done, asks Joshu. Thinking is delusion, says Nansen. Not thinking is blankness. The familiar Zen dilemma. But Nansen hasn’t finished… “Ordinary Mind is the Way” he says. This too is pretty delphic. What is ‘ordinary mind’?

We met this dilemma again in the brushwork, in a slightly different form. When the instruction has been given and you have practised a little on newspaper you come to the moment when you are faced with a blank white sheet. In your hand you have a brush loaded with ink. What are you going to do? If you think about the ideograms and how you are going to do them you fall into a kind of paralysis. Too much technique. If you don’t think about them then you will simply have some marks on paper at the end which bear little relation to what you have practised. Not enough technique. Neither is satisfactory.

You come to some kind of resolution of this dilemma in action. The energy builds up inside you until it is irresistible and you bring the brush down onto the paper. From that point things get a little easier: the logjam is moving. Day to day mind is still there because it is commenting as you go along; it is whispering that this bit is good and that isn’t and there’s not long to go now and so on. For me, it could not stop the flow but I imagine the danger of paralysis reasserting itself is always there. When you sit down to start a session of sitting meditation the dilemma is there again. If you think too much about what you are doing then you are not just sitting. If you don’t think about what you are doing then you are just drifting.

A comparison which comes to me is with learning a foreign language. You have to learn some grammar at the start. You may become very good at that – the structure of the language. You pass all your exams with top marks. Then you go to the country where the language is spoken and realise you are incapable of going into a café and buying a cup of coffee. Your head is stuffed full of technique. After a day or two you accept that you simply have to throw yourself in, forget the grammar and start speaking. The natives, after all, are not worrying about their subjunctives.

Maybe this is what Nansen was getting at with his phrase ‘ordinary mind’. It is that point where you start to bring the brush down; where you start to speak hesitatingly in a foreign language; where you stop worrying about whether you are doing the meditation right. What you are doing is by its very nature right because it balances out thinking and not thinking.

When I reflected after the retreat it occurred to me that this point, this moment, is not so uncommon in daily life. We just fail to notice it. I realised this in the session at the end of the retreat where each participant speaks about their experience. Just as I was about to speak I realised that this was exactly the same feeling as with the brushwork. You are poised. There is silence. You are going to fill it – not with marks, but with remarks. You pause, the energy comes and you start to speak. I jotted down other everyday examples as I sat in a café after the retreat. This is what I came up with.

• Knifepoint denting fruit skin as you start to peel
• Turning the ignition key - the cough of the motor
• Your foot on the first step of the staircase
• The striker rising to the crossed ball
• The resistance of the bicycle pedal as you start to move
• Dodgems – the moment before impact
• A spanner against a tight nut - you begin to turn it
• The moment of diving into the swimming pool
• The tram arrives and its doors open with a hiss; stepping forward

Each of these seems to be characterised by a minor build-up of energy which demands expression in the physical world. It may seem to be a split-second but I wonder… Here is a haiku.

I turn a doorknob knowing the hinge creaks sudden silence

At some point during the retreat the phrase “mind on mind” came to me. I don’t know whether I have read it somewhere or whether it was just spontaneous. It’s not entirely clear to me what it means but the meditative experience often seems to consist of watcher and watched and these can disappear just as speaker and language can become one; or, presumably, artist and brush can become one. In the end, it’s not hard to be yourself. I really enjoyed the retreat.