The following Dharma Talk is from a Silent Illumination Retreat, November 2010 at Dharma Drum Retreat Center. It was transcribed by Catherine Burns and edited by Eddy Street. Published in Chan Magazine Spring 2012.
Perception and Sensation
At each morning service and evening service we chant The Heart Sutra together. In one part it says:
Form is precisely emptiness
and emptiness precisely form.
So also are sensation, perception,
volition, and consciousness.
Most of you will know that these are the five skandhas: form, sensation, perception, volition, and consciousness – the five skandhas being a model of the human mind. “Form” referring to the shape, the body, the substance. “Sensation” referring to the ability to sense the world through touch, sight, smell and so on. “Perception” is what we make of what we receive through those senses – do we see a tree? Do we see a drum? Or when we hear a sound, maybe there is an interpretation of what the sound is. We hear a click; we have some sense of whether it is a twig snapping or maybe a car door shutting. Perception therefore is not the same as direct sensing. Direct sensing is just the sound – then we have some interpretation of it and that is perception.
Volition
Today I want to focus on “volition” which refers to our response, or our reaction, which is different from interpretation. Interpretation requires us to be involved and to have some prior knowledge. For example if we had never seen a tree we would not be able to call it a “tree” when we saw it. From our experience there is a straightforward correlation for most objects – we know it is a tree or we know it is a drum, or whatever. Volition, referring to our response or reaction, is more complex and worth investigating. The word “volition” tends to imply free will though it is not a word that we use much in everyday language. Generally we might say, “Someone did something of their own volition.” – they chose; they decided to do it. But this sense does not quite carry the full flavor of the word. The Sanskrit word is samskara, and it implies something more and different from free will. Sometimes it is translated as “impulse” or impulsiveness. This implies spontaneity and also a habitual reaction and this is where it becomes interesting. Here there is something about a habit-response, not a predetermined response, but a tendency to respond in a certain way. “Volition” refers to our habit tendency – some could call it our karmic tendency. For whatever reason, given a particular sensation and a particular perception we will tend to respond in a certain way. It is not the only response that could have been made; other people may well respond differently. It is not quite free will as you may feel impelled to respond a certain way. Indeed, you may just do it without any sense of thinking about it, judgment, or working out what is best. We all have habitual reactions for certain situations and circumstances and this word samskara, translated here as “volition”, is pointing that way.
Karmic Tendencies
So what decides which habits we pick up? What decides what our reactions are going to be? I used the phrase “karmic tendencies” which is the Buddhist terminology for it and in psychological terms we would say “conditioning”. Certain things have happened in the past, and we have acquired a way of responding which seems to work for us, so we carry it on. Our response becomes conditioned by past experiences and it then becomes a habit, somewhat unquestioned and switched on automatically when the appropriate triggers are present.
These can be the way we protect ourselves, such as shying away from certain situations where someone else might step forward and deal with it. Or indeed we might be the one who steps forward and responds, being very vigilant when others shy away. For some reason we are choosing that course of action but it does not necessarily seem to be a free choice. Most of us will recognize that we find ourselves doing things and we are not quite sure how we ended up doing them: How did I get myself into this situation, again, and again?
Hidden Assumptions
The question is – how did you? Somehow, certain conditions arose and you responded in a way which got you into that situation again, even though last time you were not very comfortable with it. But here you are finding yourself doing it again! These might be coping strategies we have learned through our experience of the rough and tumble of life. They may be actions that we do. They may be attitudes we have. They may be internal reactions, feelings, responses or thought patterns and they can reveal themselves in different ways.
In a sense, we have a particular way of interpreting life and we carry with us some translation tools. We translate certain situations subconsciously, into an evaluation of “step forwards” or “step back”, “say something” or “do not say something”, “go in this direction” or “go in that direction”. It is not that it is pre-determined but it is that we have a tendency to go in the same direction each time this particular situation arises. We carry a particular interpretation of the world and, perhaps without realizing it, we carry “hidden assumptions” about situations. Certain situations may carry risk for us and certain situations may carry opportunity. We have an assumption built-in, hidden and unseen, which moves us towards the situations which unconsciously we feel may be of benefit to us, and similarly these assumptions may move us away from the other situations.
Fixed Views
It is the hidden nature of these assumptions, the fact that they are habits rather than open free choices, which causes us some confusion. Sometimes we do not quite understand our own actions or attitudes. Even when we notice what we are doing we do not necessarily understand what is going on. These are fixed views.
We find ourselves holding certain fixed views, – these are my values, these are what is important to me – and in treating them as important we do not quite know why they are important to us. So just saying these are my values can be something of a rationalization: I find myself carrying these; these must be my values. Well how did you come to choose your values? How did you come to choose your preferences? Particularly and curiously, you find yourself saying: How did I get myself into this situation, again? Somehow we do not seem to learn from them. We find ourselves performing behaviors which do not work for us, and yet we repeat them again and again. There is something strongly driving us towards making repeated choices in the same direction – even when the evidence of our own recent experience does not seem to support it. This is what gives a clue to the strength of these hidden assumptions and fixed views.
Fossilized Responses
We all have responses which we picked up in the past, perhaps in childhood, perhaps later on, but then they became fossilized and we have buried them deep. But still they drive us from below even though they may be quite stale. The logic which embedded them is often no longer valid. That logic comes from another time, another place, when that reaction, response, or attitude was helpful. It may not have been the best possible one at the time but it is one that worked. It got us through a difficult situation. As living beings with a capacity to learn from experience, we learned, this works and we decided I’ll keep on doing this. By this process, it became embedded into our way of being in the world. This is curious as it seems that we are not learning from our current on-going experience, we go by what we learned in the past. As the saying goes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The young dog learns the tricks, but we older dogs do not learn so easily, we keep on making the same choices even if they are unhelpful or harmful. Now I can give you lots of examples of this. Here is one I have heard often: Imagine you are a small child with a heavy drinking alcoholic father who comes in drunk, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. You find yourself liable to get a beating, so of course you learn to hide, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe some other nights of the week are not safe too, so you generally learn to be a person who hides. You conclude that it is not safe to be in the presence of authority figures. You generalize and you extend this. You become an adult who is a bit reclusive, shy, especially feeling very uncomfortable in the face of authority figures – which might be your schoolteacher, your boss or it might be anyone. In this manner you have picked up a certain way of being in the world, which related to a way of coping in childhood.
But now as an adult you are no longer living in a household with an alcoholic father, so what are you hiding from? It is a behaviour which has become embedded, stuck and fossilized. You do not understand it; you just know that you feel awkward in certain situations and with certain people. You do not know why you do, but you rationalize it and say: Well I’m a shy person. I’m a private person (or something like that). But these stories are not always as straightforward as this; there can be twists and complications to them. For example, that small boy hiding on Friday and Saturday nights may then have heard his mother being beaten. The mother was the one who cared for him, the person he looked to. So then comes a torn feeling: Do I hide and protect myself or do I intervene and try and protect my mother and thereby get beaten anyway? A twist in the tale, which adds another process to the coping mechanism with another attitude to life established. Of course different people may react differently to this, and different responses will evolve, in this fairly gross example which unfortunately is not an uncommon one.
Buried Tendencies
There are much simpler examples; maybe an over-stern school teacher; a child who bullied you at school; or maybe being shamed at some point for something. All these things sting us, they stain us and we learn from them; but we learn in a rather inflexible way. We find a way of coping and managing them thinking I have got it! and we carry on doing it.
You may recognize some of these in yourself and you may have some idea of what patterns you have picked up. Some of them you may have been able to let go of, because you have re-evaluated them in the light of your present situation: Actually I’m no longer living with my parents, I do not need to be afraid of Friday and Saturday nights; and you are able to break free.
But if you do not know why you are afraid of authority figures, if you do not know where the fear came from because it feels deeply buried, it is very hard to break free of that tendency. Some of these tendencies remain hidden for decades, for lifetimes. We carry on exhibiting certain attitudes, habits, behaviours, and we really do not know why, even when we know they do not quite suit us.
So why am I mentioning this now? Well often the obstructions you meet in practice are related to something buried in you. You are carrying a fixed view that is not compatible with open awareness. We all have limits and as you cultivate your practice you reach your limits, and if it is a limit of which you are not aware then that can become confusing. You are not quite sure what is going on but you have a sense of being stuck, unable to progress, and this might show itself in symptoms such as recurring, wandering thoughts. You have done your sheep pen exercise and the sheep pen is overflowing and still the sheep keep coming. What is going on here?
(Editor’s Note: The Western Chan Fellowship’s retreat center in Wales is on a sheep farm. When Master Sheng Yen led a retreat there he noticed the farmers sorting the sheep into different pens. So he talked about a method of calming a scattered and confused mind; he called it “using sheep pens”. You take each thought as it comes and notice what category of subject the thought it is about, and you put the thought into the pen for that subject. What you usually find is a thousand thoughts only need about three or four sheep pens.)
Have the Courage to Look Directly
This is a recurring story in the mind – recurring again and again. Maybe there is a habit force driving it. Maybe there is actually a message for you in this story. Maybe this is not a random wandering thought; maybe this is one of your obstructions speaking to you, saying “Hear me”. But you think: I am hearing it. I’m fed up with hearing it. Well maybe you are not hearing fully. Maybe you have got so fed up with it you are only really giving it half a glance and thinking: Oh it is that again. Oh, okay, put it in the sheep pen. Well, actually, this needs to be looked at more closely. So, again we bring up this word “investigate”. What does investigate mean in this context? It actually means: Look directly at what is going on here. It is not a matter of trying to suppress it, of trying to say: This is not proper practice, this is a disturbance to practice. It is a matter of saying: Here is a part of the mind which is not yet fully illuminated. Here is a part of the mind with which you are not yet in full contact. So turn your gaze onto this story.
What is the story? Well it is just a collection of words. What is the message? Now, the message might be buried in the words. The words may be modified, sanitized. You are only really letting yourself touch the tip of the iceberg of this story – because there is pain underneath it. There is a power to this story which has not yet been expressed. The mind is offering you a little taster, and it is seeing if you have the courage to look it directly in the face and see what is below the water-line of this iceberg.
So one way is simply digesting this story: What is the context? I wonder why it keeps coming back? Sometimes the answer is to be found, not in the words, but somewhere else in the body. Move yourself out of the head – what is the bodily experience of this story? Is there a feeling, a churning in the pit of the stomach? Is there a fear associated with this story, an anger, a grief, a loss? Very likely, with these stories, you are just touching their tips. To experience it fully you need to allow yourself to experience the whole of it; which includes the whole of you – the whole of your response to it including the emotional context.
Silently Investigate the Story
So if you find yourself with a recurring story of this sort, investigate it. Which means, “silently investigate”. Place your attention on the story. It does not need any verbal analysis. It does not need any working out. It needs you to be fully present with it, whole body presence; an open mind seeing more than just the surface words. Then the context for this story, the fullness of the story, may rise in the mind and be felt in the body.
Now this can be a turning point, because you can suddenly see through what has been happening – that you are being driven by something old and stale whose time has passed. It is ready to be released, and there is no particular problem about releasing it now. It seemed like it was something you could not deal with. It was a behavior which kept you safe in childhood and it seemed very dangerous to risk letting it go. But when it is fully seen, uncovered, experienced, the staleness of it becomes immediately apparent: It is totally irrelevant to my life now. This is something that was relevant to a past time, but not now. Then it can quite easily happen that you find yourself perfectly able to set it aside. Then you think: I wish I’d spotted that sooner! When it is fully seen it can be very easy to put it aside. It is the half-seen, the half-hidden film, the hiding from fear, that makes it hard to put down.
There are No “No-Go” Areas
There may well be other reasons that make it hard to put down – fear is just one. There may be guilt associated with the story, a personal responsibility to be owned up to – your part in that particular story. In some stories we are the victim, in some we are the aggressor, and quite often there is a mixture of the two. There can be shame attached to the story. You can catch yourself out sanitizing your stories – making it look as if you are only the victim and actually you did not do anything wrong at all. Most of our life we do something wrong, don’t we? Perhaps in this particular story there is something wrong on our side, as well as the other person doing something.
Sometimes we are purely victims as this can be the nature of life, and so we do not have to find any guilt on our side as there is not always any. But be on the lookout – maybe the part of the iceberg which is under water is your part in the story, which is a shameful, guilty secret that you would rather not be seen. Then again maybe not, you do not have to make of yourself an extra victim by being a “victim” who looks to blame themselves. Do not do that.
So be open to which way it goes, to which way the story unfolds for you. In general, through this practice, there are no “no-go” areas. If a story is coming up – especially if it is coming up repeatedly – you need to turn your awareness onto it. Do not give yourself extra excuses not to look at certain things in practice. Do not say: Oh that’s not practice, that’s thinking. Thinking’s bad, I shouldn’t be doing that. As I have said, in order to get a very wild mind to settle, there is a case for suppressing thought so you can get a beginning of calmness. But there is also a case for going in the other direction.
When a puzzle, a problem, needs penetrating there is a case for letting go of attachment to the calmness and allowing some thinking, analysis and free-association to try to illuminate this story. So sometimes, yes, we do suppress thoughts, just to get some calmness; and sometimes we do a bit of thinking, to get some clarity. But in the end we come together, into unified, silent, illumination.
Take Off Your World-Distorting Glasses
On occasions it is appropriate to push ourselves a bit more in one way or the other. So do not have that excuse for “no-go” areas – thinking: Oh it is not proper practice. It is actually a very important part of practice to address your obstructions.
At times we need to be a little more sophisticated with our blockages and not tell ourselves: Oh I already know all about that. I have thought about that in the past so I do not need to do it now. Well, if it keeps coming at you, probably you do need to do something with it now. And then sometimes we tell ourselves: Well I have had all that therapy and it cost me a lot of money, so I can’t possibly question that and go down that route again. It must be finished by now mustn’t it? Well, maybe, but maybe not – check it out.
Open awareness includes everything – even things which at first glance do not quite seem to be what you expect to deal with on retreat. But they are what is coming up in your mind and that is what needs to be dealt with. If you are not dealing with them, if you are pushing them to one side, there is a sense in which you are distorting your perception. You are saying: I’m carrying my world-view filter on my glasses and I’m not going to take it off and see clearly, because I feel comfortable with these glasses on. But they are actually distorting glasses; they are giving you a distorted view of the world – a distorted view in which, for example, all authority figures may harm you, or are likely to harm you. But this is not actually so. Of course we need to take common sense precautions in life – there are risks out there – but they are not the ones we think they are – they are not those old risks. We need to take off our distorting glasses and see the world directly. Indeed if we don’t we are laying ourselves open to more risks by carrying old patterns around with us and applying them indiscriminately to the present.
Apply Direction to Your Practice
How do you judge which way to nudge your practice? Towards silence? Towards illumination or investigation? Well you do your best and you probably will make some mistakes along the way. Some of the time you may be cutting off thought, trying to get the mind to calm down, and you might overdo it ending up in “the cave of demons”. Sometimes you might spend too much time thinking, working things out and end up just with a scattered mind. But you do need to nudge yourself in these directions sometimes. Simply telling yourself: I’ll just sit here and it will sort itself out, does not always work, because you are sitting here off-course distorted and skewed. You do need to apply some effort, some direction, to your practice. There is a bit of tinkering to be done - some trial and error.
One of the samskaras that we pick up as Buddhists seems to be that thoughts are bad – we must get rid of thought; thought is the enemy. Well that comes about partly because we teach methods of calming the mind and naturally, as practice progresses, the mind becomes calmer. But because we understand that as practice progresses the mind becomes calmer, we think we can turn that around until it is backwards and say: If I get rid of thought I’ll be progressing in practice. But that is not it.
Natural Thought and Deliberate Thought
There is an interesting way of looking at thoughts and at two different types of thinking: Roshi Jiyu-Kennett of Shasta Abbey, in her writings identifies “natural thought” and “deliberate thought”. Now when I first read this I got her meaning the wrong way round, because I understood her to mean “natural thought” as the random wanderings of the mind, and “deliberate thought” as the thoughts we are in control of.
But actually, she sees these thought processes the other way round. “Natural thought” is perfectly natural, as it is perfectly natural to have thoughts. Thoughts come and they are not a problem. What she called “deliberate thought” – you could say deliberating, elaborating – is the problem as it gets in the way and separates us from directly experiencing the world; from directly experiencing our own nature. Because we have this layer of theory, interpretation, evaluation, commentary and so on, this is what separates us. But if we simply make direct contact with our natural thought, our natural feeling, our natural environment, then we directly see the nature of who we are and the world we live in. There is no filter, there is no block.
So do not try to clear every thought out of the mind. As you practice, the mind settles as you cease the habit of doing the elaboration, being left with just the natural quiet wanderings of the mind – the quiet perceptions of nature. We are not about getting rid of those. This practice is about moving you towards being a fuller human being – not being an unthinking, unfeeling robot. It is perfectly natural that a certain amount of thinking and feeling will occur – but catch yourself out, rambling off on elaborations.
Catch yourself out getting attached to what we might call those “temporary practices” of the extremes such as cutting off thought to try and get the mind calmer. It is good to do it some of the time, but it is a temporary practice. Then the other extreme: thinking, working something out, analyzing; these are useful and we should do them, but not all the time. These are like the raft that takes us to the other shore – very useful but we put them down at some point. We no longer need to carry them. But a raft is very useful for crossing the water; so make use of a raft when appropriate, but do not think the raft is the only way to travel for the rest of your life.
Silently Investigating
Master Sheng Yen used to say that you should be whole-hearted in your practice. This could be interpreted in terms of putting full effort into your practice, but it also means putting your full being into your practice – your heart and your mind. There are no “no-go” areas. Then when you settle back into the middle ground – when you are not suppressing thought and you are not thinking – there still needs to be investigation.
Now this is a tricky concept so let us review it. What do we mean by “silently investigating”? Imagine you are in a situation – the light is poor, you are outside somewhere, maybe walking in the woods. Then in the half light there is some shape in front of you which you do not quite recognize, cannot put a label to. There is some pattern. You do not know what it is. How will you find out? Are words any use to you? No. You look. You look. The investigation is the not-knowing but wanting to know. Not knowing but being willing to know, acknowledging not-knowing, keeping looking. Maybe the mind has a tendency to wander away, but you bring it back – you want to know.
You keep looking. No answer comes. No progress, but you keep looking. That is investigation; it is the keeping-on looking. Then at some point the pattern may suddenly shape itself into something you recognize, or maybe there is some movement. Maybe the animal you have been looking at has changed position; or maybe it was a leaf and the wind blows it and suddenly it becomes clear. Now you know what is was. But words did not help you to work it out; it was the looking, the constant looking with a penetrating gaze, that helped you.
Not Knowing, Keep Looking
This is how we apply investigation in this practice. We start by cultivating an awareness of the body. Which means opening the mind to look and see and feel and hear; to be open to every piece of sensory information which comes, but not to shape it into any particular object or form – to look with an attitude of wanting to know but not knowing, with the not-knowing keeping you looking.
Then maybe a bit of extra information comes along, a change in the environment or in the quality of the attention. There is a difference: Oh actually I can feel my toe; I didn’t know I could feel my toe. But this does not resolve the matter of who you are, or what life is about, or what is your nature. So you keep looking. Your practice goes on, and as you keep looking the gaze stabilizes. The scenery may expand but you keep looking. There may be a certain wonder at certain experiences along the way, a certain awe, but still you keep looking. There is no stopping from this practice, you simply keep going, keep looking.
Let us finish by reading a little from Master Hongzhi, the twelfth-century master who put together these practices under the name Silent Illumination. He left several writings, some of which are called “Practice Instructions” but they are actually more like practice descriptions. In these “instructions” there is often not much method as it is more a description of a state. Here is one from him. I’ll just read you a sentence or two:
The correct way of practice is to sit simply in stillness
and silently investigate.Deep down there is a state one reaches where externally
one is no longer swirled about by causes and conditions.The mind, being empty, is all-embracing.
Its luminosity being wondrous,
it is precisely appropriate and impartial.Internally there are no thoughts.
Vast and removed, it stands alone in itself
without falling into stupor.Bright and potent, it cuts off all dependence
and remains self-at-ease.
