On an Empty Hill - Not a Retreat Report

Walking across the hillside the fresh spring sunlight warmed the skin, the distant fir woods glistened and a pair of buzzards were playing in the sky.

"Funny!" he said to himself, "I am not here."

There were the feet, two of them, his feet, steadily pacing through the grasses; looking down he could see his coat collar and the binoculars hanging from their strap. Lifting his hand he observed the veins against pale skin.

"Life, but not my life. Where am I?"

Where his head should have been there was a kind of vacant space though which the wind blew and in which the buzzards called, an open feeling, an absence of boundaries, no horizon.

"Unbound!" he thought, remembering words he had read.

"Where am I?" The question floated off, becoming curiously irrelevant. Of course there he was walking across the hillside but this body had become merely a vehicle for a kind of awareness. That was unmistakably so.

"I'm thinking." he thought. Indeed, softly, in a disinterested manner, the awareness was describing itself; back of the head stuff, back burner, barely simmering but quite clear, precise, accurate. This awareness seemed quite distinct from the body that was its vehicle.

"No identification." the thought muttered. "You are not identifying yourself." Laughter. Indeed there was a sort of absence allowing an illumination of sky, buzzards and distant woods so that they almost shone. "It's the awareness that shines," the thought said. "You are not contaminating yourself. You have gotten out of the way."

"What is it?" the question floated free. Outwards - there was the freshness of the spring afternoon. Inwards - there was this curious absence. "I am not here." he repeated, puzzling.

"If I am not here," the thought continued, "then what is here?"

"IT is here"

"What is IT?"

"Shut up! You are an idiot probing too much into this privacy. Don't be so bloody intrusive."

IT had gone.

He took a deep breath and repeated his mantra several times. A sort of swirling, a drawing back of curtains, a coming up of the lights. IT was back.

Above the now motionless legs, the body leaning on the gate, the landscape glowed inside a serenity. The observer came and went remembering only the moment he came on stage. Observer, not self, disinterested commentator. That was it - a curious disinterestedness in which pure beauty swam.

Inside that disinterest the usual preoccupation with himself, those endless evaluations, endless questions about past, present and future, the three times of hell, the iterative foggy self-referencing of all experience, all that had fallen away. He had not done it. It had come about there in the spring sunshine. He had discovered he had only nothing to worry about.

"A pompous old prat I may be but right now in this head there isn't anything. Something, me for instance, only appears when I put it there. What is this like?"

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be a cat? What is it like to be me? An image in a mirror, no substance. The mirror itself, reflecting, containing - well- nothing. A holograph hanging in space, illuminating processes but nothing there. Look I put my hand through it.

The buzzards turned above, a pigeon shot like an arrow across the blue. Large clouds backlit by the sun. Mountains shining in the mind.

"Everything is here yet in this observation there is - well- nothing. The mystery moves in its own time through the mind of the brain of the body. Not a nothing them. Look I kick the stones of the wall. There is feeling. Do not ask too much. Here is the suchness. Only relate. Stay in the relating without thought or the non-otherness of this suchness will disappear and you will be back in the gluey world of your dualistic preoccupations. And soon it will be time to do just that. Time for tea."

He drove home reflectively, slower than usual. People looked kind of innocent. He was almost embarrassed by his feeling of affection for all of them. Even the adder he had nearly trodden upon now shone with its own particular and menacing glory.

At St Cuthbert's Swallet the brook drops out of the sun, down that dark hole, rushing into the bowels of the earth. Images these, symbols; a well, darkness and light, depth, moon and sun. They hang in awareness as time in the sky.

What is it? Continue...........

Hung Chih Cheng Chueh said:

Our house is a single field, clean, vast, lustrous, clearly self-illuminating. When the spirit is vacant without conditions, when awareness is serene without cogitation, then Buddhas and ancestors appear and disappear transforming the world. Amid living beings is the original place of nirvana. How amazing it is that all people have this but cannot polish it into bright clarity. One remembrance of illumination can break through - the dust of kalpas. Radiant and clear - solitary glory is preserved as the merging of sameness and difference - becoming the entire creation's mother. All appearances are merely this fields shadows. Truly embody this reality.^*

References

* Leighton, D. and Yi Wu.1991. Cultivating the Empty Field. The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongshi. North Point Press. S Francisco. p32.