Shattering the Great Doubt

Simon Child continues his account of koan practice, introduced in the last issue of New Chan Forum, by describing the breakthrough to enlightenment. We thank Jeanine Woodward who transcribed the original recordings of these edited retreat talks.

What do we think we’re playing at? We are sitting here, with our minds mixed up, confused, upset, tangled up, knotted up by words from a thousand years ago. What are we doing? Is that something useful, or even sensible, to be doing? It wasn’t what Bodhidharma told us to do when he came from the West; he didn’t tell us to pickle old koans for a thousand years then chew on them and swallow them. So what are we doing? We are doing something somewhat strange and artificial. It’s a device, it’s something which has been invented, and we’re doing it because it has proven useful; it’s proven itself over the centuries. We could say it’s something invented by the Chinese; Bodhidharma didn’t bring it to China. 

But we could also say that the Buddha practised it. The Buddha became very deeply touched by the questions of existence, of life and death, of suffering – and those were his koans: ‘What is suffering?’ ‘What is human existence?’ He didn’t know. He was struck by doubt, a very deep sense of not knowing, and he couldn’t find the answers in his life in the palace and so he left, according to legend, and even left his wife and baby. The questions were so important, so overwhelming, that he had to solve them. This was not a small doubt, this was a great doubt, which drove him to seeking for many years, trying everything including some quite extreme ascetic practices which nearly killed him. The search took him over. But eventually he did find it possible to break through and find a way to understand human life and existence and suffering, and to be at ease with it. 

You could say that the Chinese invented or maybe reinvented or rediscovered this method. The Buddha practised it; any answer that came to him failed to satisfy him. He was taught many techniques of meditation and many ascetic practices. He debated with many philosophers, but he did not accept any of the offered answers. It would have been very tempting to do so, wouldn’t it: ‘Ah yes, this makes sense!’ But it didn’t satisfy. He knew that a philosophy or some transient mental state was not it. What was required was a revolution in his sense of existence, and that was the breakthrough that he eventually made, sitting under the Bo tree. It amounted to a complete change in the way he related to the world: ‘Ah now, yes, I see. Aah…’ 

With our koan we are following in the footsteps of the Buddha. The koan triggers us into noticing the attitudes and views that we hold and which we believe to be in some way our ‘truths,’ the facts of our history or our personality. We reflect on these and we find: ‘Oh, I assumed it was so, but it turns out to be just a story I told myself!’ Or, ‘It turns out to be a story someone else told me and I believed it, huh!’ And we find… we find we can’t trust our sense of knowing who we are; we find we can’t trust our sense of knowing what the world is, what existence is, because somewhere along the line we’ve picked up an idea, a story, and it turns out we picked up a provisional idea; it had some usefulness in a particular situation; it was an approximation, but it doesn’t bear close examination. As we progress with investigating the koan, instead of getting nearer to a resolution we find ourselves getting further away. 

We start off with a puzzle, the few words of a koan on a piece of paper, and the rest of our life pretty clear and sorted. As time goes by we find that the words on the page have shaken our sense of ourselves, because we spot that we’ve been living a web of stories, some of them comforting stories, some of them rather uncomfortable stories. We’ve clung onto them for some reason; they fitted; maybe we leaned on them as an excuse; or maybe we just believed them as a truth. As the web of stories starts to disintegrate the doubt sensation increases; instead of diminishing as we might expect from a successful investigation, the sense of not knowing increases. More and more so-called fixities of our existence crumble away as no longer fixed: ‘That attitude that I hold about myself, it’s transparent, it’s just an idea. It has a certain degree of resonance with the way I’ve been, but it’s not an ultimate truth.’ 

We need to allow the koan to work on us in these ways; we shouldn’t limit its scope. It needs to be allowed to prod at each corner of us. It’s uncomfortable, not knowing. That discomfort might take us away from the process as we get a bit afraid and troubled by it, but it can also take us deeper into the process because we realise we need to look more closely. The problem is that the more closely we look, we find we don’t know then either; the doubt gets bigger and we find ourselves desperately searching, desperately wanting to know. Needing to know becomes more important than anything else, but we do not have a way to know. We are on the lookout; all phenomena that arise in awareness are noticed, our attention is extremely sharp, but we attach to nothing because nothing satisfies us. Nothing resolves this doubt, this discomfort. It can become totally overwhelming; ‘I must solve this, nothing else matters’. In this state people may become relentlessly absorbed. The Japanese teacher Hakuin is reputed to have been in this state, walking through the town bumping into people, bumping into lamp posts!

This is a strange state and as Hakuin found out it’s not one which really works in everyday life in the market place, which is why we can only really engage in this practice in the deepest way in a supported environment like a retreat. In this environment you can just be here without worrying; it works out. You’re supported, and knowing that, sensing that, you’ve got the possibility of plunging deeper and deeper – partly by choice, because you want to persist with the practice, and partly there’s no choice, you’ve just got to do it because you can’t be left not knowing. The Buddha couldn’t have just given up and gone back to the palace and said, ‘No, it didn’t work out.’ That was not an option. 

There can be times when the practice weakens. Master Sheng Yen used to say that when you’re in the great doubt it can go two different ways. The commonest way is that it dissipates; it slips away to small doubt, or even to complacency. But if sustained the doubt can also ‘shatter’ or ‘explode.’ These are words which indicate the suddenness and the drama of it, because it can be very dramatic and unexpected. It might just be, ‘Ha! Yes… I see. Hmm.’ It might be no more dramatic than that, but indeed it might be a great big explosion of emotion and noise – the shock of seeing things differently can be so great. 

Persist with your koan; let it persist in its investigation of you. If you find your attention dissipating, pick the koan up and persist. Don’t let the practice slip away from you, having put the effort into it so far. If the koan slips away, pick it up; if the mind wanders, bring it back. Feel this shift into a more total absorption in the koan – which is another way of saying that you and the koan have become one. 

The words of the koan are not really the point of the practice; the point of the practice is not knowing, this uncomfortable void waiting to be filled by knowledge but failing to be filled by knowledge. Our habit is to fill lack of knowledge with knowledge, even if it’s an approximation, even if it’s just something that will make do for now. But in this process that seems not to be an available option; the intensity of our gaze, the intensity of our attention, means that we don’t fall for approximations. We think ‘No, that’s not it; that doesn’t satisfy me.’ Don’t allow yourself to be satisfied in this way; have a hunger for knowing but don’t be satisfied with half-knowings. 

What is the ‘shattering’? What is a breakthrough? What did the Buddha discover? We can only talk about this in metaphor because there isn’t a language to convey something like this. But the metaphors can give us some idea of how radical it is. If you remember, the Buddha’s enlightenment phrase was, ‘House builder, I have seen through you; the rafters are fallen down and will be no more.’ What is the metaphor indicating? It’s indicating his world of mental constructions: the house, the beams. He’d realised he was living in a world of mental constructions; he wasn’t living in the world that actually is. He was inhabiting a world that he’d constructed in his mind, but it turned out that his so-called knowing of that world was just an assumption, was just an idea. It didn’t actually fit the reality as he now perceived it. As he continued his sharp attention he suddenly saw things differently; he saw beyond his own mental constructions, and he saw them as merely constructions and not as fact. 

What are these mental constructions? How do we understand that term? What does that phrase mean? 

Largely, our minds are preoccupied with a world of objects, of relationships between objects, of interactions, of names, of differentiation, duality and multiplicity, but all of that is mental construction. We see things and we relate to them as things, as objects, but that very objectification comes from us. Other people could look in the same direction and not see the same things, because their minds have different histories and different preferences and different ways of interpretation. For a common object that we have a shared experience of and we have names for, we are likely to come up with the same name, maybe each with a bit of a different understanding of it but still the same name. We think there is a thing, but actually, if we just look behind the surface a bit, this ‘thing’ turns out to be rather ephemeral, indeed a construction which can be deconstructed. 

Think about a river. We all know what we mean by a river; quite possibly you’re visualising one now as I’ve said the word. Maybe you’re standing by a river and I come up to you and say, ‘Where is the river?’ and you just point: ‘There is the river.’ We chat for a bit and I say, ‘Where’s the river now?’ and you point again. I say, ‘Well, no, because that river has flowed away. This is another one isn’t it? Same river? How does that work? Oh, maybe you’re not talking about the water, are you talking about the river bed, is that what you mean by the river, or the banks? Take the water away, there’s still a river is there?’ 

‘No, you need to have water for it to be a river.’ 

‘Oh, but the water went away, I saw it go. More water’s come… oh this is getting a bit confusing. So it’s not the banks, it’s the water, but it’s not any particular water; it’s that there is water that makes it a river. Oh, so… so the river isn’t a ‘thing’ because the thing you pointed at first is out of sight and you still say this is the river.’ 

It’s the process of flow, that’s what we call a river. It’s not a thing - we can’t pick it up, we can’t hold it, it doesn’t stay the same. It’s in its very nature that it doesn’t stay the same. If it stayed the same we’d call it a pond; it has to be flowing, it has to be changing, for it to be called a river. So our sense of this as an object is rather strange. Does it really have a beginning? I know little trickles of raindrops run over the grass, fall into a depression, possibly become a stream, then join other streams. Really our idea of a river is just a definition based on two streams joining together to make something larger and of a certain size and then we’ll call it a river, and where it hits the sea we’ll call it the sea. In between we’ll call it a river as long as it’s flowing – but if it stops flowing we won’t call it a river. 

It’s a mental convenience to think we know a river as an object but its very nature is that it’s changing and its very nature is that it’s constructed by definitions: there must be flow, there must be a certain width and so on, otherwise it’s not a river. So it’s very much a mental shorthand, a convenience, something that we know as a river but it doesn’t relate to any one object. It is confusing because we’re so used to just handling objects. And the river’s a particularly interesting metaphor to use because the nature of change is built into the definition of ‘river’ and therefore almost by definition it isn’t an object even though we treat it as such; it’s not something fixed that we can label and say ‘This is the river.’ It has to be running away from us or it isn’t a river. 

This process of change applies to everything that we might call an object; the change isn’t necessarily a flow in the same way as the flow of a river, although it might be. It’s the change of impermanence – everything is changing, there isn’t a single thing which is staying the same. Even objects which we assume have some solidity and permanence, in their own way they are also flowing. They’re in transition between where they came from and where they’re going to. That transition might be quite brief in the case of something like a mayfly or a raindrop; it could be hundreds or thousands of years in the case of something like a lump of metal, but it’s in transition, it wasn’t always so and it won’t always be so. That bell will not always be so, it will develop metal fatigue and crack. Within a few billion years the sun will swell up into a red giant and engulf the Earth. The earth itself certainly won’t always be the same as it is now; its timescale is quite long but it’s flowing – can you see it? It’s moving, very slowly. 

Some things are moving more quickly – but nothing is staying. Mentally we construct a bell as something stable because that’s convenient; we know where it is, we know how hard to hit it, we know where to put it away at the end of the retreat and we know where to find it when we arrive for the next retreat. It can seem predictable and that’s convenient. But that’s only an approximation; the reality isn’t so. That reality isn’t so for anything, including our own mental worlds which we’ve neatly compartmentalised in many ways; we’ve created those compartments; we’ve constructed our own view of the world; we’ve constructed ideas; we’ve constructed facts; we’ve constructed histories; we’ve constructed relationships and viewpoints and prejudices and attitudes, and that’s the world we inhabit. 

The Buddha’s discovery was that there’s a world behind all that where rafters can fall down. We can do without the world that we’ve con structed. In fact we’re better off without it because it ties us in knots, it upsets us, it confuses us, it limits us. And the shattering is that moment when we just suddenly see the constructions and the release of the constructions.

When it happens you inhabit a different world; you might call it a purer cleaner world; it’s clear of the obstructions of old wooden beams and lumps of metal you might trip over and so on. John Crook liked to quote a Tibetan teacher who called it ‘mind being clean-clear’. Then the doubt isn’t there; the doubt can indeed drop away because now you know. It’s not the knowing of naming of objects; you’re not back into creating categories and constructions; it’s just, ‘This is so. This I know; there’s no doubt.’ Until then you were encountering the constructions, and although not seeing through them as constructions nevertheless you were not feeling fully comfortable with them. When you looked at them closely enough you could see how you’d constructed them from ideas and history and from thoughts and anxieties. What you hadn’t realised until this point was that every single one of them was a construction and you could let go. That is a revolution in your way of relating to the world; probably for the first time in your life, direct contact with the nature of existence. The phrase is, ‘Seeing the Nature’. ‘Seeing the nature of emptiness’ is the fuller phrase, emptiness being a technical word referring to the inherently changing world being based not on objects of some fixity but of flow, change; that is its essence, that is its nature.

Seeing that, realising that in a deep way, frees you from attachment because there is nothing, no thing, to which you can attach. How can you attach to a river? Can you pick it up and take it home with you? Nonsense. Can you stop it flowing with your hand? You can’t do it with a river and you can’t do it with anything else either. This physical example is a metaphor for emotional attachment too – how can you have an emotional attachment to a process of change that has been seen through as such? It can’t be done, and it becomes so clear that it can’t be done that you give up all thought of doing it; you give up all frustration at not being able to do it because it’s just so obvious. So the suffering of attachment and aversion drops away because it is seen as a totally pointless game. 

Tying yourselves in knots with these thousand year old words does have a point. It’s not a point which is easily reached because of the tendency of the mind to wander, to lose its focus, to become dissipated, to be unwilling to give up attachments – all of these get in the way. But if you can persist with the practice, and pick it up again when you lose it, and pick it up again when you lose it again, and keep it moving by being willing to challenge your knowns – you can find this mind which is a hundred per cent attentive, experiencing every phenomenon presented to it yet not attaching to a single one, not claiming any as an answer. In that total clarity it sees these constructions as constructions, as creations of the mind, none of them as ultimate truths. They are just creations of the mind which you probably created to cope with the world, to console yourself, to find a way of getting by sometime in the past, and you see them as such and let them go. You drop into just being with, just this, becoming part of the flow, not resisting – pointless to resist the nature of existence – at ease, free. This practice can take you there. It may fail to get you there because the mind is tricky to train but it’s possible for it to take you there. This is why we persist in this rather special environment of retreat where we have the best opportunity to deepen this practice and take it all the way. 

In the context of a retreat you can simply drop in to the doubt sensation and stay there. Whole-heartedly engage with the koan; totally experience the engagement; allow it to touch you wherever it touches you. 

It’s not just an intellectual challenge, it’s a bodily challenge, it’s an emotional challenge; experience every part of it because it’s in this total experience that you have the possibility of seeing through your habitual tendencies and constructions. If you directly confront each mental phenomenon then you can see through it and beyond it. You just have to be totally present now – half a second is longer than necessary! Cultivate the doubt very deeply. 

Master Sheng Yen used to say: ‘Small doubt, small enlightenment; great doubt, great enlightenment.’ Are there different enlightenments? What did he mean by that? Well, don’t get too tangled up in that but there is a sense in which there are different strengths of experience, different durations – not different degrees of clarity but there are differences if, for example, you visit it only very briefly. If you visit it and stay there a long time and look around and realise the total enormity of it and also see the stupidity of some of your vexations then the vexations are dissolved on the spot. If you only visit briefly, maybe only one or two vexations come under the searchlight and you return to your usual reality and most of them are still there. But if you have a great enlightenment, many different obstructions and vexations can be permanently dissolved because from this new perspective they’re just unsustainable. Even when you return from that state into your everyday confused state, you’re not going to fall for them again because you know they are nonsense. But still, other vexations missed out on the cleansing; they are going to trip you up; there are still many more to work on, so practice continues.

Make careful use of the opportunity for practice. If you have any tendency to slip away and daydream, be firm with yourself; pick up the method. If you have any tendency to create no-go areas in the mind, areas which you are not going to allow to be investigated, don’t do that. Any tendency to give yourself time off, to be easy on yourself, is wasting opportunity.

All of our assumptions about our place in the world, our understandings of the world itself, are invented – pretty creative, aren’t we? In a state of not knowing, knowns become not-knowns, the mind becomes cleaner and clearer, ready for that breakthrough. You can cultivate that mind; you’re already doing it. Persevere. Persist.