This is the first of two articles edited from retreat talks by Simon Child introducing koan-practice and explaining how to penetrate koans. The second article, in issue 52 of New Chan Forum, will be called The Shattering of the Great Doubt.
Why is it that you practise?
Why is it that you practise? It’s a relatively unusual activity amongst humanity for people to be doing this so it’s a fair question to ask: why are you doing it? We could extend that and say: why do you do anything; how come you do things in the world, in your life? There’s a question of motivation: what drives us, how we decide what to do, how we bother to do anything. Sometimes we can give a coherent story about this; often we can’t – often it’s largely unconscious, subconscious, habit. We do stuff because we know we should do it, or have to do it, or want to do it, or something like that. But it’s not necessarily very coherent or even rational.
We can make up reasons and say it’s something to do with lacking something - we need something or we’d like to have something; we’d like to have money, or we need to have money to survive, or we’d like to have certain material possessions – we enjoy them. Or we want success in relationship; we want to be happy. Sometimes it’s to do with safety; feeling unsafe, feeling insecure. We do things to try to adjust our situation.
There’s an implication here that we’re not satisfied with our situation; we’re not satisfied with the way our life is or the way the world is; we’re uncomfortable about certain aspects of existence. It may be very small matters such as what’s going to happen today, or what are we going to eat, or what’s the weather going to be like; it may be larger matters of career, of relationship; and it may be larger again on a global scale. Our urge to do something, to choose an activity and to follow it, arises in some way from some sense of dissatisfaction with just staying as we are. In some ways this is of course all very obvious, but it may be important just to state it as a beginning point to where we go from here.
Arising out of this dissatisfaction, by which of course I am referring to what the Buddha called dukkha, this sense of being not at ease with how things are – sometimes in a more extreme way that we could call suffering, or maybe in a lesser way that we just call feeling uneasy, dissatisfied – we are led to want to resolve it. We have various strategies that we try to employ: seeking, acquiring, avoiding, comparing, judging, criticising, complaining – you can add more words to the list. This is a large part of our way of encountering the world, judging it: ‘Is this good for me, bad for me? Can I get something out of this? Am I in danger, do I need to avoid this? How can I get more of this? How can I hold onto what I’ve got and not lose it?’ This process of trying to resolve our sense of unsatisfactoriness in this way – by acquisition, by judgement and so on – makes the mind very restless because it’s so busy judging this changing world that we live in. It’s not as though we can make an assessment once and stick to it because something else happens and then we have to reassess the situation and make another decision, another choice, and then again and again. We complicate it further by bringing in memories of the past and play out potential scenarios for the future, rehearsing a million and one scenarios as to how we’ll handle them – even though we know that probably the million and third one is the one that’ll actually happen.
A huge amount of our energy is devoted to this game of trying to resolve our acknowledged or unacknowledged sense of unease at the way of being in the world. Of course there are very good reasons why we do this; we can look at biology, such as survival requirements in Nature – this is a mechanism which has helped us survive and will continue to help us to survive; it’s not something we have to give up on. We do need to seek out healthy food and eat it, otherwise we’ll die. This is not a completely pointless game, but it’s a game which has become overblown. It occupies almost our every moment and it stumbles over itself with multiple overlapping games going on; games of relationship, tangling with games of career, tangling with games of accommodation, tangling with games of… and so on. The mind gets very busy, very distracted, somehow fumbling along and making it mostly work out quite a bit of the time but also going badly wrong at other times. And then there are more recriminations and judgements, adjustments, trying harder, and so it goes on.
In many ways it’s also how we approach practice; we approach practice as a possible solution to all our other problems: ‘If only I can get enlightened, then the rest won’t matter.’ Well the Buddha needed to eat as well, didn’t he; he needed to find some food and eat. He wasn’t subjected to snowy weather but if he had been he’d have needed to find some shelter. So that’s a rather simplistic view, but it’s certainly an attitude that we could be picking up: ‘Yes, if I could practise and get enlightened, everything is solved.’
In this way we are practising with a seeking mind, we’re practising with an attitude of gaining – gaining something which will make us safe, permanently safe and secure. Do any of you recognise that in you? If that isn’t your motivation for practising, what is it? Is may be less extreme than that but there’s probably some hope of at least of finding some sort of peace, some sort of ease of being? These motivations are often subconscious, unconscious, we don’t necessarily recognise them. But this is how we approach our life, and this is how we approach our practice.
Rather than saying don’t do it, we can turn practice into a way of playing that game but playing it on itself. What do I mean by that? Don’t say, ‘This game is making me restless and agitated, I won’t play it; I’ll drop out of it.’ That doesn’t work, put as baldly as that, because we’re left rather dull, bored: nothing to do, nothing to eat. No, we need to play that game to some extent. But playing the game too much disturbs us. Can we find some way of beating the game without playing the game, or playing the game in a way which beats itself?
Beating the game
Practice turns towards investigating the game itself. We look into this process of trying to achieve fulfilment through acquisition. We do it by setting ourselves up with some object of practice and investigating the process of travelling there, the path. We make sure that we experience the path itself and this is a good starting point. There’s a stage of practice we call unification of body and mind; if you’re fully present in your experience you’re experiencing your own travelling of the path and this is a step in investigating the path itself. If the mind is scattered all over the place, playing its usual games of worrying about work and worrying about relationship and worrying about money and worrying about food, it’s not present in the body; it’s all over the place. But if it’s just experiencing itself being here now, it’s experiencing the practising and experiences the wants and urges arising; it’s very much present in that process.
So this becomes a rather different sort of game, if I can put it that way; the practice turns you in a different direction. This is deliberate and actually the destination of the practice is indeed in a different direction; the enlightenment that you seek, the peace that you seek, is to be found within. It’s not to be found without, it’s not something that you could go and buy if you could find the right supermarket with it in stock. It’s found through investigating your own way of being in the world, it’s found in investigating the mind through which you relate to the world and to yourself.
The practice is an invitation to go in a different direction than usual; rather than imagining that you can acquire enough from the world to make you safe and secure, rather than imagining that if you reach out and grasp often enough and successfully enough you’ll be there, it’s more saying, ‘Look within’. The methods of practice are tools to help us look within.
There are different tools and we may need to learn how to use a few of them because there are differing conditions of mind, differing circumstances, we’re not always in the same situation. Particularly at the beginning of a retreat, when the mind is very unsettled, very scattered, we need to find a way to settle it; typically we arrive in a rather scattered condition. But it’s possible to encourage the mind to settle, to allow it to settle, to nudge it in the direction of settling, and that indeed is achieved partly by deliberately letting go of the game; noticing when the mind wanders and just let go of it. Notice when you’re in some imagined scenario of the future and let go of it. Notice when a memory has trapped you into rehashing an old scenario, looking for a different outcome or for understanding of it – and let it go. This aspect of practice is just letting go of the game. But don’t imagine that just cutting it off completely is the destination, the end point – it’s not – it’s a direction of travel for now which is relevant because of the mind being scattered.
You all know various tricks to help you settle the mind, various methods of practice: maybe using the breath, counting the breath, following the breath; maybe using a mantra, a recitation; maybe using a body scan, body awareness, relaxation – various different methods which can help you have a focus to which to return when the mind wanders. Having somewhere to return to when the mind wanders makes it easier to cut off the wandering; you can switch from the wandering to your focus of meditation. Choosing a focus, it doesn’t really matter which one, is a useful device for you to help reduce the tendency of the mind to wander. By returning to a focus which is in you, in the breath, in the body awareness, or in a recitation, it helps this process of unifying body and mind. The body and mind come to spend more time together, they’re not so separate. You’re nudging yourself towards being more present throughout the day, throughout the retreat, by the simple device of returning from wherever you’ve wandered back to here and now.
These are various methods of calming the mind down. In themselves they’re not the whole of the practice. Master Sheng Yen described these methods as ‘preparatory’, not to diminish them, because they’re very important and we need to make use of them, but to point out that they have certain limitations in them which can stop you taking the practice further. By cutting off the wandering mind you’re losing a chance to investigate the mind. By narrowing your attention on to a specific focus you’re not really investigating the whole of your mind. Though they are very useful these methods have inbuilt limitations.
The two main methods of Chan, Silent Illumination, and gongan or huatou practice, are methods that have different qualities to the preparatory methods, and Shifu described these two methods as being methods which can take you all the way. The power of the preparatory methods comes from their limitation, their narrow focus, but this limitation can restrict you from going further. Their power comes from their ability to help you capture the wandering mind, but it’s captured by an artificial trick which may itself trap you if you’re not careful. At some point you need to step outside that trap and have a more open practice, a practice which allows the awareness to present to you whatever it presents without getting caught by these games that we habitually engage in.
The Koan method
I tend to use the word koan, the Japanese word, as an overall word for this approach. The corresponding Chinese word is gongan, and also in Chinese we have huatou – and these two are made more distinct in Chinese practice than they are in Japanese. It’s just a technical distinction: Gongan relates to the stories, the longer stories, while huatou relates to a shorter phrase which may be taken from one of the longer stories. What I’ve found works as a way of convenience is to use the word koan, the Japanese word which tends to include both, when I’m referring to both, but if I want to refer specifically to one or the other I’ll refer specifically to either gongan or huatou; that’s just a trick which seems to work.
These methods, whether gongan or huatou, are also methods of providing a focus to which your practice can return; your mind wanders away, then you remind yourself that you’ve taken up this practice of engaging with a koan and so you return to the koan. This, as we’ll find out over the next few days, has somewhat different qualities to returning the attention to the breath or to body awareness. The koan has a capacity to engage you because of the nature of your seeking mind.
When presented with words we tend to respond by trying to solve them, by trying to work them out, by trying to find the solution to the puzzle that seems to be there. So this is not a neutral focus for the mind. It’s a place to return to, but it’s also a place which can get us trapped into trying to solve riddles which can be a negative aspect to it. However, because of our tendency to engage with these things it makes it a more powerful place to return to, and it also makes it a place which, through our engagement with it, challenges us in other ways. It spots our sensitive points, it spots our buttons and presses them, and so it becomes a more active investigation.
We may use quite strong words about this practice; we talk about ‘great angry determination’; we talk about ‘great doubt’ and ‘great vow’. These superlatives are not accidental. This is a practice which can engage you very strongly and that’s part of its power. You may tend to drift a bit with other practices, but you don’t drift once this koan practice has got you. If you do drift you readily come back, but you tend to drift less and less because you become very strongly engaged with the koan; it’s not a neutral focus like the breath or body awareness, it’s very engaging, very challenging, sometimes hard to look at but also hard to look away.
This takes us in a somewhat different direction; it is a focus which helps us to be concentrated and present, but it has this extra quality of developing an investigation of the mind, an investigation of our experience. By triggering responses in us we’re automatically investigating our responses, our habitual responses, our tendencies to behave in certain ways; it triggers them and we’re present with them and so we are investigating them. It has the trap that we might fall into a wordy investigation: the thinking process, the ordinary everyday seeking mind trying to solve – and that isn’t it. But we can also find our way beyond that trap into a wordless investigation, into a ‘being with’ which is very alive.
Retreatants are directed how to choose a koan, how to familiarise themselves with it, and make their early investigations. Simon Child then leads them deeper into the practice.
Engaging with the koan
When you become engaged with the koan, it ‘fights’ back, and that fighting back is important, in fact it’s crucial. The whole point of the koan is not for you to solve the koan, it’s for the koan to solve you. It needs to work on you, and you need to allow it to do that. This is the beginning of a shift into the other sort of investigation, the non-wordy investigation, the non-intellectual, non-conceptual investigation. It’s experiencing being with the koan, experiencing the koan touching you or prodding you or kicking you. Maybe you had a taste of that when you first heard the koan and that’s partly why you chose it. But maybe you slipped away from that way of interacting with it and began thinking about it. Now, having given up on the thinking game because it tied you in knots, you’re more open to staying with the koan and staying with what it brings you – and it brings you these nudges and prods and discomforts and recognitions and so on. It’s pointing a searchlight into you and highlighting parts of you which you might otherwise overlook: reactivity, tensions, negativities.
The koan is becoming a tool of active investigation. This is good. If you start trying to capture this in words, you’re back into the conceptual, intellectual approach and it’s not so personal anymore; it’s a little bit distant, a bit third-person, it’s like a story about somebody else. But if you’re into just experiencing being with it and what arises, this is first person – ouch, maybe.
This is where the mnemonic ‘Let through, let be, let go,’ comes in very useful. Whatever is triggered by the koan, allow it to be triggered; let it through into awareness. Don’t be evaluating it as an answer or a non-answer or a blind alley, because that process of evaluation is a conceptual process – it’s flawed, it’s limited, so don’t apply that. Whatever presents itself to you, let it through. Let it be there in experience; not influencing it, pushing it away or holding onto it; not justifying it or judging it; not trying to join it with other things to make a nice conceptual model. Just experience.
Maybe you’ve already had a taste of this, that these koans through their poetic imagery can bring some unexpected feelings. Some koans have fairly stark images of impermanence: death, or maybe isolation. Loneliness, loss and other feelings may be evoked directly from the fairly obvious wording of the koan – but then there are the more subtle layers, hard to even name them and identify them, but they’re felt as a ‘ooh, hmm’. It’s not so easy to let go of the koan at this point because it’s got you intrigued: ‘What is going on here? What’s that going on? It’s almost like it’s trying to tell me something but I can’t see what it is.’
You may have several layers of things going on at the same time. There may be intellectual frustration at not having been able to find an answer in words and concepts. There may be the fairly stark imagery of some aspect of your koan, and then there’s maybe a more subtle undercurrent. But the common theme here is that you haven’t quite worked it out and that’s a bit uncomfortable; you haven’t quite understood what’s going on and we’re not comfortable with that. It’s hard to let go of the koan because we don’t like to leave something unresolved, so we look back at it again and again and again. But somehow, as we continue, it becomes even more unresolved; instead of getting clearer, it becomes less clear.
This sense of not quite getting it, this sense of being intrigued as to what’s going on, is the beginning of what’s called the doubt sensation, generating the doubt. Don’t look for a specific sensation, it’s not really that, it’s more like a sense of not knowing. It’s that meaning of the word ‘doubt’ - an air of ‘unknown’, of mystery – something to be solved but so far unsolvable. As we persist, rather than getting nearer to a resolution we seem to get further away because, as we persist, keeping looking back at the koan, we find other parts of the koan that also we can’t quite make sense of. It gets to the point where we want to throw the whole thing out of the window, but we can’t because we need to know.
It’s touching our vulnerability of not knowing, our sense of wanting safety through knowledge; it’s touching our pride that likes to be able to solve things; it’s touching specific parts it touches, maybe to do with impermanence, maybe to do with loss, maybe to do with… anything. And so on. We may have a conglomeration of uncomfortable feelings around it – not necessarily uncomfortable but typically there is the discomfort of not knowing. It has a strong sense of something which needs our attention, something which must be resolved, but which we can’t find a way forward with.
We’re moving towards the ‘Great Doubt’. It can become something which takes us over, though we’re not there yet. It’s heading in that direction because what it’s doing, as it goes along, is gathering together our other doubts, our unknowns. We begin to realise that we don’t really know anything; everything that we thought we knew, we can’t use it to help us with the koan; it lets us down. Most of our knowing is a provisional sort of knowing, it works, it gets us through, but when we look into it deeply we realise it’s based only on assumptions and extrapolations. At this moment here, now, with this koan jeering back at us: ‘You can’t solve me, you can’t solve me’; our knowing lets us down.
How do we move forward? It’s a curious sort of ‘game’; some people complain it’s a rather artificial game; we’re setting up a tension that didn’t need to be there; if we hadn’t picked up the koan we’d wouldn’t be so tense, and as meditators we should be just trying to relax, shouldn’t we? Why are we creating trouble for ourselves?
This practice has a particular quality which makes it worthwhile engaging with this. Yes, it is an artificial trick, but then all methods of practice are artificial to some extent: why bother to tell someone to count their breath? It’s not even as if at the end the of the day they know how many breaths they’ve had, because they stopped counting and started again once they got to ten! Koan practice is a trick, it’s a device. It’s a useful device because it highlights in a very vigorous way just how much we live on assumptions that we know, but we actually don’t know.
When deeply challenged we find we don’t know. We don’t know the essence of Zen, we don’t know the essence of ourselves, we don’t know who we are, we don’t understand life and death. In our everyday life we skim over these rather awkward issues and we get on with going to work and having relationships and what have you. It works out most of the time, but underneath all this we don’t really have a clue what’s going on. This seemingly innocuous koan from a thousand years ago or more – some inane characters having a bit of a chat – has broken through this veneer and left us feeling lost. But that’s a rather negative way of putting it; we may feel energised: ‘I’ve got to find this out; it’s become the most important thing, it’s the only important thing. I’ve got to break through this.’
Great Doubt
This is getting to the Great Doubt; it’s totally overwhelming you, obsessing you, consuming you. The only question of your life is working on this koan, because this has become your pointer, touching your most basic underlying doubt; it’s revealed it, exposed it to you. It’s also the tool of breaking through, because by continuing working with the koan the attention becomes totally sharp and clear. You’ve found that any answer that comes to mind doesn’t quite fit, and so you discard it; you don’t become attached to wandering thoughts. You notice the thoughts just in case they might seem to help, but they’re discarded, you don’t attach to them. Another idea comes along and you notice it because you’re desperate for a possible idea – but you discard it because it’s not the ‘answer’, it doesn’t resolve the sense of not knowing.
The koan is moving you towards a totally sharp, present, clear awareness. Everything is noticed in case it might help you out of the situation, but everything is discarded because it isn’t the solution. In this very sharp investigation, this sharp attention, this wide open attention, you see through things which ordinarily you let pass by; you see through habits of behaviour and vexations, you see through attitudes, because you’re seeing them so sharply, because the mind is so empty of clutter. The koan has achieved the function of clearing the mind and it’s achieved the function of sharpening the attention.
Yes, it’s a somewhat artificial trick, but it’s a good trick; it’s a trick which trains the mind, which opens the mind, which sharpens the mind. It helps the mind to see through its usual clutter, and it can break through to seeing things in a totally different way without any of the usual previous clutter, any of the assumptions, any of the habits, any of the attitudes; they’re all let go and there’s a total clarity of seeing.
This is a description of how you can engage with the koan and where it might take you. You can block it from taking you there if you attach to ‘solutions’ to the koan, if you just daydream with it and don’t really pay it much attention, if you tell yourself you know the answer and so you’re just playing the game for the sake of the form. It’s certainly easy to not make progress, but it’s also easy to make progress if you allow yourself. Tune the mind so that it’s paying attention to the process of you engaging with the koan, so that it notices itself attaching to possible answers and perhaps getting rather proud at having found them – but also it notices that, to be honest, it’s not completely satisfied with the ‘answer’. You know it’s only a provisional way of looking at it, and that enables you to let go. Because you’re looking for total satisfaction, you’re looking for total clarity, a clever twist of words doesn’t satisfy you.
You may become trapped if you think you’ve got the right words because you’ve heard about this koan; you know what the so-called ‘answer’ is. Or you’ve read some Dharma theory and you know it’s ‘empty’ or it’s nothing or it’s everything or something like that. These are just concepts – do they match your current experience? To find out you’d better be in touch with your current experience.
Don’t be trapped by theoretical knowledge or past experience. This current moment’s experience is your work on the koan, or, it’s the koan working on you. Be very present with it, be very attentive, and allow it move in its own way through these different phases. If wordy intellectual thoughts arise, just let them wander through the mind. That’s part of the process of letting go of them, by seeing them and realising they really don’t satisfy in a deep way. If you suppress them, it just creates a tension in the mind and they keep on arising and it just distracts you.
By all means allow your clever intellectual constructions to arise and be examined, and let them go and try again, and then maybe another one arises. Maybe mixed in with them, because this isn’t necessarily sequential, mixed in there may be something different. Maybe it’s more a feeling about the koan, maybe something is evoked, maybe something’s triggered – let it through. Whatever the koan produces let it through, experience it, be with it, know it, but don’t hold onto it. Don’t push it away and don’t hold on. It goes when it’s ready, to be replaced either immediately or later by something else, and then the same applies: let it through, don’t judge it, just experience it.
Over a period of time you develop a certain relationship with your koan, which John used to call ‘getting the taste of the koan’. The ‘taste’ is a feeling about the koan, or of relationship with the koan. You have a sense that this koan is about loneliness, or this koan is about fear, or this koan is about something else. That’s your understanding of your relationship with the koan, or it’s your understanding of the characteristics of you that the koan is poking at. You allow that taste to emerge because it helps you to acknowledge and stay with something which you might otherwise avoid; you might avoid confronting that you’re afraid or lonely or whatever it might be.
Sometimes the process of a taste emerging highlights a particular phrase or word from the koan. It may be as though a huatou is emerging from the koan; you have looked at the whole koan and its taste is summarised for you in one phrase or one word. Picking up that one word is the same as picking up the whole koan. It’s not that you’ve taken that word out of the koan, it’s more like that for you that word is the koan; that’s all the reminder you need of the koan because by now it’s so well known to you. If you find that happening that’s fine, but check it’s not a way of avoiding or overlooking something else in the koan which is also important to acknowledge.
You find a shorthand, maybe a phrase, a word. Later maybe you don’t even need any words, because by now you have this sense of not knowing and this itself is your prime investigation; the ‘doubt’ itself becomes the object of investigation, the sense of not knowing that’s always present which makes you always be present with it.
As well as talking about great doubt, we talk about great determination, indeed great ‘angry’ determination – this gives us some idea of the energy to be applied when working on a koan. Don’t let it slip away from you. Remember Master Sheng Yen’s advice: whenever you are working with a koan or huatou pick it up; if it slips away, pick it up. Don’t be satisfied with just feeling at ease and peaceful and calm, thinking ‘Oh, practice is going well!’ No, practice is going badly; you’ve lost your koan – pick it up. It should always be with you at all times, and if it’s not, pick it up again.
It’s very active practice, very dynamic – it changes. Effort is required; it’s not a passive casual process, it’s something in which you have to engage fully. If you do so the rewards can be great, indeed it can push you very hard and push you a long way. From our first faltering steps with the koan we can take the practice further. That is your task for today: to pick it up in a more continuous and deeper way. Don’t let it slip out of your grasp, and if it does slip pick it back up again immediately.
