Physically, I did not find the retreat too difficult. Having regularly practised the one hour meditation sessions traditional in vipassana, sitting for half an hour at a time is not much of a problem for me. And the exercises offered during the breaks between sessions were enough to get the stiffness out of my limbs. Alternating between sitting cross legged and kneeling also helped me avoid any major discomfort and apart from an occasional few minutes, tiredness was never a problem in spite of the shortness of sleep. My only physical difficulty was a disturbing sensation in my neck, which comes from time to time due to long sessions at the keyboard of my computer. However, I foolishly allowed this sensation to dominate me on the first day, resenting it as a ruse to unsettle me over the week ahead, but Shifu's advice to rub it if it became too bad was both compassionate and liberating. Two of my companions on the retreat also massaged it for me, and this helped to ensure that by the third day it had ceased to trouble me.
But what had my neck problem taught me? Mainly that I had come to the retreat with my head too full of the need for physical endurance, too caught up in the anticipation of long hours of sitting, too anxious to arrange everything in the small space around me to suit myself. The problem with my neck taught me that I was in danger of skating across the surface of the retreat, bringing too much of everyday thinking to it, too intent on doing the retreat rather than on living it.
At no point did I entirely lose this sense of doing, though it became less strong after the first two days. It arose in part because having wanted to experience a true Chan/Zen Master for many years, I had pre-programmed the area of my mind that tries to find my small self within an experience, instead of allowing the experience to speak for itself. The lesson my neck problem taught me in those first two days will remain with me. And in absorbing the lesson, I found myself readily accepting the strict routine of the retreat. As I did so, a curious thing happened. On the third morning, the morning boards that roused us at 4.00am ceased to be a call to duty, and became instead just sounds. I heard them for the first time, as they arose out of the stillness, each steady clap alternating with silence, and yet the clap and the silence both part of the same continuing process, and with no distance between this process and my own mind. The whole experience was exactly in its place, just itself and nothing more. Afterwards I felt great gratitude to the Guestmaster, walking through the mud and rain of the early morning with his morning boards. Were the boards the Guestmaster, or the Guestmaster the boards?
After the morning boards there was early morning yoga. My mind, by this time, had usually become preoccupied by my surroundings, intrigued by the anonymous shapes in the 4.00am darkness and the rustle of clothes as we swung our arms and bounced our knees. Shih- fu himself, in his white face mask, was the only person easily identifiable, and he seemed to float in the air on a small rise of ground in front of us, as insubstantial as the morning mist.
After the morning yoga, the still, silent meditation hall was especially welcoming, almost comforting, with the cushions just as we had left them at the close of the final sitting the previous night. They seemed patiently to await our return. And always half way into the first session I was lifted by the song of the first bird, suddenly arriving within my meditation with a sweet, startling clarity. The morning boards of the animal world. How would the enlightened mind hear the sound? Just as I heard it. No difference.
Within the meditation sessions my mind became busier than I had expected. At no time was there the calmness that I have experienced in the past. Perhaps I was disturbed by the excitement of being there. Yet I felt no impatience with my mental chatter and this surprised me. Perhaps I was too self indulgent, feeling that just to be on the retreat was the important thing. I began on the first day with my usual vipassana practice, watching the breath, feeling the subtle sensation as the breath came and went, but the retreat only really started in earnest for me when I had my first interview with Shifu. I spoke to him initially about watching the breath, and told him of those experiences in meditation when my mind becomes clear and still and thoughts drop away to be replaced by a focused stillness in which there is only a sense of awareness. He listened carefully, then cautioned me against what is called in Zen 'sitting in a cave with ghosts'. I wondered if I had not explained myself properly and had given him the impression I was talking about the drowsy, trance like state which I knew all to well was to be avoided. Then I dismissed the idea. If Shifu said I was in danger of sitting in a cave with ghosts, then I was in danger of sitting in a cave with ghosts. Thus I discovered that there was another state, however subtle, that was a trap on the meditator's path.
In my second interview with Shifu I told him of the koan meditation I have been practising intermittently over the years. "And what", he asked, "is your koan?"
I told him, "Why did Bodhidharma come from the East?"
Shifu half smiled and answered at once, almost jokingly, "Because he had nothing better to do". He then asked me what was my answer to the koan, and when I told him he remained silent.
Armed with Shifu's permission, I turned from the breathing at the next meditation session and concentrated on the koan. But immediately a doubt arose in my mind. During my past use of the koan it had spontaneously reshaped itself in my mind from the form traditionally used in Zen - "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?" to "Why did Bodhidharma come from the East?" This reshaping had appeared rational to me at the time. After all, Zen, Chan, Bodhidharma, call it what one liked, had come to us from the East, not from the West. Absurdly, I now allowed myself to become distracted by the problem of East or West, and I wished I had asked Shifu whether it was acceptable to use the koan in this changed form. In order to calm this distraction I dropped the koan and went back to concentrating on the breathing, but at the same time I felt a deep sense of identity with the koan, as if Shifu had given us to each other.
At the next interview, I returned to the problem of East or West and asked Shifu in what form I should use the koan. He confirmed that it should be used in the original "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?", and I realised the foolishness of my attempts at rationalising East and West. Shifu then told me from now on not to return to my breathing as a focus in meditation, but to work always with the koan.
The following day while working with the koan an answer arose, clear and very simple, and so obvious I felt a surge of joy. But when I told Shifu at my next interview he said, with each word clearly enunciated and separated, "That answer is wrong." I felt deep gratitude to him. His words showed me I had for some years been in danger of taking the wrong path in my attempts to realise Zen. Then Shifu said:
"Don't ask yourself for the answer, ask the koan. Keep asking WHY? WHY? WHY?"
"And when answers arise?"
"Treat them like other thoughts, drop them."
"And in those moments when one is not asking the koan?"
"Keep the sense of enquiry. Chew on the koan, like something sweet."
"Is it possible for the mind to be still, and yet to be asking the koan?"
"It is possible."
"And is this the right koan for me?"
"All koans are equally good if you choose them yourself."
So I began to ask the question of the koan "Why? Why? Why?" Even without examining it intellectually, rational answers arose. Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? Because he had nothing better to do. Why? Why nothing? No-thing. How could there be something better to do? Impossible. Insights about the Bodhisattva mind seemed to emerge. An answer even arose to the question that had long puzzled me, why Bodhidharma had sat for nine years facing a wall when he was already enlightened, cutting off (so the story goes) his very eyelids in order to keep himself from sleeping. But the koan itself remained silent. For the rest of the retreat it became my companion, inside and outside the meditation hall, sometimes friendly, sometimes irritating, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, sometimes a little intimidating, just like a real person. And in the days after the retreat I found myself enquiring into the nature of that "Why".
But there were other things that happened outside the meditation hall that were also important to me. In some ways the kinhin walking meditation was more of an experience even than the sitting. For years I have worked with kinhin in my tai chi practice, and always there has been something lacking, some sense of unsteadiness, as if body and mind refuse to be one. Yet in walking in that muddy, bumpy field, where the grass became trodden by us into a circle, I realised that in the unsteadiness, as I slowly set down each foot in turn and transferred my weight to it, there is only the unsteadiness. And then the unsteadiness becomes experienced for what it is, a simple sure presence. It is only by denying that moment of uncertainty, as one places the foot on the ground, by trying consciously to transform it into steadiness, that uncertainty arises. If the mind is there in the contact between the foot and the earth, then mind, body and earth become one.
I also came to value the short walk down to the bottom of the field where we practised kinhin. There was something about this walk that seemed to capture the essence of the retreat. For although we all walked separately and in silence, the boundaries between us faded, and there was only a shared quiet, almost dogged determination.
On this retreat there was none of the "preciousness" I have experienced elsewhere, and find unhelpful. None of the obvious, visible guru worship. None of the hopes of bliss, of altered states, of ecstatic revelations. Just a sense of presence, of things in their place, of life being lived, ordinary yet miraculous. And in the kinhin there was also the physical presence of Shifu himself, in plastic overshoes and a woollen cap pulled tight around his ears, and the wind off the Welsh hills tugging at his robes. And in his commands of "faster, faster" as we changed from the slow to the fast walk, I was caught up in a deep sense of compassion, the compassion of the Master towards me, compassion in which I was allowed to share, so that his compassion was not something given to me, like a gift from outside, but something he called forth in myself. And Shifu's compassion was the centre of the retreat, the still point around which everything else moved.
I find it difficult to write about Shifu, without sounding overstretched, artificial, as if I am creating false experiences through my delight in using words, and without sounding as if I am falling into guru-worship, which was not at all a part of what happened in this, my first direct contact with him. So what is there for me to say and how is it possible for me to say it? The only words which ring at all with the truth of that experience is that here was a man to whom I had nothing to give. Certainly it would be correct to say that he wanted something from me, but it was wanted for me, not for him. So for the first time in my life I stood before a man for whom there was no need to dissemble. No need to try and project a persona, to pretend to wisdom, to show kindness for the sake of kindness. In that realisation there was no great rush of emotion. It was something much deeper, and yet not deep at all. Something immeasurably profound, yet perfectly obvious and straightforward. It was perhaps my first experience of a human being standing without ego. And yet even to say that reveals the presence of my own ego, as if I have a right to make such a judgement about another person. So better perhaps to remain silent, and to recognise what happened in my meetings with Shifu was a transmission to me of something outside the scriptures, which cannot tarnish with the years. "Chan", said Shifu one morning before the first meditation began, "is Buddhism".
And my impression at the end of the retreat? Chiefly one of great yet tranquil gratitude. To the Guestmaster, for his quiet authority, for his hard work and powers of organisation, for his years of study and of searching which made the retreat possible, for his compassion in enabling us to sit with Shifu, and for his morning boards. To Paul Kennedy, for seeming to capture the spirit and the humour, as well as the essence of Shifu's words, and for his own implacable determination to fight off jet lag and serve us all. To Guo Yen Hsi, for the beauty of his chanting, for the warmth of his smile, for his discipline in the meditation hall, for his guidance on the necessary stretching and relaxing exercises between sittings, and for demonstrating so clearly the nature of the true relationship between a monk and his abbot. To the Maenllwyd, which sheltered us with its simply, kindly presence, to the wind off the Welsh hills, to the early morning darkness, and to the first note of bird song each morning. And to Shifu, for showing me that the Patriarchs can be taken at their word.
