Part Two: The Other Side is Right Here

The great sages had, as one scholar put it, “wonderfully seasoned understanding.” From this understanding come the great koans by which we can discover that our bodies, hearts, and minds are a symphony of Life and not separate or closed off from that music. The koan introduced last time,

A monk asked Chao-chou, 
“Has the dog Buddha nature or not?” 
Chao-chou said, “Mu.”

may be a simple question about which beings have Buddha nature and which don’t. But Chao-chu’s answer transcends that kind of questioning. All beings have Buddha nature, but it is not a question of whether beings have or have not. What Chao-chu points to is the all-pervasiveness of Buddha nature. That symphony of life is available in every moment, and it happens on a vast and boundless stage. We could think of that stage as a piece of paper. When you look down on the edge of it, the paper is so thin you can't really see it. When you turn the paper on its flat side, there is its whiteness or colour, it contains the sun, clouds, rain, earth, logger, tree, millworker, and so on. If you look around right now, everything appears to your senses, but there is an invisible aspect as well that is home to everything. It’s a paradox. And being with this understanding unparadoxically is “Mu.” Here's an article on finding home right where you are by monk, scholar, teacher and author, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. He writes, “Every single day we do countless things that express this buddhanature—small acts of compassion, moments of insight and understanding. These things are so common that we don’t even notice them.”

Examine every instance, every moment, every phenomena from the stance of that little one syllable word: “Mu.” Which challenges us to examine everything to discover that its true nature lies beyond any question about it. Free of our baggage, our conditioning, we open to this discovery. Robert Aitken writes that “...the agonizing interrogatives ‘who?’ ‘why?’ and ‘what?’ are not answered [by koans] in any literal sense, but they are certainly resolved.” Who you are, why you are, and what you are become utterly clear, but no answer or question gets at this directly. Just using “Mu” instead creates a release from cognitive structuring of reality, from the mind’s constant story-making, and building of self and other.

These koans are sages’ guides for our inquiry into the nature of our experience. They are like checkpoints at the gate. They seem to hold something that is on the other side, an understanding that the koan can unlock. Wu-men, the ninth century originator of The Gateless Barrier collection, comments that, “If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses.” I’ll break this down under three headers below: The barrier of the ancestors, The mind road, and The ghost.

The barrier of the ancestors — we’ve been asking these questions forever.

If you have read Joseph Campbell or Northrop Frye, you know that such barriers are archetypal elements of the human psyche and experience. The barrier is a metaphor for stages of life and so on, but here the barrier stands between consensus reality and what is called in Zen, the Great Freedom. It is an epic obstacle surmounted by heroes of the past, but it is also current and personal — the barrier is the conditioning of a lifetime. See this barrier wherever it comes up; to that we say “Mu” until we see through it.

The barrier is called gateless because the truth, the great freedom, is not different from what is right here; there can be no gate between here and here, now and now. The barrier is the conditioned mind and all of its interpretations, interference, and insistence that it knows what it knows for certain. One spiritual teacher, Mooji, states that the conditioned or thinking mind is “a severe limitation on what we really are.” This limiting filter can be cut away. Or gradually worn away. It is a barrier like a pane of glass; the view through it will not change upon realization. What changes is the viewer; the viewer disappears. The viewer becomes the view and vice versa. Conditioning masks that freedom that is already here now.

The goal of practice is to free ourselves of societal, familial, and other conditioning as much as anyone can, and regain beginners’ mind. Quoting Ram Dass, “Jesus said you will get to the kingdom of God and that’s where you’ll find the children. I like to believe in childhood or child-like qualities as a goal. Or a way to reach spiritual awareness. And it’s not to go back to be a child, it’s to be child-like, in the sense of innocence, openness, freshness and beginning.”

We can be curious, innocent, open, and then every moment is experienced as fresh and like new. Beginners mind can surpass the barrier.

The mind road — what does it mean to cut it off?

Koans show where you are stuck, where the conditioning is so strong, you can't even see that it's conditioning and instead believe it is really real and insurmountable. Where you feel stuck is precisely where you realize awakening or freedom. Conditioning, preferences, and habitual identification/attachment are illuminated by the stuckness. All of life’s ups and downs are opportunities to realize your true nature. Make all of life the path, states one Tibetan aphorism.

In the beginning of a dedicated spiritual practice, a lot of unprocessed and unconscious stuff can rise to the surface of awareness. “Percolation,” was a term one of my teachers used. I had unacknowledged grief and anger about the MS, loss of mobility, and my vision of the future, gone. I also had resentment toward a few people and long-held grief over not knowing my mother. Psychotherapy can help us understand the roots of our suffering, ourselves, our traumas, and how unskillful behaviour causes harm. Mindfulness, meditation, or spiritual practice can help with these too, but also give us the means to let go of those things. At some point there is no longer any need to delve into our psychological hangups and painful patterns and finally just put them down. Guo Gu comments that “when you are free from these habitual patterns you become more grounded and congruent.” Climbing that sacred mountain and leaving our baggage behind so there is lightness of being, surprise, energy, curiosity. It has been true for me, as I let go of resentment and grief.

“Cut off the mind road,” does not mean to stop thinking and rather to change the relationship to thinking so that one sees it is just phenomena arising. There is no need to follow every (or any) train of thought. Further, we acknowledge that thinking and sensing happens in the empty and potent space of true nature and thereby step out of it, step out of the belief that “I am thinking.” Thinking is just happening, just life unfolding. It’s not not supposed to be happening, but the koan takes thinking and sensing out of the realm of questions about true nature and into something else that is none of these things and all of them.

My teacher, Matt Flickstien, offered a most helpful description: “We are constantly talking to ourselves. It is relentless. We are attached to that voice and are consistently listening to it. Since the voice has been there for so long, there are times when we are not even conscious that we are hearing it. This voice speaks to us in terms of duality. The mind has no other way of interpreting its experience of what it perceives to be the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ worlds. As a result, the mind is always in conflict with itself. When we can observe the mind as it is without attempting to change what is present, all inner conflict ceases. There is no longer any division between the observer and the observed. This process fosters equanimity, inner peace, and the realization of our true nature.”

Monk and scholar, Ajahn Sumedho, writes, “If we begin to notice confusion as confusion and uncertainty as uncertainty, there is clarity in that. The clarity is in the knowing of it as it is, rather than in trying to straighten out the conditioned world so that it never upsets or confuses us.”

The ghost

The ghost is something that is not real, clinging to that which is insubstantial and bound to change. The ghost is the sense of self created by identity with phenomena. The ghost is the “I” who is thinking, and following thinking, and believing it. And then clinging to what it creates. Clinging is the barrier. It is the conditioned mind that clings.

The bushes and grasses are insubstantial and subject to change; they represent identity and attachment — such as with money and possessions, old resentments, and persistent habits of thought. ”We are all ghosts after all!“ writes Aitken.

The self we know so well is a ghost in the sense that it is like fantasy or a dream; it is a construct “that prevents you from experiencing the preciousness of every moment,” writes Guo Gu. He continues, “This self is the source of grief. It projects and reifies its own vision of the world onto the world itself, assuming that to be the sole reality. It seeks to preserve itself at all cost, processing everything out there as “things” to be possessed or rejected. In doing so, the self alienates itself and separates itself from the world of phenomena. This self can even take itself—your sense of who you are—as a thing as well, formulating narratives and images about itself.”

Without something to cling to, who are we? What if we just stop collecting things and hanging onto them so tightly?

The gateless

Ram Dass suggests,”… as you are quiet and you listen and hear how it all is, then you will relate to all of it in a harmonious way, in a way in which there is not exploitation. Harmonious in the way you relate to the floor you're sitting on, to the person next to you, to the night air, to the world you have to live in.” I try to depict this movement in my artwork. In the evolution of the work here you can see how the chickadee emerges out of random background elements. The chickadee itself is made out of random elements. So are we. All that is, random elements, in harmonious relation. In each moment we are re-emerging. To some degree we can choose how that goes: emerge into suffering or into freedom. We don’t choose cancer, for example, but we can choose how to meet it.

When the mind gets quiet, what is left? Mu. Seeing that is not seeing. Hearing that is not hearing. Thinking that is not thinking. No self. No filter. No ghost. Just this. A great clarity arises like a sword cuts through; but it doesn’t divide anything because there is nothing to divide; it leaves what was already there and only slices away the filter that constricted it. The “I,” the conditioned mind clarifies — like mud settles to reveal clear water or like reaching a mountain peak after an arduous climb. It swipes the view clean and leaves no trace of identity. Severs what was never really there in the first place.

Aitken comments, “A single syllable turns out to be a mine of endless riches. Because each and every phenomenon is ‘mu.’ Therefore, it offers endless discovery and each discovery rich in its revelation, in its everything ... noticing and remembering, noticing and remembering, gradually you become big with Mu—all things become big with Mu. Fantasies, plans, and sensations become absorbed in Mu. Mu breathes Mu. The whole universe breathes Mu.”

Guo Gu assures us, “You shouldn’t feel that this mu has nothing to do with you. You may ask yourself, ‘Who cares if the dog has buddha-nature or not?’ Actually, does this question have anything to do with dog or buddha-nature? No. It has to do with you. The real question is: Where is your buddha-nature? Who are you?” You are this, here, now; you are home.

And Wu-men wrote, “Mu is where inside and outside become one.”

And what then? Our true nature, we find is compassion in action. Guo Gu writes, “Because everything is there, you see the suffering and the joy and potential of all beings. Your actions respond intimately to all beings. This is compassion….You simply respond to what the situation calls for…. Because self-grasping is absent, from your perspective there is no more gaining or losing and grasping or rejecting, as these dualities can exist only on the traces of self-referentiality. When they are not there, you can truly help living beings — your family members, your friends, people around you, and the world. This is ‘to walk together hand in hand with all the generations of lineage masters, to see through the same eyes as they do and to hear through the same ears as they do.’ This is the bodhisattva path.”

We keep remembering “Mu” until eventually we see through the barrier, stop going down the mind road, cease any ghostly clinging, until the Vow of the great awakened and compassionate Bodhisattvas makes sense. Here is the Zen version of that vow. Perhaps next time, I’ll break down this beautiful vow.

I vow to wake all the beings of the world.
I vow to set endless heartache to rest.
I vow to walk through every Dharma gate.
I vow to live the great Buddha way.