Case 29 The Sixth Patriarch's "Your Mind Moves"                
 
The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument.
One said the flag flapped, the other said the wind flapped;
they argued back and forth but could not reach a conclusion.
The Sixth Patriarch said, "It is not the wind that flaps, it is not the flag that flaps; it is your mind that flaps."
The two monks were awe-struck.
 
Mumon's Comment
It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is not the mind that moves. How do you see the patriarch?
If you come to understand this matter deeply, you will see that the two monks got gold when buying iron.
The patriarch could not withhold his compassion and courted disgrace.
 
Mumon's Verse 
    Wind, flag, mind, moving,
     All equally to blame.
     Only knowing how to open his mouth,
     Unaware of his fault in talking.

          The story in this koan is from the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.  If we read this sutra we learn that Hui Neng the Sixth Patriarch was not actually a recognized teacher at the time of this story.  He had been in seclusion practicing on his own for 10 years, deepening his realization as per the instructions of the Fifth Patriarch.  He comes into town to listen to a traveling teacher when he encounters these two monks.  What he said to these two monks seemed so astounding that the traveling teacher asks him if by chance he is the the fellow who is the lineage disciple of the Fifth Zen Patriarch.  When Hui Neng says yes, he is asked to give his first public talk and begins his teaching career.
​          On reading this koan one might think the Sixth Patriarch is simply admonishing the two monks for what seems a rather stupid argument but then what he said might not have struck anyone as so astounding.  During the time of Hui Neng (7th Century) Buddhism was a highly intellectual endeavor.  A large Buddhist cannon had been translated and was earnestly studied but only Zen, which was a small school, had a lineage of teachers which went all the way back to the Buddha.  And Zen was and is not an intellectual discipline but a meditative discipline.  These arguing monks were not of the Zen sect so maybe they were surprised to be admonished.  And then maybe this "mind flapping" thing was Hui Neng saying the movement of the flag/wind was all in our heads?  Was this a statement of the idea that everything is in our heads which is one understanding (not mine) of the Mind Only School of Buddhism?  Or maybe he was talking about the Universal Mind which contains all our minds.
          Our individual minds are capable of weaving a practically impenetrable jungle of thoughts.  Rarely do we see clearly but are instead filled with confusing thoughts.  The Buddha recognised this as a primary cause of our suffering.  We might respond that it is only some of our thoughts that cause suffering.  Yes, some of our thought make us happy but the Buddha and I would respond that for almost all of us we have woven with our thoughts an inherently incorrect understanding and can never be truly happy with this incorrect confused understanding of the world.  Now of course you want me to write what is true and real, something you can believe in.  But that is not the Zen way.  The Zen way is not to replace one set of ideas with another.  That may happen eventually.  But what is true and real in Zen is the practice. It is Zazen (sitting meditation), Kinhin (walking meditation), and fully engaging body and mind in whatever we do without any extra thought (daily life practice).  It is the Eightfold Way of the Buddha and the Six Perfections.  All of this stuff is to slowly disentangle the confusion of our thought so that we can see clearly.
          Be careful with the first step on the Eightfold Path of Right Understanding.  Please don't just substitute the theological edifice of some sect of Buddhism for what was your previous way of thinking.  The Buddha laid out only some simple truths which are hard to deny, the truth of our suffering, that everything is in constant change, that everything and everyone, is interconnected by and results from cause and effect (what the Buddha called "causes and conditions") The one really difficult idea laid out by the Buddha and is the non-atman or no-self doctrine. It is completely antithetical to the way most of us think.  My suggestion is that we ponder this idea but that again it's true understanding can only be revealed through deepening practice. 
          Back to the koan, contemplating this story and our "flapping mind" we are asked to disentangle any ideas we might have about our sensory and intellectual connection we have to the physical world.  We do this not as an intellectual endeavor but rather by experiencing this connection in it's raw form before any ideas are added to experience.  This is not easy and can take years of work in meditation.  We are like scientists who should if they are good scientists not take any theoretical idea as an absolute truth but rather test and retest in various conditions all theoretical ideas.  In the practice of meditation we are performing a repeatable experiment, that many thousands of people have already performed so that we can learn the truth ourselves of our relationship with the world we live in.
          



 

Case 28 Ryûtan Blows Out the Candle                          
 
Tokusan asked Ryûtan about Zen far into the night.
At last Ryûtan said, "The night is late.
Why don't you retire?"
Tokusan made his bows and lifted the blinds to withdraw, but he was met by darkness. Turning back to Ryûtan, he said, "It is dark outside."
Ryûtan lit a paper candle and handed it to him.
Tokusan was about to take it when Ryûtan blew it out.
At this, all of a sudden, Tokusan went through a deep experience and made bows.
Ryûtan said, "What sort of realization do you have?"
"From now on," said Tokusan, "I will not doubt the words of an old oshõ who is renowned everywhere under the sun."
The next day Ryûtan ascended the rostrum and said, "I see a fellow among you. His fangs are like the sword tree. His mouth is like a blood bowl.
Strike him with a stick, and he won't turn his head to look at you.
Someday or other, he will climb the highest of the peaks and establish our Way there."
Tokusan brought his notes on the Diamond Sutra to the front of the hall, pointed to them with a torch, and said, "Even though you have exhausted the abtruse doctrines, it is like placing a hair in a vast space. Even though you have learned all the secrets of the world, it is like a drop of water dripped on the great ocean."
And he burned all his notes.
Then, making bows, he took his leave of his teacher.
 

Mumon's Comment
Before Tokusan crossed the barrier from his native place, his mind burned and his mouth uttered bitterness. He went southward, intending to stamp out the doctrines of special transmission outside the sutras.
When he reached the road to Reishû, he asked an old woman to let him have lunch to "refresh the mind."
"Your worship, what sort of literature do you carry in your pack?" the old woman asked.
"Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra," replied Tokusan.
The woman replies,  In the Diamond Sutra it says,
 "'The past mind cannot be held, the present mind cannot be held, the future mind cannot be held.  What mind are you trying to refresh.?"
At this question Tokusan was dumbfounded.
However, he did not remain inert under her words but asked, "Do you know of any good teacher around here?"
The old woman said, "Five miles from here you will find Ryûtan Oshõ."
Coming to Ryûtan, Tokusan got the worst of it.
His former words were inconsistent with his later ones.
As for Ryûtan, he seemed to have lost all sense of shame in his compassion toward his son.
Finding a bit of live coal in the other, enough to start a fire, he hurriedly poured on muddy water to annihilate everything at once.
A little cool reflection tells us it was all a farce.

          Mumon's Verse

         Hearing the name cannot surpass seeing the face;
         Seeing the face cannot surpass hearing the name.
        He may have saved his nose,
         But alas! he lost his eyes.

          This is a very interesting and complex story for a Koan, and Mumon give us important background information in his comments.  We learn that Tokusan was an intellectual who studied the Diamond Sutra and was sure in an intellectual battle he could destroy any defender of the Zen sect.  But then he encounter a woman of obvious intellectual acuity and sophistication in Zen who very quickly destroys Tokusan.  He is helpless when the woman asks  "The past mind cannot be held, the present mind cannot be held, the future mind cannot be held. What mind do you need to refresh?"  This reminds me of the story of the Sixth Patriarch who might of heard this same section of the Diamond Sutra and had a spontaneous enlightenment experience.  We normal humans tend to think that our mind is this constant flow of internal thoughts, dialogue, images, sounds, memories emotions etc.  It is like a river that flows though our heads and we identify with that river and might even say that is who we are in our essence.  But the Diamond Sutra tells us again and again that all that stuff is empty.  It has no real substance, it is just fluff,  passing energy and yet we try to grab hold of it spin it in our heads which only increases the volume of the river.  This is how our thoughts become obsessive and delusive and filled with suffering.  We try to fix the idea of our selves in these thoughts but this is just delusion.  The river keeps on flowing, always changing, and everything around us is also continuously changing.  There is nothing fixed, not our thoughts and not the mountain across the valley.
          What is our mind?  Is it that stream of thought or something else?  Most of us would say it is various things, our awareness but certainly also that river of thought.  It is what goes on internally in our head.  But if you are a deeply experienced meditator you might think of it as something else.  I heard an interesting story the other day.  My teacher Harada Roshi went to see a member of the sangha who is quite sick and was suffering from severe delusions.  The Roshi simply told this fellow that what he was experiencing was not his mind.  Something happened, all that experience in meditation kicked in and this fellow was able to return to his clear rational mind.  I also had a similar experience many many years ago when I was experimenting a bit with LSD.  I wanted to see the effects of meditation on the LSD experience.  I could quickly turn off the hallucinatory effects of LSD through meditation but then when I stopped meditating about 5 min. later the hallucinations started up again.
          In the Diamond Sutra there is mention of the "non-abiding mind."  (Trust me though I am not going to look up any quotes this is probably from the same part of the Sutra that the woman of our story quotes.)  In one sense the non-abiding mind is what we are trying to cultivate as Buddhist practitioners.  It is the mind that is unattached, not attached to the past, not to the future, not even to the present.  We Buddhists practice non-attachment because we are told that attachment causes suffering. It is something we have to practice because our minds seem to be naturally sticky.  We try to be conscious of both our deep seated attachments and moment to moment attachments and consciously let them go.  This is an ongoing process that we never seem to completely conclude because on some level we are attached to non-attachment.  We are attached to the Buddhist teachings. We are attached to our practice. We are attached to our understanding.  We are attached in all sorts of ways that we are not conscious of or just don't think of as a problem.
         When we sit in meditation we get down to the nitty-gritty of non-attachment.  Many people are taught to practice meditation by cultivating an inner mindfulness and watch the river of thought pass by without becoming attached to any one thought as it passes by.  This is not very easy because quickly our thoughts become so dense there is no room for mindfulness and we quickly loose consciousness of our thinking.  Then in a moment we become conscious again but now those thoughts are just a memory.  By becoming conscious that we were just lost in thought we can chose to keep thinking about whatever we were thinking about or try to let the thoughts and the subject of the thoughts go.  Our practice tells us that we should let the thoughts go but sometimes the power of the attachment to the subject of the thoughts is just  too powerful and no matter what we try we still return to the same subject and loose consciousness in our thought.  This is attachment.  When I had lots of responsibilities at work for most of the first 1/2 hour of my morning practice I could not get thoughts of my responsibilities out of my head.  It is really difficult to just let these thoughts go, by just being conscious of  them so usually we have some thing to focus our attention on when we become conscious that our attention has strayed.  Commonly this focus is the breath.  Maybe even the breath is counted.  This is where concentration becomes important.  And the breath is not the only thing used for an object of concentration, sound, sight, the bodily sensations of our skin, and even posture.  The Tibetans really focus on concentration through the practice of complex visualization.
          Normally we think of attachment as being attached to the people we have feelings for or some object or idea for which we also have feelings. Attachment seems to be something emotional, and not rational.  In the complexity of the human mind generally all our thoughts are accompanied by some level of emotion.  In fact emotion is often invoked even before thought.  We can see that attachment and aversion sort of rule our lives and seems unavoidable, and aversion is a sort of attachment in reverse resulting from some attachment to how we want things to be.   It seems that emotion rules our attachments, and it is emotion that keeps us attached.  Breaking attachments often involves emotional pain.  We have a whole web of thoughts that are all based around an idea of a self that are held together by emotional attachment.  This is only the beginning of our understanding of attachment. 
          In meditation we can see the many ways we attach.  Sitting in meditation we can watch thoughts arise and see them as a string of attachments. We can also see that each thought is usually accompanied by some emotion.  Sometime this emotion is only a slight bodily feeling that might not be thought of as emotion but then as meditation deepens it is possible to experience a state of complete bodily equanimity in which there is no emotional attachment to thought and then we will understand emotional attachment. We will then see emotional attachment is the movement of body energy (chi) and see how body and our intellectual mind work together creating a larger intelligence.   In long periods of sitting deep unconscious emotions and thoughts with a long history arise.  Sometimes these deep attachments are stored in some way in our body and if we can let go of a deep attachment then it will actually transform how our body feels.
          When we sit in meditation we try to let go of any thoughts that arise.  In some sense each thought is an attachment  We do not dwell on thoughts that arise and attach more thoughts to the original thought but again and again return to whatever object of attention we have chosen.  At first, just a few moments later another string of thoughts will arise.  They might be on another subject or they might be on the same subject.  We can see that we have recurring themes to our thoughts.  Eventually as we continue our sitting practice we find more and more space between our thoughts.  We will experience deepening concentration.  We will uncover that there is a more subtle layer of thought that is not very energetic, like a whisper, but still functioning between our more energetic thoughts.  Eventually with lots of practice we can cut through even this layer and experience moments of complete silence.  This is where concentration is very important.  I understand attachment now as on the most subtle level as the attachment of thought to thought, thought to emotion, emotion to thought, thought to sensation and emotion to sensation, and all this attachment is just habit.  
          One time when I was sitting quite deeply but still just starting to break through into periods of real quiet I could see how the subtle noises in the space would turn into words in my head.  A sound would transform into a word seamlessly. And then that word could easily become a sentence and so on.  This was not the result of some deep emotional  attachment but a habit of attachment.  And because it is a habit and all attachment/thought is in some way a habit we can break the habit by finding a way to cut off thinking for longer and longer spans of time.  We do this by again and again cutting our thoughts with concentrated attention and not give our habit of thinking any energy.
          One might respond that this cutting off of our thoughts is also an attachment.  It is just our attachment to non-attachment.  This is true and it is the last attachment that must be let go of and this part to some extent happens spontaneously.  It often does not happen on the cushion because that is a place of effort but might happen if the teacher shouts at you or you bump your toe, in the case of this koan the teacher blows out a candle, in the case of the Sixth Patriarch he heard a portion of the Diamond Sutra.  And then we enter a place where there truly is no attachment.  We in Zen call this Original Mind. 
          From the place of this Original Mind everything is different.  Not that things look different, though they do look and sound and feel and taste and smell a little different.  The sensations are intensified/energized.  Colors are brighter sounds are clearer and there may be even an intense experience of beauty.  But more important than this intensification of experience is that there is an inherent understanding from the perspective of the Original Mind.  There is no ego in the Original Mind.  There is no division in the Original Mind, and because of this there is no separation between self and others. There is the recognition that the True Self is without boundaries. There is insight into non-duality.  From the perspective of the Original Mind the Original Mind is not an attribute of an individual being but because, it does not separate itself from it's content, which is what we hear and see and taste and feel and smell,  it is the whole Universe.
           This insight into non-duality changes everything. We practice hard, purify our thoughts, quiet our mind, so that we might have an experience and insight into non-duality, to only discover that it is not our experience or our insight but the experience and insight of the Non-Dual Universe.  And at the same time all our previous confusion and even suffering is also the confusion and suffering of the Universe.  But to call it confusion and suffering is to come from the individual perspective.  Once there has been a deep insight into the Non-Dual true Zen practice is not to leave this understanding on the cushion but to bring this understanding into our daily lives.  This is to see thinking as no-thinking, attachment as no-attachment, even life as no-life.  We do this by again and again returning to the Original Mind of no thinking.
          In the last commentary I wrote a lot about chi energy and how important it is in meditation so the question naturally arises how does the experience of chi relate to what I have just written?  The accumulation of chi is natural with the deepening of meditation and from my experience a strong chi experience invariably accompanies any experience of the deep quiet of the Original Mind.  Experience has shown me that it is not only passively accompanying breakthrough experiences but can be causative.  This is exactly why a hit with a stick or a shout may precipitate the sudden quieting of the mind or a deep insight.  Often during sesshin when my mind is noisy and I am unsuccessful in quieting it through my normal meditation techniques I ask for the kiosaku stick, and often with a hit from the stick I find the chi energy rises right to the top of the skull and I find myself (no-self) totally awake with a totally quiet mind.
          This is how we can understand the story in this koan but it is only a true understanding if we have this same experience.