your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain in one extreme or the other
you will never know Oneness.
Those who do not live in the single Way
fail in both activity and passivity,
assertion and denial.
To deny the reality of things
is to miss their reality;
To assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality.
I had an ongoing debate with a friend for many years on the importance of learning to not think during meditation. He was an avid practitioner of about 8 years when we started talking about this issue, a student of a student of Sasaki Roshi. He didn't believe that learning to not think was the correct direction he should go in his meditation. He would tell me that not thinking was like dying and why would he want to do that. He would tell me that the way of Zen was "everyday mind" which is a classic Zen saying. He would tell me that trying to stop thinking didn't work for him. And here Seng Tsan seems to be providing another argument for my friends position.
I on the other hand told my friend that my teacher Harada Roshi was very specific in asking me to master not-thinking. My friend responded that maybe Harada was just tailoring his teaching to me specifically. I said "no" and told him that one time Harada told all the participants in a sesshin that if they could stop their thinking for one minute their lives would change. I pointed out that teaching not-thinking was also not just Harada's teaching but a general teaching within Zen, for example when Dogen was asked how zazen should be practiced he said, "Think not-thinking." At some point my friend and I stopped debating this issue. I even think that based upon a few things he said recently that maybe he has experienced not-thinking.
This question of thinking verses not-thinking is a point of contention within the Zen community I think that this contention results from confusion and misunderstanding. To begin it is important that we understand what is meant by not-thinking. One might think that to not-think is to enter some death like trance without thought or consciousness. There are stories of people reaching this death like state in meditation and returning to consciousness only after many hours, days or even years. Sometimes these tales are cautionary. Some Zen teachers are very specific in saying that this state of mind is not the Zen way. In the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch there are several passages that argue against this state of mind. There is another form of not thinking. This not thinking is completely awake yet the mind is quiet. The internal verbal dialogue has stopped for the most part. And there is a deep serenity but also it is a state of mind that is open and intelligent. Hakuin calls this "the thought of no thought". in his Song of Zazen. It is from this state of mind in which we recognize the oneness of things as in "Be serene in the oneness of things."
There is another argument that some Zen practitioners use. It goes like this. " The practice of Zen is not about not-thinking it is about non-attachment. If you don't attach to your thoughts then there is no problem with thinking." This is in fact true except to use this as an argument against not-thinking is to not understand the deep nature of attachment. Attachment and non-attachment happens on many different levels and in many different ways. There is of course the attachment to life and the attachment to identity. These are really difficult to detach from. Then there are all sorts of other attachments like sunny days and good coffee. Maybe we will find ourselves disappointed or even unhappy when the sun isn't shining or we can't get a good cup of coffee in the morning. Need I go on/ If we investigate our thoughts and look at our attachments then we will see that most of our thoughts result from attachments and that our attachments result from thoughts. And so one argument for not-thinking emerges.
Someone might say, "I am detached because I don't take myself and my thoughts seriously, I recognize that this world is a mystery that I cannot fathom." This may be a good place psychologically for Zen practice but it is not a good argument against not-thinking. Carrying around this attitude does not mean one is thoroughly detached. Be careful, even ignorance can be an attachment. It also does not mean that one has dropped the attachment to self that keeps us in our dualistic perspective.
To not be attached to thoughts is actually the practice of Zazen and it results in not-thinking. What do I mean by this? When we practice Zazen we are taught to let our thoughts go. We do this by placing our attention on some object of focus like our breathing, or our posture, or a mantra. Durring meditation if we catch ourselves lost in thought or maybe not so lost but just thinking then we just refocus our attention on our object of attention and hopefully drop our thoughts. Though our thoughts may not drop very easily, if we persistently return to our object of focus then they will eventually loose their energy and disappear. This is a long and arduous process. For a long time after you begin this practice one thought will just be replaced by another. All your daily concerns and deep unresolved issues will emerge. Eventually you will be able to hold your attention on your object of attention for long periods of time but maybe now you experience a persistent underlying layer of thought that is never quiet. Again if your are persistent even this underlying layer of thought will loose it's energy and disappear. Now you can truly experience not-thinking. This is non-attachment to thought. And it is a process that can take many years to begin to master. When a truly experienced Zen teacher teaches to not try to stop thought but only practice non-attachment, he /she is actually teaching both non-attachment and not-thinking.
The deepest level of attachment is the attachment of one thought to another. In practicing zazen we eventually learn to cut this attachment but this doesn't mean that all thought is stopped. If all thought is stopped there is no insight. Zen insight, the insight into non-duality, resides at the boundary between thinking and not-thinking. to reside in a state of non-attachment in zazen is to have a very quiet but not absolutely quiet mind. Thoughts will arise as the situation demands but then are quickly dropped when not needed. If you are practicing koan Zen then this is the place where koans are answered.
Now I am going to backtrack a bit. Though we might read in the Zen Literature arguments against the complete stopping of thought, where even consciousness and awareness is stopped, we can also find arguments for this death like state of mind in the Zen literature. Zen Training by Sekida or the Awakening of Faith Sastra by Asvaghosa in classic Buddhist literature are examples. I am going to say from my experience that this complete stopping of thought is valuable not so much in itself but because it often precedes that other quiet and awake state of mind. Also it has something very valuable to teach, that everything that we attach to in our internal world as part of our individuality can be turned off through the practice of meditation. This is experientially irrefutable evidence of our own individual "emptiness." There is a name for this experience, the Great Death, which must include both parts, the complete stopping of all thought followed by insight into our "emptiness." But then the Great Death is followed be a great rebirth or what is more commonly called The Great Awakening. This is to see the world without duality, this is to be serene in the Oneness of things.
This stanza is not an argument against not-thinking, it is an argument against the straight forward approach of trying to use will power to turn off thought. Nor can we think our thoughts away. These efforts will only produce more thoughts. This is attaching to an idea of not thinking and attachment creates thought. The proper way to approach this issue the Buddha termed The Middle Way because the path he advocated was to follow a middle path between attachment to fixed ideas. This means that in our practice we should not worry about whether our thoughts stop or not. If we diligently and properly practice then some day our thoughts will simply stop. If we notice they have stopped and think this is some sort of accomplishment then they will just start up again. So again we work our way back to this place of not-thinking and do this again and again until there is nothing special about not-thinking.
Now on to the next Stanza.
Those who do not live in the single Way
fail in both activity and passivity,
assertion and denial.
To deny the reality of things
is to miss their reality;
To assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality.
There is a strain of thinking that Buddhists are prone to. It goes something like this. This whole world, everything that is seemingly out there is actually a product of our own minds. For many this is an attractive idea because the corollary idea is that we can control our own version of reality through our thoughts. This is a type of magical thinking. Buddhists are prone to this type of thinking for many reasons, one of which is a school of Buddhist thought that is called Yogacara which states an idea that everything is "mind". There is also a long history of Buddhist thought that talks about how each of us are filled with delusions and illusions which are a product of our thought. Taking this a step further some of us say that everything is a product of our minds
In some sense the reality we live in is a construct of our minds. We live in a human world. A world of humans and human relationships and things that we find important. Our constantly busy minds gives each of us a unique world view which in a sense is our own unique world. The question is, is there an underlying reality from which our each own unique world derives? If we are physicists then of course we say yes, this is the world that physics is trying to describe. But a person who believes that everything is a product of our own mind will say that even the world of physics is a product of our own mind. As Zen Buddhist's this issue is not one for philosophical debate but we hope can be answered through our practice of meditation. Fortunately it can be answered through experience if one takes the practice of meditation deep enough. Simply stop thinking. In the fully awake state of not-thinking the world does't disappear. Our experience has a very different quality, a sort of quality-less quality without any added thoughts our emotions. We have given this a name " suchness." Suchness is pure experience without interpretation. This is still not the underlying reality of the physicist. Suchness is still a construct, it is just not a construct of our thoughts, it is a construct of our body and brains. It is a construct of our physiology. Even so this answers our question. Yes there is an underlying reality that is not a product of thought. It also answers some other questions such as the nature of our delusions and illusions and as well as the very important question (to us Buddhists) of birth and death. It in fact answers all the questions that the practice of meditation can answer but only if we are willing to think about the experience. There is a quote from Dogen which goes like this. "There are those who pile delusion within delusion and those who have insight after insight" ( translation from the Genjo Koan)
To assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality.
Many Zen practitioners get attached to an idea of emptiness or even the experience of emptiness. Emptiness is an important insight and experience for a Zen practitioner but as Seng Tsan makes clear it is not a stopping point. Humans are not one sided creatures. Though we practice meditation to learn to quiet our minds and maybe eventually stop thinking, thinking and understanding is not our enemy. There is a phrase for a person attached to emptiness. It is "being in the fox's cave." Zen is not about just sitting in emptiness, it is also about rebirth into non-duality.