Case 41 Bodhidharma's Mind-Pacifying
Bodhidharma sat facing the wall.
The Second Patriarch stood in the snow.
He cut off his arm and presented it to Bodhidharma, crying, "My mind has no peace as yet! I beg you, master, please pacify my mind!"
"Bring your mind here and I will pacify it for you," replied Bodhidharma.
"I have searched for my mind, and I cannot find it," said the Second Patriarch.
"Now your mind is pacified," said Bodhidharma.
Mumon's Comment
The broken-toothed old Hindu came so importantly, thousands of miles over the sea.
This was raising waves where there was no wind.
In his last years he induced enlightenment in his disciple, who, to make matters worse, was defective in the six roots.
Why, Shasanro did not know for ideographs.
Mumon's Verse
Coming east, directly pointing,
You entrusted the Dharma, and trouble arose;
The clamor of the monasteries
Is all because of you.
This is a classic Zen story about the Enlightenment of Huike the second Zen Patriarch. It is told in reduced form in this koan because it is expected that every Zen student already knows the story. Here is the story in a little more detail.
Bodhidharma comes from India about 550CE. At that time in China Buddhism existed as a religion but only through translations of Sutras. Consequently it was more a religion of doctrine, philosophy and study then the practice of meditation. Bodhidharma was the first lineage Buddhist teacher to come from India and the Buddhism he brought emphasized meditation practice and having that same enlightenment experience as the Buddha had. Bodhidharma set himself up in a cave on a mountain in Northern China and had very few students, one of them was Huike.
The story is that Huike was already a monk and had an earnest desire for enlightenment. He seems to have been deeply suffering if he was willing to cut off his arm to get Bodhidarma's attention. I am not sure this part of the story is actually true but it does point to the commitment one must have if one is to follow this practice all the way to enlightenment. Once he has Bodhidharma's attention he asks. "Please pacify my mind."
Bodhidharma responds, "Bring your mind here and I will pacify it for you."
Huike responds, "I have searched for my mind, and I cannot find it."
This is interesting because Huike would not have responded this way unless he had been practicing meditation for many years. I don't think Huike gave this response immediately but rather this is like being given a koan. It can take years to properly respond. Huike was probably sent off to meditate after being asked the question. When he fimally gives this response that he cannot find his mind it is because he has pealed away all the layers of his thought and there is just quiet, there is nothing there. But still this experience has not quite sunk in. It takes Bodhidharma to point out that this finding nothing is just the point, and then Huike has that deep experience of insight that transforms everything.
The enlightenment experience has two sides. One side of the experience is samadhi, the other side is insight that results from samadhi. One cannot happen without the other. Huineng the 6th Patriarch refused to separate the two but the fact is that samadhi usually precedes insight. There are many different types of samadhi. Normally samadhi is defined as meditative absorption but actually samadhi is a normal state of mind that we commonly experience playing music or sports or doing art or anything that naturally absorbs us, our random thoughts quiet, and we are fully concentrated on the subject at hand. "Fully engaged mind and body" this is how Dogen Zenji described samadhi and this is the practice of Zen whether on the cushion or off. Samadhi on the cushion can also take a variety of forms. We can become absorbed in the breath or listening or posture, etc, any one of the many objects of meditative concentration. And then there is the samadhi where the mind is just plain quiet without any particular object of meditative concentration. We are not in true samadhi until all random thought stops and the mind is fully quiet and this is much more difficult then one of the many forms of natural active samadhi. Put me in skis going down a mountain at 30mi/hr and I will instantly be in samadhi and it has been that way since I was a teen. But it took me 7-8 years of daily meditation practice and several sesshins before I first experienced samadhi on the cushion. Samadhi on the cushion is different. It is different because because the mind is not so deeply engaged that there is not room for insight. Koans are meant to pull us out of samadhi for just a moment to spark insight. And what is that most important insight?
"I have searched for my mind, and I cannot find it," said the Second Patriarch.
"Now your mind is pacified," said Bodhidharma.
The insight is simple, when we quiet our mind we discover that there is nothing there. The Buddha said that we have no Atman (soul). In the Mahayana we use the term emptiness to describe the insight or we might just say there is no self. But this simple insight changes everything. Before our whole way of thinking was built on the idea of an individual self. Now our whole way of thinking is going to build on the insight that there is no individual self.
A note: I changed the translation that I pulled off the internet from,
"I have searched for my mind and I cannot take hold of it", to
"I have searched for my mind and I cannot find it." The reason I made the change is not only that other translations correspond to my change, which they do, but that the original translation does not properly give the insight. The first translation is the insight of a beginning meditator. For the beginning meditator it is quickly obvious that the stream of thought which passes through consciousness, and we might think of as our mind, cannot be grasped. Some might also say that our awareness/consciousness is our mind and it cannot also be grasped. This seems a deeper insight but it is not enough. To experience that it all disappears in truly deep meditation is the basis for insight that this koan is trying to express. As I always do in this blog I am trying to push the reader to work hard and deepen your meditation.
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