26

SALT AND SHEEP

TO BE AWARE is to be constantly in the present moment, fully relaxed. In Chan meditation, you try and try and try. You know you fail; you try again. You know you are trying, and then you relax and come back into the present moment.

You can get a taste of this kind of awareness by sitting comfortably wherever you are and becoming aware of your body, of your heartbeat, and the movement of your chest and abdomen as you breathe. Let your breath fall into its natural rhythm. Relax into its rising and falling.

With practice, you will find that you can actually touch your breath. Not put your hand on it but become aware of it. And with awareness of the breath comes a deeper relaxation. You feel the natural rhythm of the breath.

Some people learning meditation hear the word “concentration,” and they take it to mean to concentrate or to focus. As a result, they force themselves to concentrate! This creates pressure. The body and mind are tight. Energy is being expended, gobbled up, and this creates a kind of nervous exhaustion.

In Chan, concentration refers to a quality of mind. It is not attained by force or an assertion of will. Rather, it refers to our density of mind.

What do I mean by “density”? Think of it as being more or less diluted. For example, think of a handful of salt dissolved in water. How can we obtain the salt? One way is to put a small fire under the water and slowly boil it off. As the water evaporates, the salt solution becomes more and more concentrated. This too happens with density of mind. Concentration, in this case, is not a verb. It is not an action. It refers to a quality. It is the salt.

This is how the mind progresses: It’s initially scattered, mixed up, all over the place. We filter; we refine; we concentrate. Our awareness also thickens like this. It becomes concentrated. The wandering and scattered thoughts are the water evaporating. We just let them go.

 

IN CHAN, WE work with the mind from two aspects: the scope of the mind and the activity of the mind.

We round up the mind like a sheepdog herding sheep.

In the morning, the sheep are all over the place, eating grass here and there. The shepherd lets out the sheepdog, a clever, skillful creature. The dog dashes around, making circles that are smaller and smaller to gather the sheep.

The mind is like the sheep—all over the place, scattered over a large area. Coming back into the present moment brings our minds back to a smaller area, which is the body. This is what I mean when I talk about the scope of the mind.

Likewise, activity of mind is a gathering process. Chan sees the untrained mind as haphazardly moving. By coming back to the present moment, by coming back to our bodies and breath, we train the mind to move in a regular pattern in a small area until we are able to slow it down and eventually bring it to a single point. Our awareness is in that single point: it is very concentrated, very dense. When this happens, a natural rhythm emerges that is no longer self-imposed. It is not self-created. It exists prior to the self.

When you are bringing your awareness back to the present moment, back to the body and breath, you are still working. You are still self-generating and self-creating. There is effort involved and pressure. This kind of relaxation is not very relaxed. There is intention. You are looking for the breath instead of finding the breath and letting it come to you.

You will discover that if you keep coming back to the present moment, if you keep coming back to the breath, you will train the sheep. As soon as they see the dog, they come together all on their own and gather themselves into an obedient little group.

We have evaporated the water. The salt is in hand. The sheep are nicely arranged. In this state, awareness is what we are. Still, in Chan we go one step further. After we concentrate and become awareness, we ask: Where does this awareness come from? What’s behind the veil?