The story is told that Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Chinese zen, still unknown to the world, is journeying along a road when he approaches two monks outside a monastery who are engaged in dialectical debate. Observing the monastery pennant flying in the wind, one monk argues that it is the flag that is moving. The other claims it is the wind that is moving. Hui-neng passes them and says flatly: “Mind is moving.” Upstream of the debate, upstream of the duality of wind and flag, there is “just this.” This “upstream” is not a place. It is the simple, intimate awareness that is the reality and function of mind, as Hui-neng uses the word. This mind is the sound of one hand. It is the one without a second, outrageous and without contradiction. It is the pennant flying in the wind; the tips of the maples dancing in the sky. It is moonlight falling on pines with no one to witness.
Standing here in summer, there is just this world. Just this exquisite moment. But what is it? No need to answer. Simply allow the emptiness of attention, this intimacy, to speak for itself. This surrender. The absolute fits the relative like a box and its lid. Like the air and the sunlight. Like the wind and the leaves. Like hearing and sound.
Within the listening, a listening. There is a listening within the mind’s attention to seemingly external sounds. It is the focus and coherence of the soul, attention itself, an intrinsic listening and waiting upon the implicate order of things, the abiding and unfolding essence in which all living, all sound, is rooted. It is the disappearance into the river of the Unborn. It is the audible life stream committed to its own rise and completion and return. It is the fulfillment and abundance of all beings.
It is the bodhisattva path. Where there is nothing left but that—no, when there is even a momentary surrender to that—our whole life can become the basket of loaves and fishes. “Tip the basket,” a gentle voice calls in the breeze. See that all are fed.