Meditation

 MEDITATION AS AN INTENSE AND FORMALIZED cultivation of empty-mind stillness—that was dhyana’s primary contribution to Taoism, the main catalyst that transformed Taoism into Ch’an. Etymologically, dhyana means something like “to fix the mind upon”—hence, meditation as controlling the mind, fixing the mind upon emptiness and tranquility. This kind of meditation is mentioned in the seminal Taoist texts, as in Lao Tzu’s poetic descriptions: “polish the dark-enigma mirror / to a clarity beyond stain” and “inhabit the furthest peripheries of emptiness / and abide in the tranquil center.” But the ancient Taoists never developed meditation into a formalized technique, so far as we know. It was much more individualistic, and it was always part of a larger practice. And in the end, after absorbing dhyana practice, Ch’an similarly moved beyond dhyana and returned meditation to the larger practice native to its Taoist origins.

The nirvana-tranquility of dhyana’s empty-mind meditation might be seen as a stage in both personal practice and the historical development of Ch’an. Bodhidharma, for example, at the “official” beginning of Ch’an, said that through dhyana we can “see original-nature.” But dhyana was only a way to begin. Prajna-Able, the Sixth Patriarch, advised:

Don’t listen to me talk about emptiness, and then just devote yourself to emptiness. This is the most important of all things: don’t devote yourself to emptiness. If you just empty the mind and sit in serene tranquility, you’re devoting yourself to a blank and traceless emptiness.

And almost two centuries later, Purport Dark-Enigma described people practicing this form of meditation—“arresting the flow of thought, they don’t let it rise; they hate noise and seek stillness”—and then he denounced it because it violates the free movement of Tao.

Mature Ch’an goes beyond empty-mind stillness to inhabit original-nature as Tao or tzu-jan. Lao Tzu described meditation as “sitting still in Way’s company.” And Prajna-Able said “Mind all clarity absolute is the fieldland of Tao.” This seems almost the exact opposite of dhyana, for it cultivates mind moving according to its nature, spontaneously and unrestrained, rather than clutching at stillness and emptiness.

Indeed, for Sixth Patriarch Prajna-Able, meditation was about “seeing original-nature,” rather than cultivating dhyana tranquility in the search for some kind of liberation:

My wise and understanding friends, in this dharma-gate, sitting ch’an at origins has nothing to do with mind and nothing to do with purity. And I never talk about stillness. People speak of gazing at mind, but mind is at origins illusion. And since illusions are mere mirage, what is there to see? People speak of gazing at purity, but our original-nature is original source-tissue purity—even when illusory thoughts hide from us this existence-tissue all clarity absolute.³⁰

And Prajna-Able’s influential dharma-heir, Spirit-Lightning Gather, said that “no-thought is just sitting in samadhi-meditation stillness. Ch’an, on the other hand, Ch’an is all about seeing original-nature.”

We have seen how Ch’an meditation reweaves consciousness and earth/Cosmos by emptying away the structures of self, leaving empty-mind mirroring the ten thousand things, thereby replacing self-identity with identity as tzu-jan, Tao’s great transformation of things. But wu-wei as a foundational cultural assumption adds dramatic new dimensions to meditative practice—dimensions that initially seem contrary to the cultivation of empty-mind, and that led Ch’an masters like Prajna-Able to criticize meditation when practiced simply as dhyana’s cultivation of empty-mind tranquility.

As it is nothing other than Absence, generative source of both thought and the ten thousand things, empty-mind is not simply an empty space of stillness or tranquility. Hence, Ch’an meditation reveals that seeming tranquility as something much deeper: a vast dark-enigma darkness, the generative tissue that is nothing less than the tumultuous source constantly burgeoning forth into the ongoing transformations of the Cosmos. This is mind as dharma-master, as Buddha, as always already awakened.

For Ch’an, meditation’s cultivation of emptiness is only a way of clearing away the machinery of self and returning to see with clarity that source and its movements. Hence, the fundamental form of mature Ch’an meditation not as dhyana cultivation of tranquility, a polishing of the mind-mirror, but as wu-wei practice: meditation not just as tzu-jan occurrence witnessed in empty mirror-mind awareness, but as wu-wei participation in the process of tzu-jan. And awakening as the recognition of that as “original-nature.”

Rather than a struggle to empty all mental activity away, Ch’an recognizes thought as part of tzu-jan or Tao: exactly like streamwater, for instance, moving sometimes deep and still, sometimes swirling and headlong. And in a passage about meditation from the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Prajna-Able describes the cosmological dimensions of thinking as part of original-nature:

Thought thinks the original source-tissue nature of this existence-tissue all clarity absolute. This existence-tissue all clarity absolute is the potency of thought, and thought is the expression of this existence-tissue. In it’s own original-nature, this existence-tissue all clarity absolute rises into thought—and even tangled through perception like sight and hearing, it never stains the ten thousand mirrored things. So, you move always composed and free.³¹

Potency () and expression () (which we encountered briefly in the footnote on this page) are important cosmological/ontological concepts in Chinese philosophy. Potency refers to the inherent potentiality or nature of things that gives shape to their particular expression, or “instantiation/manifestation” in the world. This is, as always in Taoist/Ch’an thought, not a metaphysical dimension to things, but the nature inherent to a thing—and as such it is virtually synonymous with inner-pattern (this page) and ch’i-thought/mind (this page f.). In simple contemporary terms, Prajna-Able is saying that thought is the Cosmos thinking itself. And so, thought is itself always already awakened: there is no need for a meditative struggle to quell it.

This approach came naturally to Ch’an because, as we have seen (this page f.), thought is : hence, ch’i-thought woven wholly into the ever-generative ch’i-tissue, into a living and “intelligent” Cosmos. It may seem unlikely that our trivial and obsessive train of thought is the movement of the Cosmos/Tao, the Cosmos thinking itself: deep philosophy perhaps, but the everyday trivia? And yet, isn’t that typical of the Cosmos? It’s mostly trivial and repetitive: same galaxies, stars, and planets over and over, same seasons and grasses and insects, same days and nights and…same thoughts and feelings.

Original-nature is tzu-jan occurrence in perpetual movement. And not only the movement of thought. Empty mirror-mind perception too participates in the movement of tzu-jan: the ten thousand things of this Cosmos becoming us one after another after another, going inside us and vanishing there—that too is part of the great transformation of things. Hence: as a matter of actual experience, perception also is wu-wei action.

And so, in yet another instance of Ch’an’s insistence on dismantling itself, we find Ch’an razing the very practice that gives it its name: dhyana, empty-mind meditation. We find as well another version of the Ch’an insight that we are always already enlightened, that there is no awakening to be discovered in meditation because whatever happens in consciousness is already wu-wei, and therefore already enlightened. And that entails a profound acceptance of oneself, a potentially transformative aspect of Ch’an practice.

This represents the subjective experience of the essential identity of Absence and Presence. Presence burgeons forth from Absence and so is essentially part of Absence. Or put another way, it is Absence seen in its differentiated form. Thought (Presence) is as much Tao as no-thought (Absence), and is therefore as enlightened, which is why Ch’an masters often ridiculed meditation practiced as the mere pursuit of emptiness and stillness. This is a bedrock insight that has a long history in China, stretching back to the beginnings of Taoist thought: in Lao Tzu, for instance, who spoke of “sitting still in Way’s company.” Or Wang Pi, the seminal philosopher in Dark-Enigma Learning, which was crucial in the creation of Ch’an through the amalgamation of Buddhist and Taoist thought/practice. In his commentary to the I Ching, the earliest of Taoist texts, Wang Pi begins a passage addressing Absence and Presence with:

Return means turning back to the source-tissue, and that source-tissue is the very mind of all heaven and earth itself. Wherever activity ceases, stillness begins; but there’s no opposition between movement and stillness. Wherever words end, silence begins; but there’s no opposition between silence and words.

In speaking of “no opposition between movement and stillness,” Wang Pi is describing the unity of Absence and Presence in the empirical Cosmos; and in speaking of “no opposition between silence and words,” he is describing the unity of Absence and Presence in the realm of consciousness. Already, here in proto-Ch’an Chinese philosophy, we have a description of mature Ch’an practice. And it will be described again and again in various ways by the Ch’an masters to come. Purport Dark-Enigma, to take an example using the same terminology, said “Movement and stillness are both Absence’s own original-nature…a person of Tao who depends on nothing makes use of both movement and stillness.”

Returning to Ch’an’s Taoist roots, wu-wei as the very form of consciousness appears already in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, with its seminal description of wu-wei practice:

a sage abides in the realm of Absence’s own action [wu-wei]

living out that wordless teaching.

The ten thousand things arise without beginnings there,

abide without waiting there,

come to perfection without dwelling there.

Without dwelling there: that’s the one way

you’ll never lose it.

As is so often the case with Lao Tzu, there is no distinction here between subjective and objective realms. It sounds like he’s talking about empirical reality, but it feels like he’s talking about the realm of consciousness. Those ten thousand things could be occurrence appearing as objective facts, or as subjective facts such as thoughts and memories. So in its very form, this passage asserts a unity of subjective and objective as a single tissue of tzu-jan occurrence.

Without dwelling there: that is the crucial thing. It means accepting the movement of thought or life as part of Tao’s great transformation, rather than clinging to a permanent self, a stable and enduring center of identity that sustains itself in turn by clinging to a constellation of assumptions and ideas. Yellow-Bitterroot Mountain describes this non-dwelling in terms of mental process, where Ch’an meditation might be described as thought not anchored to self as some entity outside change: “Right now, thought following thought after thought: just don’t dwell in it.” And we have seen Chuang Tzu describing it in terms of empty mirror-mind:

Live empty, perfectly empty.

Sage masters always employ mind like a pure mirror:

welcome nothing, refuse nothing,

reflect everything, hold nothing.

Prajna-Able calls this non-dwelling the root of his “dharma-gate,” his teaching. After criticizing meditation conceived as the simple pursuit of dhyana emptiness and tranquility, he says: “A mind not dwelling anywhere in dharma’s world of things: it’s Tao flowing through freely.” And he further describes meditation as simply sitting

without motion and without stillness, without birth and without death, without leaving and without coming, without good and without bad, without dwelling and without setting out—all in the simplest stillness and quiet. That is the great Way [Tao].

And Ch’an’s sage-master wrecking-crew dismantles the Ch’an practice of wu-wei too, insisting that wu-wei is simply the structure of anyone’s everyday experience, that we are all therefore already enlightened. And simple empirical observation confirms this. If we search our actual moment-to-moment experience for that permanent self we assume directs our thoughts and actions, we find nothing. In the actual process of doing things, like washing dishes or planting a garden, we can find no self acting. It is only when we reflect on the action that we inject a self, and we do that only because of our cultural assumptions. The same is true of thinking or feeling. We assume these private mental activities to be the quintessential arena of self, but again: if we examine what is actually happening when we think, we can’t find any trace of a self. It is, again, those cultural assumptions that make us say thinking is the activity of a self.

Ch’an’s wu-wei meditation is simply a way of “seeing” that fact as our “original-nature.” It is a way of seeing that, liberated from the self anchoring us outside/against tzu-jan’s vast movement, we are always already “wandering boundless and free through the selfless unfolding of things” (as Chuang Tzu describes it on this page). Or indeed, as the boundless transformation of things. And self, when it does arise, is only part of that drift, is therefore a kind of “selfless self.” Chuang Tzu speaks of this mind wandering several times:

Let your mind wander the pure and simple…. Blend your ch’i into the boundless, follow occurrence [tzu-jan] appearing in things of itself and don’t let selfhood get in the way.³²

Just let your mind wander along in the drift of things. Trust yourself to what is beyond you—let it be the nurturing center. Then you’ve made it. In the midst of all this, is there really any response? Nothing can compare to simply living out your inevitable nature. And there’s nothing more difficult.

Ch’an meditation is not an attempt to suppress thought processes, but simply a way to reduce things stimulating thought, thereby allowing us to “see original-nature.” It reveals stillness too as part of tzu-jan occurrence. And further, it allows us to inhabit that stillness at the source of wu-wei movement, which is a remarkable and emotionally powerful ( as “heart” in addition to “mind”) kind of intimacy with the very origin of the Cosmos. In this intimacy, awakening is not empty-mind tranquility. It is instead to move freely and selflessly with change, living a simultaneity in which inner and outer move as a single tissue of thought and perception woven through empirical fact and event. And it is a simultaneity in perpetual motion and transformation that continues only imperceptibly changed after death. Hence, awakening as Chunag Tzu’s wu-wei practice of “wandering boundless and free through the selfless unfolding of things.”