“Body like mountain, breath like wind, mind like sky.” —Tibetan saying
Imagine if the sky held onto everything that floated through its vastness: clouds, thunder, lightning, planes, birds, etc. It’d be so cluttered that its boundless blueness would be obscured. The sky itself, like all non-sentient objects and sentient beings, is conditioned—meaning that it’s impermanent, subject to decay, and insubstantial (exists dependent on other phenomena).
This metaphor of the “mind like sky” is a poetic, helpful reminder that when the thinking mind declutters itself during meditation, we begin to feel our profound inter-being with vast, spacious awareness: that which is unobstructed by phenomena. In Zen speak, we sometimes refer to this as Big Mind or Buddha Nature. We are never separate from Big Mind even when Small Mind is busy cogitating and cognizing.
We often don’t notice that Small Mind is busy until we still the body in meditation, whether that’s sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. Sometimes people new to zazen say, “I can’t meditate because my mind is constantly thinking,” or “There’s so many thoughts that it’s impossible to stop them.” Sometimes the discomfort of an agitated mind is so intense that beginners give up before they experience any relief from the chattering mind. It’s unfortunate that there’s so much misinformation about meditation as a method to control the mind or to stop thinking. With such an unrealistic expectation, quitting seems like more of a relief than summoning the energy to persist.
If the goal of zazen is not to stop the mind from thinking, what is the point? There’s numerous ways to respond to this frequently asked question. The response that’s arising now is that meditation helps us observe the Small Mind, see through its layers of conceptualization, and manifest Big Mind in our everyday activities. By paying close attention to how the mind functions, we can better understand what thoughts, stories, and emotions create suffering for us and potentially for others whom we might blame for our distress. The less we suffer, the more skillful and compassionate we become.
I want to emphasize that the content of our thoughts is not the same as the process of thinking. Although noticing what thoughts are “saying” during zazen is natural, analyzing the content is not the practice of “just sitting.” When we become fascinated with thoughts during zazen, we inadvertently (or intentionally) strengthen the proclivity of Small Mind to wander away from the physicality of the present moment.
When we refrain from engaging in the why or what of thoughts, thinking mind gradually slows down in part because we’re withdrawing our energy-attention from it. When we drop our fascination with thoughts, they slowly stop proliferating. Every time we notice we’re thinking, we can gently say “thinking” to ourselves and let thoughts drift through the mind like clouds through the sky.
“Think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking? Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen.”—Eihei Dogen, “The Universal Recommendation for Zazen”
The mind functions as a “sequence of momentary mental acts, each distinct and discrete.” It is “not a lasting subject of thought, feeling and volition.”1 In other words, our “individual” mind consciousness is ever-changing, just like everything in the saha (mundane) world. It’s because of this dynamism that it’s possible in each single act of consciousness to experience an object with bare attention—just noticing and feeling it without arising associations, stories, emotions, or a contracted sense of “me.”
As Bhikkhu Bodhi states in his insightful and clarifying treatise on The Noble Eightfold Path, that the task of right (or beneficial) mindfulness is “to clear up the cognitive field. Mindfulness brings to light experience in its pure immediacy. It reveals the [sensory] object as it is before it has been plastered over with conceptual paint, overlaid with interpretations.”2 The “monkey mind” of human consciousness needs to be stabilized enough for us to feel the liberative experience of this “bare attention.”
In Zen there’s an oft-quoted saying that zazen is “good for nothing.” This admonition reminds us to investigate the self that strives to gain something and drop this mental posture because it IS one of separation. Although there is truly nothing to attain because Buddha Nature is all-pervading, I feel that this phrase can be misleading for beginners and become a fixed view that adds a layer to the “conceptual paint.”
The Buddha set out on his spiritual quest to investigate and end human suffering in the present moment. IMHE (“E”= experience), this is the “goal-less goal” of zazen: stabilizing body-mind so we can be free amid suffering. When the “conceptual paint” thins, or as Tozan Ryokai says “erroneous imaginations cease,” Big Mind realizes itself and so do we.
Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Noble Eightfold Path. Onalaska, WA, BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2011.
Ibid.
Beautifully written! Thank you!