“Therefore you should stop the intellectual activity of pursuing words and chasing sayings, and should learn the stepping back of turning the light around and looking back. Body and mind will naturally be shed, and the original countenance will become manifest.”
–Dogen, “A Generally Recommended Mode of Sitting Meditation” 8*
I said earlier that all thought arrives in words. I admitted then, and I repeat now, that this simple insight is troubling to one who has spent his life in the business of words. But it has returned to me in a more comfortable form lately, and has helped me to a different method of meditation that, for now at least, is bearing fruit.
I’ve spoken often in this journal about the snaking, proliferating thoughts that intrude on meditation and can sometimes render an entire sitting nothing but twenty minutes of free time to fret. For me, at least, such thoughts always arrive as words. It might be a way of stating a particular emotion I’m feeling, as if some second party in my head wanted to put it to me clearly; it might be a bit of practised dialogue, with some other person I want to win over or defeat in some matter; it might be something I’ve heard, or even a brief snatch of song lyric. But it is always words. It’s hard to imagine being that is not in words—but I am eager to try.**
Lately, instead of trying to meditate in such a way that thoughts do not arise or, if they do arise, simply pass on through my consciousness without making trouble, I have instead reversed the process, and I now deliberately concentrate my mind on a state and a space that is completely non-verbal. By definition that space excludes thought, and I find I am able to rest there for some time in a silent calm. Of course words still arise and can carry troubling content. But it is somehow easier simply to maintain a non-verbal mental state than it is to maintain a “meditative” state for the whole self. It’s a form of emptiness with particular meaning for me, since my mind is so rarely silent. To what it might conduct me, this state, I don’t yet know; perhaps it is merely a superficial calm; but it is certainly a pleasure to live in that silence while sitting.
It can seem at first like hard work, this concentration on silence. But I am coming to realize slowly that in fact the truly hard work is the work of thought, of being in thought. Such energy and effort expended to cast everything of oneself into words! The work of falling silent comes to feel restful and peaceful after a while. I suspect a life in words is always a peaceless life, and that the reverse is also true.
* In Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 1, p. 414.
** Let me recommend P.K. Page’s delightful and deceptively simple poem “Stefan” as an adjunct reading at this point.
12 October, 2024.