After a long hiatus in which meditation has seemed so slight and evasive a response to the tragedy of world governance unfolding around us, a few ideas have begun to cluster productively once more, after new reading and re-reading.  One portion of that re-reading is the writing of Yung-Ming Yen-Shou (905-976) on “The Cooperation of Concentration and Insight”.*  On one level, these two terms are analogous to the simpler pairing of “stopping and seeing” during zazen: “A brief time of silence, a moment of stillness, gradually build up into correct concentration” (376).  Insight is also called, at least in Cleary’s translation, wisdom, and sometimes knowledge; these seem to be the possible fruits of sustained, concentrated meditation.  And although I had read this document years ago, this time it struck me with great force, for I have failed as yet to allow a purposeful concentration into my meditation practice.  It struck me, I think, as too wilful, too deliberate an effort.

The kind of emptiness I sought, and sometimes experienced, was in essence passive.  If I could release the habit of thought and at least briefly surrender attachments, I might enter a mental space of silence and absence.  If I entered it truly, I need do nothing at all, and if it dissipated into thought there was nothing I could do.  The question of the value of such experiences has haunted me, however, and many are the Buddhist writings which condemn those neophytes who dwell in a kind of void in which no true surrender of the object world, or engagement with others in acts of compassion, is possible.  To put it in these new terms, I might find a space of peace and quiet, but I could gain no new insight there.  I had stopped without seeing.

But if the energy of concentration is permissible in meditation, is indeed fundamental, then I suddenly understand the kind of work I may do to make an experience of silence and emptiness meaningful.  Rather than watch helplessly as the stray thoughts arrive to sting my peace and poison it from within, I am invited to concentrate my powers of attention and understanding on that emptiness, to make it rich, alert, active, and free.  When I concentrate well, the thoughts cannot arise; when they arise, I have not concentrated well.

This effort, this mode of meditation practice, is new to me, and I am not yet aware of any insights arising from a more concentrated silence.  Yen-Shou however “recommend[s] equal cultivation of concentration and insight, not one-sided practice.  They are originally one entity, not two things” (377).  Though earlier I spoke of insight as a fruit of concentration, they are simultaneously branch and fruit together.  Perhaps as I concentrate with this natural image in mind, I will find myself cultivating insight as well.  Deliberate cultivation, it seems, is acceptable practice.

* In Thomas Cleary’s compilation of documents from “The Five Houses of Zen” in vol. 1 of Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary.

13 March, 2025.