We’re encouraged in so many Buddhist scriptures and readings to realize the nature of mind.  This must mean not only to seek and contemplate the original one mind, one’s Buddha-nature, but also the everyday and ordinary mind, the mind that gives rise to those “thoughts” that intrude on our meditation and drive our daily lives to distraction, suffering, confusion.

            At the same time there are many utterances, particularly in the Tao Te Ching, that describe water as the exemplary image of strength, yielding, non-attachment—an image of the movement of the Way.  See for instance chapter 8: “The highest goodness resembles water.  Water greatly benefits all things, but does not assert itself.”  Also chapter 78: “Nothing is so flexible as water, yet for attacking that which is hard nothing surpasses it. There is nothing which supplants it” (Medhurst translation).

            In today’s sitting I understood mind—one mind, empty mind—as water, shapeless, running and slipping everywhere, stopping at no obstacle but merely changing direction, flowing quietly lower, always lower, so it can empty into rivers, into the sea.  And I also understood everyday mind as all the barriers and impediments we have raised in the course of our lives to the free flow of mind-as-water.  Dams, berms, channels.  Forks we have created so that the water of mind is forcibly divided in two, in four, in eight, so that we may give a different name or character to each, and argue over them with ourselves and others.

            If the emptiness we are taught to seek is like the shapelessness, impulsiveness, spontaneity, and playfulness of water, then I too want emptiness.  And if the mind that burdens me is little more than a series of small dams I have built up to create a workable world, then I am that much more prepared to let it go, to have them wash away.

            And if the mind is water, and at death the course of my mind is absorbed into the ocean, losing all specificity but part of a new vast expanse I have never known before—then I can anticipate that moment more calmly than ever before.