The entries have thinned out: there has been no new quality to my meditation for many weeks, and there is no value in repeating myself. Today, though, something distinctly different from past experiences: a sense of complete relaxation no matter what the sitting mind was doing, no matter what thought-tangles arose—a sense of openness, of “suchness,” that I have rarely enjoyed. The insight has been brought about in part by my rereading of Thomas Cleary’s compilation Minding Mind in his Classics of Buddhism and Zen (vol. 1), and in particular the “Absorption in the Treasury of Light” of Zen master Ejō and the “Elementary Talk on Zen” by Man-An.
I find in both these readings a relatively rare emphasis on meditation in the open public world, no matter what one is doing, and a firm correction to those who seek. Ejō quotes Yongjia: “Eternal calm is not apart from right where you are; if you seek, I know you cannot see” (446). To different degrees the two masters stress that experiences of meditative stillness in a quiet, darkened place, in search of release from the importunate public world and from the thoughts and desires to which it gives rise, reflect the shallowest notion of Zen:
Even if you put aside pen and ink, abstain from social relations, sit alone in an empty valley, live off the fruits of the trees and clothe yourself with grasses, and sit all the time without lying down, in your mind you are trying to stop movement and return it to stillness, cut off illusion completely, dwell only on absolute truth, reject samsara and grasp nirvana, despising the one and loving the other; all of this is possessiveness. (Ejō, p. 452)
This is Man-An on the same theme:
As for people who set out to cultivate spiritual practice with aversion to the objects and desires of the senses, even if their minds and thoughts are empty and still […] still when they leave quietude and get into active situations, they are like fish out of water, like monkeys out of the trees. (pp. 459-60)
This is so close to my own experience of meditation and its effect on me beyond the meditation space that the lines hit home and hit hard.
But the value of such commentary has been, for me, a recognition that on some level I have never stopped hoping that meditation would calm my mind, calm my thoughts, make me stronger and easier in my dealings with the world, would offset and placate my attachments and aversions. But if “eternal calm is not apart from right where you are,” there is no need to seek it; it must encompass all the realms and experiences of life, including confusion, desire, anger, impatience, and the others and inanimate objects that trigger such emotions.
In such an understanding meditation has nothing to do, nowhere to arrive. The new possibility: simply to sit bathed in that light and eternal calm that is always all around you, waiting to be seen. It is a state of complete acceptance and openness.
And so in today’s meditation there was an almost immediate ease and peace. Thoughts that arose left me indifferent and wandered away. The sense of having nothing to seek opened my sitting to a sense of wonder at what was actually there, already there, in the state I had entered, but also beyond it in the daily world. The experience rose and fell, swelled and sagged, as I sat, but that too made no difference to me. How sublime it felt to have thoughts and to have no aversion to them.
Ejō has many powerful counters to the kind of meditator I have been. He asks, “If you think the total non-arising of thought to be right, then are wood, stones, and clods of earth right?” His image of a happier meditation expresses the kind of ease I was feeling this morning: “sit grandly under the eaves without seeking enlightenment, without trying to get rid of illusion, without aversion to the rising of thoughts, and yet without fondly continuing thoughts” (pp. 454, 455). It is an image of the effortless, a true wu-wei. After all, the light is always “right where you are,” as a physical person but also as a mind.
5 April, 2025.