Many of my recent readings converge on a single idea: that Zen study and meditation may help us by saving energy — whereas the every day ego-driven mind is continually spilling its energy and exhausting the true mind.

I’ve written before of my intuition that it is in fact the stray, compulsive thoughts of the everyday mind that are hard work; whereas the open, peaceful, empty mind one meditates towards is in fact the most restful, the most conserving of the energy of our being.  Perhaps at that time I had forgotten these readings in Zen Essence, that surely inspired my earlier post:

Buddhism is extremely easy and saves the most energy.  It’s just that you yourself waste energy and cause trouble. (Zen master Foyan, trans. Thomas Cleary, in Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 1, p. 174)

While you are paying attention, you should not make any effort to struggle with whatever is going on in your mind.  While struggling you waste energy.  As the third ancestor of Zen said, “If you try to stop movement and return to stillness, the attempt to be still will increase movement.” When you notice that you are saving energy in the midst of the mundane stress of daily affairs, this is where you gain energy, this is where you attain buddhahood, this is where you turn hell into heaven. (Zen master Dahui, in Cleary vol. 1, p. 186)

I can’t say that recent sittings have not felt like hard work.  I seem to be just now no further along in the escape from pointless, distressing thought than when I began, and so I often sit down to meditate with a sense that I must work very hard indeed to overcome them.  If I do enter a state of open-ended emptiness—and I can say that I do so in most meditations, though they are so brief, and I make no claims for their depth—it can feel like I must again work very hard not to lose it.

So of course I lose it; the thoughts return.  It feels easier somehow to give in to their various levels of torment and confusion.  But is it?  Really?  Or is it possible that the best means of gaining some light on one’s self is in fact to relax everything, every effort, every standard you think you have learned of wisdom or peace or enlightenment, to breathe deeply in a state of the utmost rest—and thus saving energy so readily wasted by the spendthrift mind? As Dahui also says,

Just make your mind free.  But don’t be too tense, and don’t be too loose—working this way will save you unlimited mental energy. (ibid.)

10 January, 2025.