The burden, in the old sense of the refrain, of Bodhidharma’s “Bloodstream Sermon” is “see your nature.”  As in, “To find a buddha, you have to see your nature” (11).  Much of the sermon takes up the relations among mind, buddha, nature, and body.  In the enlightened state these are all one condition: “The Buddha is your real body, your original mind.”  So this is not “the material body of four elements” (43) or the everyday mind that we are talking about.  The idea of an original mind reminds me of my reading of “The Original Face,” which asks, “What was your original face before your mother and father were born?”  It is related to the Taoist idea of the “uncarved block,” the mind before it is inscribed—from one’s first breath—with the wants and whims of the world.

Today I meditated with some sense of trying to “see my nature.”  The text guided me to a better meditation than I’ve had recently (oddly, since the trials of the last year have eased, my meditations have struck me as less gainful).  Of course this meant my usual effort, and occasionally my usual gift, of being able to find emptiness and silence, and to experience those as a space more than a condition, a space into which aimless thoughts and anxieties do not enter.  At other times, of course, the straying importuning thoughts came and went.  Do they ever cease, or is each moment of sitting a new effort beginning from scratch?  In any case, it suddenly seemed clear to me: the interruptive thoughts are my nature, or a part of it.  Distraction is my nature.  The flow and recoil of thoughts, and the intermittent moments of peaceful rest—perhaps that is my real nature?  That sounds defeatist, but is it?

For there are certainly moments in Bodhidharma that insist that Buddha is nothing other than one’s self precisely as it is at this moment.*  I must meditate on its full, capacious, perplexing range of experience.  There is nothing to change, though there is so much to see.  Otherwise I meditate while deep in a duality between original mind and everyday mind, and to that extent at least I stay in a condition of struggle, choice, and hierarchy.  This is why so many meditation instructions I’ve read tell one not to resist or to remark the random thoughts with any particular concern; let them meander, and eventually they will settle, like children who have exhausted themselves in disobedience.

“See your nature.”  It is such a simple injunction.  It seems a sound basis for further meditation.  Like the lotus position, it is there to provide solidity and stability while the mind frees itself.

(Translations of Bodhidharma by Red Pine for Weatherhill Books, copyright 1992.)

* “Our mortal nature is our buddha-nature.  Beyond this nature there’s no buddha.” (17)