The week has been chaotic, with many decisions looming and swirling (when isn’t it so?), yet I enjoyed a solid and simple meditation today; pleasing, but without undue gratification.  I later realized that this sitting coincided with my first readings of Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Wen-Tzu, one of the five major source documents of Taoism. It may be more than chance that connects these two experiences.

I had sat down with the simplest intentions and in effect without hope of outcome: that mood of “just sitting” that I have adopted in the past, with some hoped-for connection to shikan-taza.  I felt the solidity of the body in its position in my seat.  My breathing was not regulated, but it was calm and quiet.  The same was true of my mind: there was an ongoing experience of solidity where the mind has been.  There were many thoughts, coming and going, and they neither disturbed nor altered the character of solidity in which I breathed.  I might say, if it were not so conclusive sounding, that I had briefly attained that desired state in which the arising of thoughts and the essential emptiness of real mind were not in tension, not even much distinct from one another.  It might equally be said, and perhaps more accurately, that for most of my sitting there was no outer watching mind at all, thinking about the meditation experience.  The session was deeply calming, and it felt new.

The Wen-Tzu is a collection of teachings “attributed to Lao Tzu” that appears to have been compiled about a century BCE.; Cleary says that his is the first translation in a Western language, so perhaps my not having encountered Wen-Tzu before is not as embarrassing as it might appear.  Passages such as these may have prompted my day’s meditation:

“Therefore sages cultivate the basis within and do not adorn themselves outwardly with superficialities.  They activate their vital spirit and lay to rest their learned opinions.  Therefore they are open and uncontrived, yet there is nothing they do not do; they have no rule, yet there is no unruliness.” (158-9)*

“Emptiness means there is no burden within.  Evenness means the mind is untrammeled.  When habitual desires do not burden you, this is the consummation of emptiness.  When you have no likes or dislikes, this is the consummation of evenness.  When you are unified and unchanging, this is the consummation of calmness.  When you are not mixed up in things, this is the consummation of purity.  When you neither grieve nor delight, this is the consummation of virtue.” (159)*

In retrospect, such lines came to feel like descriptions, though in ideal form, of something I experienced this morning.

* The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary.  Volume One.

26 January, 2024.