Book:Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

"It is wisdom which is seeking for wisdom."

BEGINNER'S MIND 
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

RIGHT PRACTICE
Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life."

POSTURE 
"These forms are not the means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind. There is no need to obtain some special state of mind."

BREATHING 
"What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale."

CONTROL 
"To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him."

MIND WAVES 
"Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind, we do not care for any excessive joy. So we have imperturbable composure."

MIND WEEDS 
"You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in jour mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice."

THE MARROW OF ZEN 
"In the zazen posture, your mind and body have, great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable."

NO DUALISM 
"To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body. With your full mind joujorm the mudra in your hands."

BOWING 
"Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow, even in jour last moment. Even though it is impossible to get rid of our self-centered desires, we have to do it. Our true nature wants us to."

NOTHING SPECIAL 
"If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special."

RIGHT ATTITUDE
"The point we emphasize is strong confidence in our original nature."

SINGLE-MINDED WAY 
"Even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only one way."

REPETITION 
"If you lose the spirit of repetition, jour practice will become quite difficult."

ZEN AND EXCITEMENT 
"Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine."

RIGHT EFFORT 
"If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra."

NO TRACE 
"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."

GOD GIVING 
"'To give is non-attachment,' that is; just not to attach to anything is to give."

MISTAKES IN PRACTICE 
"It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should he grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice."

LIMITING YOUR ACTIVITY 
"Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always towards ourselves."

STUDY YOURSELF 
"To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism."

TO POLISH A TILE 
"When you become you, Zen becomes Zen. When you are you, you see things as they are, and you become one with your surroundings."

CONSTANCY 
"People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy."

COMMUNICATION 
"Without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, to express yourself as you are is the most important thing."

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE 
"Big mind is something to express, not something to figure out. Big mind is something you have, not something to seek for."

NIRVANA, THE WATERFALL 
"Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, nor actual difficulty in our life."

RIGHT UNDERSTANDING
"Our understanding of Buddhism is not just an intellectual understanding. True understanding is actual practice itself."

TRADITIONAL ZEN SPIRIT 
"If you are trying to attain enlightenment, you are creating and being driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion."

TRANSIENCY 
"We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence."

THE QUALITY OF BEING 
"When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity."

NATURALNESS 
"Moment after moment, everyone comes out from nothingness. This is the true joy of life."

EMPTINESS 
"When you study Buddhism you should have a general house cleaning of your mind."

READINESS, MINDFULNESS 
"It is the readiness of the mind that is wisdom."

BELIEVING IN NOTHING 
"In our everyday life our thinking is ninety-nine percent self-centered. 'Why do I have suffering? Why do I have trouble?'

ATTACHMENT, NON-ATTACHMENT 
"That we are attached to some beauty is also Buddha's activity."

CALMNESS
"For Zen students a weed is a treasure."

EXPERIENCE, NOT PHILOSOPHY
"There is something blasphemous in talking about how Buddhism is perfect as a philosophy or teaching without knowing what it actually is."

ORIGINAL BUDDHISM 
"Actually, we are not the Soto school at all. We are just Buddhists. We are not even Zen Buddhists. If we understand this point, we are truly Buddhists."

BEYOND CONSCIOUSNESS 
"To realize pure mind in your delusion is practice, If you try to expel the delusion it will only persist the more. Just say, 'Oh, this is just delusion,' and do not be bothered by it."

BUDDHA'S ENLIGHTENMENT 
"If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall."

Are you the image you project and relate to each other?

STANDING IN YOUR OWN AUTHORITY

Nobody told us that what we are is a point of awareness, or pure spirit. This isn’t something we’re taught. Rather, what we were taught was to identify with our name. We were taught to identify with our birth date. We were taught to identify with the next thought that we have. We were taught to identify with all the memories our mind collects about the past. But all that was just teaching; all that was just more thinking. When you stand in your own authority, based in your own direct experience, you meet that ultimate mystery that you are. Even though it may be at first unsettling to look into your own no-thingness, you do it anyway. Why? Because you no longer want to suffer. Because you’re willing to be disturbed. You’re willing to be amazed. You’re willing to be surprised. You’re willing to realize that maybe everything you’ve ever thought about yourself really isn’t true.

When you’re open to all that, then and only then can you stand in your own authority, on your own two feet. Only then can you really look for yourself underneath the mind and into the space between the next thoughts, to see clearly that what we are exists before we think about it. What you are exists before you name it. What you are exists before you even call it “male” or “female.” What you are exists before we say “good” or “bad,” “worthy” or “unworthy.” What you are is more fundamental than what you say you are. What you really are is quite a surprise when you see it for the first time, when you feel it. You can start to feel your own transparency. You begin to recognize that it’s possible that you really aren’t a “someone” after all, even though the thoughts of a “someone” arise, even though in your life you often act as if you’re someone. It’s the way you get along in life. You respond to your name, you go to work, you do your job, you call yourself a husband or a wife or a sister or a brother. All of these are names we give to each other. All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they’re true. As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.

IMAGINING OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Let’s look at how we form an image of ourselves out of nothing, because that’s actually what we’re doing. Out of this vast inner space of quiet and awareness, we form an image of ourselves, an idea of ourselves, a collection of thoughts about ourselves—this is something that we’re taught to do when we’re very young. We’re given a name, we’re given a gender. We acquire experience as we go through life, as we go through the ups and downs of what it is to be a human being; with each event that happens, the ideas we have about ourselves change. Bit by bit, we accumulate ideas of who we imagine ourselves to be. In a rather short time, by the time we’re five or six years old, we have the rudimentary building blocks of a self-image. Image is something that, in our culture, we value very highly. We pamper our image, we clothe our image, we try to imagine ourselves to be more or better or sometimes even less than we really are. In short, we live in a culture in which the image we project to ourselves and to others is held as a very high value.

I remember when I was studying psychology in college and one of the topics was the importance of a good, healthy self-image. I was fascinated by the subject, and one day it occurred to me: “Image? Good image, bad image, it’s just an image!” I realized that what we were being taught was to go from having a negative image of ourselves to a good image of ourselves. Of course, if we’re going to stay in the realm of images, of believing that we’re an idea or an image, then it’s better to have a good image of ourselves than it is to have a negative image of ourselves. But if we’re beginning to look at the core and the root of suffering, we start to see that an image is just that: It’s an image. It’s an idea. A set of thoughts. It’s literally a product of imagination. It’s who we imagine ourselves to be. We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.

So in effect, we are all walking around presenting an image to each other, and we’re relating to each other as images. Whoever we think somebody else is, it’s just an image we have in our mind. When we relate to each other from the standpoint of image, we’re not relating to who each other is, we’re just relating to our imagination of who each other is. Then we wonder why we don’t relate so well, why we get into arguments, and why we misunderstand each other so deeply.

Everybody knows how painful it is and how much suffering it causes to walk around with a bad self-image. Almost all of us, either consciously or unconsciously, are in some process of trying to feel better about ourselves. It’s very common that once you get through the façade of most human beings, what you find at the core is a feeling that the image they have of themselves is insufficient and not good enough. It’s an image that seems in some way wounded—and it can never quite capture the essence of that person.

But there’s something deeper going on here; there’s a possibility of looking at image in a whole new way, from an entirely different vantage point. Allow yourself to see that your self-image is just an image—not reality, not the truth, not who we really are. We can think we’re pretty good, or we can think we’re really not so worthy, but either way, both of those conclusions are based on an image we have in our minds, which is something that we’ve inherited and created based on influences from our society, our culture, our friends, our parents, anyone with whom we’ve ever engaged. As we grow up, we gain the ability to re-create this self-image, but when we’re young, society, parents, and culture condition us with an image of ourselves. When we transition out of childhood, we try to change our image—because we decide it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t feel quite right. It is like an old piece of clothing that we don’t want to wear anymore. So we try something else on; we create new images, new illusions of who we imagine ourselves to be. But whatever this image is, when we look deep down in the core of all images, there is this feeling that we’re faking it, this sense that we hope we don’t get caught, because we’re not really being who we are, that we really don’t know who we are.

When I was quite young and I looked out at the world around me, I remember thinking, “Hey, everybody else seems to know who they are.” Whether it was my friends or my parents, whether it was people whom I met as I went through life, I had this feeling that everybody seemed to know who they were, and they seemed to know what they were doing, with a fair amount of certainty. But as for myself, I felt like I was faking it. What I didn’t realize was that everybody else was faking it, too! It looked like almost nobody else was faking it but me. But really, when I began to talk to more people about it, when I began to listen to what people said and how they said it, I began to realize that more people were faking being themselves than I had ever imagined.

THE DISCOVERY OF NO-IMAGE

If we’re living from the standpoint of a self-image of who we think we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, this also creates an emotional environment. For example, if we think we’re good and worthy, we’ll create good and worthy emotions. But if we think we’re unworthy, then we’ll create negative emotions. So we can have a good or bad self-image, a self-image that feels emotionally either better or worse, but no matter what it is, if we look deeply at the core of all our images, there is this feeling of not being authentic, not being real. There’s a reason for this. It’s because as long as we’re taking ourselves to be an image in our minds, we can’t ever feel completely sufficient. We can’t feel completely worthy. Even if the image is positive, we don’t feel completely enlivened.

If we’re willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that’s really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don’t insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it’s just an image, it’s just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They’ll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we’re not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.

What is the experience of feeling and knowing yourself as no image, no idea, no notion at all? At first, it might be disorienting or confusing. Your mind might think, “But there’s got to be an image! I have to have a mask to wear. I’ve got to present myself as somebody or something, or in some particular way.” But of course, that’s just the mind, that’s just conditioned thinking. It’s really just the incarnation of fear, because there is a fear of knowing what we really are. Because when we look into what we really are—underneath our ideas, underneath our images—there’s nothing. There’s no image at all.

There’s a Zen koan—a riddle that you can’t answer with your mind, but that you can only answer through looking directly for yourself—that says, “What was your true face before your parents were born?” So of course, if your parents weren’t born yet, then you weren’t born yet, and if you weren’t born, then you didn’t have a body, you didn’t have a mind. So if you weren’t born, you couldn’t conceive of an image for yourself. It’s a way, in a riddle, of asking: What are you, really, when you look beyond all images and all ideas about yourself, when you look absolutely directly, right here and right now, when you stand completely within yourself and look underneath the mind, underneath the ideas, underneath the images? Are you willing to enter that space, the place that casts no image, no idea? Are you really willing and ready to be that free and that open?

Technique:What or Who am I?

Before we actually find out what we are, we must first find out what we are not. Otherwise our assumptions will continue to contaminate the whole investigation. We could call this the way of subtraction. In the Christian tradition, they call this the Via Negativa, the negative path. In the Hindu tradition of Vedanta, they call this Neti-neti, which means “not this, not that.” These are all paths of subtraction, ways of finding out what we are by finding out what we are not.

We start by looking at the assumptions we have about who we are. We all have many, many assumptions that we don’t even realize we have. And so we start to look at the simplest things about ourselves. For example, we look at our minds and we notice that there are thoughts. Clearly there is something or someone that is noticing the thoughts. You may not know what it is, but you know it’s there. Thoughts come and go, but that which is witnessing the thoughts remains.

If thoughts come and go, then they aren’t really what you are. Starting to realize that you are not your thoughts is very significant, since most people assume they are what they think. They believe they are their thoughts. Yet a simple look into your own experience reveals that you are the witness of your thoughts. Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren’t who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.

In the same way, there are feelings. We all have emotional feelings: happiness, sadness, anxiety, joy, peace. We have feelings in the body, be they feelings of energy—a contraction here, an openness there—or just an itch on your toe. There are various feelings, and then there is the witness of those feelings. Something is witnessing or taking note of every feeling you have. So you have feelings, and you have the awareness of feelings. Feelings come and go, but the awareness of feelings remains. And although we need not deny any feeling we experience, it is important to notice that our deepest and truest identity is not a feeling. It cannot be, because there is something more primary before feelings arise: awareness of feelings.

The same is true for beliefs. We have many beliefs, and we have the awareness of those beliefs. They may be spiritual beliefs, beliefs about your neighbor, beliefs about your parents, beliefs about yourself (which are usually the most damaging), beliefs about a whole variety of things. Beliefs are thoughts that we assume to be true. We can all see that our beliefs have changed as we’ve grown, as we move through a lifetime. Beliefs come and go, but the awareness of beliefs stands before the beliefs; it is more primary. It is easy to see, then, that we cannot be our beliefs. Beliefs are something we witness, something we watch, something we notice. But beliefs do not tell us who the watcher is; they do not tell us who the noticer is. The watcher or the noticer, the witness, stands before the beliefs.

The same thing goes for our ego-personality. Everybody has an ego, and everybody has a personality. We tend to think that we are our egos, that we are our personalities. And yet, just as with thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, we can come to see that there is a witness to our ego-personality. There’s an ego-personality called “you” and then there is a watching of the ego-personality, an awareness of the ego-personality. The awareness of the ego-personality stands before the personality; it is noticing it, without judging, without condemning.

Here we’ve started to move into something more intimate. Most people believe they are their egos and their personalities. But a simple willingness to look into your experience reveals that there is personality, and then there is the witness of personality. Therefore your essential, deepest nature cannot be your personality. Your ego-personality is being watched by something more primary; it is being witnessed by awareness.

With that, we arrive at awareness itself. We notice that there is awareness. Everybody has awareness. If you are reading these words right now, it is awareness that is actually taking this in. You are aware of what you think. You are aware of how you feel. So awareness is clearly present. It is not something that needs to be cultivated. Awareness is not something that needs to be manufactured. Awareness simply is. It is that which makes it possible to know, to experience what is happening.

Who Is Aware?

Generally we think, unconsciously, that “I am aware,” that I am the one that is awareness, that awareness is something that belongs to me. We presume there is some entity called “me” who is aware. Yet when we start to investigate this meditatively, quietly, simply, we start to see that while there is awareness, we can’t actually find the “I” or the “me” who is aware. We start to see that this is an assumption that the mind has been taught to make, that “I” am the one who is aware. When you turn inside and look for who’s aware, what is aware, you can’t find an “it.” There’s just more awareness. There isn’t a “me” or an “I” who is aware.

In this way we are still subtracting our identity through this deep investigation. Through looking at what we are not, we are actually pulling our identity out of thought, feeling, persona, ego, body, mind. We are pulling our identity back out of the exterior elements of our experience into its essential nature. No sooner do we get back to awareness itself than we encounter the primary assumption that “I am the one who is aware.” So we investigate that assumption. As we investigate it, through our experience, we discover time and time again that we cannot find out who it is that is aware. Where is this “I” that is aware? It is at this precise moment—the moment when we realize that we cannot find an entity called “me” who owns or possesses awareness—that it starts to dawn on us that maybe we ourselves are awareness itself. Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.

Now for some people—for most people—this will sound radical. This is because we are so used to identifying ourselves with our thoughts, with our feelings, with our beliefs, with our egos, with our bodies, and with our minds. We are actually taught to identify with these things. Yet through our investigation we start to see that something stands before thought, before personality, before beliefs—something that we are calling awareness itself. It can flash upon us through this investigation that we are awareness itself.

This does not mean that there are not thoughts. It doesn’t mean that there’s not a body. We’re not in denial of ego or personality or belief or anything else. This is not a denial of all these exterior elements of our human self. We’re simply discovering our essential nature. Bodies and minds and beliefs and feelings are like clothing that awareness puts on, and we are finding out what is underneath this clothing. It can be quite transformative to realize that you are not what you thought you were, that you are not your beliefs, that you are not your personality, that you are not your ego. You are something other than that, something that resides on the inside, at the innermost core of your being. For the moment we are calling that something “awareness” itself. The radical nature of this insight is not that awareness is something you possess, or that you need discipline or need to learn how to do. Awareness is actually what you are; it’s the essence of your being. And not only is awareness what you are, it is also what everyone else is, too.

That’s why we call this a transcendent recognition, a transcendent revelation. It’s actually our identity waking up from the prison of separation to its true state.

No matter how old or young you are, notice that throughout your life things have changed: your body has changed, your mind has changed, your ego has changed, your beliefs have changed, your personality has changed. All of it has been in a state of flux over many years. But all along, from the time you attained language, you always referred back to yourself as “I”: “I am this. I think that. I believe this. I believe that. I want this. I want that.” While everything else has changed and continues to change, the “I” that you refer to has always been there. When you say “I,” it is the same “I” now as when you were a little child. The exteriors have changed. The thoughts have changed. The body has changed. The feelings have changed. But the “I” has not. On the level of intuition, there is a knowing that remains the same as it ever was, and you refer to it every time you say “I.” Without you even recognizing it, that’s the part of you that’s divine. That’s the sacred part. That’s your essential nature. But that “I” has no form and no shape. It is of the nature of awareness and spirit. And so anybody can notice for themselves and within themselves that this sense of “I” has been there all along.

The great twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi had a saying, “Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.” Meditative self-inquiry is a way of finding out what remains, what has always been.

Technique:Fire of Truth

When you listen deeply, feel intimately, and allow yourself to experience this moment exactly as it is, the emotional and energetic bodies soften. Take a few minutes now to just listen to and become aware of your surroundings. As you let the sounds become known, also become aware of the scent and the feel of the space around you in and outside of the room so that your feeling sense isn't confined to your skin and bones. Give yourself an opportunity to be open to the environment of sound and a sense of the space outside your body.

Notice that the more you relax, these sounds and experiences penetrate you and flow into you without defense. You will feel yourself softening and opening. Invite yourself into this openness. You may find that the sense of a barrier between the outside world and what's happening inside your skin becomes very transparent, or you may feel as if you can't find the boundary between inside and outside. Experiences of outside noise and what is happening in your body become of the same quality. A feeling in your body isn't really different than the sound of a car driving by or a bird in the trees. A feeling in your body is not really any more yours than the feeling of the space in the room where you sit. Notice that if you begin to take ownership of any experience, this starts to divide the world into inner and outer, mine and theirs, an outside sound and me. But essentially it's all just experience, inside or outside, the same. Not mine and not other than mine.

The presence of stillness opens the body and soaks into you like a sponge, if you allow it. A silent understanding happens that is not in words but is the direct experience of what is. Allow yourself the great gift of not looking for some alternate experience. Without thinking about it, without the movement of a single thought, what is it that experiences this? What is it that experiences?

Recognize that there is nothing that experiences this moment, but even that nothing is known and experienced. There is something mysterious that knows, something mysterious that experiences in this moment, but you can't say what it is because, when you say what it is, it's not that. It's closer, more immediate. As soon as you think about it, you see it's not that thought. It's before the thought. No description is necessary, so just rest on the edge, on the precipice, on the direct experience, directly feeling as though you do not exist and yet knowing that you do.

One thought about this mystery sets apart heaven and hell. Thought rips the unity into pieces to be analyzed by the mind. But silence unifies. The experience of this moment is present but ungraspable, known but not definable. This that is awake cannot be caught. You can sacrifice that vain attempt to define and grasp it, and instead just let it go. Maybe you are not you after all. Maybe you are this that is awake inside of this very moment of experience. Find a willingness to be it, rather than know it. As the body opens, sounds still flow through silence. What in you knows itself as silence? This is undefinable. If you lose your way, listen again to the sounds. They will point back to the silence, which will point back to that which knows both silence and sound. Don't get lost in thought or you miss your life. Just simply relax, and relax, and relax. It's the simplest act of faith and trust.

This awakeness that is awake within you knows itself. The mind does not know it, the body does not know it, and emotions do not know it. This awakeness only knows itself as itself. This truth is simple, beyond all comprehension. It is immediate, before all seeking. It is ever present, displaying itself as every single facet of this experience right now.