Blue Cliff Record Case 80
A monk asked Joshu, “Does a newborn baby have the sixth consciousness or not?”
Joshu said, “Bouncing a ball upon swift waters.”
The monk also asked Toshi, “What does bouncing a ball upon swift waters mean?”
Toshi said, “Moment by moment, the flow never stops.”
Verse
The sixth consciousness is the void of turiya. The monk poses a question. Zen adepts knew where Joshu was coming from, bouncing a ball upon busy swift waters. Where it falls it doesn’t stop. Who can see it?
The monk’s question about the sixth consciousness might seem very abstract or philosophical, so we have to ask ourselves, what is behind the question? What motivates it? Sixth consciousness refers to that part of the mind that organizes the five senses, the five senses being the first five consciousnesses. It organizes them into my having an experience, so it’s trying to describe a level at which we presumably are going from something like pure experience, pure sensation, hearing, sight, taste, touch, smell, to the formation of a self, the addition of a conceptual organizing framework.
The monk is asking about a baby because presumably he’s asking: Is there an earlier, purer state that we start out from before thought and self and concepts start intruding and contaminating things? Does the baby represent that natural state that we’re trying to get back to? I don’t think he’s particularly interested in the experiences of babies. I think he’s asking something about the nature of practice. What kind of condition is it that we think we’re aiming for?
If I remember correctly, Joko opens Everyday Zen with a similar kind of statement, where she says something like, My dog doesn’t worry about the meaning of life. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it’s something to that effect, the idea being that the dog just lives in this state of worrying about where its next meal is coming from or whether it’s hot or cold, gets patted on the head, and some way again it stands in for the life of immediacy, uncomplicated by self-consciousness. I think this is a perennial trope in the literature of practice, where we’re drawn into imagining what would it be like if only I could be rid of X, and we fill in the blank. Very often it’s conceptual thinking, dualistic thinking. In a lot of Buddhism it’s desire or attachment. What would it be like if only I could subtract this aspect of myself?
The two teachers in this story have some sense of what he’s asking, what he’s longing for in terms of an answer. And the metaphor they use, about a ball bouncing on rapidly flowing water, if nothing else, is not a picture of simplicity or tranquility. It’s a picture of turbulence and change. It’s not a picture of a smooth surface of a pond without any ripples or disruptions just perfectly reflecting everything around it. It’s not a picture of the newborn mind as a clear mirror, simply reflecting whatever is in front of it without contamination of thought. That’s the kind of thing the monk would have preferred and he’s aiming at it in his practice.
They seem to suggest that the monk is looking for something simple and unchanging, and instead, he’s confronted with turbulence and constant change and Toshi rubs it in when he says, Thought by thought, the flow never stops. We don’t have a picture of thought-free pure sensory consciousness. Thought after thought, the flow never stops.
The other thing that is evidently missing in the monk’s fantasy about the simplicity of baby consciousness, is of course the presence of the mother. As Winnicott said, there is no such thing as a baby, meaning no such thing as a baby without a mother. Not only does the image of the bouncing ball on flowing water remind the monk of impermanence, if he bothered to put the mother in the picture someplace, it would be a reminder of interdependence.
That’s the other inconvenient truth of Buddhism. We’ve got these two truths that we spend all our time trying to avoid. Impermanence and interdependence. And so often, practice is framed in terms of creating an autonomous, unchanging state, something that will void the reality of impermanence and interdependence. I will settle into a certain state of consciousness and it will be all internal and my doing. It won’t be dependent on anything or anybody, and it’s designed specifically to get me out of that kind of dependence on anything or anybody.
Sometimes the epitome of that fantasized state is described as pure awareness, pure consciousness, an awareness without content, without object, the pure mirror before anything shows up in it. It’s a fantasy that consciousness somehow exists completely internally and privately and it can’t exist without the body and without the world, as if consciousness or mind will somehow be independent of the sensations of the body’s suffering, aging, needs, and that consciousness itself was something pure and preexisting. It’s an experience that we exist somehow inside waiting for the movie to start, waiting for input and information and sensation to come through the windows of the senses.and be reflected on this pure white screen of consciousness, and in meditation we get to close all the windows and just have the pure white screen.
Perhaps some people like going to the movie theater and just looking at the screen before the movie starts. Personally, I prefer the movie, but it seems to be a persistent kind of fantasy that plugs right into this idea of autonomy and the erasure of interdependence. In western philosophy, this idea was addressed by what was called intentionality, which was a somewhat unfortunate bit of jargon because what it means is not purposefulness but aboutness, and the idea, which originates with Berkson and then the phenomenologists, was the idea that there was no such thing as consciousness without content, that awareness is always awareness of something.
In order to describe awareness, we have to talk about seeing and hearing, feeling, tasting, the interaction of our body with the world. Awareness is interaction. It’s interdependence. Another way you can describe it is non-separation. I don’t exist as a mind or awareness inside my body waiting to contact the world outside. My innermost nature is constituted by my engagement with the world. There is no mind or awareness separate or pre-existing engaging the body with the world with information, sensation, and so forth.
Too often non-separation gets abstracted into something like a capital O oneness, as if it's some special state that you can get into. You feel at one with the world, as if when you’re not in that state, there’s some kind of inherent separation. But what I’m suggesting is that non-separation is what we already are and can’t help but be, that the inner has no existence or content or meaning without the so-called outer. Just like there’s no such thing as a baby without a mother, there’s no such thing as separate inner experience without connection, engagement, interdependence on this so-called outer world where things are inevitably one.
Obviously we can distinguish the baby from the mother and we can talk about the difference between inner and outer experience, but we can’t have one without the other, and we have to be very careful that we don’t turn our practice into a particular kind of curative fantasy that tries to create a special kind of inner experience that shields us from the reality of either impermanence or interdependence.
Over and over again, as we look at our practice, of what brings us to it and the stages we go through, we can see in one way or another, we're in this kind of endless conscious or unconscious struggle with life as it is. And not just the overt difficulty and struggle of life as it is, but the very nature of life as impermanent and interdependent. We’re all inevitably seeking this ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card, where life is the jail and free somehow means a kind of inner freedom that throws off all the supposed shackles of embodied and relational existence.
This monk is just asking a version of the question we all ask ourselves: Isn’t there some way to shed the part of myself that’s giving me all this trouble? Maybe we think we can shed something like anger or desire. Probably even that’s a certain kind of myth, and what we need to do is figure out mood, anger, desire, and dependency, so we can handle them well rather than badly. Not that we’re going to find some state that is free of all these things. At the most basic level, when we sit, we’re not going to get into a state that’s pure and thought-free. Like Toshi says, thought by thought, the flow never stops. Well, is that a problem or not?
If there’s no alternative, if there’s no solution, is there a problem?