I‘ve misplaced the original source of this story, so I’ve improvised a little with the retelling. How do we understand the difference in what the monk heard and understood between the first time and the second? See, the monk had originally experienced something that had brought him peace, he said. He was in some way sure that the thing that he was searching for was found, and in a way, he identified with and was settling into that certainty of his nature and buddha nature were one thing. And that’s all true. So what was missing?
We see it in the difference between what happens in the second encounter with Fayen, where he’s upset, maybe a little angry, confused. Fayen points to that mind, and says, The fireboy is seeking fire. It’s not simply the mind that identifies with fire as buddha nature, as peace, as some kind of spiritual state of one kind or another, but the mind of doubt and confusion itself is the very fire of the fireboy. That was what was missing in his original misunderstanding.
I thought of this story when I saw a little cartoon posted on Facebook, and I put it on our zendo facebook page with the comments. Apparently it was a cartoon that was created by someone who was using it to advertise some kind of training in mindfulness and I believe CBT. In any case it was simply a cartoon and it showed a man and a dog sitting side by side, and the man said in the caption, My mind is full, and the little thought bubble is filled with a thousand little pictures of words and letters and stuff. His mind is full. Next to him is the dog, and the two of them are sitting looking out at the landscape, just a plain green field with a couple of trees and the sun, and in the dog’s thought bubble is just the perfect representation of exactly what’s in front of him: a tree and the sun. Not a thought in his head. Just immediate perception. The dog is the mindful one here. Apparently in this story it's the dog that has buddha nature and the man who doesn’t.
So I thought about that picture in terms of Fayen and this story of the fireboy. The person who drew the cartoon thought it was self-evident that the goal of practice is to clear your head of thoughts and images and worries and emotion and conceptions so you see reality directly. If you see reality directly, everything will be clear and pristine, just as it is. You won’t have all that gunk of thought in the way. Maybe it makes you more natural, just like the dog has no conceptual preoccupations. It’s a kind of built-in assumption about the nature of practice, that we’re aiming at something in particular. We’re aiming at some kind of calmness or clarity, certainly not that full mind that’s just cluttered. Right?
Now, I would say that the mind of the dog is what the monk had gotten the first time around, and I think that is very nice. It makes for a good pet. It’s easy to have folks like that sitting in the zendo. Of course, there’s a possibility that we might consider that the dog has been neutered, and that’s one of the reasons he doesn’t have his mind full of very much. Where is his passion? Where are his likes and dislikes? Is it really the goal to have it extirpated?
I think it is certainly the case that for many of us, the byproduct of long sitting will be that our mind will quiet down. Someone has likened it to a jar full of sand, and when it’s shaken up, the sand settles to the bottom and the water looks clear instead of muddy, and that’s very nice, and I think that does happen to a more or less extent with people. But the dilemma, of course, is that the people to whom it happens think they are very enlightened, and the people who think the water is cloudy think there’s something very wrong with them and think they’re damaged.
That’s a shallow interpretation of what I think practice can do. See, I think that practice will really make a difference in your life not so much in terms of how much clutter is removed when you’re sitting on the cushion, how much quiet and calmness you’re able to achieve, but what is your relationship to all the rest of it? What insight do you have in the nature of the clutter? The sixth patriarch warned against seeing practice as endlessly wiping dust from the mirror, not only because it can never be wholly accomplished, but because you’re endlessly splitting your mind into the clear parts and the dust, the part that you cherish and the part that you see as the contaminant, so that the very distinction between clarity and clutter perpetuates a deep dualism that almost inevitably results in a certain kind of internal conflict, an endless attempt to get rid of the parts that are defiled by calm and clarity.
Joko taught the simple practice of labeling thoughts as a way for us to see the true nature of thought, not as a way to get rid of thought, not as a way to have thoughts go away so you could sit with a perfectly clear mind. In a way, by repeating thoughts to ourselves, by labeling those thoughts, and seeing those thoughts as thoughts, for her this was a way of teaching the emptiness of thoughts, They’re just thoughts going through your head. They are empty, and empty meaning they are not permanent. They are ephemeral, they come and go.
If you look at that original cartoon, on the one hand out there is grass and trees and sky and inside is clutter. Is one more real than the other? Grass and trees and sky are just as empty as the clutter, and the clutter is just as real as grass and trees and sky. Each are just things happening in the moment. Can we watch the clutter the same way we watch the clouds through the sky? Do we hate the clouds for messing up our clear blue sky? Do we hate our thoughts for messing up our clear calm mind?
See, our mind is going to be full, one way or another, a lot of the time. And that is not a problem. The problem is when we go to war with our own minds in the name of some image of clarity that we’re trying to achieve. A lot of meditation has as the byproduct some degree of clarity, but it’s a dangerous kind of byproduct, it’s addictive, and we can become obsessive, thinking we have to endlessly work to fix and purify, to calm. The real work of practice is to leave everything just as it is, see it just as it is, inside as well as outside, each equally empty, each equally perfect, just as it is.