Mind is not a mirror

Over the last week I have been the recipient, as might be guessed from my previous post, of a barrage of conspiracy theories from a friend who decided it was ok to send me endless YouTube videos, blogs, talks and websites promoting them. I found that this tended to disturb my thoughts. I asked myself, do I pay attention to this? Try to debunk it, or look deeper into the source material, where available? Do I try to find out what this person’s problem really is, or just ignore and block? It got inside my head, so to speak, so like anything else, it can become fuel for practice.

In my opinion, those with any sort of personal practice such as A\A\, zazen, and so on, should be very careful about what I think of as 'curating the mind', that is, examining the contents, checking new contents as it comes in, deciding what to keep and what to discard. However, this can be time consuming and knowledge being what it is, essentially endless. I don't have time to check 2-hour long videos to decide whether they are worth knowing about, my life is busy and even without these things there is a whole bunch of information I need to process without adding more. But it gets under the skin nonetheless, more so than the topics themselves. The result is confusion, a stirring of the mind, things stick to it like particles of dust, and a common  understanding in Zen is that the practice is to 'polish the mind like a mirror', so it’s all material for practice surely?

This idea is put clearly in a poem by the monk Jinzu Jouza, when asked by the 5th patriarch to compose an enlightenment poem. The translation I have is as follows.

Our body is the bodhi tree,

and our mind a mirror bright,

Carefully we wipe them hour by hour,

And let no dust alight.

Ok, sounds good, but the 5^th patriarch didn’t feel it was the best that could be done. He said that if a person practiced like this they would make progress, but it was the poem of a person approaching the gate, but not yet though it.

For comparison, the poem composed by the future 6^th patriarch, clarifies this further.

There is no bodhi tree

Nor stand of a mirror bright,

Since all is void,

Where can the dust alight?

I first read this a few months ago, and finding myself in a position where ‘dust is settling in the mind’, I do what one is supposed to do, sit in zazen, and observe. I came to realise that what the 6^th patriarch is talking about as the mind, isn’t the mind as we usually think of it, since dust can’t alight on the mind. So, the thing that is clogged up with thoughts, ideas, troubles, is by definition something other than the mind. Maybe it is better to distinguish between thoughts and mind.

I don’t want to speculate on what is meant by mind, because all I can see and define is what it is not. In fact, it is the not, nothing, void. Not a nihilistic void of meaninglessness, but a full void, like a womb in that it carries everything, everything is born of it, yet itself cannot be thought of, much less disturbed by thoughts. In practice, if my zazen consists of an exercise of trying to curate the mind and throw out unwanted thoughts, I am not approaching this void at all, but merely rearranging the furniture in my mind.

Paradoxically, I want to be careful not to separate thoughts and mind, since observation tells me that they are not separate from mind, not something you can cut off and discard, but rather an aspect of mind; its flowers if you like, that while not the main point are still integral to the whole. This is the meaning of the ‘void flowers’ vision that I had many years ago now (did I mention this before?). Now I might say, thoughts are the flowering of the mind, but they are not its root and stem, only the part that arises in consciousness.

I don’t want to overthink all of this trying to come up with the perfect analogy, the most important thing is not the theory, but the practice, what do we do about it. In practice this means zazen, but it also means the awareness we cultivate in zazen, and carry on into other activities. For me this is my aikido, the tai chi form, but also daily life, making coffee, going for a walk and the rest. Thoughts arise, some quite disturbing, both from within and without. They are all potentially sticky, we can get caught up in them if we are not self-aware. But we don’t want to try and cut them off or some other act of violence, but simply notice what is happening. Notice during zazen when the mind wanders or gets sleepy. Notice in aikido when I have lost my centre. Notice when a friend draws me into fruitless discussion, or when something irritates the mind.

I’ve found that the noticing itself has a disarming effect. In Aikido, noticing you have lost your centre tends to re-establish it. In the same way noticing you are being led away by sticky thoughts tends to dissipate them and natural mind arises. By practicing like this, just noticing, and letting the correction occur naturally, is the only way I have found to get back consistently to that basic, unadorned awareness which is the basis from which we arise, not by polishing the mirror of the mind, but by noticing that the mirror on which dust alights isn't the mind that we seek to cultivate in the first place.