Confidence in outlook comes through cutting assumptions about the ground.
The key to practice is to maintain that without distraction.
The supreme expression is to exercise the sense of practice in everything.
May I have confidence in outlook, practice, and expression.
Commentary
What, you may ask, is the point of philosophy, logic, and other conceptual fabrications when it comes to a method of meditation that involves doing nothing in mind?
The point is to be able to rest in doing nothing. This is not so easy. Doubts arise, and with doubts, questions. When am I going to get somewhere? Does anything really come of this? Am I doing nothing the right way? Is this all there is, doing nothing? The point of the logic and philosophy is to resolve such questions and deny doubt any foothold.
Suzuki Roshi once said, “Our practice is about absolute confidence in our fundamental nature.” In Soto Zen you stare at a wall and do nothing. It is a different approach, but the practice is not dissimilar.
The six verses that follow take you through the philosophy in clear simple
language. It is so clear that it is not particularly difficult to understand. But an intellectual understanding is not enough to resolve questions and ease doubts.
You do have to understand it intellectually. Then you have to mull it over, and keep mulling it over, until something shifts, and the logic makes sense at a different level. It is accepted not only intellectually, but emotionally and physically, too. We don’t have a word for this in English, at least not to my knowledge. It is not exactly convinced, which carries a sense of being victorious in a contest, internal if not external. Nor is it exactly being persuaded or overcoming objections, though that is certainly part of it. It’s more that something shifts inside, a response to something that rings true. A threshold is crossed, the logic makes sense, and you accept it in such a way that doubt and resistance no longer arise, at least not at the conceptual level. This is not a shift that you can make happen. It happens when body, heart, and mind are ready. All you can do is bring the right conditions together. One way to do that is to read the prayer aloud regularly, with understanding and confidence, with faith and
yearning, and with compassion and aspiration. As Rangjung Dorge writes,
“Confidence in outlook comes through cutting assumptions about the ground.”
This deep acceptance is important because in this approach it is the basis for mahamudra practice. When the mind of the body, the mind of emotion, and the mind of awareness are attuned to the fact that there is nothing behind or underneath what arises in experience, it becomes possible to sit at ease and do nothing. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise, of course. The practice of mahamudra is to rest in attention and do nothing. That attention needs to be sufficiently clear and stable that whatever does arise has little effect on you — that is, you don’t need to do anything with it.
To build that capacity, you need to be able experience both reactivity and
confusion without being taken over by them or having to push them away. Recall Buddha Shakyamuni sitting under the bodhi tree. He experiences attraction (Mara’s three daughters), aversion (the rain of weapons from Mara’s army of demons), and not knowing (Mara’s final challenge). In each case, Buddha Shakyamuni does not react or fall into confusion. That is how you practice. Objects of attraction cease to elicit attraction. Objects of aversion cease to elicit aversion. Objects of not knowing cease to elicit dullness and confusion.
After meditation sessions, when you go about your life, you carry that sense of no ground in everything you do. This also takes practice. Above all, it takes deep acceptance. Your behavior, what you actually do in situations, changes. You become less reactive, less impulsive. You become a better listener, for instance. At the same time, you become more responsive because there is less of your stuff getting in the way—no second thoughts, for instance. A knowing that does not depend on reason begins to become active. An ethic of behavior also emerges in which the spirit of no ground, no distraction, and no control naturally takes expression.