RETREAT REPORT BY L.H. | Getting The Buddha Mind

On the first day of my second week-long meditation retreat with Master Sheng-Yen, the intensity of the kung-an, the repeated questioning “Who-am-l” continued at the high level that had developed during the first retreat, one month before. Shih-fu helped to sustain and deepen this intensity by asking me to practice as a matter of life and death, reminding me that one never knows when or if such an opportunity will present itself again in this lifetime.

Many times the question “Who-am-l?” would burst into flames, and tears of spiritual commitment would spring from my eyes, almost turning to steam in the heat of my longing to get to the bottom of this primordial question which all beings are asking, consciously or unconsciously, and which even the universe itself is asking by its very existence. I did not feel caught up in an isolated personal quest but felt very near the center of the universal quest of human beings and, indeed, all conscious beings. But various spiritual experiences of peace and insight would arise and put out the flames of the kung-an, and I would suffer the illusion that these were answers to the question. Shih-fu relentlessly yet kindly attempted to turn my attention away from these spiritual experiences back to the sheer intensity of the practice “Who-am-I?”
These experiences were like wandering from the path to look at beautiful flowers or inspiring vistas. At this rate, one might never reach the end of the path. The master told me that if the flames of “Who-am-I?”
die down, I must not simply accept this as part of the process but kindle them again with the torch of my own intense determination. The fire must become so vast that everything is consumed.

The talks Master Sheng-Yen gives during retreat are particularly potent for everyone, and convey important personal messages to each practitioner. This does not occur through the ordinary thinking process but, as Shih-fu himself says, is like throwing a ball that one must actually catch with the entire body and mind without knowing what direction this ball is coming from. On the second or third evening of the retreat, Master Sheng-Yen asked who had experienced sadness that day. I did not raise my hand because I had been experiencing simply the torrent of desperate longing for the Truth, interspersed with periods of peace and insight. But Shih-fu’s message got through to the deeper layers of my being, because during the meditation period that followed the evening talk, I indeed experienced great sadness.

The problem I have of leaning slightly to the right during meditation began to concern me more deeply, This problem comes from years of sitting in meditation alone, with no one to correct my physical posture. But it is more than that. It dramatizes the deepest level of personal illusion, because when I am leaning to the right, I feel confident that I am perfectly upright. This illusion persists not only with eyes closed but also with my eyes completely open. Suddenly, I felt deep sadness that I do not know who I really am, that the ideas and perceptions about which I was so sure were not true. As I continued to ask the question “Who-am-I?” I shed tears of sadness from the heart rather than tears of determination from the will. I was asking the question more deeply than ever before. When I reported this experience to Master Sheng-Yen in his interview room, far from consoling me, he intensified my mood by stating clearly and convincingly that every thought and action since my very birth had been similarly off the mark-that I had lived my entire life in the realm of the false, imagining it to be true.

I accepted his statement and immediately felt a burden of intellectual and spiritual pride, that I was not even aware of carrying, fall away. With his subtle perception, Shih-fu saw that this purification had been accomplished, and he told me to forget the whole thing, that it was merely a mood, and I should simply return to the practice of “Who-am-I?”

Pushing forward more and more strongly with the kung-an, I often experienced the flames of determination raging for several hours on end. Finally, on the morning of the sixth day, with not only my whole mind but my whole body, with all its muscles and nerves, riveted on the question “Who-am-I?” there was a sudden release. The words clearly presented themselves: “There is nothing there.” All tension dissolved as the phrase repeated itself: “There is nothing. There is nothing.” There was a direct experience of what the Prajnaparamita Sutra teaches: there is really no body, no mind, no universe. I both laughed and wept as I experienced the radical nature of this resolution, or disappearance, of the question “Who-am-l?” A totally new realm presented itself, the realm of prajnaparamita or Perfect Wisdom. For several hours I sat in utterly quiet and balanced meditation, but there was no I, no body sitting in the zendo, no process of meditation, no universe. As the Heart Sutra expresses it: “No wisdom, no attainment, no path.” I felt no need to report this to Shih-fu, because it was perfectly clear and self-authenticating, and there really was no Shih-fu and nothing to report.

Master Sheng-Yen then asked all of us in turn, “Where is your mind?” I answered directly from the experience that nothing exists: “Nowhere!” Shih-fu asked me immediately: “Who says this?” Just as immediately, and with deep conviction, I answered: “Nobody!” Shih-fu again questioned: “What about the body that speaks these words?” The answer came: “There is no body!” The master turned aside and remarked: “Empty.”
Just before this I had been doing fast walking (with no one walking and no zendo to walk in), when Shih-fu shouted, “Stop!” Right before me was the scroll of Bodhidharma, and my eyes were gazing at the long fingernail on the third finger of his right hand. Shih-fu had then asked, “Where is your mind?” and I had answered inwardly, “In the third fingernail of Bodhidharma’s right hand.” When I told this to Master Sheng-Yen later, he said that this was a correct answer to the question, not the other series of answers I had given. He told me to let go of the experience of emptiness and continue to question “Who-am-l?” with strong effort.

Later that afternoon, on the final full day of retreat, I was to be led further into the realm of Ch’an towards which Bodhidharma’s fingernail had been pointing. The realm of Ch’an is completely different from the perfect stillness and emptiness of prajnaparamita, where one does not even experience peace, for there is no one to experience it. The realm of Ch’an is a realm of laughter. For several hours while seated in the meditation hall I was swept with wave after wave of laughter at the wonderful impossibility of everything. Given the Truth that nothing really exists, we are presented with an endlessly varied universe, whose existence is impossible yet whose appearance is vividly undeniable. The utterly quiet, primordial expanse of Emptiness is continually surprised as when a big stone is thrown into a still pond or colorful rockets explode in black space. Like a child, one can only laugh in sheer delight.

My brief foray into the realm of Ch’an was sparked by remembering a line from an ancient poem that Master Sheng-Yen had given me three years before. For one year I had only the Chinese. The following year Shih-fu gave me the translation, which was something like this: “The bridge is flowing and the stream is standing still. Beneath the water, the moon is shining, and fish are leaping in the sky.” It had been just a bizarre Zen poem to me then, but now, another year later, it became an igniting flame. I felt I might be going slightly crazy. I felt like a train that had left its tracks and was flying through the sky. I saw the world in the opposite way from the habitual view of the conventional mind. I was sure that stones floated up into the sky and feathers plunged to the bottom of the ocean. The oxen were eating rice with chopsticks and the farmers were grazing on grass. The children on the street were wielding the incense board and Shih-fu was throwing firecrackers in the zendo. I laughed and laughed and laughed, while the swift flow of “Who-am-l” continued in the background. At one point, two cars on the street had a humorous conversation with their horns. I started laughing again, but this time the other meditators in the zendo began laughing with me.

My laughter wasn’t just subjective. The world really is this funny.

The Zen teaching-story came to mind about the master who killed a cat because none of his students could demonstrate the spirit of Ch’an in order to save it. Later, when his principal student returned from a journey, the Master asked him how he would have saved the cat. The student placed his own grass sandles on his head and walked out. The Master remarked: “If he had been here, the cat would have been saved.” I saw clearly the spirit of this action. Our habitual way of viewing the world must be reversed. Sandles belong on the head, not on the feet.

The last night of retreat, I sat in meditation right through till the dawn sitting, smoothly and deeply questioning “Who-am-l?” and refusing to allow myself to be diverted into spiritual experiences of any kind. No more tears, no more laughter. The next morning, I felt like a stick of incense burning in an empty room, like the sound of firecrackers in the streets, like a human being who eats and sleeps. What is there to realize? The retreat was over, so there was no opportunity for an interview. But I’m sure Master Shen-Yen would have said: “Return to the question, ‘Who-am-l?'”

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