Putting Your Mind At Rest

This talk takes as its text the famous Zen koan, "Bodhidharma puts the mind at rest." In it I describe the practice of meditation and how it relieves suffering by helping to free us from our usual (mis)perceptions of how our thinking mind works and its domination of our inner life.

Transcript

Case 41,

From The Gateless Barrier,

Bodhidharma pacifies the mind.

Bodhidharma faced the wall.

The second ancestor stood in the snow,

Cut off his arm,

And said,

Your disciple's mind has no peace as yet.

I beg you,

Master,

Please put it to rest.

Bodhidharma said,

Bring me your mind,

And I will put it to rest.

The second ancestor said,

I have searched for my mind,

But I cannot find it.

Bodhidharma said,

I have completely put it to rest for you.

This koan is a story about suffering and how to ease suffering.

The Buddha famously said that what he taught was suffering and the end of suffering.

That word suffering,

Dukkha,

Has also been translated as unsatisfactoriness,

Which is a much broader term,

Basically saying much of life isn't to our liking.

And of course we know that.

We get things we don't want,

And we don't get things that we do want.

And we lose things.

All we have to do is look at the five remembrances to be reminded.

And this little koan,

This little story,

Is actually beautifully constructed to take us into this mystery of how unsatisfactory everything is,

And whether there's anything we can do about it.

Because all of us come to Zen with that sense that something's not right,

Something's not right,

That I'm suffering,

Things are not the way I want them to be.

We don't come to Zen because our life is perfect and everything is bliss and joy.

Nobody does.

And actually,

As we know,

Nobody has a life that's all bliss and joy,

Contrary to what it may look like from the outside.

So here is this second ancestor of Bodhidharma's standing in the snow,

So it is cold.

He has been there a long time,

And he's cut off his arm.

I mean,

This is so dramatic.

This is the high drama koan.

And the cutting off of his arm is often meant to indicate how sincere he is,

How much he really wants Bodhidharma's teaching.

But I think there is another way to look at this,

Which is the agony that this poor monk is experiencing.

Many of us know that agony,

That emotional agony of,

I can't stand this anymore.

I can't stand how I feel.

I can't stand my life right now.

And sometimes we actually do physical things to make ourselves not feel the emotional pain.

People cut themselves.

Certainly people reach for things to numb the emotional pain.

Alcohol,

Other substances,

Shopping.

We engage in shopping therapy to try to make the emotional pain ease.

So we all know this,

This sense of,

I can't stand how I feel right now.

And this poor monk goes to Bodhidharma and asks for help.

Now it's no accident that the koan starts out saying Bodhidharma faced the wall.

He was meditating,

And the story goes that he faced the wall non-stop for nine years.

Now why would someone who is already a very accomplished master,

A very realized being,

One of the Buddha's disciples who came from India to China to bring his form of the Dharma to save more beings,

Why is he sitting there meditating still?

And of course the message is that waking up is never done.

That we don't get to a place where it's all good,

Where we don't suffer anymore,

Where the waves don't keep coming and crashing on the shore of our lives.

And so Bodhidharma,

Like all of us,

Needs to practice.

He needs to create those settings where he can see more clearly,

Where the mind can settle.

Bodhidharma is putting his own mind to rest as this koan begins.

And the monk says,

Your disciple's mind has no peace as yet.

I've stood here.

I've done everything I can think of.

I've cut off my arm.

It's not working.

What do we do when our lives aren't?

You know,

When we do all kinds of things,

Much of the world seeks fixes of various kinds,

Solutions of various kinds.

As I said,

All those addictions we think of,

All those escapes.

And in fact,

One teacher said,

You know,

If you can find something else that works,

Go do that.

Don't do this practice.

This practice is hard.

Go try other things and see if any of them work.

And I think what these centuries of people found was that nothing else ultimately worked for them.

And so after trying many things,

As the Buddha tried many things,

They came to sitting down,

Facing the wall,

Facing themselves,

Watching the heart-mind so closely over such a long period of time.

And that there was healing in that.

That there was the relief of suffering.

And this monk doesn't know how suffering gets relieved.

He just says,

Please help.

So Bodhidharma says something that is puzzling.

Almost sounds like he's playing a trick.

He says,

Bring me your mind and I will put it to rest.

And what he's inviting the monk to do is a practice that is called wado.

It's taking a question,

An imponderable question,

And letting it be there in your mind,

In your zazen,

As you go through your day,

As you drive the car.

In this case,

Where is my mind?

It could be the question,

Who am I?

It could be the question,

Who is hearing that sound?

Any of those questions will do.

Because they ask us to focus again and again on a question that has no answer.

And it is knowing in our bones,

In our guts,

That this question can't be answered,

That somehow opens us up.

Opens us up to the mystery.

Opens us up to the truth.

That those stories we tell ourselves of having a mind that's fixed and mine and separate from everybody else's,

That all of that falls apart when we keep looking at it.

So Bodhidharma invites the monk to engage in this practice.

And the monk comes back and says,

I have searched for my mind,

Probably after a long time,

But I cannot find it.

Bodhidharma said,

I have completely put it to rest for you.

Really?

I mean,

How did that work?

And was that true?

Well,

Certainly,

Bodhidharma didn't put it to rest for him in the way we might traditionally think about it,

Where there would be some laying on of hands and suddenly this poor monk's mind would calm down and everything would be peaceful and quiet after that.

Not possible.

Didn't happen.

Although we often want that.

We often turn to someone,

Some teacher,

Some guru,

Somebody in the world,

And we say,

Make this better for me.

Solve these problems for me.

Please take away my suffering.

And some people actually hold themselves out as able to do that.

Sure,

Just follow me and I will take away your suffering.

Zen doesn't do that.

Zen is very clear that no one can take away my suffering,

Your suffering.

So then what is Bodhidharma doing and why is he saying,

Okay,

I've put your mind to rest?

Well,

What he is doing is creating the conditions,

Creating an experience.

He is creating something for the monk.

He is first of all saying,

I will teach you.

He's saying,

Here's what I want you to do.

Go search for your mind.

Bodhidharma can't then determine what will happen for that monk,

But he can guess that what's likely to happen is that the monk will engage in this deep exploration of where the mind is and what the mind is,

And that in that exploration will come a relief.

Just like Bodhidharma was creating an experience for himself of facing the wall,

Of simplifying.

So this morning,

When I talked about the four commitments again of silence and physical stillness and custody of the eyes,

Not looking at each other,

What we're doing is we're creating that experience for each other.

We're creating the simpler experience of being present without all the swirl of distractions so that the waves of the mind have the opportunity to calm down as we're practicing here in Sishin.

Perhaps you've found this.

Perhaps you have found that you can create those opportunities meditating on a cushion,

But perhaps some other way.

I find now that when I have five minutes,

That rather than pulling out my phone,

Rather than filling my ears with sound from a radio,

Sometimes I will sit still and look at a tree in my front yard and just watching something simple creates the possibility of the heart-mind calming down,

Of the heart-mind getting a bit of rest,

A bit of ease.

That's what Bodhidharma is providing for this monk.

Now,

It's easy to imagine that then it's done.

Bodhidharma says,

I've completely put it to rest for you,

And they lived happily ever after.

But of course,

That doesn't happen.

That's why we keep practicing.

That's why we keep watching the heart-mind.

That's why we keep creating those experiences of really investigating what it means to walk,

To sit,

To watch a bird,

To listen to the traffic.

Because as we investigate that over and over again,

Over and over again,

The swirl of this mind calms down.

Bodhidharma is pointing to this experience of not being able to find the mind,

Meaning there's no there there.

I can't locate it.

It's not a physical thing.

It doesn't have distinct boundaries.

It's not exactly mine.

But thoughts keep coming up and falling away.

What's healing about that?

Why is that at all helpful?

Well,

What we know is that when we begin to see the blurriness,

The fuzziness,

The inability to get our hands around this thing we call mind,

It opens that dharma gate to understanding how much of our worries,

Of our preoccupations,

Are completely made up.

This worry about whether someone got something that I didn't get,

This worry about whether somebody offended me by saying something I didn't want them to say,

That on the one hand,

In the conventional world that we call the world of form,

Yes,

Those things are real.

They matter.

They make us feel things.

And in this bigger world where there is no distinct mind that's all my own,

But just the coming and going of thoughts and sensations,

All of these things look like bubbles in a stream,

Bubbles that form for a moment and are gone.

And that brings relief.

Not permanent relief,

Not complete relief,

But a definite easing of the suffering that we can get so caught up in when we are,

As the writer David Foster Wallace says,

Trapped in our own skull-sized kingdoms,

That so much of the time we are caught feeling completely trapped in these minds that create create so much suffering.

So Bodhidharma has led this monk to have an experience that the monk can only have for himself.

Here we sit supporting each other in having experiences that we alone can have.

But as the saying goes in our practice,

No one can do this for you,

But you can't do it alone.

We support each other.

We encourage each other.

We remind each other.

And that's the enormous gift that we give to each other in Sangha,

Whether it's a sashin like this one,

Or a weekly sitting,

Or just a conversation with a Dharma friend.

And this is radical.

While most of the world reaches for quick fixes,

We're digging deeply into something so subversive.

Wumen's verse points to this.

He says,

Coming from the West and directly pointing,

All the trouble springs from this.

Meaning what Bodhidharma has asked people to do,

Which is to look,

To look again,

To look again at their hearts and minds.

All the trouble springs from this.

The jungle of monks at sixes and sevens is your fault after all.

Your fault meaning to Bodhidharma's fault.

It's our fault for asking each other to do this practice that is so radically different from what most of the world brings to our doorstep.

And so much offers the possibility of the relief of suffering.

As we read this morning,

Zazen is going right into the ocean of awareness,

Manifesting the body of all Buddhas.

The natural luminosity of mind suddenly reveals itself and the original light is everywhere.

It's not a matter of extinction or of activity.

There is no increase or decrease in the ocean and the waves never turn back.