Smoothing rough water
"It is not enough to be interiorly silent, and we all know that to be completely present in mind, to be fully in what we are doing, is to remain very much alive. It makes for not only inner peace but efficiency in all of our deeds and in everyday life. And therefore we often say to people, 'Well, just take things one at a time. It's so easy to do things that way.' 'Keep your mind on your job.' 'Concentrate.' But the difficulty with this is that if our concentration in our work is a constant effort, is something, in other words, we have to exercise ourselves to do all the time, then as soon as our strength flags a little then off it goes and we lose it. That's the same as saying, 'Oh you ought to concentrate.' Or, 'You ought to be fully aware of what's going on around you.' And you, as it were, force your mind to focus on it. It's a forced action.
Hui-neng learned that you don't achieve this by force, but you achieve it by insight. While one school of thought is trying to pacify the mind by ironing out the thoughts , the other is leaving it alone. As a matter of fact trying to calm your mind is about as effective a way of getting a calm mind as trying to smooth rough water with a flat iron. The other way is to realize that there is as it were no ego; no stuff to whom thoughts happen, no one to whom experience happens. And through that insight, the idea of the constant entity called the ego, to whom life happens, and for whom life is a problem, is seen to be unreal. There is no past. There is always only a present. As one Buddhist master put it, 'We don't say that spring becomes summer. We say there is spring and then there is summer. We say there is spring and then there is summer.' In other words, we don't have to try to live in the present. We have to understand that only the present is real. There is no past. There is no future.
Look at the practical wisdom of this in a great undertaking, like climbing a mountain. You've got a long task ahead of you and if you keep looking up at the top, you'll feel wearier and wearier, and every step becomes like lead. Or, if you're a housewife washing dishes, and you've got a great pile of dishes by the sink, and you behin to think as you wash through them that you've washed dishes for years, and you're probably going to have to wash dishes for the rest of your life, then in your mind's eye you see this prodigious pile of dishes piling up as high as the Empire State Building. This has been your drudgery in the kitchen all your life, and will be for all the years to come, and you are appalled and oppressed. But dispelling this dread isn't a matter of trying to forget about washing dishes, it is realizing that in actual fact you only have on dish to wash, ever: this one; only one step to take, ever: this one. And that is Zen.
That is concentration at its best. So then, our problem is that we feel inside us a constant struggle, or fight ... " - Alan Watts, "The Discipline of Zen," Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life, Collected Talks 1960-1969
Hui-neng learned that you don't achieve this by force, but you achieve it by insight. While one school of thought is trying to pacify the mind by ironing out the thoughts , the other is leaving it alone. As a matter of fact trying to calm your mind is about as effective a way of getting a calm mind as trying to smooth rough water with a flat iron. The other way is to realize that there is as it were no ego; no stuff to whom thoughts happen, no one to whom experience happens. And through that insight, the idea of the constant entity called the ego, to whom life happens, and for whom life is a problem, is seen to be unreal. There is no past. There is always only a present. As one Buddhist master put it, 'We don't say that spring becomes summer. We say there is spring and then there is summer. We say there is spring and then there is summer.' In other words, we don't have to try to live in the present. We have to understand that only the present is real. There is no past. There is no future.
Look at the practical wisdom of this in a great undertaking, like climbing a mountain. You've got a long task ahead of you and if you keep looking up at the top, you'll feel wearier and wearier, and every step becomes like lead. Or, if you're a housewife washing dishes, and you've got a great pile of dishes by the sink, and you behin to think as you wash through them that you've washed dishes for years, and you're probably going to have to wash dishes for the rest of your life, then in your mind's eye you see this prodigious pile of dishes piling up as high as the Empire State Building. This has been your drudgery in the kitchen all your life, and will be for all the years to come, and you are appalled and oppressed. But dispelling this dread isn't a matter of trying to forget about washing dishes, it is realizing that in actual fact you only have on dish to wash, ever: this one; only one step to take, ever: this one. And that is Zen.
That is concentration at its best. So then, our problem is that we feel inside us a constant struggle, or fight ... " - Alan Watts, "The Discipline of Zen," Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life, Collected Talks 1960-1969