MIND AND NO MIND: A Zen Talk For A New Year

MIND AND NO MIND
A Zen Talk for a New Year

Edward Sanshin Oberholtzer

Delivered at Empty Moon Zen New Year’s Zazenkai
31 December 2022

The case

Damei (Daibai) asked Mazu (Baso), “What is Buddha?”
Mazu said, “This very mind is Buddha.”

Gateless Gate, Case 30

Sit with that for a moment while I cast my mind back to a January well over a decade ago when I was shuso during what we then called the winter ango at the Boundless Way temple in Worcester, Massachusetts where I would sit just inside the door to the zendo. In the early morning, with the sunlight just beginning to stream through the blinds, a white noise machine hummed around the corner immediately behind me, masking the voices in the dokusan room across the hallway. As far as I knew, it was a purely mechanical noise machine, not some electronic mix of dozens of digetized sounds woven together in a tangled yarn of noise that might be picked apart by a mind more musical inclined than mine. No, just a machine-made, mechanical, physically generated noise that, as I would sit there in the early morning quiet, would morph from a indistinguishable buzz to what I could swear was the sound of a digereedoo playing deep in the outback and, from there, on to the wordless chorus of some Eastern Orthodox monks on Mt.Athos, chanting in the chill of that early morning, all just heard, just pieced together, there on the edge of my consciousness. My mind, reaching out, trying to make sense of the randomness presenting itself, finding patterns in the ten thousand grasses, and sometimes, just imposing those patterns.

And we find those patterns all around us, animals and castles in the random forms of clouds, faces in the rock strewn surface of Mars, conspiracies in the chance alignment of public figures on social media. But it can be deeper than that. Sometimes, those forms, those patterns are actually there. After all, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean thast people aren’t out to get you.There is a debate going on in various schools of mathematians as to whether mathematics reflects the underlying structure of the universe or is, as the 18th century Italian philosopher Vico held, simply a construct of the human mind. A conflict perhaps resolved by noting that that mind is itself a part of that universe.

Our minds are active, reaching out to the world around them, finding those patterns both in the stuff of the universe and in themselves. And isn’t this where we find the dharma, baked into the world around us, there to be uncovered, to be grasped. The insights of the Buddha, sitting there under that Bodhi tree, prodded by the rising of the morning star, these insights were nothing that you or I couldn’t come to if we’d only open our eyes. “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” And this observation of Meister Eckhart could just as easily be written as the eye through which I see the Dharma is the same eye through which the Dharma sees me. Dogen tells us that “[t]o carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is realization.” This very eye, this very mind is Buddha.

Wumen, never one to miss the opportunity to express his apprciation, gave us this verse for the koan that goes:

The blue sky and bright day—
No more searching around.
“What is Buddha?” you ask.
Hiding loot, you declare your innocence.

Blue sky and bright day, clouds drifting by, digeredoos emerging from the randomness of noise. The Dharma, not simply woven into our universe, the Dharma is our universe, waiting to be discovered in the ten thousand grasses.

But, of course, neither Wunmen nor Mazu leave us there. That would be too easy. Just a few pages down in the Gateless Gate, we find him, if not contradicting himself then pausing and opening that eye, taking in the ten thousand grasses and seeing them whole. Once again, we can thank Wumen for adding case 33 into his collection.

A monk asked Mazu (Baso), “What is Buddha?”
Mazu said, “Not mind, not Buddha.”

I’ve nailed a small tray to a fencepost in our back yard. What might not go into the composter, scraps of meat, bones, the remains of a non-vegetarian lifestyle, goes into that tray, a gift for the neighborhood crows. Placing the remains of a Christmas roast duck out on the fencepost in back brought an entire murder of crows, descending on the tray, cawing, pecking, grabing, sqaubling. A shining, feathering, swirling mass, very much there, very much a suchness of crows. I see them standing out against the snow filled field behind the house. Just there. Each crow in its particularity, each crow a node in the vast universe of crowdom. An Indra’s net of crows. Crow, duck bones, snow, sky , grass. Where does one begin, one end? Where in emptiness do we find crows, mind or Buddha? Just there, just sitting, nudging oneanother aside, and eating out there on that fencepost.

Were we to hear of crows in the Diamond Sutra, we might expect the Buddha to tell his disciple, “Subhuti, the Tathagata teaches that what are called crows are not crows and therefore they are called crows.” And we chant this, or could chant something like this each time we gather, in the Heart Sutra, “Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight, no realm of mind consciousness.” and no crows.

Franz Kafka in his Blue Octavo Notebooks has given us this brief parable:

“The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.”

Look through the world around you and you will find intimations of the Dharma, glimpses, echoes, not always complete, but never less than rich. The sound of a digeredoo in the midst of white noise, a hint from the sermon of a Christian mystic, a taste of emptiness from a middle European Jewish writer. And a parting poem from a long ago Zen master:

Present a sword if you meet a swordsman;
Don’t offer a poem unless you meet a poet.
When speaking say one-third of it;
Don’t give the whole thing at once.

Unless you are feeding the crows.

Thank you.