Welcome
Welcome back. For the first half of this session, we’re going to talk through our koans / gōngàn 公案. Then we will try one final practice of meditation, taken from the Korean chán (Seon, or Sŏn) tradition. We talked last time about the practice of Zen/Chán/Sŏn as responding to the tendency towards mental proliferation. This time, we’re going to explore one more meditation tradition, one more practice, that aims to undercut or undermine this tendency. But first, let’s talk about our koans / gōngàn 公案.
Koans / gōngàn 公案
- What koan / gōngàn did you choose?
- Why did you choose this one?
- How did you make this a practice?
- What were the results of this practice?
- Were there any moments of insight? Were there any frustrations?
We’ll feed back in the main group.
Sŏn’ga kwigam
Our last text in this segment is the Sŏn’ga kwigam (Models for Sŏn Practitioners), which was written by Sŏsan Hyujŏng 西山休靜, who lived between 1520 and 1604. The book was put together some time around 1564, and draws on a wide range of traditions of Buddhist literature. The text was first written in Chinese, and translated into Korean in 1569. It draws heavily on Línjì, whom we looked at last time, and another Zen teacher Chinul. The latter believed that conceptual teachings were important to support meditation, and vice versa: without meditation, conceptual wisdom is dry and unproductive; and without conceptual wisdom, meditation can easily lead us into depression or inactivity.
We’re going to discuss hwadu (Chinese: huatou 話頭, meaning “the point of the story”) practice. This is related to gōngàn. You have seen some gōngàn already. Does the dog have a Buddha nature? Wu 無!!! These gōngàn aim to provoke a puzzled perplexity in us. In the Sŏn tradition, this perplexity is to become a constant practice. As the text reads, “the moment you realize [are enlightened] that there is no path of reason and no path of meaning and no taste, and the mind is frustrated and bored, that is where the said person abandons his physical life, and is also the foundation for becoming a Buddha and becoming a patriarch.”
Practising hwadu
The text gives 10 ways of practising this hwadu (constant reflection on the point of the gōngàn) badly, termed “illnesses”. These are
- to ponder it with the faculty of consciousness [manas];
- to be fixated on it where you raise eyebrows and blink [your] eyes;
- to make your livelihood [from it] on the path of language;
- to elicit proof [for it] from writings;
- to accept [only] where it is raised up;
- to toss it away into a bin of no concerns;
- to make an understanding [of it in terms] of existence or non-existence;
- to make an understanding of [it as] the truly non-existent;
- to make an understanding of [it as] the principle of the Way [reason];
- and holding onto delusion while waiting to be enlightened [to it].
Instead of this approach, we need, the text says, to “simply raise the story, generally rouse the spirit, and just doubt, “What is this?”
A Meditation Practice
This connects to one form of practice taught by the former Korean nun Martine Batchelor, practising this question “What is this?” You can read about this here: https://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/what-is-this-seon-practice-in-the-korean-tradition/
We’re going to have a go at this today, in the spirit of inquiry. The stages, which I’ll talk you through, will be more or less like this:
- We’ll establish ourselves in meditation (following some of the practices we have explored in the previous few weeks.
- We’ll then introduce the question “What is this?”
- The aim of introducing this question is not to seek an answer, but to make our entire body and mind itself a question.
- If answers do pop up, then just gently move past them by asking “What is this?” once again.
Writing Exercise
Having tried this meditation practice, we’ll write for 8 minutes, with a title “What is this?” Try to sustain this questioning outside of the meditation as well.
Discussion
Finally, we’ll chat through what we have discovered, or what we have undiscovered, through this process.