I gave this talk on Sengcan’s Affirming Faith in Mind on Saturday, May 7, 2022, at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

This is Case 98 from the Blue Cliff Record:

Yun Yan asked Tao Wu, “What does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many hands and eyes for?”
Tao Wu said, “It’s like someone reaching back and groping for a pillow in the middle of the night.”
Yun Yan said, “I understand.”
Tao Wu said, “How do you understand it?
Yun Yan said, “All over the body are hands and eyes.”
Tao Wu said, “You have said quite a bit there, but you’ve only said eighty percent of it.”
Yun Yan said, “What do you say, Elder Brother.”
Tao Wu said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes.”

Last week I spoke about Sengcan’s Awakening Faith in Mind, that long verse we chanted last Saturday and again today. I focused on three themes raised by that foundational Zen text:

• First, our human capacity for self-reflection is wonderous and useful, and it’s also bedeviling. It can produce an echo chamber or hall of mirrors in which we may remain neurotically trapped. This echo chamber is the “small mind” discussed in the text, at least when small mind is all small mind knows.

• Second, this small mind is in the business of slicing and dicing; of objectifying and making relative comparisons among objects. Inside the hall of mirrors, we tend to use our own subjectivity to objectify ourselves and other subjects. This produces much personal and collective suffering. Small mind seeks an escape from the hall of mirrors.

• Third, small mind tries to think it’s way out, but it can’t. Inside the hall of mirrors, small mind imagines itself as having the capacity to find what it’s seeking. Like a hammer, it pounds away at its supposed problem, but without realizing it is pounding on a screw. A better metaphor might be a hammer pounding on a sponge ball. It can’t make a dent. The pounding is futile—properly directed, it’s an expression of bohdicitta, the mind aimed at awakening. The pounding eventually tends to give way to rest and ease as small mind discovers itself in Great Mind.

This week I want to build on what I said last week, picking up on some of the themes presented in your wonderful questions and comments during our discussion following my talk, including the first, excellent question RB posed after my last talk: How does all this play out in our lives? I want to use the lovely and much beloved koan I just read as a touchstone for today’s discussion.

Yun Yan asked Tao Wu, “What does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many hands and eyes for?”
Tao Wu said, “It’s like someone reaching back and groping for a pillow in the middle of the night.”

Have you had this experience? You’re shifting in bed, still in a sleep state, but conscious enough to know you’re readjusting your position. Without thinking, you reach for a pillow, find it, and put it someplace where it provides support and comfort. And then you slip back into deep sleep. It all just sort of happens.

A few nights ago, I woke in the middle of the night and small mind started spinning. I so wanted to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t find it with that spinning mind. But when I just ceased to engage that mental activity, and when, eyes closed, I centered my mind’s eye in the luminous darkness, sleep found me and I let go into it. It was there all along, ready to have me when I was done trying to have it.

Great Mind always is there for us like this. We often tune into it in seemingly small, ordinary moments, knowing ourselves both as part of it and as it, appreciating it and consciously entering the flow of it. Some people experience this walking in a forest or meadow; others while playing with a child. They may use different religious or secular language than I’m using here, depending upon their way of life, but we’re tuning into the same thing.

Great Mind often finds me as I sit quietly in my home office, the morning sunlight illuminating the papers on my desk. Or as I watch steam rise from my teacup. The steam is dancing, no less alive than I am.

We sense in these moments that Great Mind is not something we possess or achieve. Great Mind is not contained in my skull. It’s not contained period. It’s there as the ground of all being, in which we beings participate.

Zen practice ultimately invites, prods, and supports us toward an experience of harmony among small mind—my personal experience of ordinary mind—and Great Mind—the ground of all being in which small mind can discover itself rooted.

A big, transformative realization of Great Mind sometimes occurs suddenly in Zen practice. But I truly think that deep realization always develops, or sinks in, slowly. We must know Great Mind in our bones, not as an idea or a one-shot experience. We come to know that this no-ground ground is always here, even when we’re not perceiving it quite so clearly or pleasantly.

Sengcan’s chant is about awakening faith in mind, but intimacy and complete trust ultimately are what we are seeking. Perhaps we need something like faith early on, as small mind remains anxious about ceding control; about accepting itself as immersed in Great Mind; unwilling to admit it’s not driving the bus. But the experience to which Sengcan is ultimately inviting us is more akin to trust born of experience than to an intellectual leap of faith or act of will.

It’s true that some Zen texts seem to equate the moment at which we’re first overcome by a realization of Great Mind with completion, and it’s true in a sense. But other texts tell us these experiences are a sort of initiation and encourage us to stay focused on continual integration of small mind and Great Mind. This is important, because there are myriad ways small mind may try to co-opt its recognition of Great Mind.

We can fetishize those moments of recognition, particularly the most dazzling ones. We can inflate them and imagine they make us extra special. We can try hard to reproduce them, usually without success. We can become a samadhi junkie, spending countless hours on retreat, chasing blissed out states and imagining we’re becoming more holy. I’ve been guilty of versions of all of these things along the way.

Small mind can become completely intoxicated with and lost in the recognition of Great Mind. In her book The Awakened Brain, Lisa Miller, a Columbia professor who researches the neuroscience of spirituality, tells a story about a woman who has an initial awakening experience and, in her excitement, enters a Buddhist monastery. She lives there for over three years, dedicating most of that time to meditation practice. She eventually feels disconnected from the world and her own life, so she leaves the monastery. In the first days after her departure, she has a dream that convinces her she must return and that the Dali Lama will be coming to pick her up. She packs a bag and spends the day waiting in her front yard, but he never shows up. Miller’s research affirms that the most resilient, wise, and well-adjusted people among us are not stuck in either place; they’re tuned into Great Mind and small mind is functioning fully, in harmony with Great Mind.

So there are countless ways small mind can and probably will attempt to co-opt and control Great Mind once it perceives it. We must be alert to this possibility. At the extreme, we sometimes see one who has recognized Great Mind get tragically stuck in the perspective of the absolute, from which we say there can be no killing, because there is no life and death; no stealing, because there is nothing to possess; and so on. Small mind confuses itself with Great Mind, becomes grandiose, and perverts these metaphysical truths, finding license in them to do things that cause harm.

Small mind isn’t really knowing itself and manifesting as Great Mind until it’s thoroughly soaked in Great Mind and knows and accepts its humble, joyous place within it. The koan with which I started nicely shows that. After Tao Wu make the reaching for a pillow analogy, Yun Yan says, “I understand.”

Tao Wu said, “How do you understand it?
Yun Yan said, “All over the body are hands and eyes.”
Tao Wu said, “You have said quite a bit there, but you’ve only said eighty percent of it.”
Yun Yan said, “What do you say, Elder Brother.”
Tao Wu said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes.”

The younger monk gets it, but he’s still skimming the surface. The older monk attests to his experience that the eyes and hands of compassion permeate every cell of one’s body; that they are every atom of this vast universe. This is small mind manifesting as Great Mind.

Our Zen practice nudges and supports this awakening to and trust in Great Mind in multiple ways:

• Through zazen, in which we allow small mind to relax, step back, and rest in Great Mind.
• Through koans, if we take up that practice. Small mind wants to approach them as puzzles or dilemmas, but we discover that satisfying responses to them don’t originate from small mind.
• Through ritual, chants, and other forms in which we enter the stream of activity of Great Mind, moving, vocalizing, and giving of ourselves.
• Through sangha, in which we can discover the Bodhisattva of Compassion in our midst.
• Through the Precepts, which help us know how to harmonize small mind with Great Mind in those situations in which our experience of sangha—of community—is most at risk.
• Through service, from which we can discover there is no distinction among giver, receiver, and gift.