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Satori, as we know, is not the crowning of an ultimate success but of an ultimate defeat. The consciousness of always having been free appears in us when we have exhausted all the attempts, all the training, that we believe may be capable of liberating us. If the disciplines could not be paths resulting in satori, that does not mean that they may not be paths to be followed; they are paths leading to blind-alleys, all leading to a unique and ultimate blind-alley; but they are to be followed just because satori cannot be obtained unless we have come up against the end of this last blind alley. They are to be followed with the theoretical understanding that they lead nowhere, so that experience may transform this theoretical understanding into total understanding, into this clear vision which is the arrival in the blind-alley and which lays us open to satori.

-- Hubert Benoit, Zen and the Psychology of Transformation

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At that same time, Yasutani Roshi also recommended that shikantaza, a form of Zen meditation, should be my practice. He went on to say, “Shikantaza is like sitting in the center of a clearing in the forest, knowing that ultimate danger is about to strike, but not knowing what form it will take or from what direction it will come.”

Let us look intently at Yasutani Roshi’s description of shikantaza. We have gone to the forest to sit, presumably to get away from the distractions of the busy everyday world and into a place conducive to quiet meditation. Instead of the usual description of deep calm and peace, however, he describes a situation of life-threatening danger. One might well imagine that this would be the last way to describe an ideal state of meditation. Yet the Roshi used this state as metaphor for the highest mode of zazen — the practice of enlightenment itself. I believe he did this because, at the moment of ultimate danger, the tension between peak alertness and profound stillness is stretched to its taut limit.

As you sit quietly reading, take a moment to imagine that a shocking sound, totally unexpected and dangerously out of place, is suddenly heard nearby, you are not sure from where. Instantly you come to a peak of alertness, at the same time becoming wholly still, scarcely breathing, barely expending an extra iota of energy. You are ready to act instantly. Ten minutes of this intense awareness can be exhausting, combining the absolute height of tension with the deepest inward stillness, creating the near-perfect set of conditions that may open us to enlightenment.

Now feel yourself to be the sitter in the forest. If your eyes shift even momentarily to the left, danger may strike from the right. Even a flick of the eye may divert your full attention. You are not stirring a muscle. Your bodily tension is at once deeply quiet and relaxed and at the same time in a state of balanced, alert order. With virtually no energy dissipated in movement, it is maximally available to perception. With even the smallest movements of eye and voice stilled, there is no support for thought, no inner dialogue. All inner noise has quieted. Attention, neither narrowed and object-directed, nor diffuse as in sleep, nor distracted by internal noise, is now liberated to seek its true center within and to open without. The field of perception has become maximally open and receptive to Being.

In this unmoving pool of perceptual clarity, every event carries primary information and is perfectly processed. In this state of near-perfect order, the most unexpected and unpredictable events are accommodated and integrated to the fullest. I believe it is right here that the measureless moment of enlightenment comes, if it is to come at all; when attention telescopes to point zero at the center and simultaneously opens to infinity at the periphery. Yet neither center nor periphery remains. As the fourteenth century Tibetan, Longchempa, wrote: “One may well burst out in laughter!”

-- Taizan Maezumi Roshi, The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment

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As the sage Jnaneshwar has put it so poetically in his Anubhavamrita, when Prakriti (manifested energy) found that her lord Purusha (the unmanifest Absolute) was without any form, she felt so ashamed that she clothed Him in millions of forms which kept on changing every instant.

-- Ramesh Balsekar, Peace and Harmony in Daily Living

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Meditation is often misunderstood as ‘concentration’ on some word or image, but concentration means excluding everything, rejecting everything. It is a self-centered activity. Meditation really means absolute clarity, which can only come about in the total silence of the mind, not the self-centered concentration. Clarity can only happen when you are not concentrating on something, not when you are excluding everything, but you are merely silently being aware and attentive to every thought, every movement, without trying to correct anything. Meditation truly means clarity: being attentive to every thought, every word, every feeling, every desire, without in the least trying to correct anything according to a pre-conceived pattern.

-- Ramesh Balsekar, Peace and Harmony in Daily Living

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Your thoughts and desires are part and parcel of the mind. The mind is simply fattened by new thoughts rising up. Therefore it is foolish to attempt to kill the mind by means of the mind. The only way of doing it is to find its source and hold on to it. The mind will then fade away of its own accord. Yoga teaches chitta vritti nirodha [control of the activities of the mind]. But I say atma vichara [self-investigation]. This is the practical way. Chitta vritti nirodha is brought about in sleep, swoon, or by starvation. As soon as the cause is withdrawn there is a recrudescence of thoughts. Of what use is it then? In the state of stupor there is peace and no misery. But misery recurs when the stupor is removed. So nirodha [control] is useless and cannot be of lasting benefit.

-- Ramana Maharshi

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Egoocentric conditioning has no energy of its own. It is sustained wholly by our life force. When we are suffering, we can feel our vital energy being drained away into feeling upset or afraid or depressed or resentful. Those are conditioned states, and our conditioning lives in us like a parasite.

When our life force is not going into egocentricity, that vital energy is available for the authentic self. We feel enthusiastic, and there is a sense of ease and well-being. But watch how quickly that well-being is drawn off as egocentricity moves back in, latching onto the energy for its own purposes. Let's say I just had a great meal. “Yeah, but now I need a little something more–candy, maybe, or a drink, or a cigarette.” Or, I did a great job on a project at work. “Well, yes, but my boss didn't give me the praise I deserved, and I'm pretty depressed.” Or, I kept my commitment to meditate thirty minutes every day for a week. “But I'm still not enlightened or even calm and peaceful. I must not be doing it right. I don't have good concentration. Maybe I should take up something different.” Those are the voices of egocentric conditioning. They will never let you rest and just be. They are always urging you to get more, do more, be different.

In Buddhism, an image used for this phenomenon is the “hungry ghost.” A hungry ghost has a gigantic belly and a long, thin neck tapering up to a little head with a tiny mouth. The hungry ghost is constantly trying to take enough in through that little mouth to feed its immense belly. That is the dissatisfaction of egocentricity, always pulling at us–“Do this! Want that! What about this other thing?”–in a futile attempt to satisfy an endless hunger. If we pay attention to that process in ourselves, we will see that it is pretty much a full-time occupation.

Much more important to observe is how that process happens inside our heads. Imaginary scenes, complete with voices and images, take us out into the future or back into the past and produce predictable emotional responses. As soon as one scene fades, along comes the next thing to get stirred up about.

In case you were wondering if this is a crackpot notion from a Californian who took a wrong turn, let me point out that it is actually part of what the Buddha taught, as an explanation for what goes on in this life we are living. Craving and grasping at one experience after another is part of an endless cycle of dissatisfaction. The Buddha described the cycle in detail, and you can observe it within yourself. Watch how energy shifts within you, how you are taken to a point of upset; then your attention attaches to something else, and you are taken to another point of upset, on and on through the day. Notice how that pattern of energy building and dissipating recurs more or less constantly in your life.

-- Cheri Huber, Sweet Zen

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There are times when we are in Hell, and other times when Hell is in us. When we are low, humbled, depressed, made to feel small and empty, and we fight desperately to rise above this condition, then truly Hell lies within. But when this interior Hell is faced, clearly seen, accepted, and patiently attended to without protest, it is already half way to becoming Heaven. At last we give up the struggle and relax, consciously becoming this very emptiness which is gnawing at our heart: and behold, a wonderful transmutation! Fully seen and entered into, the aching void within turns out to be remedy for all our pain, the Great Void, Reality itself. uffering drives us to become what we are. It forces Self-knowledge upon us, and our misery is relieved. But we soon forget the lesson. Again and again our misplaced hopes revive—our false hopes in our false selves. Facing in instead of out, we wilfully overlook our voidness or nonentity, and of course Hell breaks out all over again. How tragically slow we are to learn by experience that there is only one experience—namely, experience of the Experiencer here and now—which is not, in the end, bitter experience!

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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The Seer is one who, ceasing to imagine what he hopes or fears he may be, has the courage to look at what he is. After all, in so far as mystical experience is healthily genuine, it is only superior realism concerning our nature. No wonder, then, that mystics tend to make use of the Mandala—the symbol which is also a map. Tantric kyilkhors or meditation diagrams, the Golden Flower of the Taoists, the elaborate emanation systems of Neoplatonism, Dante’s Mystic Rose, and St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, are instances.

The last of these is particularly interesting. St. Teresa pictures the soul as formed of a single diamond or perfectly transparent crystal, but containing many mansions, with God’s dwelling at the centre. Ordinarily, we live in the outer court, unhappily ignorant of what lies within. But when, by prayer and meditation, we turn our attention towards the centre, we find our interior castle to be immense. As we progress through its concentric mansions, a delicious sense of interior recollection comes over us; our breath seems to cease; we seem quite bodiless. At length we know a self-forgetfulness so complete that we seem not to exist at all: there remains only the empyrean heaven, a dazzling cloud of light, in the very centre of our souls.

No doubt the Saint intended this to be taken as a parable, a picture in space of spiritual things which are out of space. She and her nuns would scarcely have welcomed the suggestion that these concentric courtyards or mansions are located precisely out there in the regions where we are more or less human, and their centre is located precisely here at the spot where we cease to be anything at all, and Reality shines alone and unhindered. Nevertheless the Interior Castle is effective as a religious symbol because it is also (in spite of its designer’s conscious intentions) a diagram of what we are in cold fact, visibly, in this very room and at this very moment.

Whether we move into the next room, or go out for a walk, or shoot off to the Moon, we take this Castle with us everywhere. Its outer courts are always ranged about us over there, region by region, and we are always safe here at the bright Centre.

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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“Mankind,” says Jung, “has never lacked powerful images to lend magic aid against the uncanny, living depths of the world and the psyche. The figures of the unconscious have always been expressed in protecting and healing images and thus expelled from the psyche into cosmic space.” Of these beneficent images the Mandala is the most potent and universal. Indeed it is not to be despised, this wonderful gift to ourselves from ourSelf, this handy Self-portrait, this fascinating model or educative toy, from which we may learn more easily the difficult lesson of what we are.

Let us take a few examples. First, a profoundly numinous nursery rhymes:

This is the Key of the Kingdom In that Kingdom is a city; In that city is a town; In that town there is a street; In that street there winds a lane: In that lane there is a yard; In that yard there is a house; In that house there waits a room; In that room an empty bed; And on that bed a basket— A Basket of Sweet Flowers: Of Flowers, of Flowers; A Basket of Sweet Flowers.

In unpoetic language, my approaching observer, advancing through all my regional appearances, does not find the expected man: his bed is empty. Like us all, he is out, and has never been in. So the observer backs away:

Flowers in a Basket; Basket on the bed; Bed in the chamber; Chamber in the house; House in the weedy yard; Yard in the winding lane; Lane in the broad street; Street in the high town; Town in the city; City in the Kingdom— This is the Key of the Kingdom. Of the Kingdom this is the Key.

Certainly we have here, in charming figurative language, the Key of the Kingdom of Heaven that is within us—the Kingdom that is smaller than the tiniest seed yet larger than the greatest of trees. The Chandogya Upanisad puts it like this: “In this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. One should know what is there. What is there? Why is it so important? There is as much in that little space as there is in the whole world outside.” In other words, each of us is a nest of boxes, with nothing in the last box—but that nothing contains the whole nest of boxes.

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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Reality is too easy to see, too evident: we cannot bear such transparency. Plainness and simplicity are the last things the religious man wants: he craves complication and obscurity, words by the million, intricate pictures, puzzles of every kind—something really hard to get his spiritual teeth into. He cannot bite onto the Void, but demands a substantial diet: food for thought, stimulants for the pious imagination, doctrinal pabulum to digest and assimilate—anything which promises to fill the bottomless Abyss and conceal him from himSelf.

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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Tibetan Buddhism is particularly specific and detailed on the subject of “Visualizing the Physical Body as Vacuous”. This is the title of one of the exercises, in which the disciple is expected to see himself as “internally altogether vacuous like the inside of an empty sheath, transparent and uncloudedly radiant, vacuous even to the finger-tips, like an empty tent of red silk, or like a filmy tube distended with breath.”

Hollowness, again, is the central notion of Taoism. The Tao itself is hollow and limpid. It is seen in the still nave of the wheel, without which it could not turn; in the nothing a pot fits round, and which makes it a pot; in the empty space within the walls of a house, and the really useful part of it; and above all in the Sage himself, whose motto is “To become full, be hollow” or “What is most perfect seems to have something missing”. This Hollowness is his indestructible wealth, his refuge, his immortality.

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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Hui-Neng, following the Prajnaparamita philosophy, was fond of saying that from the first, not a thing exists: our self-nature is absolutely pure and empty.

Nevertheless a number of his followers made a something of this purity, and started looking in themselves for it, as if it were a separate entity from the one who is looking, an ethereal and transparent object of some kind. Again, the idea of the Void, or sunyata, which is basic in Mahayana Buddhism, is always tending to become an idea of something attainable, something to practise and make a habit of, something to treasure and get attached to, something to believe in and argue about and make a dogma of and use for purposes of self-affirmation: in short, it is always turning into its very opposite, and only resulting in more misery and bondage instead of release.

And so the Mahaprajnaparamita has good reason to include, as the fourth of its eighteen varieties of emptiness, the emptiness of emptiness itself, the voidness of the very notion of voidness. Every support has to be thrown aside, every hold relaxed, every idea exploded, every possession given up, every point of reference lost, every retreat cut off, and indeed every abandonment abandoned. Only then are we stripped quite naked, and ready to take the final plunge into the abyss of our own nothingness.

Only then, in other terms, are we simple and childlike enough to stop thinking and look at what we are. The scales of thought fall from our eyes: we are no longer blind to the obvious; we enjoy what Suzuki calls the simplest possible experience, “because it is the very foundation of all experiences.” Not that the truly simple is either common or easy: as Suzuki points out, “It requires the highest degree of intellectual perspicuity to look into Reality in its suchness and not to weave around it subjectively-constructed meshes.”

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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It is one of the merits of Buddhism that it has, more than other religions, refused to attribute to Reality any virtues or qualities at all, however abstract or basic. It follows the negative path of the mystics to the very end—if there were an end. This is because final release, the removal of every doubt and defilement and karmic effect, can only be had (as the Itivuttaka, a Pali scripture, puts it) “in the destruction of the substratum.” The idea of Reality, as something specific and contrasted with Unreality, as something to hold on to, has to go. Plunging down and down into ourselves, we meet no obstruction whatever, no utmost limit or floor, nothing that can be thought about or named. We see that we are absolutely unconditioned: not merely free from the blemish of selfhood, but of being as distinct from non-being. “Even oneness itself remains not,” says Seng-t’san (d. 606): it turns out to be yet another artificial, mind-made limitation, an impurity that has to be washed away.

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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Ordinarily, my so-called waking life is a dream, a trance. My attention, absurdly detached from its source and centre here, is fastened upon the surrounding world, upon the phenomena of my periphery, as if these images were self-supporting and independent of me. I regard them as real, and myself as unreal. It is as though, incurably long-sighted, this observer could never bring himself into focus, but must always over-look his own existence here and now. We all suffer from this astonishing defect of vision: as I walk in the street, I note around me the preoccupied and absent faces intent upon the other faces, the clothes, the shop windows, the cars—intent upon anything and everything but the faceless one who is intent. We live off-centre, as if we had no centre. We cannot face ourselves.

It is desperately difficult to wake from this dream. Courage is needed, and great persistence. As the Katha Upanisad puts it: “God made sense turn outward: man therefore looks outward, not into himself. Now and again a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.”

To reverse this centrifugal tendency of mine, I have to break a life-long habit. Turning inwards, I must move against the outflowing stream and boldly make for its source. Everything short of this inmost well-spring and centre of mine, everything—no matter how excellent—which is peripheral, is to be passed by. “The true Buddha sits in the interior,” says the Zen master Chao-chou T’sung-shen (778-897). “Bodhi and Nirvana, Suchness and Buddha-nature—all these are outer clothings, defilements… Ever since my interview with this old man, I am no other person than myself—I am master of myself. It does not profit you to seek this man in the outside world. When he is right here do not fail, by turning round and looking the ‘wrong’ way, to interview him.”

LOOK IN! This vital turning round or true conversion, though variously described in different religious traditions, is insisted upon by all the great teachers. It is what the Chandogya Upanisad calls “finding your way back into yourself”; what the Taoist Secret of the Golden Flower calls “the backward flowing movement, looking inwards at the room of the ancestors”; what Plotinus calls “withdrawing into yourself and looking”; what the Zen master Neng of Yun-chu calls “throwing your light inwardly, to see by yourself what is this body of yours, this mind of yours”; what Kabir calls “entering into your own body.” In fact, as Kabir points out, you discover there “neither body nor mind… You shall find naught in that emptiness. Be strong, and enter into your own body: for there your foothold is firm. Consider it well, O my heart! go not elsewhere. Kabir says: ‘Put all imaginations away, and stand fast in that which you are.’”

”It is true that those who have dared to turn round and gaze within do not always describe what they find as the Void, or Emptiness: it may appear rather as Light, or the true Self, or Pure Consciousness, or God. Thus St. Augustine: “Being admonished to return to myself, I entered even into the secret chamber of my soul… And I beheld with the eye of my soul the Light unchangeable.” And Ramana Maharshi: “If the mind is turned in, towards the Source of illumination, objective knowledge ceases, and the Self alone shines as the Heart… We are to dive in to the Self.” But what no serious seeker here has ever found is a head, or a body, or any thing. “In this kind of seeing,” says The Secret of the Golden Flower, when the eye looks inwards, “one only sees that no shape is there.” This is where nothing human or phenomenal can survive. In the splendid language of the Mundaka Upanisad: “As rivers lose name and shape in the sea, wise men lose name and shape in God, glittering beyond all distance.”

-- Douglas Harding, Zen Experience: A Western Approach

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A certain priest has said, “All you do is repeat the same things day after day. You ought to give your listeners a change. Their minds will be more receptive if you throw in some stories about the Zen masters of the past.”

Dull-witted as I am, I think if I put my mind to it, I could probably remember a couple of anecdotes to tell people. But that would be like feeding them poison. I don’t want to do that.

I never cite the Buddha’s words or the words of Zen patriarchs when I teach. All I do is comment directly on people themselves. That takes care of everything. I don’t have to quote other people. So you won’t find me saying anything about either the “Buddha Dharma” or the “Zen Dharma.” I don’t have to, when I can clear everything up for you by commenting directly on you and your personal concerns right here and now.

—Bankei, THE RYŪMON-JI SERMONS

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—Ramesh Balsekar