Chan is a spiritual practice.
It’s not about releasing stress. It’s not about improving your mind so that you
can do better at work, or improve your interpersonal relationships. It’s not about healing your body and making
you feel more comfortable. Chan is a spiritual
practice.
Chan can be compared to a cake. The cake has a very delicious, very
nutritious, and very wonderful filling in the center, surrounded by very
delicious cake with wonderful icing on the top. If you focus on releasing stress, healing the
body, and clarifying the mind, you are only tasting the icing. You are missing the cake, and you never get
close to even realizing what a wonderful filling it has inside.
Chan practice is challenging. It’s not a wonderful,
peaceful, go-to-this-nirvana feeling every time you sit. Anybody who has ever tried Sitting Chan has
experienced pain in their legs. It is very
difficult sometimes, even excruciating. Mental
practice can be just as challenging; just as difficult.
You need more to sustain you, to be able to
get through this practice, than just superficial benefits.
It’s not that you won’t realize these
things. It’s not that you won’t witness
these things. It’s just that you don’t
practice Chan to get these benefits; you get these benefits because you
practice Chan.
There are many reasons why people come to
Chan practice. They may have a lot of
stress in their lives, their job or study may be difficult. They want some release from their stress. They want to find a calmer, more peaceful
place. Perhaps they have other
challenges in their lives that they look to Chan practice for a solution to. They may want to have more self-esteem and
self-confidence from which they can develop interpersonal relationships that
are deeper and more valuable. Or maybe
they have some physical problem that they want to try to find solution to. Finding resolution to these problems through
Chan practice is a very difficult path, if your only motivation is to find a solution
to a problem.
A Japanese sensei of Zen once asked me “Why do you sit and do the seated meditation?”
I gave the answer that I thought she wanted
to hear: “I want to find a peaceful, calm
place. I want to relax and I want to be released from the stress of my job.”
She looked at me and said “This sitting meditation, very difficult,
very challenging. You should go sit on your back porch and drink a beer. You
will find this peaceful place.”
As important as these problems may seem, in
relationship to what Chan practice can provide you, they’re actually very, very
insignificant problems. Chan practice is
interested not in releasing or relieving some temporary problem in this
temporary body. It is interested in
evolving your spirit to be something greater than it was. If we see ourselves as a spiritual being that
has existed long before this body and will exist long after this body, then, there
is an opportunity to evolve, to grow, to become something greater at the end of
this life than we were when we entered it.
Chan practice is challenging. When we sit, the body hurts, the legs hurt,
the back hurts, and the knees hurt, everything becomes very painful, and we
need something to sustain us through that part of the practice. What you will find is that when you sit, and
you breathe, at some point in your practice, you’ll find that you surpass this
physical discomfort, that miraculously in the middle of the meditation, you’ll
realize: it didn’t hurt today. The pain
is gone, and there is something deeper, some deeper place that you went to, in
this practice. The pain is no longer
there. And you have evolved also, you
have realized, you have witnessed surpassing the body. And this becomes the model that you carry
forward.
But surpassing the body is just the first
step; it just gives us some foundation, because you’ll find when you surpass
the body, now you get to deal with the mind. And the mind is infinitely more challenging to
resolve and surpass than the body was. The
mind will raise a million different distractions and will create reasons why
you’re wasting your time, why this is boring, why it hurts, why you’re not
really getting the benefit. The mind
will find many, many reasons to try to find a way to release itself from the
challenge of being trained and eventually surpassed.
If we follow the practice, and don’t try to
short-cut, without trying to do too much too fast, we can use the witness of
surpassing the body. There’s a model for surpassing the mind. We’ll find once you surpass conscious mind,
you’ll get to deal with sub-conscious mind. Everything that you’ve done in your life that
was painful, that was difficult, that was challenging, that you still hold
inside that you haven’t released, you’ll have to go through and re-live that
again. Feel it with the same clarity,
the same emotion, the same hurt, the same challenge, until you’re able to
release it from the sub-conscious. All
of the accumulated karma that you bring into this life, all that you create while
you’re here, you’ll have to purge and purify, and cleanse and cultivate that
also from your being.
When you resolve and surpass body, and when
you resolve and surpass mind—conscious mind and subconscious mind, you’ll find
that, there’s no-longer separation between these aspects of self. That the
wisdom of the body and the wisdom of the mind and the insight of the spirit are
not separate things competing for time, trying to compete for your attention as
you sit. You’ll find that the separation between them dissolves. And this is
when you’ll have the opportunity for deep insight into the self, to be able to
see who you are.
You strip all of these things away, and see
what your true nature is, to truly achieve enlightenment within this lifetime,
true happiness and peace inside that’s not dependant on circumstances or
situations, but evolves of itself from within you.
This is what’s achievable from Chan
practice.
