Angry Determination

During the meditation practice today, there was a point where I practiced a kind of angry determination. If I am not mistaken, this is a term that is used in Master Sheng Yen’s book Things Pertaining to Bodhi (2010). I am not sure how to describe it. I think I just got so tired of feeling that I was drifting in practice or going down the road of simply not being focussed. I tried very hard to keep with Buddha recitation followed by huatou. There came a point where the discomfort of my body changed because I started to feel that the Buddha nature is in the pain itself. There are some sutras which show that there are infinite numbers of Buddhas in the tiniest grains of sand. I believe that the sutra of Samanthabhadra’s vows best describes it:

By the power of this Aspiration of Samantabhadra, /I bow with as many bodies as there are atoms in the pure lands/of all those victorious Buddhas manifest in my mind, and/I pay homage to all of them. (http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/samantabhadra.pdf)

Though this seems so fantastic, it is truly comforting to contemplate the vastness of this analogy. And it certainly helped me to feel that the pain was a part of that wonder. I was no longer trying to dissociate from it, when I started to fathom that this Buddha nature is in the pain itself.

I think that the angry determination comes when I realize how terrible and out of control “I” am without awareness. And someone who is aware of how their thoughts ensnare them in so many ways can often arouse determination just from contemplating their own inability to fully ‘put themselves in order’. This determination, however, is not about trying to force myself against myself. On the contrary, there is an initial giving up that seems to happen before I get to the angry determination. The giving up might mean giving up every mental crutch I have that conveniently puts off the present moment. It just comes when I realize that there is no ‘putting off’ anymore, because the next moment just becomes a reflection of what has arisen in the present moment. If I am not taking care of this moment, then the next will simply be a reflection of how I am in this moment.

But I also think that the anger is not about exertion. It is more of an attitude of not thinking that the future is going to ‘shape’ who I am, and feeling exhausted with the illusion that it will do so. In fact, one of the most pervasive illusions is that which says that who I am just continues indefinitely to no end. It is awareness that allows me to see that only the present attitude will shape who I am. This is another way of saying that the only moment to care for is the moment that is currently in mind. If I imagine some future time when I might ‘get it together’, I am really just adding yet another thought to current awareness. This is not so necessary and it actually ends up draining a lot of thought energy. So I think that in order for the meditative practice to be fruitful, there needs to be this kind of attunement with what is happening inside oneself, at a miniscule level, in a single moment.


References

Sheng Yen (2010) Things Pertaining to Bodhi. New York, NY: Dharma Drum Publications