Every Thought Is Perfect

The One Day Chan meditation retreat lasted from 8 am to 5:30 pm. In the afternoon, I felt the usual symptoms of sitting for a long time: the aches here and there, which affected my concentration. Sometimes the discomfort of that pain did not feel at all bearable, in spite of my redoubled efforts to stay on my method of practice, no matter what. I found that the two effective ways of dealing with pain are questioning, “who is having pain?” and surrendering to compassionate love. I suppose these two approaches are reaching for the same thing. However, I find that in cases of extreme pain or discomfort, compassionate love feels more reassuring, at least in the short term.

What I also noticed this time was that, as I was using huatou, I felt the method becoming more and stranger to me, as though I lost any sense of how I could even pose such a question, much less even come up with a sound answer. After a while, the method had me feeling a bit lost as to how to ask it. It is as though all the ways I pepper that question with a kind of ‘significance’ start to fall away. Is it good or bad to feel a bit disoriented or even disengaged from this method? I suppose I can say both yes and no, from my own experiential perspective on this. It’s good in the sense that any kind of intensive sitting practice is going to throw off any theoretical approaches one tries to inject into it. Eventually, theories become somewhat irrelevant in the face of the raw experiences of discomfort, during intensive meditative sitting. But in another sense, the disengagement resulting from that dryness of huatou concerns me. I think that it might have been the result of the physical discomfort that this disengagement might have arisen.

One thing that helps is to understand that in meditation, what I do or don’t do has no bearing on what true mind is. Thoughts come out perfectly in meditation—not because they are connected to another thought, but the opposite. A thought is perfect insofar as it is part of the mind’s functioning. If I look at it from this analogy that the Venerable uses: the thoughts are the waves while the mind is the ocean. Judging the wave’s substance by its size and shape is not going to get us closer to what the waves is made from. In the practice, it means to try to see the totality of the mind in one emerging thought. It is not hard to do this (quite), because from that analogy, we can say that all waves in the ocean have the same nature of water. But normally, I only see the moving edge of the wave and not the inner substance. Another way of understanding it (on a crude level?) would be to say that thoughts are ‘perfect’ because they are impermanent, always yielding to new thoughts. “Imperfection” emerges as an illusory comparison of thoughts, as though one were to combine two bubbles together.