Knowing and Not Knowing

I was using huatou method of asking the question “What is Wu?” during the meditation session this morning. This practice is quite tricky at times because there is not much to hold onto while asking the question of what is ‘nothingness’. And there were times when I did experience frustration in the process, as I began to realize that there is no object of ‘knowing’  in this question. The question itself becomes an interrogation into the meaning of ‘knowing’ and ‘searching’ for what is to be known.

To know: what is there to know? Maybe I can begin by exploring this question a bit. Whenever I seek to know something, am I not creating a kind of object in my mind: something to be seen, felt, heard, etc.? This becomes hard to do when we start to talk about mind. First of all, there are not really any empirical qualities attached to mind, so the search for mind in this way can seem a bit strange. Second of all, mind seems to be the basis upon which all observations arise, so it seems odd to try to look for the mind, the way one does look for an object.

“Wu” is a method where I start to investigate that which cannot be known as an object, or that which is the basis for all knowledge of subject and object. But no sooner do I start to practice it, and I become frustrated by my inability to try to know that which has no object. But today, I started to realize that perhaps this question is more like a process than a result. The process is to let go of the search for mind in an object of mind, but it is also recognizing a subtle mystery. If knowing “What is Wu?” cannot entail finding an object that can be said to be mind, I wonder what kind of knowing we use to know what is wu? I think this is the direct awareness that only mind is capable of. But maybe it is a knowledge I am frightened of, because I am used to subject/object as the way of knowing.

Letting go of subject/object seems to be the only way to resolve the question, but what does this letting go look like? It may be a kind of process of unknowing, where the mind is no longer drawn in by dualism but keeps waiting to see its own process. But it is not easy to get out of this special kind of dualistic knowing that I engage in every day. I think part of the challenge is to relate that there is another way of knowing, and I can never know that way through the mindset of subject and object.