Lately, I have been feeling that my meditation practice goes right into huatou (generating a question) method. I am not deliberately trying to relax the body from top to bottom, and nor am I even focusing on the body. Tonight, it worked quite well for me, because I was able to sit for an hour without really worrying about the pains in my body. Every so often, I would simply adjust my spine whenever I felt some sensation of compression or tightness, as my spine does tend to tighten a bit over a longer sitting. And I found that I was able to let go of trying to find the 'sweet spot' of comfort in the body. A space opened up in mind where I was able to just see the confusion of the mind as it is. Even striving for an answer to the question seemed non-existent. Only the question, "who is reciting the Buddha's name?" lingered.
I have noticed in myself a tendency not to be able to stay with questions in daily life. I am somehow used to the idea of trying to grasp and answers or desirable states of being to comfort myself when I am confused or don't have a full answer to a challenge I am facing. But what I notice is that the ultimate relaxation is not to answer a question at all, but simply to raise it again and again. By raising a question without trying to answer it, I give myself the mental space to appreciate the real existential confusions that are part of my being. I am not trying to delegate the question to some mundane process, like 'how to make friends' or 'how not to be lonely'. These are just false questions, because they already presuppose that I fully understand the existential questions I wrestle with as a person. Instead of trying to funnel the questions into these mundane sort of conditions or 'problem categories', one can choose the opposite approach of funnelling outward, or driving these smaller questions into a more ultimate question such as "who am I"? Where is the mind? How do I know anything? What is thinking? Who is sitting? etc.
In his book Work as a Spiritual Practice, Lewis Richmond advocates a kind of question generating method where a person tries to suspend her or his tendencies to answer a question using preconceived ideas of what the real question is. He suggests a staged process of working with questions, which I will list below (and which is further described on pages 48 and 49 of Richmond's book):
1) Raise the question- at this stage, the person begins to focus on their emotions and wonders what kind of questions are being signalled by the emotion itself. If I am feeling worried or unsettled, what question might be underneath that state of worry or discomfort? This stage involves framing or possibly seeking a question that may need answering
2) Repeat the question- at this point, the person repeats the question softly to her or himself, without trying to jump in and answer it. I consider this stage to be quite similar to the huatou method as taught by Chan and Zen masters, in the sense that it is appreciating the existence of a question rather than trying to find an answer. According to Chan and Zen, all 'answers' are really just coming from the discriminating mind which separates itself into subject and object. Repeating the question stalls and subverts this process by not being satisfied with a simple answer which isn't really an answer at all.
3) Follow the question- this process involves continually returning to the question at all times of life, in a relaxed manner. Again, the process parallels the huatou method, in the sense that returning to the question incubates a doubt sensation. Richmond recommends embodying the question by somehow tying the question to a specific action like walking or doing some work. Where Richmond's approach departs from huatou method is that he allows the practitioner to change her or his question as needed, and considers the question to be constantly morphing into new forms as one works with the question subconsciously. With huatou practice, on the other hand, one is continually staying on the same question.
4) Settle the question- if one has been persistent enough up to this point, they will have either found an answer to the question or settled the desire to question. Richmond suggests that the question is resolved not through intellectual answers but through fully involving one's being in the question itself. Being fully with one's concerns can also sometimes unearth a deeper or more substantial question than what had been first posed.
I think that there is another advantage to 'staying' with a question that Richmond perhaps doesn't discuss too much in his book. I think that sometimes trying to create an answer too prematurely can only create more vexations. For instance, if I become confident that I know how to answer a question and keep reminding myself of the answer, it is a bit like trying to fit the breadth of a question into a tiny thimble. If questions were so easy to answer that they would only require one or two simple sentences (like 1 + 1 = 2), there would never have been a sense of worry to begin with. So I have found it important to take the feeling of worry seriously, as indicating a series of interlocking unsolved riddles. When I stop grasping a hold of one 'cause' and saying 'this is the reason, and only this', I find that I feel less anxious. It is as though I am appreciating the gravity of my questioning mind, rather than trying to silence questioning through easy, pat answers or 'root causes'.
The other advantage to Richmond's method is that it allows for greater frustration tolerance, particularly when questions appear to be insoluble at the moment. Only when I can stay with a challenging dilemma can I experience its complexity and also be able to know that the confusion is bearable. I can stand to be nothing and take no stand for a while, as I sort out the different threads of my life situation.
Richmond, Lewis (1999), Work as a Spiritual Practice. New York: Broadway Books
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