Neither Rushing Nor Still

 Just take tis single thought of shattering the mind of birth and death like a tile that knocks [down] a gate. [You should be like someone] sitting in the midst of a raging fire, wanting to escape. Do not step haphazardly; do not stand still (What Beginning Chan Practitioners Should Know, Master Boshan, from Attaining the Way,p.7)

As I am reading this passage from Master Boshan, I am thinking of a gazelle or even a mountain goat, a chamois, or some other graceful creature that survives through a mincing pace. Such kind of animals require a lithe body and movement that allows them to step over the crags of the narrowest of steppes, while still being able to avoid detection by predators. The combination of "not standing still" yet "not stepping haphazardly" perhaps best embodies this picture.

What do the raging fires represent? Perhaps they represent our ideas. As I was walking today, I thought about how the terms "idea" and "ideation" (as well as "ideal") have a similar root word of "Id", which also connects with identity (the sense of I) and even the mind of the Freudian id which is thought to be the seat of one's primordial wishes and desires. The one thing that is common to all these terms is the fact that they relate to half-formed, relatively fixed thoughts that obsessively recur over and over again. In contrast to unfolding events, ideas are often replays of the same event as a memory in our mind, something that lacks fluidity and might even represent unprocessed trauma or a stale, beaten path. The raging fires, in fact, represent the distracting influence of desirable impressions or ideas that cloud us from seeing the emptiness of all reality, or its unfolding constant nature.

In fact, people often get it backward, assuming that ideas are the only assurance of reality, whereas emptiness signals a kind of "void" or "lack". But its' the fixity of ideas that perhaps Boshan is cautioning us about. If I hold to a comforting idea about where I will be in ten years, or even hold the hopeful impression that I will be promoted tomorrow, little do I realize that I am attaching to a static concept that doesn't reflect the ceaseless nature of things. Instead of realizing that things are in continuous flux, I get stuck on ideas of who I am, a reality "out there" and this becomes a kind of mental prison to me. The only way to break out, says Boshan, is to "shatter the mind of birth and death like a kind of random "tile that knocks down a gate". We can only imagine that such a tile is accidental, because we hardly see such an event happen in everyday life, unless there is a passing wind or a storm.

If I practice with urgency, I know that each time I reinforce the concept of subject and object, self or other, I get deeper into my own delusion of what the world is. I don't go to the source of all being and thinking, which is beyond thought yet contains it at the same time. I suffer from this because I fail to realize how changing the reality actually is. It's like trying to catch water with a sieve. So this idea of not stepping haphazardly, not staying still, requires a kind of hyper alertness: knowing the dreamlike mind, and trying to avoid the reification of mind into objects and subjects.