What is There to Doubt?

 In the course of practice, the most crucial thing is to arouse the "doubt" sensation. What is this doubt? Not knowing where you came from prior to your birth, you have know choice but to wonder where you are from -Master Boshan, p.7 from Sheng Yen, Attaining the Way

The first part of Master Boshan's exhortation relates to birth and where we came from "prior" to our birth. This seems a bit strange, perhaps, because most people don't remember what happened to them before they were born or even how they got to the world. So, what does this "prior to your birth" really entail? To get to this point is really to question what exactly does it mean for anything to be born, for that matter. Is our own sense of existence truly who we are, or is it nothing more than a series of thoughts, ideas and inklings ? How do we know that the "sense" of who we are is truly who we are at the base? I believe that these are the questions that may give rise to doubt.

While on the bus back from the medical clinic, I had this thought: each person on the bus is a universe unto themselves. There is something infinite about everyone's experience on the bus, where we can't even compare one experience to the other. I can try to imagine "empathically" what it might feel like to be someone else based on my imaginative construction of what is means to "wear their clothes", adopt their mannerisms, or take on their expressions, but at the end of the day, there is something irreducible about experience itself. I cannot just take my current "experience" and plant it into someone's body or brain. At the same time, however, I can tell that somehow everyone on the bus must be aware. They must have awareness in order to be able to do what they're doing. This "awareness" seems to be the basis for any kind of experience in general. It's like the movie screen through which all the images are being projected to create a sense of time and space. But I cannot "take on" the awareness of someone else. Awareness can't be broken up into parts, switched and swapped, or treated as an object. Awareness just somehow is, and as such, is not locatable. 

This ground of experience (awareness?) is perhaps what Boshan means by the great doubt, in the sense that we are looking for this fundamental being that came prior to the birth of anything. Even "birth", now that I think of it, is nothing more than a concept to me, because I don't even remember the event of being born. Did mind suddenly come about through birth, or is it just the basis for any birth? These are the kinds of questions that can make us wonder who we really are and what we were before things came into being. 

Another way of putting it is: prior to subject or object formation, who creates the subject? Who creates the object? But where does the urgency to know this come from? It must come from an insight (to go to my previous entry) that birth and death are like a raging fire of suffering from which there is no escape except to get to the root, to go beyond birth and death themselves.