An Incense Stick

              The room is subdued, ready for the Venerable’s talk. Lights are dimmed in the warm summer night to prevent the participants from being too hot. I settle myself into the Venerable’s words and his presence.  And every time he comes to our meditation center in Toronto, it is like going home again. It is also like awakening from a dream. Another analogy I am perhaps ashamed to use is that of a young man who thinks he’s ready to do things on his own, only to find himself having to return to the path again and again. I am the stray cat who keeps having to go back to the words of Dharma until he can finally understand.

                Why is it strange to say that this mind I use to write is wisdom mind? Why is it weird to say that the mind I use to eat, to sleep, to talk, is the wisdom mind? It is a little like discovering that I am breathing air. But to really and truly know it is both immediate and at the same time a revelation.  At that point, I begin to realize that I don’t need to contort the mind to appear ‘calm’ or ‘settled’ or ‘profound’. The mind cannot be squeezed into a mold. It is quite simply that which must be for all the events, phenomena and experiences to occur. So why do I believe that I can find the mind in a particular thought? Venerable mentioned that there is always a choice between wisdom and vexation mind. It never depends on anything around me, on what is being said, or on who says it. This shifts the focus away from the content and toward the deeper experience of who is listening.

                I believe that in Venerable’s talk, everything is flowing from the principle that all the phenomena are within mind. It is not 30 different minds in front of me when I lead the session on Living Chan tomorrow. Rather, it is just mind engaging mind. I don’t need to appeal to any other mind or ‘connect’ ‘my’ mind with yours in some complicated way. For you to read this requires an already unified experience of thoughts. It is not that the thought connects someone else’s thought to create a new thought. All thought is arising in the same source. But as soon as I think I am talking to someone else, a delusion is created. It is the delusion of present thought arguing with the previous thought. I take the previous thought to be separate from ‘present me’ and then start discriminating previous from current thought.  This is like someone who keeps building a ‘better’ sandcastle and then ruthlessly cutting down the previous sandcastle which she too had made. We forget that both castles emerge from the same being.

And the whole of our inner talk becomes structured around this delusion. When I am talking with someone, can I see that the person, the body, and the thoughts are all part of the same mind? If I don’t treat these as separate, how might the experience be different? Rather than trying to locate the other person, I might try to locate the original mind that is having this experience. Keeping this in front of me, I won’t be ensnared by the trap of arguing with the previous thought.

                What goes against the grain of mind is the tendency to separate my current thought from the previous thought, and then to call the current thought the ‘real’ self. This also seems to happen with the sense of the body as being mine. We are constantly engaged in these dualities. But the true function of mind is not to win over or reign supreme in relation to others. It is more of a way we harmonize with the present situation and try not to assign a self to anything we experience, be it feelings, thoughts, etc. As I heard the Venerable say this, I started to think that this means not trying to defend this current thought as ‘myself’ and then using it to disparage other thoughts. In fact, all of this is me! I don’t need to pick and choose one over the other.

                In Buddhism, there is a comparison that is often used to explain who first and second thought engage each other, and that is the incense stick. (I think this analogy came from the Questions posed to Buddha by King Milinda). If I spin a lighted incense stick around, I see the incense stick as a circle rather than as different points in time. And from that connecting of previous to present thoughts, I presume that the circle is real. But is it? We can say that the phenomena of the incense stick always exists in mind no matter what position it is in, but is it the same stick over time? And does one moment of its movement connect with the other? Actually, the incense stick is in constant movement. And is it really the same one as what I saw in the previous position?

                How do I apply this to daily life? I think the way to do it is to see that the interconnections of the moments of the incense stick do not come from the stick itself. It comes from mind. But if I start to think that the stick is a circle, I begin to cling to the illusion of an external form that endures over time and is the source of all things. The circle represents the ‘self’. It is the mind’s tendency to habitually associate different moments in a fictitious whole. To break that, I have to shift away from connecting the present and previous thoughts, and seeing the deeper interconnection of all phenomena. In this way, I am free from the habitual and can start to see how I get caught in those attachments to forms.