Silent Illumination- A Few Notes

 I attended a class today about Silent Illumination practice hosted by GuoShing Shi, one of the monastic teachers at Dharma Drum Mountain. I have to say that I learned quite a bit, and the class inspired me to explore a little bit about Silent Illumination. Master Sheng Yen apparently wrote three books about Silent Illumination practice, two of which have been translated into English. One of them, Method of No Method, was the basis for Fashi's lecture, and it seems destined to be one of my favorite classics. I was heartened to see it on my bookshelf, rather than missing among several other books (I am still wondering what happened to my copy of Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics and Morals, as well as one of Michel Foucault's books about the birth of hospitals. Perhaps a graveyard for missing books lies somewhere out there!).
    What impressed me in particular about Fashi's talk is that she really delved into this notion of having a practice, and what that means. She even asked the participants point blank, what is practice? Many people have their own view of what practice means. Some answers that emerged from the audience included "meditation", "mindfully being in the moment"; "wholeheartedly doing", or "being present with the current action." While these ideas have their points, Fashi chose to focus on the practical and social benefits, including the ability for Buddhist practice to promote clarity of mind, ability to communicate reasonably with everybody, as well as ability to recognize emerging states of being before they manifest.
    What emerged from the early discussion for me is that practice needs to appeal to a person from one day to the next; otherwise, it is never 'practiced'! What makes practice appealing, according to Fashi, is how its foundation rests in relaxation. Without a relaxed mind and body, meditative practice is next to impossible, because it never really gets to a deeper place. In Silent Illumination in particular, there is an emphasis on unifying mind and body in order to eventually let go of all distinctions between 'me', and 'not me', or between 'this body' and 'that world'. Fashi really emphasized how important this letting go truly is to the practice of Silent Illumination in particular. Unlike other practices where there is a tangible object of focus and exertion, Silent Illumination emphasizes a kind of method-less stripping down to the elements of experience, without forming any attachments or connections between successive ideas.
   In my next blog, I will explore a little bit about the stages of Silent Illumination.