Directly Going Forward

 Master Boshan's "Exhortations on Investigating Chan" (collected in Master Sheng Yen's Attaining the Way) offers quite a bit of sage advice, not only about Chan practice but about life in general. I started re-reading this book today, and I would like to share a few ideas.
    Going into a method like huatou requires a certain kind of directness in confronting life's struggle and existential dilemma. Part of what holds people back, according to Master Boshan, is the sense of looking to others for confirmation or approval. Master Boshan remarks:

Do not step haphazardly; do not stand still. Give rise to no other thoughts, and don't count on the help of others..with no other thoughts and refusing to halt, just directly dash forward (p.7)

As I was reading this short passage, I thought: even for non-practitioners who are unfamiliar with Chan, this kind of suggestion is quite useful and helpful. For one, it points to the tendency that people might have of holding back their deepest energies, in expectation of someone to help. What often happens in cases like these is that a person loses their determination to "dash forward" and to overcome their existential anguish, because they are still assuming that "someone else" knows what they're doing. It is as though one forever ignored the voice within them in favor of a fictional expectation that someone else has the answers to one's deepest questions. In fact, I believe that this expectation is both a desire and a fear: a desire to be relieved of the stress of life through the stroking of others, coupled with the fear of rejection or, worse still, being deemed somehow "irrelevant" by others. How did the views of others take such a powerful hold on us in the first place? Again, fear and desire seem to play a key role in these situations.
  The second part of Boshan's exhortation has to do with dropping thoughts to arouse a genuine doubt sensation.Sometimes this might seem esoteric, but I see it more as coming to realize one's nose. A nose is not a spectacular thing, and it often gets overlooked among life's details, but if one truly discovers that "this is my nose", everything will cease to be taken for granted, because everything is in the unfolding moment. If I am swept away in identifying with my thoughts, I am not in charge of my life, but if I know that this mind is in this moment, then I do not get caught up in abstractions.

Sheng Yen (2006). Attaining the Way. Boston:: Shambhala