The Beautiful Gaze

  We sometimes imagine that people see "right through us". I wonder if you have ever experienced that idea where a person was able to pierce deeply into the darkest part of you and reveal something you never realized before. In fact, such kind of ideas are often projections that we imagine on others. When someone scowls at us, such as when they are cut off in traffic or rush past us, we might bring our minds back to the memory of when, as small children, a look was more than just a look. Those were the days when our survival often seemed to depend on being able to discern whether a face is loving or threatening; life sustaining or life-terminating!

   What I tried to say is: there is a reason why the human gaze is often studied and becomes a token of power. An authority figure can overpower us simply through a look (which can provoke anxiety), because looking so deeply comes to represent knowledge. A parental figure can punish a child simply through an unloving look, which can in turn remain with that child even well into adulthood. It's sometimes our task in adulthood to understand that the gaze is often only a display, and has nothing to do with who we are fundamentally. If we aren't able to understand the gaze in this way, it will paralyze and overpower us, and we can be gripped with a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia.

   Human gaze can serve the evolutionary function of a warning, but many people naturally have a sad or somber gaze, perhaps from many years of suffering. This is where the gaze has outworn its purpose, and what started out as a single expression soon becomes deep and hard grooves in the forehead, cheeks and mouth. This is where even a look from a stranger becomes confusing. We can never tell whether those hard lines are from exhaustion, disapproval, or simply neutrality. There is often a tendency to over-read these things.

   From a Buddhist perspective, everyone has a beautiful gaze. It's only because I dislike certain faces that I label them, judge them or want to reject them. I confuse the surface with the reality which is infinite. But because mind beholds all faces and can create an infinite range of expressions, no single expression ever scars the surface of the mind or creates a single wrinkle in the mind's surface. The mind is so infinitely pliable that it never requires a single moment of cosmetic surgery. It is like the softest rubber imaginable. A person's face, no matter how angry or resentful, cannot scar my Buddha nature. There is no gaze so powerful that it can pierce or break the mind. All gazes are phenomena precisely of mind, lacking in the nature of I and You. But we need to practice this, and not wait for a rainy day to do it. Practice in front of the mirror. Then in front of strangers. What is this gaze? Who is the seer? Who is the seen?

Trust in Mind

  What does it mean to trust in mind? I heard this expression during our Buddhist study group today, and I would like to elaborate on it a bit. I specifically had a follow up question and that is, what is the difference between trusting mind and trusting "self" or "ego"? How do we know that we are trusting the original mind and not the ego or the self that we think we are or sometimes identify with (especially the persona)? As I suggested during the meeting today, it's only when we let go of wanting to know the answer to "what is mind" that we can trust in mind. This is a weird paradox that I will describe in more detail.

    We know that when we practice huatou, we are asking a question for which consciousness cannot come up with a cogent answer. As soon as I answer the question "Who is reciting the Buddha's name?" by saying "me" or "I", I have already reduced the answer to a thought object. Anything we say about "I" or the self is going to take the form of language, thought, an image, or something else that we can reduce to the status of something seen or understood. This I is something that I am actively trying to grasp or control: it's like an acting role that I am continually trying to refine by editing parts here and there, just to make it look good or to somehow curate it as a viable answer to the question.

   Whatever the mind is, it's something that cannot be grasped. The mind is what I use to see, hear, and even to type these words. Were I to try to reduce the mind to a bunch of words on a page, this would be similar to the eye trying to see itself. Now, if I were to mistakenly define the mind, is it the true mind itself that makes the utterance, or is it a "false", deluded mind? In fact, regardless of whether the mind says the correct answer or not, it's always the true mind that answers the question. We are simply confused because we take the words as the answer, similar to how we confuse the finger with the moon.

    Trust in mind comes precisely when we realize that the words don't matter as much as the mind behind the words. When I am confident that the mind I use to type these words is the true mind, then what words I type matters less than the spirit in which I am typing the words: the confidence that the source of these words is, in fact, the true mind. This is a bit like looking down at a frozen pond in the winter, and deducing that the dark moving shapes just below the surface must be living beings. The words are like the puppet, so there must be a puppeteer somewhere, and this is precisely what the words are pointing directly to, whether we use huatou or not.

     This is to say that as long as I don't confuse the finger with the moon, then what I say to people and how I act around them will have a certain dignified confidence. I don't need to know where this confidence is from because I am not fixated on making an appearance. My only motivation is to somehow show the fish shapes swimming underneath the surface of frozen water. That means, I don't need to be so ostentatious, or good with words, or ornate. I have the confidence of knowing where the finger is pointing, without needing to paint my fingernails a pretty glossy color.

   The true mind is a form of living grace. We are never out of the grace of mind, because nothing can never be away from mind itself. It's only when I get stuck on words, thoughts, images from mind that I start to create some pretty strange karma. To put it in a different way: instead of being a transmitter of infinite radio signals, I start to mistakenly think that I wrote and performed all those radio songs myself. I stop admiring my ability to be a transmitter of signals, and instead, put all my hopes on claiming ownership of the songs being transmitted. This is where the self begins. It confusedly thinks that the songs belong to it, and that it creates the sounds, when in fact, sounds are only causes and conditions. We are all receivers of the noise of the universe. The noise is beautiful as long as we stop thinking in terms of "my noise", "your noise", etc.

    

Treat Others as One's Own Thoughts

     When we are in retreat, we are typically told that we should behave as though it were only "ourselves" who are on retreat, and not others. What does this mean? I think it suggests that we would arouse a gentle attitude toward others, as though they were our thoughts. It also entails that I do not treat other beings as distinct from me. Otherwise, I am only projecting onto others what is actually just my own mental habits. How we see others is often not so much related to others as it is related to how we relate to our own thoughts. Do we treat thoughts as things to be afraid of, as "solid" things, or as parts of a connected whole? Do we feel afraid or threatened by our own thoughts, or do we see them as passing things that, like clouds, will dissipate and form others? Only when we see beyond duality can we know that thoughts are both useful and insubstantial: useful in the sense of giving us information, but insubstantial in the sense of being fleeting. When we relate to thoughts from this latter perspective, we are seeing things come and go in a soft way.

   There is a story that Master Sheng Yen recollects in Day 3 of the second meditation retreat recounted in his book Sword of Wisdom, in which a mother instructs her daughter to hug a monastic whom she has supported, and then ask him how he feels after hugging him. The mother, upon hearing his reaction "like a dry stick leaning against a cold cliff", chases the monastic out with a broom and burns his hut down. Master Sheng Yen remarks about this story that the monk "had isolated himself from people and the external environment, but he had become attached to his isolation. He had not succeeded in transcending disturbances within his own mind" (p.55).

What does it mean that the monk didn't succeed in going beyond his own mental disturbances? One way of thinking about it is that the monk has discriminating mind. He sees the daughter as someone that he is not supposed to have feelings for as a monk. What he really should have asked himself is, how do I relate to the daughter? We use thoughts to relate to people, and thoughts are often based on comparisons. The solution would have been not to be afraid of the daughter hugging him, but to see that the entire experience consists of mental formations. Had the monk realized the empty nature of these formations, he would not have responded coldly to the daughter. There would have been no need for him to cultivate distance from something that was already coming from his own mind.

Meditating on Rocks

  In my recent trip to Scarborough Campus at U of T, I marveled at what was called a "rock walk"-- a kind of prosaic walk through some of Canada's geology. I started to reflect on my early fascination with rocks, and how that came to evolve. Geology took the form of early trips to the beach with my dad, collecting rocks (or what sometimes turned out to be fossilized glass) in these big jars that I took home with me. I think that I was as much interested in the physical forces impinging on the rocks as I was on the actual substances themselves. For instance, it amazed me that molten lava could harden in the air to form igneous rocks, after having been buried deep within the ground at a super-hot temperature that liquifies the rock. I was also quite intrigued by how limestone can contain fossils for millions of years, and how the forces of erosion can shape rocks into various shapes that form valleys, cliffs and even mountains. This would truly make an interesting study that can take a lifetime to learn.

   Substances lose their interest very quickly. Rocks that were part of a valued collection soon enough become dusty and unobserved artifacts, like those paperweights we used to have (when we had paper, of course). The only "use" I might have for a rock is to gently massage it when I am anxious, as this gives me a strong sense of solidity and grounding in the present. The point is: when something is taken out of its context, it easily becomes a kind of disembodied artifact, lacking in sense and even "fossilized" by its detachment from other things. To truly understand a rock is to see its relationships engraved upon its surfaces. Geologists don't just study rocks as "things" that sit on the ground: they see, rather, the universe reflected in the rocks themselves, giving them clues about the age of the earth and the kinds of periods that the earth must have gone through for that particular formation to manifest, including the ice age.

   When it comes to rocks and "emptiness", I would have to say that emptiness is the sense of everything containing everything else. The rock contains a record of all things: wind, soil, mountains, erosion, sun, water, living forms...all the things that have acted upon it to make it what is appears to be now. It takes a certain kind of inquiry to see that kind of emptiness: a rock is not "just a rock" that is inanimate, but more so, contains a spirit, a being, an aliveness, that we see by looking at its contours, where it has been and what happened to it. At the same time, this requires that a living and alive mind penetrate beneath the "thingness" of the rock to see its animate nature. Even Schopenhauer was able to see that rocks were animate: they change, they exist, they live, just as we live, and they don't possess a static form any more than we do. But to recognize all this requires that we open up to our own connection with it, and let curiosity see beyond the "thingness" that we can easily reduce things to.

Sixty Percent!

   I used to hate getting C pluses in school. There was a time when I was in 7th grade where I was essentially a B and C student, with perhaps the exception of English. I didn't like it but at the same time, I didn't know that I could achieve an A given some diligence and motivation. I later learned the value of self-motivation and study, and I was able to get straight As throughout high school and university. However, this does not translate to getting "A's" in life and beyond.

   Venerable Chang Yuan related how, in his capacities as a monastic, he is often assigned the task of "fix it" person, doing repairs in the center. He mentioned, rather jokingly, that he is only getting "60%" in terms of the quality of what he does. Venerable comforted me at that moment. I am sure that he is underestimating his abilities, but what moved me was the fact that he is still able to perform his duties as best as he can, without worrying that he is at "60 per cent". This is indeed quite heartening--and it suggests that he doesn't excessively crave the praise or the feeling of satisfaction that comes from achieving such grades.

   There is a lot of pressure to "be" somebody in this human world. We certainly don't see it that much in animals or even ghosts, but we see that desire in humans: the desire to achieve, to stand out, to appear as somebody and not "nobody". Being average entails the threat of eventual abandonment or replacement by someone who is "above average". So we do violence to ourselves by saying we are not good enough and need to continually better ourselves, unless that betterment comes from the heart.

 I am convinced it comes from school and childhood. I wonder if my fascination with education and pedagogy comes from my struggles with the concepts of success and failure in life, and how I desperately want to revise them. The boy (or young man) who cried about getting a 79% --in front of his peers--is a boy that needed a different view of life. The grade strangled him, made him emotionally stunted. It can happen to anyone, truly. But Fashi reminded me that the meaning of work is not about achievement or promotion. It's actually about learning to accept when we are 60%, when we are 40%, and know that the 100% is because we got a lot of support from someone or somewhere. That is--don't cling to ideas of success or failure, but treat every experience as a gradual learning process with no fixed end or outcome. Then, indeed, as Ven Chang Yuan put it, I can be a "happy boy" all my life.