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.
True practice is to face and accept one's feelings, not to ignore or numb them; otherwise, religion becomes an opiate that suppresses emotions. The fact is that emptiness and real feelings coexist. The goal of practice is not to numb or hypnotize oneself but to reduce attachment to these phenomena by recognizing their emptiness, thus facing real-world problems with more composure and wisdom, rather than ignoring the problems and responsibilities of the real world.
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