Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value, avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!
Tao Te Ching, verse 20
Tom’s comments:
Free of thoughts, where are your problems?
We do not need to shun thought in its entirety, just not buy into the suffering it creates through comparison and moral judgement.
We can see through the values, ideals and standards that other people and society dictate to us. We can see through the received wisdom of the day.
We can let go and be real, discover who we truly are – we can discover what it is to be human for ourselves and not simply force ourselves to fit into an ideological mould, no matter how reasonable it sounds. We can be who we are.
And who are we? Are we separate from the world that gave birth to us? Are we separate from the environment that shaped and influences us? Are we wholly good or bad? 0r can good come from bad and vice versa? Can failure lead to success?
I put it to you: all things are interdependent, and no things exist by themselves.
just for the purpose of breaking through obsessions, doubts,
intellectual interpretations & egocentric ideas
Yuanwu (1063-1135)
Tom’s comments:
If there was ever a dogma in Zen Buddhism* (and there is no dogma by the way) it is that there is no fixed Zen teaching. In Yuanwu’s letters, from which this quote was taken, Yuanwu gives us a no frills introduction and foray into the heart of Zen.
And so we hear of zen teachings ranging from reading the scriptures to simply hearing the sound of a ringing bell; from seeing an object drop to the ground to the admittedly extreme physical blows that are often dished out (and received) by zen masters as a form of teaching – not a method I would advocate, I hasten to add.
So the teaching methods and expressions of truth may vary from person to person and from time and place, forged out of the cultures and characters of the moment. This is why the teaching reinvents itself from generation to generation, and varies from teacher to teacher, even when the core teaching and core ‘realisation’ is the same.
*Yuanwu was actually Chinese, so strictly speaking he is a Chan Master. When Chan Buddhism spread to Japan it became known as Zen, Zen simply being the Japanese word for Chan.
Dasbodh, written by Sri Samartha Ramdas in 1654, has been long used as a source text for seekers of enlightenment within the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Nisargadatta Maharaj’s lineage, the Inchegarei Sampradaya, were hugely inspired by this text and Nisargadatta used to regularly read from it.
Here Samartha Ramdas is pointing us to something very profound, yet very simple once realised. For more, compare this verse with that of Zen master Han-Shan here.
If you try to figure it out, if you try to look for it, you have already missed it, for you have presupposed incompleteness, you have assumed the presence of lack.
Where is the lack? In what way are you incomplete?
It is the mind that tells you you need something else, the mind that ‘says this is not enough’.
There is no need to believe the mind and the stories (lies) it spews forth: it is already here, ‘LACKING NOTHING AT ALL’, and you are it.
Shoal of Sardines, Photograph by Federico Cabello, National Geographic Your Shot
The mass of unenlightened spiritual seekers,
trying to figure it all out,
trying to see their True Natures,
like the proverbial fish looking for water,
or the lady looking everywhere for her necklace,
only to find it on her neck.
The trying-to-figure-it-all-out is the suffering.
AÂ horde of egos,
trying to be happy,
struggling to attain Bliss and Peace,
like someone using a bloodied towel to wipe up blood,
like a person in quicksand sinking ever deeper with each attempt to be free.
The trying-to-be-happy is the suffering.
Why bother?
Why argue with what is?
What’s wrong with right here, right now?
(It is the mind that tells you otherwise)
Stop:
Water is here all you around you, dear fish!
My lady, you look stunning in your necklace!
The splattered blood is perfect, right where I wanted it to be!
When you stop moving, look, the quicksand disappears!
‘No, don’t stop’ says the mind ‘There’s more, just around the corner your prize awaits.’
‘Just go that one bit further and you’ll have it figured out.’
‘Peace and Bliss are yours. You are much more than just this.‘
The mind believes the mind,
thought believes its thinking.
The mind thinks it is the doer,
and so thinks it can do something about this.
But what can be done? And who/what can do it?
This cannot be figured out (by the ego/doer/mind).
How can the ego realise it does not exist?
What can you do to realise there is no doer?
There is nobody here!
So how can there be anything to do?
Look:
Actions happen by themselves,
according to the nature of things:
planets orbit the sun,
the wind blows,
rivers flow,
seeds sprout,
plants grow,
babies are born,
hearts beat,
lungs breathe,
minds think,
bodies act…
Nobody doing any of it,
all of it happening anyway,
all of it choicelessly accepted,
by the all-embracing awareness,
that is none other than our ordinary everyday experience:
spontaneously present,
spontaneously aware.
Did we ask to be aware?
Did we create awareness?
Did we create our experiences?
Or did our awareness spontaneously arise?
Or did experience and experiences spontaneously appear?
Seeing this,
it is seen.
Did you chose to be a seeker?
Did you chose to take yourself to be a doer?
See, you are not in control,
for there is no evidence of a controller.
Why believe in that for which there is no evidence?
Look:
There is no mass of unenlightened seekers at all,
The horde of egos is but an imagined illusion.
No unenlightened people,
no enlightened people,
Just what is.
All there is is life,
a uni-versal process,
a vast interconnected web,
spanning from celestial bodies to nervous systems,
one system operating…
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
Everything is happening,
Tom Das 