The Mind of Not Choosing

 

By Gerry Hōshō Rickard

The Great Way is not difficult,
for those who have no preferences.

I have always been intrigued by these opening lines of the Hsin-Hsin Ming also known as Verses on the Faith-Mind or Verses on the Perfect Mind.

It’s a Zen text attributed to Seng-t’san, or Sosan, the third Chan patriarch, which emphasizes a direct path to enlightenment through non-dualistic thinking.

A big part of non-dualistic thinking can be described as thinking non-discriminately. This has nothing to do with the word discrimination in the sense of unjust or prejudicial treatment of people on the grounds of age, ethnicity, disability, gender etc. Rather it points to a recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another—for example between “right” or “wrong.”

So, as humans in our dualistic thinking, we have these discriminatory thoughts all the time where we distinguish between “right” and “wrong,” “black” and “white,” “night” and “day,” “yes” or “no,” etc. The Hsin-Hsin Ming refers to these types of thoughts as preferences, opinions or distinctions between two things.

Its verses talk about Buddha-nature that is inherent in all of us—the mind as it really is in its original state of true reality or suchness (tathatā), prior to human intellect, labelling, stories, opinions and these discriminatory thoughts.

Kodo Sawaki, also known as the Homeless Kodo, put it in the following way :

Grasping things with our thoughts, we each behave differently. When we stop perceiving with our illusory discriminating consciousnesses, we can experience the world that we share. True reality isn’t something we see from our individual perspective.

Hsin-Hsin Ming again:

Like and dislike is the disease of the mind. As long as we interpret something with our discriminatory mind, we put our own slant on it. We make it “ours.” If you want to realize the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. In other words, the act of choosing automatically creates dualities, a sense of separation where we create a self and other, “this” separated from “that.” In short, the mind shouldn’t categorise.

Roshi Jakuso Kwong, in his brilliant book Mind Sky : Zen Teaching on Living and Dying summarised it like this:

When you take a long hike in the forest and happen to pick up a leaf to look at it closely, you’re not judging; you’re just examining it, exploring the veins in the leaf and its shape. At such a moment, the discriminating mind isn’t there. You’re not thinking that you dislike this particular kind of leaf, or wish it could be greener. You’ve picked it up without thought, and you’re seeing it as it is. This is the prajna awareness—your Zen Mind—that is behind your conceptual mind.

The Zen mind, big mind, the non-conceptual mind, the natural mind, the mind before thoughts—there have been many ways to describe this place.

They can all be summed up as the mind of not knowing, a place of stillness before we begin to discriminate in the relative or rational mind. “What you don’t know is true understanding,” wrote Roshi Kwong.

Buddhism talks about this not-knowing mind as “seeing things as it really is.” Just as a mirror merely reflects what appears in it, “seeing things as it really is” is seeing from a mind that is egoless. Nothing is beautiful just as nothing is ugly in this mirror mind. It just is. Something appears, or is reflected in the mirror, and then disappears again. Nothing is clung onto, and nothing is pushed away.

So the non-discriminating mind can also be called the mind that doesn’t attach to things and sees all things just as they are in their coming and going. Everything is experienced in its own suchness.

This is pure awareness, that which is aware of our experience. In other words, we experience our world through being aware of it. This awareness has always been here, always present, before we add layers of thoughts, judgments, opinions, perceptions and stories about this experience. If we add these layers, then we have already moved away from what we are simply aware of and move into the mind of choosing.

I’ve been reading and listening to Rupert Spira a lot these days—a modern day teacher rooted in the nondual (Advaita Vedanta) tradition.

Like other sages, such as Ramana Maharshi, he uses the image of the film screen to describe awareness, a metaphor for the aware mind that is always present. The images and movies on the screen are merely the objects, thoughts and experiences that appear on this screen (within awareness). But they are not the screen and the screen is not them.

The screen, like the above mirror, is that which is always present, i.e. our awareness that is always, and has always been, here before or after thoughts, views, opinions and discriminations. Rinzai Zen Master Bankei called this the “Unborn” Buddha mind. In his teaching of the Unborn, he also mentions this discriminating mind which takes us away from our true nature.

The Unborn is the mind of the Buddhas.

If you live according to it, then from the first there’s no distinction between observing and not observing. Those are designations that arise after the fact. They’re one or more removes from the place of the Unborn.

When we say, “This is a man,” or “This is a woman,” those designations result from the arising of thought. They come afterward. At the place of the Unborn, before the thought arises, attributes such as “man” or “woman” don’t even exist.

How easy, therefore, is it to live in this mind of not knowing? Can I really live my life without thoughts that discriminate between things? That’s a real test as to how far our practice has come. It seems almost impossible to live a life without views, judging, choosing or preferring. It’s how our mind has always worked. Can we truly live in, what Pema Chodron calls, the mind of pre-prejudice?

Zen teaches us to go beyond the dualistic discriminations of our ordinary consciousness, and to be directly and one with our true nature. We let go of our rational mind, our thinking mind, the small mind and open our mind of non-discrimination—our big mind.

We open up our not knowing mind. Not in the senses that we don’t know anything, but in the sense that we find the place that doesn’t  choose, prefer, or discriminate. From here can come a wise and appropriate response.

When no discriminating thoughts arise,
the old mind ceases to exist.

Our task is to let go of these images that obscure the presence of the screen that always holds them and which is always present. Here lies the mind of not knowing, the mind before all thoughts arise. This is our practice. As these next two lines of Hsin-Hsin Ming state:

Let go of longing and aversion,
and it reveals itself.

Here there is no difference between beautiful and ugly. Here, mountains are just mountains. Here is our life as it is.

 

 

Gerry Hōshō Rickard is an Irishman living in Mozambique. He has a Master’s Degree in teaching Mindfulness from the University of Bangor in Wales, and now teaches, leads retreats and online sessions in Mozambique and beyond. A practicing Zen Buddhist he has received the precepts from Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Zen Centre in Santa Fe. His articles are part of his way to attempt to live up to his dharma name, Hōshō, which means “voice of the dharma.”

 

 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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