Soto Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri wrote:
When you are sitting in zazen, don't think. Don't use your frontal lobe. Your frontal lobe is sitting with your already, so don't use it to think.
In the Second Meditation Descartes finds one proposition immune to his doubt. The demon of deceptions "can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think I am something." This argument is condensed in the Discourse as the now famous "I think, therefore I am" (Fr., je pense, donc je suis).
Unlike Descartes, Dainin Katagiri takes a different course, "I don't think, therefore I am naught." Of course, it takes a lot of work on the part of the person doing zazen to keep being naught. And then there is the nagging sense that this is so much nonsense. It is like a small pumpkin in a tub of water. A person pushes it down then thinks, "The pumpkin is naught." But he knows that the pumpkin is still there; and so is he!
Since when did the suppression of thinking, in which there is required a suppressing agent, lead to naught, or the same, emptiness? To be sure, the agent is still there looking out for thought as if to strangle it should it appear.
The Sixth Ancestor Hui-neng was critical of this approach. He said:
Deluded people attached to the characters of dharmas hold that calmness, in which one realizes that all dharmas are the same, means simply to sit unperturbed and to remove erroneous thoughts without allowing others to arise in the mind; that to them is calmness in which one realizes that all dharmas are the same. If this were the case, this Law would [render us] equivalent to insentient beings and would be a cause of hindrance to the Way. (14)
The suppression of thinking is not the aim of Zen. The aim is to see the pure Mind shorn of appearance which is an incorporeal seeing in a positive sense. This Mind is the self-nature which gives rise to ordinary thoughts. The Sixth Ancestor calls it True Thusness because it is the substance of thought phenomena like water is the substance of waves.
Dainin Katagiri's zazen never arrives at Hui-neng's True Thusness which is positive. This exercise of zazen is negative. Nor does it ever reach naturalness. One has to make effort. But for one who has seen the pure Mind nothing further needs to be done. Pure Mind is everywhere. So what is the need to suppress or establish it?
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