When Zen master Huangbo was recorded to have said, "To make use of your minds to think conceptually is to leave the substance and attach yourselves to form," he was saying something profound in the sense that our concepts are compositions of substance or essence; this essence being, in other words, the unconditioned Mind. The Sixth Patriarch Huineng says about the same thing. "True Reality is the substance of thoughts; thoughts are the function of True Reality." As should be fairly obvious, the goal of Zen is to see this substance, not verbalize about it or imagine it can be approached by taking further conceptual approaches.
Zen of our everyday world, however, doesn't heed this advice. Maybe such Zen just doesn't fully appreciate the immense subtlety involved. Or perhaps it doesn't know about it: that we must penetrate into the very substance of our thoughts and conceptions. Unfortunately, what is going on with our typical Zen adept, he or she is engaged in conceptually trying to remove or suppress concepts so as to arrive at a conceptual thought of the non-conceptual! Or the adept is trying to conceptualize this substance such that he or she imagines a non-conceptual substance! But truth be told, this substance or essence arrives on its own, so to speak, without our help. We just have to be empty, at the right time, without our mind being engaged in conceptualizing or being in a state of presumption.
I am aware of the difficulty of what it takes to see this substance in light of the fact that what is going on inside our heads is a conceptual performance that has never been stopped for even a split second. We have even learned to deceive ourselves believing that half of us is already the unconditioned Mind or Buddha Mind while the other half (the conceptual part) we only need to overpower or suppress which can be done by the practice of meditation or xichan (習禪) which we understand to be a physical practice. But such an approach while helpful is less important than first understanding our "mission impossible" which is to inwardly see pure Mind, the substance.
To behold pure Mind, inwardly, involves kind of a strange seeking in which we are in open empathy with the idea of pure Mind while, at the same time, rejecting our conceptualizations of pure Mind, itself. Our practice has come to the stage where we have an open channel (empathy) to pure Mind; not being taken in by the interference of conceptualizing it. Still, substance has not arrived for us. But we have stopped digging the hole deeper. This, nevertheless, puts us into a better position to behold substance which is what our thoughts are made of.
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