The language of classical ( 600-1300 AD) Chinese Zen is particularly difficult for us to understand, but we need to make the effort to understand it because if we don’t we’re likely in our Zen practice to be gradually subsumed by the dominant trend in the West, which is concerned with psychological wellness and individual development. And it’s important
also that we understand that language, not in some abstract or scholastic way, but in terms of our own practice.
A good example of a word which arises continuously (originally in the writings of the Chinese Zen masters of the Tang dynasty period and immediately before is ‘MIND’. By ‘mind’, confusingly for us, the Chinese sometimes mean exactly what we mean by mind: the configuration of thoughts, memories, self-identity and so on which make up what we call the self.
But what they also mean by mind is something entirely different from that. Which they sometimes call ‘mind-ground’, or use metaphors like the bright mirror. And what that means in relation to our sitting is that fundamental level of experience where, as it were, the space inside us and, as it were, the space outside us, is the one alive and charged space within which everything is held: these thoughts, this body, the bodies of all other beings. And the characteristics of that ‘mind’ are openness, calmness, serenity, compassion, and so on.
And when some masters make statements like “mind is world” that’s what they’re alluding to, mind not as a philosophical statement about the real nature of the universe, like some kind of contribution to quantum theory from eighth century China, nor Idealism, but mind as the fundamental level of experience, this experience during Zazen. And often they (the Chinese Masters) will use the metaphor of the ocean. And in understanding all these metaphors, it’s helpful to understand a distinction which they make between substance and function [sometimes nature and function].
So, nature/substance is the irreducible (underlying) specificity of what something is, and function is its various manifestations. in the case of water, for instance, the substance of its nature is that it’s wet (it’s always and necessarily this) but one of its functions (ie what it sometimes manifests as) is that it’s stormy, another of its functions is that it may save someone ( who is dying of thirst) or drown someone. There’s all these different functions, but the one underlying substance. And we can understand the mind on that basis as well. It is this underlying calm, open, aliveness. And (the waves of) our thoughts are, as it were, one function of that. The assumptions behind this are profoundly optimistic.
It’s not that we need to get rid of these thoughts, but that we need to understand them. So we need to understand that our thoughts at the outset, in one sense at least, are illusory: they are not something we need to get rid of, they are something that we need to understand.
So we need to make an effort to try and grasp this very different way of thinking. Otherwise we’ll just interpret the literature, particularly the Koan literature in a very superficial way.