The earliest of the foundational zen texts is the “Shin jin mei”, The Verses of Faith Mind, normally attributed to the third patriarch, who [in the usual zen way] almost certainly didn’t write it.
There’s lots of different translations. The translation I like has a first verse which goes as follows.
“The Great Way is not difficult.
Just avoid picking and choosing.
When love and hate do not arise,
things cease to exist in the old way.”
An understandable way of reading this verse is to see the first two lines as encouraging equanimity, particularly in zazen, and to assume a repetition in the third and fourth lines. So on this interpretation, to say “The great way is not difficult. Just to avoid picking and choosing”, means that out of the cascade of thoughts, emotions, memories and so on that we experience during zazen, we don’t grasp on to some and push others away. So we’re not picking and choosing. We’re just allowing everything to come and go freely. And then, the second part of the verse: “when love and hate do not arise…” repeats that. So [in this interpretation] when attachment and aversion [love and hate] to the various aspects of our experience don’t arise, things cease to exist in the old way.
This is a legitimate [and usual] way of looking at the verse and is [arguably] better than nothing. But we can make a deeper interpretation, which doesn’t keep all our individualistic and dualistic assumptions hidden yet intact.
And that involves an interpretation where there isn’t repetition. In this reading, the first and second parts aren’t the same.
In this reading,“The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing.” doesn’t mean that when a thought arises we don’t grasp it or push it away. What it means is that when a thought arises in the way that we normally understand ‘thought’, we’ve already been picking and choosing, because what has happened is that out of the infinitely faceted nature of all the ‘objects’ of our experience, we’ve homed in on one aspect, thus delineating the ‘thought’ [or emotion, or memory, or sensory experience]
What we’re experiencing as a naturally arising thought which we’re then taking a position towards [of love or hate] is itself a collapse of our awareness around the ‘thought’. Thus we make ourselves unaware of all the corollaries of that thought: in emotional terms, in sensory terms, in memory terms, in karmic terms, in locational terms, and so on. So if we’re able to experience all these different aspects of each area of experience [each ‘thought’] then we’re not picking and choosing and then in consequence, love and hate do not arise. It is like becoming aware again of all the facets of a jewel, not just the one directly facing us.
Thus the reference in the third and fourth lines to love and hate isn’t referring to the individual thoughts, emotions or memories caused by a collapse in our awareness around that thought. It’s a process whereby either our awareness doesn’t collapse, creating the ‘thought’ by delineation and exclusion, or [more likely] when we become aware that it has collapsed, we open out again [‘opening the hand of thought’].
And that’s also what Dogen means by zazen being a dropping off of body and mind. The problem that we have with the usual interpretation, making the two bits of the verse the same, is they are just encouraging equanimity. And that aspiration does not break down either the primary dualism between self and world nor the secondary dualism between mind and body.
In fact, it introduces a third dualism between, as it were, the witness mind, the mind of awareness and the mind which is the conduit and handmaiden of these various ‘thoughts’.
In almost all of these Chinese texts, the Chinese are intentionally using ordinary language rather than technical language. But the difficulty that we have with that is that because it’s ordinary language we automatically try and fit it into our ordinary ways of thinking, which oftenf leaves us in a position of banality, disguised by the sonorousness of ‘Zen’