When the Chinese Zen masters make statements like ‘Mind is world’, they don’t mean that another world [or this one] is somehow inside your mind. They’re not taking an idealist position. They’re saying that everything is of one fabric, that the distinction we make between self and world, between thought and world, is incorrect.
It’s often difficult for us to understand what these masters are talking about, because one of the primary influences on classical Chinese Zen is Yogacara. And Yogacara, which has been mischaracterised as ‘mind only’, tends to be missed out from the influences on Zen. We think of Nagarjuna, of the movement around Buddha nature, of the Tiantai school, of the Huayan school; but we don’t think of Yogacara.
And until Professor Waldron’s recent book [‘Making Sense of Mind Only’], there’s actually very little in English for the general public about Yogacara. And that’s very unfortunate. Because Yogacara has a whole vision of mind, consciousness and world, which is extremely applicable to our practice.
One of the points that Yogacara makes is that in the act of perception, both the object and the subject appear.
When I see something, when my, in their language, eye consciousness is engaged, both the flower appears, but also, as it were, the person appears.
The person who’s seeing the flower is not pre-existing. Although we can grasp that in theory, the tendency that we have is to say, well in this moment, I’m obviously seeing something. I might be mis-seeing it, or other creatures might see it differently. But there is a definite something ‘out there’ seen by an ongoing person ‘in here’,
So we can understand the point [which is same point that neuroscience would make] but we immediately undercut it by grafting on top an assumption that there is a real world out there.
And the value of meditation is that the ‘mental objects’ which appear when we’re meditating -the thoughts, the emotions, the memories, the internal chatter. which create and maintain the self from moment to moment- it’s much clearer to see those as constructs, as not really existing. When we experience a thought, it’s easy, or or at least easier to move from what Yogacara would call the imaginary state where, as it were, I’m just seeing things [‘out there’] to the dependent state which understands that one thing is arising in consequence of many other things.
This particular thought is arising because of experiences that I had today; because of indigestion, because I’m irritated by the noise of traffic, or whatever. So, meditation helps us shift from a state of, as it were, naive realism which initially we perpetuate in meditation, thinking the contents of our experience come pre-formed and exist. [as they appear] It helps us move from that position to one of dependent origination. And from that position, it becomes easier to move into what Yogacara called the third state, which is the true state, which is that reality is ineffable. And so as it were, we see [ the flower] in two ways. We see it in its conventional form. There’s a flower, there’s a thought,there’s a mountain, and we see it in its vastness, its ineffability.
And so it’s very unfortunate that Yogacara is missed out of the influences on Zen that people acknowledge because when it is missed out, the risk is that we misunderstand the purpose of meditation. In error we think of it primarily in terms of psychological wellness, in terms of calming the mind, in terms of suppressing thought and inducing a state of contemplative peace, [or insight into emptiness] rather than addressing the fundamental cause of suffering: the assumed duality of self and world. And the overcoming of that duality is not to create a nihilistic state, but to create a state of vibrant aliveness. That we have, and always have had, but forget.