Tag: The Zen Lineage

As practitioners, we try to steer a course between, on the one hand, spiritual grandiosity and narcissism, and on the other, duality and separation.

To help us, Master Baso said ‘Mind is World’. He wasn’t talking about the personal mind obviously, although it’s true that the personal mind has the karmic world it creates, like a mirrored prison.

He meant the mind of awareness. The personal mind arises within this, as do all things. Hence, mind is world. There is nothing for our spiritual grandiosity to inflate into. There is nothing outside this mind, so there is no separation.

The light which falls on us is not our accomplishment. It does not belong to us. But if the world was empty of practitioners, where would the light fall?

Master Baso famously said, “Mind Is World”

We’re apt to take this to mean that we create our world.

But he didn’t say that, he said Mind Is World.

When we carefully observe the mind, what remains ours? Isn’t it the case that everything comes from ‘outside’? Isn’t what we call Mind a vivid exemplar of dependent origination? And if that is so, what is there to clear? What is there to settle?

Menzan talked about “the frozen blockage of thought and emotion”; how it obstructs our practice and our life.

To understand what he meant, we need to distinguish between emotion and feeling. Feeling is our lived, momentary, felt response from moment to moment, fluid. Emotion is frozen feeling.

Something arises in the body. We then say “I am anxious”, then we speculate why we might be anxious, and the whole process of rumination starts. The thought and the emotion aren’t separate.

And we may imagine that this frozen mass obstructs our mind, but in fact it obstructs our heart. It is there like a blockage in the throat, preventing the heart emerging into the world.

If we do not understand this, our Zen will be too cognitive, it will lack feeling: Zen is not our liberation from feeling, but our liberation into it.