Glasgow Zen GroupMaster 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?
The case:
The master entered the hall. After sitting quietly for a while,he said “Is everyone here, or not?”
Someone said, “Everyone is here”
The master said, “I’m waiting for one more to come, then I’ll speak”
A monk said, “You are waiting for a person who does not come”
The master said, “it’s a person that’s really hard to find”
Commentary:
Is a person who does not come, and who does not leave, always with us, or not?
In Zazenshin, Master Dogen says ” in non-thinking, there is someone, and that someone is maintaining and relying upon me”
Is this “someone” the same as Joshu’s “person”, or not?
Is it absurd to call this “person” Faith Mind, or not?
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.