Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘From early childhood we gather the techniques we need to live skillfully in society. But because we accumulate so many ideas about how things should be, we lose the ability to see, taste, and hear them as they really are. Even if we are encountering phenomena of form, if we can perceive with true clarity of mind, we know that we were never born and will never die — and know that we are born every day and die every day. When our awareness is not lacquered hard with conditioning, it is born and it dies with every single breath, yet its truest course never has been born and never will die.

This is not something we can know intellectually. We must directly encounter it. When we try to understand it intellectually, we reduce that which is beyond birth and death to the level of dualistic perception. We have to let go of everything we have ever held on to, and then every encounter is new, each thing is perceived intimately and directly. This way of holding on to nothing at all, adding no small self, is what mind is, what Buddha is.

The Sixth Patriarch continues, “That which creates all the characteristics is mind, and that which transcends all the characteristics is buddha.” The Sixth Patriarch is teaching carefully here because it is so difficult to imagine a mind that is not full of thoughts. We believe that thinking about things is our responsibility. But those ideas twist and color what we perceive. If we could let go of anything that comes along, we wouldn’t have to do zazen. All day long seeing and feeling only what is in front of us — that is the mind. Not adding any extra ideas to what we perceive — that is Buddha. In this pure one-mindedness that hears the bird’s song and then lets go of it, there’s no idea of profiting; of grabbing a thought or letting go of the thought. Just as it is, this is the mind, this is Buddha.’ (Not One Single Thing)