Amazing!

To live is to enjoy a truly great mysterious adventure! We have a body that moves, senses the universe, thinks and speculates, imagines realms which can never be touched, and it all happens with no volition, all by itself. The fascination is beyond understanding, yet we take it all for granted without giving it a second thought. What moves? Senses? Thinks? Imagines? And can never be touched? Whatever it is that functions in these ways has no name to ever adequately contain its meaning. IT is transcendent to a description.

Many enlightened beings have pondered this matter and come up short. The founder of Zen—Bodhidharma—saw it this way... “The Buddha is your real body, your original mind. This mind is not outside the material body of four elements. Without this mind, we can’t move. The body (by itself) has no awareness. Like a plant or stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It’s the mind that moves.” 

Huineng (sixth patriarch of Zen) saw it the same way with his famous observation about a flag’s movement. One monk argued it was the wind that moved the flag. Another said no, it was the flag alone which moved. Huineng corrected them both and noted that it was neither. It was the mind that moved. Nāgārjuna sliced this matter in a variety of ways, but one of my favorites is his poem about walking, which ends this way:

“These moving feet reveal a walker but did not start him on his way. There was no walker prior to departure. Who was going where?”

The mind moves: That is an amazing observation! And of course, it makes sense even if we don’t give it a second thought. Thinking about it doesn’t alter the function. The mind moves independently of thought, yet thought is absolutely dependent upon the transcendent mind, which can never be found and never described. 

When we enter this world, our mind is with us, stays with us while we are here, and remains when we are gone. My mind is not “mine,” and your mind is not “yours.” The mind is beyond possession. The Buddha said that there is no person—neither you nor me—to possess anything. The person we imagine our self to be is just that: “Imagined.” 

We all fabricate this entity called ego to have a sense of self. We all have the same wish—To know who we are.

After spending 9 years doing zazen facing a blank wall, Bodhidharma met with Emperor Wu and was asked “Who stands before me?” Bodhidharma answered, “I don’t know.” Nine years and he didn’t know. The reason he answered as he did is that who we truly are can’t be known. Our perceptual faculties can’t go to our unconditional nature. What we can perceive is concrete and objective. I can see a rock. I can see my own skin and a picture I fabricate (which goes by the name of “self-image”), but it is not my skin nor the fabricated image, which is me. Who am I? I don’t know. But then I don’t need to. My knowing doesn’t alter my existence at all. Without knowing what, who or how I still move, sense, think, and imagine. And it all happens without my volition.

There are really only two things which must be known:

1. Who I am not—Not an imagined, independent self which exists in isolation without connectivity to life, and

2. That whoever I am, however inadequately defined, is no different from you or The Buddha. We are indiscriminately connected in the vast and boundless realm we call “life.”

Amazing!