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The First Gate of
Practice
A
Dharma Talk by Zen Master Dae Gak
The
nature of our thinking mind is that it can't know the absolute. Even
if it makes up something fantastic and spectacular, it is still made
up out of memory. It is still simply a reworking of something the
mind has already known. To realize not knowing, to realize that
there is a phenomenon of existence that is completely ungraspable
and there is nothing we can do-this is our practice.
There is absolutely nothing you
can do to adjust yourself, your position, your thinking, your
mantra, your shikantaza, in order to understand it with your
thinking mind. You can't bring it on board. It is like trying to
take a pogo stick and get to the moon. There are principles of
thrust that are parallel, but after that it's a whole different ball
game. So we sit and there is that arrogant effort to make sense of
it, to believe that one can actually control and figure it out with
this rusty pocket calculator we call a brain. This linear tool is
making some effort to try to know the nonlinear. Not possible. Hard
to believe. Hard to accept. The mind wants to know, the mind thinks
it can know, and so we reach a gate of impassability.
Impassability, the Chinese
character is "guan," impassability, the gate that can't be passed.
We reach that completely frustrated. The mind cannot know. No matter
how you adjust your mantra or how many kong-ans you pass, guess
what? The bottom line is "don't know." Not knowing-and there is no
knowing of not knowing: "Oh yes, I know. I know about this 'don't
know.'" No, true "don't know" pervades every crack. You know
eventually when you finally get it. When one really sees the
hopelessness, that mind comes to a screeching halt and something
else that has always been there is revealed. Not that it can be
known. Not that it can be held, but there is something far beyond
knowing. And then one begins to realize, make real, that the touch
of a friend's hand, the sharing of a cup of tea, is not different
from the swirl of two solar systems colliding.
That, that very glance of
recognition between you and a friend, is not separate from, is no
different from, the manifestation of all existence itself. And the
flash of awareness that is your own being is the flash of all of
creation itself. It is the burst of time. It is the collision of
your mother's egg with your father's sperm. It is the collision of
all sperm and egg. It is the collision of all creativity, creation
itself and the twinkle of your own breath. And if you try to tell
anyone or talk about it, they will call you foolish. And you
realize, in the hopelessness of your effort to know, that all that
you can do, truly, is be loving and kind. That the bottom line is
that one can't know, and all that one can do is be compassionate.
That is the first gate.
Not a
small gate. To come up against the unworkability of the whole of it.
And having come up against it again and again and again, we pass
through that gate and settle into the immediacy of our practice.
Just now, just this. No place to go, nothing to do. If it can't be
realized here, then where? If it can't be realized in this, then in
what? If it can't be realized now, then when?
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