The History of Getting Here

Every morning for over a year I woke up at 3AM and headed for the Zen Academy in Houston. It was about a 15 minute drive… after all who else was on the road? By 3:30AM I was seated in the top floor meditation room reserved for Master Myo Bong and his selected students and was staring at the wall and contemplating my assigned koan. For example,

The Dharma is true and never changes, yet the iron wheel melts.

Figure that one out…

After 45 minutes to an hour Myo Bong, 2 other students and I moved to the study room where I pulled out my trusty laptop and we began to translate this work by Bodhidharma fromthe Chinese. We looked at other translations and struggled with them because they just didn’t quite get the right meaning across. If you are translating a book about baseball from Japanese to English, then you need to have three skills. First, you’ve got to have command of Japanese and its subtle nuances. Second, you need the same level of skill with English. Third, you’ve got to know what baseball is all about. You’ve got to know what a double play is. Well, when it came to Bodhidharma, it seemed that  none of the translations had all three elements. We embarked on the process with Myo Bong translating from Chinese into English at a conceptual level. Our job was to find the precise English words to convey the right idea.

For example, in most translations the idea of the Self is introduced. You see it over and over in the context of you have to see your “True Self”. The problem is that when you use those words it leads you to believe that there really is such an objective thing as “my Self”, but there isn’t.  So what do you call it? We came up with “The Original Nature of Mind”. This conveys the concept much better because it is the mind before it is clouded by the Three Poison Minds of Greed, Anger, and Ignorance. It’s the mind before it is clouded by the rational thinking mind that makes associates and attaches objective meaning to “external phenomena” that really have none.

So, here’s a taste of Bodhidharma.

Bodhidharma

I.  INTROSPECT UPON YOUR MIND

Student: If one wants to seek Buddha Tao, what is the most essential and all inclusive teaching [dharma]  to practice?

Master: Only the way of introspecting upon your own mind encompasses each and every activity.  This teaching is called the essential and all inclusive way.

Student: How is it possible for one way to encompass all activities?

Master: Mind is the original root of all activities [ten-thousand dharmas].  Every dharma originates from mind.  Clear realization of mind takes in the ten-thousand dharmas.  It is like the branches and flowering fruits of a large tree all stemming from the root.  In order to cultivate the tree, you must keep the root alive.  Removing the root destroys the tree.

When mind is realized, cultivating perfect Tao is easily accomplished by clear examination.  However, if mind is not realized, attempts to cultivate Tao are useless and unprofitable.  Therefore, you should know that everything, good and bad, is derived from your own mind.  If you search for anything outside of your mind, it is impossible to find.

II.  THE BEST WAY TO WATCH THE MIND

Mind Has Two Sides: Tainted and Pure

Student: What is the proper way to watch the mind?

Master: The four primary elements[1] and five aggregates (skandas, data from the five sense organs)[2] inherently have no “self”.[3] When functioning, the mind has two aspects.  What are the two?

[2] Someday we will know what these are. Rupa is the given sensory material — what is seen, what is touched, etc.  Vedana is the accepted qualities of the sensory material.  Samjnana is sense perceptions.  Samskara is sensory transformations.  Vijnana is consciousness of those things.

[3] The elements that come together to form the body and conscious have no intrinsic “self”.

Ron’s comments:

The critical thing to see is that nothing really has any properties apart from the properties that you give it in your mind. If you say something is hot, or pretty, or even a table… all those attributes are in your mind. The most effective technique for seeing and understanding this is to carefully watch your own mind… to see how it works.

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