The Great Way is not Difficult

Delivered to Dohasa Zen Group at their first hwadu meditation retreat on Saturday, 11 July in Oslo, Norway.

In this retreat, we are exploring several closely connected themes. We're discussing the concept of non-duality – the true nature of reality – and its beautiful expression in Sengcan's poem Faith in Mind. We're also learning the basics of hwadu practice, the principal method of meditation in Korean Sŏn. This evening, I'd like to explore how Faith in Mind is an expression of the very non-dual nature that hwadu practice reveals. Faith in Mind is one of the most beloved texts in the Zen tradition. It is traditionally attributed to Sengcan, the Third Patriarch of Zen, and is one of the clearest expressions of non-duality found anywhere in Zen literature. Non-duality refers to reality as it is before the discriminating mind divides it into distinctions such as self and other, good and bad, or pleasant and unpleasant. This central theme is expressed in the poem's famous opening lines: 

The Great Way is not difficult for those not attached to preferences.

When neither love nor hate arises, all is clear and undisguised.

Separate by the smallest amount, however, and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth. If you wish to know the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. These are beautiful words, but they can easily be misunderstood. Someone reading these verses for the first time without context might think that Buddhism is asking us to get rid of dualistic thinking altogether, to stop making distinctions and see everything as the same. But that's not what Sengcan is saying. To understand his point, we need to look a little more closely. The problem is not that we make distinctions, but that we mistake them for fixed, inherent features of people and things. Instead of recognizing them as interpretations created by the mind, we begin treating them as simply the way people and things actually are. We no longer think, "I find this beautiful," but "This is beautiful." We no longer think, "I dislike this food," but "This food is disgusting." Without realizing it, we mistake our judgments for reality itself.  As a child, I hated broccoli, or anything green, really. When I was about eight or ten years old, I went on a camping trip with my father. When we returned to camp after a long day of hiking, I was absolutely starving and couldn’t wait for dinner. That evening, the campsite canteen had made one enormous pot of soup for everyone. My dad went up to the counter and brought back a bowl for each of us. As soon as mine landed on the table, I practically drank it down. I wasn't quite sure what it was, and my dad, out of mercy, didn’t tell me what it was so that I wouldn’t go hungry all night. Whatever it was, I thought it was absolutely delicious. Still hungry, I asked for another bowl and quickly finished that one too. Only after I had gotten through two bowls did my dad tell me that it was broccoli and cheese soup. I was shocked and confused: “Huh?! Did I just eat broccoli?! But I actually liked it!”Moments before, broccoli was the nastiest thing on earth. Then, in an instant, it was something I actually liked. Nothing about the soup changed in the moment I went from hating broccoli to liking it. The soup simply was what it was. The only thing that changed was my mind, which made it into something disgusting or delicious. The same process unfolds countless times throughout our lives, without us ever noticing. A famous story from the life of Wŏnhyo, one of the most beloved figures in Korean Buddhism, further demonstrates just how radically our conceptual mind can transform our experience of reality. Wŏnhyo was traveling to China with his friend, a fellow monk named Ŭisang, to go study with the great Buddhist teachers there. A sudden storm forced them to take shelter in a nearby cave. In the middle of the night, Wŏnhyo became thirsty. Feeling around in the darkness, he found a gourd filled with water and drank from it. The water was wonderfully cool and refreshing, and with his thirst quenched, he went back to sleep. When he woke up the next morning, he realized that the cave was an old tomb and the gourd was actually part of a human skull filled with foul, stagnant rainwater. He was horrified. Only hours earlier, the water had tasted wonderfully cool and refreshing. Now that he knew what he had actually drunk from, he was utterly disgusted. Nothing about the skull or the water had changed. The only thing that had changed was his perception of it. The refreshing water of the night before and the revolting skull-water of the next morning were both creations of his own mind. In that moment, Wŏnhyo realized how profoundly his own mind shaped his experience of the world.

Both of these examples clearly demonstrate that the mind deeply influences how we see and interact with the world. There’s nothing wrong with these dualistic distinctions in themselves. In fact, we need them to navigate our everyday life. If you're getting ready for work in the morning, you need to distinguish between a clean shirt and a dirty one. The problem is not that the mind makes distinctions, but that we mistake those distinctions for the way people and things actually are. This is the very process through which so much of our suffering arises. As Sengcan writes, When in harmony with the nature of things, your own fundamental nature, you will walk freely and undisturbed. However, when mind is in bondage, the truth is hidden, and everything is murky and unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness.

In other words, when we fail to see things as they actually are, we lose our peace of mind. When we mistake our mind's interpretations for reality, we begin identifying with them. When we identify with them, we form attachment. Attachment leads to clinging. Clinging leads to fear of loss. Fear of loss leads to stress and anxiety. Before long, something that was once simple has become emotionally charged, and our peace of mind is lost. To see this process in action, let's take a painting as an example, perhaps a piece of modern art. Imagine two friends, both art students, visiting a museum together. They stop in front of the painting. One is deeply moved. "What a masterpiece," she says. "This artist is a genius." The other looks at her in disbelief. "What are you talking about? It looks like a tube of paint exploded on the canvas!" Before they know it, they're arguing and getting more and more frustrated with each other. One can't believe the other has such terrible taste in art. The other thinks their friend is being condescending. What began as a simple conversation about a painting has become an argument about each other's intelligence, taste, and character. This is the problem Sengcan is pointing to. The mind doesn't simply notice differences; it builds an entire world around them. At first, there was simply a painting. Then one person labeled it "beautiful" and the other "ugly." Those simple opinions quickly became something much more: "I'm right," "You're wrong," "You have terrible taste," "You're being arrogant." Before long, the discussion is no longer about a painting at all. The two people have become caught up in defending the worlds their own minds have created. When we mistake our mental fabrications for reality itself, we make our experience of life far more difficult and painful than it needs to be. But now I'd like to suggest something much more radical. Everything we've been talking about so far has been directed outward. We've seen how the mind projects these dualistic distinctions onto paintings, broccoli, skulls, and the people around us. But why would that process suddenly stop when the mind turns its attention toward the person we call me?

What exactly is this I that you believe yourself to be? Close your eyes and think back to a childhood memory, perhaps a day at school, eating a meal at your grandma's table, a summer vacation with your family. Notice how it feels like you were there. The same you that woke up this morning, the same you sitting here right now. From that childhood memory to this very moment, your entire life feels like it has happened to one and the same person. There has always been this continuous, unchanging sense of self, experiencing your life.

But let's examine this sense of self more closely. Can we identify what it actually is? Is it your body? Your body has changed continuously since the day you were born. Is it your thoughts? They come and go from one moment to the next. Is it your emotions? They may change several times before dinner. Is it your memories? Even they fade and change over time. Everything you can point to is constantly changing, and yet the feeling remains of one enduring you living this life. So where exactly is this unchanging you that seems so real? 

Perhaps the deepest of all our mental constructions is the sense of being a separate, unchanging self. Just as we attribute fixed qualities to the world around us, we construct a continuous sense of self out of our ever-changing stream of bodily sensations, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and memories. The problem is not that we have an idea of who we are, but that we mistake that idea for what we really are. This mistaken sense of self lies at the very heart of dualistic thinking. It creates the fundamental division between self and other, from which all our other dualistic distinctions arise. As Sengcan writes, Let go of things as separate existences and mind too vanishes. Likewise when the thinking subject vanishes so too do the objects created by the mind. This is precisely why Buddhist practice places such great emphasis on realizing our original nature: when we see what we truly are, the mistaken sense of self and all the divisions built upon it fall away. But to see through this illusory sense of self, we must practice. Thinking or philosophizing about this will accomplish nothing. Why? Because these habits are not merely ideas. They reach all the way to the core of who and what we believe ourselves to be. Later in the Faith in Mind, we read To know this Reality directly is possible only through practicing non-duality. In other words, the teachings can point us in the right direction, but they cannot take the journey for us. We have to do the work ourselves to directly realize this reality. Until we see its truth for ourselves, our understanding will remain merely conceptual. So, how should we practice? How do we cut through these deeply rooted habitual discriminations and directly realize our original nature? Earlier, we learned the basic method of hwadu practice, the principal method of awakening in Korean Sŏn, inherited from China's Linji tradition. For the better part of a millenium, generation after generation of teachers have taught this method to their students because it has proven extraordinarily effective at revealing our original nature. One notable example is Kun Wolha Sunim of Tongdosa Monastery, one of the great Dharma grandfathers of Dohasa Zen Group, who is said to have guided over one hundred students to awakening through this method. That was one teacher, in one place, at one time. Imagine what might be revealed if you practice sincerely. The instructions for hwadu practice are fairly simple. First, relax your body and mind, and raise the hwadu as a real, living question. Arouse a genuine sense of doubt by sincerely investigating the hwadu. If the mind offers answers or explanations, or if you get lost in thought, recognize it, let it go, repeat the hwadu once or twice, and gently return to the questioning. Throughout daily life, in all four postures of sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, keep raising the hwadu and continue the investigation with steady, moderate energy. Hwadu practice rests on three essentials: Great Faith, Great Determination, and Great Doubt. The three of them together are like a sturdy tripod - if one leg is missing, it falls over. Great Faith is the trust that this practice is pointing to something real - our original nature - and that we are capable of realizing it through this practice. Next is Great Determination. We must be determined to continue investigating the hwadu, never giving up until we understand it for ourselves. And Great Doubt, the essential element I want to focus on this evening, is not what we normally call doubt, the everyday feeling of skepticism or disbelief. It is a compelling sense of wonder, not-knowing, even perplexity - a deep desire to know the answer to the hwadu. This doubt isn't something we manufacture. It arises naturally, because we simply do not know the answer to the hwadu, and yet our faith and determination will not let us stop until we know it for ourselves. You probably already know this doubt feeling. Who here has lost their keys before, such as the keys to your car or home? Imagine that you are late for an important appointment, you still haven't left home, and you can't find your keys. You checked the usual spots: the hook by the door, your bag, the kitchen counter. Nothing. You simply do not know where they are, and yet you have to find them now. In this situation, you're not standing still saying over and over "Where are my keys? ... where are my keys? ... where are my keys?" and hoping they will magically appear. Instead, the feeling of needing to find them follows you as you move from room to room. At some point, after having looked everywhere, you are filled with a sense of complete not-knowing as to where your keys are. You stand in the middle of the room, your mind has gone quiet. You know they are here somewhere, but all you are left with is an unresolved feeling of "where could they be?". There's no thinking, no words - just this still, quiet sense of perplexity. Traditional descriptions of the doubt sensation are often vivid like this, and it would be easy to think that we are asking you to have a small panic attack. Lucky for us, that is not the case. If panic was what was needed, we would all have awakened long ago! This is just a clear example to help you understand this feeling. It is important to keep a calm and relaxed body and mind at all times. We always aim to practice with smooth, even, moderate energy, neither too much nor too little. In reality, the doubt sensation will evolve over the course of your practice. It will be gentle in some moments, strong in others, absent in some, all-pervasive in others. Be patient and let it ripen on its own.

Sŏn masters throughout the history of Korea and China have consistently emphasized that we should investigate the hwadu as a live phrase. In this way, hwadu practice accords perfectly with the following lines from Faith in Mind:

So cease attachment to talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know. And elsewhere:

To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of mistakes.

In other words, when we let go of our attachment to intellectual reasoning and verbal concepts, we are no longer blocked from recognizing our original nature. Sengcan is pointing to our tendency to bring thinking, concepts, language, and analysis into our practice, and how this blocks the path to direct realization. When we investigate the hwadu, the mind immediately begins looking for something to grasp and hang onto, some firm ground to stand on, some way to make sense of it. It starts creating strategies: "Maybe I should think about the hwadu like this," or "Maybe if I practice like that, it will work." In that moment, the hwadu has become a dead phrase with no potential for awakening. But when we let go of the mind's attachment to talking and thinking and simply remain in this wordless sense of wonder and not-knowing, the hwadu is a live phrase. It is this non-dual state of doubt which gives the hwadu its extraordinary power to cut through habitual discriminations and reveal our original nature.

In the Sŏn tradition, there is a famous saying:

Great Doubt, Great Awakening;

Small Doubt, Small Awakening;

No Doubt, No Awakening.

In other words, the depth of our awakening depends upon the depth of our doubt. As our practice deepens, that initial sense of doubt gradually fills our entire being until it becomes the Great Doubt, a single mass of questioning in which there is no room for thoughts, concepts, or anything else. The dualistic distinction between the hwadu and the person asking it collapses. There is only the living question itself. Then, when that Great Doubt finally shatters, what is revealed is our original nature, which has always been here, obscured only by the mind's dualistic divisions.  Awakening, then, is not the acquisition of some special quality or extraordinary state of being. It is the direct realization of our original, non-dual nature, no longer obscured by the mind's habitual discriminations. Nothing new is added to us because nothing was ever missing in the first place. We simply hadn't recognized what had always been there.

In our school of Sŏn, we speak quite openly about the possibility of awakening, but please know that this is not an all-or-nothing practice. It's easy to listen to a talk like this and assume that awakening is the only thing that matters. But this is the same habit of the dualistic mind we've been talking about all afternoon: the desire to attain something that we think we are missing. Long before a breakthrough occurs, the practice is already transforming us. We spend less time lost in thought and more time fully present. Old habits gradually lose their grip. We become less entangled in our fears, our emotional reactions, and the stories we tell ourselves. We see ourselves and the world more clearly, and become more open and responsive to life. For some, awakening arrives quickly. For others, it comes only after years of steady, patient practice. However your path unfolds, every sincere moment of practice enriches your life, helping you become a kinder, wiser, and more compassionate person. With this talk, I've tried to bring together the themes we've been exploring throughout this retreat: non-duality, Sengcan's Faith in Mind, and hwadu practice. To summarize: Faith in Mind describes how the discriminating mind divides reality into dualities - self and other, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant - which obscures our original nature and gives rise to suffering. At its heart, it is a poem about the direct realization of our original, non-dual nature by no longer mistaking the mind's habitual discriminations for reality itself. Hwadu practice is specifically designed to let you realize that non-dual nature for yourself. In other words, what hwadu practice reveals is exactly what Faith in Mind describes. The poem is not a beautiful work of philosophy for you to understand intellectually. It is a description of what is realized through sincere practice.

If there is only one thing I hope you remember from this talk, it is this: simply do the practice. Investigate the hwadu sincerely, and the meaning of everything we've discussed this evening will reveal itself through your own experience. I hope Sengcan won't mind, but I'd like to adapt the famous opening line of Faith in Mind ever so slightly:

The Great Way is not difficult... for those who sincerely investigate the hwadu.

That's all there is to it. Continue investigating the hwadu with Great Faith, Great Determination, and Great Doubt. If I asked you right now to give the answer to the hwadu, what would you say? You have to say something. Can you feel that sense of not knowing? That is the doubt. Stay with it, and just keep going until you understand the hwadu for yourself.

The passages from Faith in Mind (Ch. Xinxin ming 信心銘 신심명) quoted in this talk are drawn, with occasional slight adaptations, from Richard B. Clarke's translation, Hsin Hsin Ming: Verses on the Faith-Mind (White Pine Press), and are used here with gratitude for his work in making this text available to Western practitioners.