Category: Enlightenment

Enlightenment, Meditation, Practice, Truth, Zen

Q49. Do we become emotionless, not feeling sad or happy after reaching the final goal?

Zen Fools

A. Many people think we will not have feelings like sad, anger, pride, lust, happiness and so on after reaching the final goal. Some people use being emotionless as a scale to measure how much progress they have made in meditation progress. This is one of the most common wrong ideas about Zen meditation. Why should we continue our life, not to mention practising to reach the final goal, if we become emotionless like a wooden craft? We have the same feelings: feel sad when seeing sad things, angry when encountering unjust situations, and happy when seeing happy things.

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When we’ve reached the final goal, we can see things as they are, which means we can see things as neutral. Then we see things like a movie: we are sad during a sad movie and happy during a comic play. What counts is that we never become frustrated however sad the movie is and never become so attached to the movie as to disturb our life, since we know it is not real. Likewise, when coming upon a sad situation in reality, we feel sad but never feel so frustrated as to damage our life because we know it is neutral in itself. Meeting with a good thing, we feel happy but never become so proud of, or attached to it, as to mess up our life because you know it is also neutral in itself.
In a word, we have the same feelings but in a different dimension.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Enlightenment, Meditation, One, Truth, Zen

Q48. When practising at home alone, how can I know whether I am doing well or not? Can I feel any change when doing well as told?

Zen Fools

A. In the beginning you might feel it difficult to focus on your question, but it becomes easier and easier over time and the question will be internalised sooner or later.
Once your question becomes one with you, your practice feels very easy and even interesting, and you feel as if it is going on of itself, with little effort. Whatever you do, you feel your work is not separate from your practice, when we say work and practice are one. Then you start to feel what you couldn’t feel before: see and hear what you couldn’t see and hear before. For example, you can be surprised or shocked to hear a sound from a bird, a dog, a car, a person, the wind or anything. On hearing a sound, not knowing what it means, you feel it as the sound of the truth, feeling yourself becoming one with the universe. Sometimes you may feel as if your body has disappeared or collapsed down, becoming one with the universe. You are so happy at that moment that you might burst into tears.

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The feeling doesn’t last long but your practice seems to go better and you get more confidence. Experiencing such changes, you come to grasp the words ‘see with ears and hear with eyes’. What is most important here is that you must not be attached to them, nor must you try to avoid them.
No matter how good or marvellous things are that you may experience; you must not attach yourself to them, keeping it in mind that it is also no more than an illusion. You should not be attached even to enlightenment.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Buddhism, Enlightenment, Happiness, Koan, Meditation, Practice, Truth, Zen

Q47. Student: What are you when your body is not you?

Zen Fools

A. Master: A piece of cake.
Student: How does it taste?
Master: Bitter.
Student: What happens when we eat it?
Master: All die.

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Commentary:
How mysterious!
It tastes bitter and kills all.
Why do people struggle to eat it?

When all die, all illusions die.
When all illusions die, you are eternity itself.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Buddhism, Enlightenment, Meditation, Mind, Truth, Zen

Q46. I seem to have a lot of lust within me. How can I eliminate it from me?

Zen Fools

A. If you do want to eliminate your lust and have compassion, don’t struggle to do away with the former, but try to know what it is. How could you remove it without knowing what it is? To know it, trace your lust back to its root whenever you feel it. On reaching the root, you will realise not only that lust comes from the same root that compassion is from, but that the root is the very final goal you long to reach, when you will be compassion itself. Remember that everything is from the same root.

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Don’t try to remove your lust,
since it is another face of your compassion.
Don’t be attached to compassion,
since it is another face of lust.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Buddha, Buddhism, Enlightenment, God, Meditation, mindful, mindfulness, One, Practice, Truth, Zen

Q45. How can I be mindful?

Zen Fools

A. Very simple. If you know what your mind is, you can be mindful all the time with no effort. Most people try to mindful only to fail because they strive to do what they don’t know. In other words, to be mindful is difficult since you don’t know what your mind is. Actually, most people don’t know how to start to be mindful when they try to be mindful because they don’t know their mind.

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Anyway to be mindful, you must know what your mind is. How could you try to be mindful without knowing what your mind is? Try to find what your mind is and you will become mindful with no effort. What are you when your body is not you? Mind is the name of you when your body is not you, which is also referred to as true-self, true-nature, the nature, the truth, the Buddha in Buddhism and the God in Christianity. Whatever it is called, the name itself doesn’t matter. We should know what it is beyond the name.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Buddhism, Enlightenment, Meditation, Truth, Zen

Q43. How can we remove our attachment?

Zen Fools

A. You should know what attachment is and where it comes from before trying to remove it. It comes from your misunderstanding things. When you can’t see things as they are, you come to misunderstand them, or make illusions of things. Taking the illusions for real, we overestimate them just as we regard a piece of broken glass as a piece of diamond and a piece of rope as a snake, when we struggle to obtain or to run away from them by all means. In a word, attachment is our strong desire to possess or avoid something.

To eliminate our attachment we should be able to see things as they are, that is, see things as neutral, when our attachment will disappear of itself. However, we might hold it down for a time, but we are likely to fail to remove it permanently if we try to fight it off. We can persuade ourselves not to have attachment and hold it back for a time, in the way we give up a big sum of money beyond our reach, by fooling ourselves into saying to ourselves, “More money than is necessary for an ordinary life can ruin people, so I don’t like such big money.” However, the attachment can come out any time again when such big money seems to be within our reach because we still have the root of it.

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Either focus on your question, or trace your attachment back to its root and you will feel it becoming weaker with time. On reaching the root of it, you will realise that its root is the very final goal you long to reach and that it is the same root from which your compassion stems, when your attachment turns into compassion of itself.

Not until we realise the fact that everything we value is neutral in itself: neither valuable nor worthless, can we root out our attachment.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Buddha, Buddhism, Enlightenment, God, Koan, Meditation, Mind, One, Practice, Religion, Truth, Zen

Q39. Could you describe what we are when our body is not us?

Zen Fools

A. In fact it is beyond description and can’t be reached through words, but it is not separate from words and can’t be explained without words. When reading a text, or hearing a talk about it, you should take it as more than words.

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It is called the truth, the mind, the true nature, the true self, or the Buddha in Buddhism. In Christianity, it is referred to as the truth, the spirit in you, the word, the lord, or God – as John 8:32 says, “Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
Everything, whether living or non-living, or whether saints or sentient beings, belongs to nothing but the truth. The truth is neither blue nor yellow, and has neither any frame nor any form. It is neither existing nor non-existent, and since it is boundless like the empty air, not only does it have no inside and no outside but also it can’t be measured. It is with us all the time, and we can’t escape it even for a moment.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.

Buddhism, Enlightenment, Koan, Meditation, Practice, Truth, Zen

Q36. What is a koan in Zen meditation? Why can’t I understand koans even though I have read a lot on meditation? They make no sense to me.

Zen Fools

A. A koan is a sort of dialogue between a master and his students that is used to check whether they have reached the final goal. At the same time, it can be a good question you can practice with. It is just like a maths question in maths, in that a question can be used to test students on one hand and can be material to study on the other hand; so it can be referred to as a Zen question. If you understand perfectly the principle of a question, you can solve other questions easily. Koans might seem to be funny and even look like a joke. Sometimes they may seem to make no sense at all. However, once you have reached the final goal, you will understand how clever, correct and beautiful they are.

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Some people think that each question has a single answer, and, memorising it, say they know the correct answer. The truth is that each koan has so many answers that we can’t say all the answers, even if we spend all our life saying the answers to a single question.
It is just like when five year old children are asked a maths question, “What is 3 + 2?” Not all, but most of them can provide only a single answer 5, because they have not mastered the four rules of arithmetic. However, most secondary school students know that though the answer to the question is 5, it can be said in countless other ways, such as 6 – 1, 1.5 + 3.5, 4 + 1, 4.8 + 0.2, 100 – 95 and so on. They also know that although each of the answers seemingly has a different form, all of them are perfectly correct answers.
If you expect to understand koans by reading books, it is natural for them to seem to make no sense at all. Trying to grasp them through reading is like trying to wash a mud-stained cloth with muddy water; it will make things more complicated, since koans are asked to check whether Zen students are freed from the illusions with which we are bound, but reading books is to create illusions. Only when you are freed from illusions can you understand them clearly.

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.