White Lotus wrote:If you can understand the mindfulness of no mindfulness......you're on the verge of unbinding
in shikantaza there are periods where one becomes aware of having wandered off. this no mindfulness is part of shikantaza.
there is no mind to be mindful and yet there is seeing of things just as they are: there is a mind to be mindful, no-where any emptiness.
Nature and no nature is the eternal nature of nirvana
no mind, no nature: mind, nature. what you look for is what you find. the seeking mind in a way creates its own concepts by the very nature of its seeking.
anyway, all this is very conceptual. seeing is superior to the freedom of knowing.
best wishes, Tom.
If I remember correctly--and I'm not sure I do--Ma-tsu would say to his students, "Mind is Buddha" or "Buddha is this mind." But to his advanced students, he would say, "There is no mind and no Buddha." Upon hearing this, one of his famous students, who became a Zen Master in his own right, said something like, "The old man can go on fooling people, but I will stick with "Buddha is mind." Upon hearing this, Ma-tsu said, "The plum is ripe."
I don't remember which Zen Master said the following--maybe Huang Po--but when asked, "What is Buddha-nature?", he replied, "It is your ordinary everyday mind." Regarding my own meditation practice, I have thought about this a lot, because I often seek the right state of mind. Whereas, this answer seems to suggest that there is no right or special state of mind. As soon as you seek it, you've gone far afield.
A saying of the Sixth Patriarch is appropos. Someone asked for instructions for attaining the enlightened state, and Hui Neng replied, "Let your mind flow as it normally does." So, is all the teaching and meditation simply "skillful means"--i.e., something to do--until we realize that there is no (enlightened) mind?
Yet surely there must be an "original"--i.e., undefiled--state of mind. I intuitively think so, and have had results from a slight variation of the instructions derived from a Koan: "Return to the state you were in before your grandparents were born." This is the original nature without all the toxic mental garbage. But perhaps that state can be called, "No-Mind" in the sense that our mind (lower case "m") is nothing other than the toxic garbage.
Of course, different Zen teachers used their own original terminology, and "mind" or "Mind" need to be seen in the context they are used in. That may range from there being "no mind at all" to the "mind is the "One Mind" of Huang Po. The seeming contradictory statements are not due to error but the different choices of terminology by different Zen Masters and--first and foremost--the needs and capacities of students in individual teaching situations.
It is hard to make hard and fast universal statements. A Zen Master might tell one student one thing and another student something totally different, according to each student's needs in the moment.
The original quotation of "understanding the mindfulness of no-mindfulness" may be suggesting that mindfulness is just another concept in which we create another mind in addition to the mind we already have, and attaching to that only further entangles us in the delusion we seek to be liberated from.