Pacifying the Mind

7.1 Pacifying the Mind

Of Bodhidharma's legend, everyone has heard a few episodes: nine years facing a wall; crossing the river on a single reed; Huike standing in snow to his waist and severing his arm to seek the Dharma. The images are so vivid that at the mere mention of Bodhidharma, what rises is a legend of concentrative power—as if facing the wall meant sitting motionless year upon year, the very summit of the four jhānas and eight attainments.

Set this layer of makeup down gently first. These stories are embellishments added coat upon coat by later ages; beneath the makeup lies one short text and a few plain records. Take the makeup off and read the text, and you will see something more astonishing than the legend: the "concentration" Bodhidharma taught was never, from the very start, on the ladder of the four jhānas and eight attainments.

Wall-Gazing: What Bears the Weight Is Not the Wall, but the Mind

The two words "wall-gazing" (biguan) are the signboard of Bodhidharma's gate—and the place easiest to misread.

The lamp records tell that Bodhidharma dwelt at Shaolin, "sitting facing a wall, silent all day long," and people called him "the wall-gazing brahman"—that is the literal reading: facing an actual wall. Yet in the same fascicle of the same book, the words Bodhidharma gives Huike for entering the Way are these:

Outwardly cease all conditions, inwardly let the mind be without panting; the mind like a wall—thus one may enter the Way.

"The mind like a wall"—the weight has quietly shifted from "the wall one faces" to "a mind that is like a wall." Zongmi of the Tang said this reading out plainly: the wall is a figure for the mind—a mind that, like a wall, outwardly stops all conditions and inwardly is without panting, no longer climbing along conditions, no longer heaving and stirring, and therefore able to enter the Way.

Set the two readings side by side and feel no hurry to adjudicate, for whichever you take, the load-bearing end is the same place: pacifying the mind. The wall may be a means, or it may be a figure; "pacifying the mind" is the thing actually being taught. The earliest datable record now extant—the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks by the Vinaya master Daoxuan of the early Tang—records Bodhidharma instructing Huike with one explicit equation:

Such pacifying of the mind is called wall-gazing.

Pacifying the mind just is wall-gazing. The moment Bodhidharma's concentration enters the written record, its name is "pacifying the mind"—and search the early records through: the words that describe his gate are constant—pacifying the mind, abiding fixedly, firmly abiding without shifting, still and unconditioned; the vocabulary of grades—"the first jhāna," "the second jhāna," "the eight attainments"—appears nowhere, not once.

The Entrance by Principle: Concentration Rests on a True Nature Originally So

The doctrinal core Bodhidharma left is one short text, called the Two Entrances and Four Practices. The roads by which one enters the Way are many, but in brief they come to no more than two: the entrance by principle, and the entrance by practice. The passage on the entrance by principle is precisely the "what" of Bodhidharma's concentration:

Trusting deeply that all the living share one same true nature, which only the adventitious dust of deluded thought has covered, so that it cannot show forth. If one then casts off the false and returns to the true, abiding fixedly in wall-gazing, with no self and no other, the ordinary and the sagely as one, firmly abiding without shifting … still and unconditioned: this is named the entrance by principle.

Look at the premise of this passage: all beings share this one same true nature, complete in themselves from the first; all that is lacking is its covering—the adventitious dust of deluded thought. On this premise, what "concentration" has to do is not to manufacture a state that was not there before, but only to cast off the false and return to the true—to let what is originally there show forth. Abiding fixedly in wall-gazing is the mind settling, without raising discrimination, upon this true nature: no division of self and other, the ordinary and the sagely as one, still and unconditioned.

Set this beside the concentration of the first six parts, and the divide shows at once. The four jhānas and eight attainments are a ladder: every rung presupposes "not yet arrived," to be climbed grade by grade, relinquishing the coarse and taking up the subtle. The entrance by principle sets concentration instead upon a true nature that is originally so and awaits no climbing—not an ascent through stages but a single abiding. Concentration turns from a ladder to be climbed into a present accord with what is originally so.

This is not a later age pleading Bodhidharma's case for him. Zongmi—of all the patriarchs in Chan history the one most given to doctrinal classification—drew up with his own hand the doxography of the five kinds of chan: the chan of the outer paths, of the ordinary person, of the lesser vehicle, of the greater vehicle—the concentrative states cultivated in these first four grades he assigned, every one, to the range of "the four jhānas and eight attainments"; only the fifth, the practice of one who suddenly awakens to one's own mind as originally pure, is named the supreme-vehicle chan—and what was handed down in turn within Bodhidharma's school is exactly this chan. Then comes the verdict, hard as nails:

Before Bodhidharma arrived, what all the old masters understood [as chan] was only the earlier four jhānas and eight attainments … only what Bodhidharma transmitted is suddenly identical with the Buddha-body, utterly different from all [other] gates.

Weigh this sentence with care. Zongmi is not saying that Bodhidharma's chan is "one rung higher" than the four jhānas and eight attainments—one rung higher would still be on the same ladder, only standing taller. What he says is "utterly different from all other gates": not on that ladder at all. In "suddenly identical with the Buddha-body," the core is the word "suddenly"—not a gradual becoming-identical, grade by grade, but identical at the very moment one suddenly awakens to one's own mind as pure; and the identity being sudden, there is no grade left to divide, no station left to scale.

The concentration of the first six parts unfolded wholly within the framework of the four jhānas and eight attainments; from Bodhidharma on, Chan walks apart from that framework. The volume's departure begins here.

I Have Searched for the Mind and Cannot Find It at All

The character of Bodhidharma's concentration is at last laid bare in one famous dialogue. The lamp records tell of Huike seeking the Dharma from Bodhidharma:

"My mind is not yet at peace; I beg the master to pacify it." The master said, "Bring me the mind and I will pacify it for you." He said, "I have searched for the mind and cannot find it at all." The master said, "I have pacified your mind for you."

What Huike brought was, on its face, an ordinary question: my mind is not at peace; I beg the master to teach me to settle it—which is all but the request "how do I enter concentration," and the very way the question is asked already presupposes that there is a mind that can be pacified and a method by which to pacify it. Bodhidharma does not answer inside that presupposition; he takes the presupposition apart: the mind that wants pacifying—bring it here and let me see it. Huike searches—searches everywhere, and finds nothing to be found. And Bodhidharma seals it on the spot: I have pacified your mind for you.

In that one thought—the mind sought for cannot be found at all—the pacifying of the mind is already complete. No ladder, no sequence, no method—because the thing that was to be settled was never there to be had in the first place; and since there is no mind waiting to be pacified, the technical question "how to pacify it" falls empty. In the Chan school, the question of concentration turns over at this point: from "how do I train the mind into concentration" to "there is, from the first, no mind there to be concentrated."

One measure of care must be stated: this dialogue appears nowhere in the earliest historical biographies; it is a fixed form that crystallized gradually in the later lamp records—not a recording from that snowy night in the sixth century, but the Chan school's most mature self-explanation of its own gate. In quoting it, this book quotes that explanation.

Bodhidharma gave concentration its name. This "pacifying of the mind" that stands on no ladder passed down to the gate of the Fifth Patriarch Hongren and there divided into South and North—and with that, a new question surfaced: this concentration without grades—is it suddenly complete and present, or is it gained by gradual wiping?

Two verses, each answering its own way. The next chapter, Sudden and Gradual.