Concentration and Wisdom, Not Two

7.5 Concentration and Wisdom, Not Two

Part Seven comes to its gathering-in. Bodhidharma named concentration the pacifying of the mind; Huineng rewrote concentration and wisdom as substance and function; Hongzhi sat it into silent illumination; Dahui pressed it into watching the huatou—four rewritings, each different in shape, yet what they reconstructed was one and the same "concentration." This same concentration—what, after all, is it?

The clearest answer is in the "Sitting in Meditation" chapter of the Platform Sūtra. There Huineng defines the very compound "meditative concentration" on the spot:

Outwardly, amid all objects good and bad, when not a thought stirs—this is called sitting; inwardly, to see one's own nature unmoved—this is called Chan … To be outwardly free of signs is Chan; to be inwardly unconfused is concentration. If outwardly one clings to signs, the inner mind is at once confused; if outwardly one is free of signs, the mind is then unconfused … If, seeing all objects, the mind is unconfused—that is true concentration … Chan without, concentration within—this is what "meditative concentration" means.

True Concentration Is Tested in the Seeing of Objects

The key of this definition lies not in the word "still" but in "free of signs" and "unconfused." Outwardly free of signs—that is Chan; inwardly unconfused—that is concentration: this must not be read as two stages of work, first getting free of signs and then gaining concentration; it is two names for one and the same thing. Spoken toward the outside—in that it clings to no sign—it is called Chan; spoken toward the inside—in that it does not scatter—it is called concentration. One thing, two names: the names are two, but the thing is at root one.

And the criterion line is to be weighed word by word: "if, seeing all objects, the mind is unconfused—that is true concentration." True concentration is tested in the seeing of objects, not preserved where no objects are. A mind held very steady in a quiet room with no one and nothing about is not necessarily concentration; a mind that does not move along when blame and praise come thick and circumstances shift and stream—that is true concentration.

The four characters "amid signs, free of signs" are this concentration's manner of operation. Huineng sets up his three "withouts," and of the first he says: "no-sign means, amid signs, to be free of signs." Amid signs—not leaving objects, not shutting the eyes and stopping the ears; free of signs—not bound by objects, not turned about by them. The two words look opposed; in truth they are two faces of a single act: it is just because one stays amid signs, not avoiding them, that there is any being free of signs to speak of. To wall out objects and stop up the senses, never touching circumstance at all—that is not freedom from signs; that is fleeing objects.

And for just this reason Huineng, in the same chapter, closes the door on withered concentration with his own hand: "There are also those who teach people to sit, fixing the mind and contemplating stillness, motionless and unarising, and from this they set their effort to work … know it for the gross error it is." To hold the mind down, press thought dead, sit oneself into a stone that raises no ripple—gross error. He is not opposing sitting; he is opposing the setting up of "sitting until motionless and unarising" as the goal of the work. Look back, and each of the four houses has closed this door once: Huineng rebukes "fixing the mind and contemplating stillness" as gross error; Hongzhi guards himself against inert emptiness with "vast yet never dull"; Dahui guards himself against the pressing-down of thought with "do not use the mind to dam them up." The one who named concentration, the one who established its meaning, the one who sat it, the one who investigated it—without prior agreement, each first shut the door on dead concentration. The word "living" is the common bottom line of the Chan gate's whole reconstruction of concentration.

Walking Is Chan, Sitting Is Chan

If concentration is tested in the seeing of objects, there is no reason it should hold good only on the cushion. The Song of Realizing the Way, attributed to Yongjia Xuanjue and recited for a thousand years, spreads the living concentration across the whole of one's comings and goings in a single line:

Walking is Chan, sitting is Chan; speaking or silent, moving or still—the body at ease.

Walking is Chan; sitting upright is Chan; speech, silence, movement, rest—there is nothing in which that "body at ease" is not at work. If concentration existed only in sitting and were lost on standing up, it would still be a station dependent on posture; the concentration Huineng establishes is carried along—the living capacity, amid speech and silence, motion and stillness, of a mind that does not follow objects into confusion. The Song of Realizing the Way says further, "concentration and wisdom, perfectly luminous, not stalled in emptiness": concentration and wisdom fused and luminous through and through, not stalled in a stillness of inert emptiness.

How, then, does this living concentration run in the ground of the mind? Another of Yongjia's texts, the upekṣā verse of the Yongjia Collection, gives the finest mechanism of the whole chapter. Upekṣā is equanimity—equanimity-balance, the holding of both sides evenly:

By śamatha, still yet ever-illumining; by vipaśyanā, illumining yet ever-still; by upekṣā, neither illumining nor still.

Calming makes the mind still, but within the stillness illumination is always contained; contemplation makes the mind illumine, but within the illumining stillness is always contained; and equanimity keeps it from falling off on either side. Yongjia says it more plainly still: "lean to concentration and you sink into torpor; lean to wisdom and the mind grows restless … make concentration and wisdom equal, letting go of both extremes." Lean to concentration, and in time it sinks; lean to wisdom, and as it multiplies the mind stirs. The reader will recognize these old friends—Part Two's pair, agitation and sinking, that small fire which had to be tended by the hour, now watered, now fanned. In the Āgamas, agitation and sinking were treated each from its own side; in Yongjia they receive the non-dual solution: stillness and illumination held equal, containing each other from the first, and the leaning toward either side has nowhere from which to arise.

The same truth has an independent witness in Dazhu Huihai, of the Hongzhou line, and his simile is sunlight: "The illumining is wisdom; the unmoving is concentration … the equal functioning of concentration and wisdom—that itself is liberation." The sun has its light and its body: where it illumines is wisdom, where it is unmoving is concentration—two functions of one and the same sun. Dazhu adds a criterion too, threaded on the same string as the "Sitting in Meditation" chapter: "facing objects with no-mind, unmoved by the eight winds." Facing circumstance with the mind not dragged off by it—praise and blame, honor and disgrace, gain and loss, pleasure and pain: none of the eight winds can move it. And the verse with which Huineng sealed the monk Zhihuang, in the "Conditions and Occasions" chapter of the Platform Sūtra, gathers this meaning into nine characters:

Mind itself is named wisdom; buddha itself is concentration; concentration and wisdom held in equal balance.

The Spine Closes

Here the four streams converge, and one meaning can be established: the concentration of Chan is not the kind of station, like the four jhānas and eight attainments, that can be "entered" and "attained"; it is the living concentration that is amid signs, free of signs—one substance with wisdom under two names, non-dual and held in equal balance.

Bodhidharma's naming (pacifying the mind—not on the ladder), Huineng's establishing of the meaning (concentration is the substance of wisdom; wisdom is the function of concentration), Hongzhi's manner of sitting (silence and illumination at once—lacking either, it is not), Dahui's manner of investigation (the gathering of doubt is concentration; its bursting into a seeing of the source is wisdom)—four vertebrae, one pillar, closing here. And among the four, this book has from beginning to end set them side by side, not ranked: South and North, sudden and gradual, silent illumination and watching the huatou—each has its capacity, each its remedy; to raise the four vertebrae into one spine is precisely to say that they are different moments of one and the same reconstruction, not rivals contending with one another.

Part Seven Is Walked

Only, just where this spine closes, yet another far door has been pushed faintly open. A concentration unconfused amid signs, a concentration of stillness and illumination held equal, unmoved by the eight winds—its ultimate face, it would seem, is no longer the single pole of "calming"; concentration and wisdom being not two, concentration has already been pressed back to the door of prajñā. That line the volume's final chapter will gather head-on; here it is only noted.

And before that gathering, the concentration gate has one last stretch of road to walk. Chan gathered concentration back into the present thought, back into walking, standing, sitting, and lying—yet there is one direction Chan does not take: magnifying concentration. There is a tradition that magnifies concentration to the measure of the whole dharma-realm—within a single thought, the myriad images appearing together. The seed buried in Part Four, when we pulled one corner of the robe, is about to flower.

The next part, the Lotus and Huayan.

Four reconstructions, ten thousand words—gathered in Yongjia's seven characters:

Walking is Chan, sitting is Chan; speaking or silent, moving or still—the body at ease.