Where Are Your Horses?

Notes on Attention and Zen for The Empty Cup.

Wild horse carved from a mammoth tusk, Vogelherd Cave, c. 30,000 B.C.E., Wikimedia Commons

Dear Friends,

As a long time associate of the Friends of Attention and the Strother School for Radical Attention, I was delighted to write this guest post for their publication, The Empty Cup. The editors asked me to write on Zen and attention, so here is a brief report on my experiences during this winter’s silent retreat.

— Sal (aka Kenzen)

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Notes on Attention and Zen

(Cross-posted with The Empty Cup)

I’ve just returned from a week-long silent Zen retreat, a sesshin. My Zen group, the Village Zendo, holds these retreats every year, beginning the day after Christmas and ringing in the new year with 108 bells. I’ve been going to them since 2012.

Zen practice has seasons and rhythms. In addition to daily sitting, there are periods of intensified practice known as ango (安居) or peaceful dwelling, held twice a year in Japan, summer and winter. The tradition goes back to the time of the Buddha in Northern India where monks and nuns often traveled for much of the year but came together during months of the rainy season.

Within an ango, there are multi-day sesshins. Sesshin, (接心) or gathering the heart-mind, is a time of all day zazen (sitting meditation), alternating with kinhin (walking meditation). Noble silence is practiced, with the forgoing of any speech outside of necessary communication. Meals are silent and inwardly focused, and a meditative quality is kept during samu (work practice), chanting ceremonies, Zen talks, and individual meetings with teachers.

During sesshin, we sit eight or nine periods of zazen each day. There’s an effort to it, of course, but also a luxury. Your preoccupations have time to flourish into great entangling hedges of thorns and then to exhaust themselves and return to earth. The sweetness of bare earth.

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When I teach beginning meditation, new students often think they are going to be learning a form of concentration, a way to focus the mind and eliminate distractions, a taming of attention. Surprisingly, the classic Zen texts have little to say about attention. Other traditions, like the Tibetan Vajrayana or Theravada Jhyana practice, lead students through a succession of exercises in concentration and focus, but Zen takes a simpler approach.

In the essay “Fukanzazengi” (“Recommending Zazen to All People”), written in 1233, Eihei Dogen offers instructions for the proper way to arrange the body, finding a quiet room, using a cushion, sitting upright in the lotus or half-lotus posture. As for the mind in zazen, he says simply: “Now sit steadfastly and think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.”

Beyond thinking!

Here, Dogen is quoting the great teacher Yaoshan Weiyan (745-827), who once said these words in answer to a monk who asked about thoughts during meditation. That conversation became a koan, a dialog for students to contemplate, one that can help them leap clear of dualistic thought.

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By contrast here’s another koan:

One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu: “Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?”

Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word “Attention.”

“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more?”

Ikkyu then wrote twice running: “Attention. Attention.”

“Well,” remarked the man rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth

or subtlety in what you have just written.”

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: “Attention.

Attention. Attention.”

Half angered, the man demanded: “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean

anyway?”

And Ikkyu answered gently: “Attention means attention.”

This koan appears in the book The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, which was first published in 1965. Kapleau cites a source, but no one has been able to follow that citation successfully, so there are those who wonder if Kapleau may have invented the story himself.

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For me, zazen has no particular form of attention or state of mind. I experience many states of mind and heart as I sit, and no two periods of meditation are ever alike. I appreciate the movements of my own attention and the constant flow of thought and feeling. I follow my breath going in and out, and in the same way, thoughts and sensations arise and dissipate. I like to approach whatever appears with curiosity. Oh! That’s what’s on my mind. Oh! That’s how I’m feeling.

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“Beyond thinking” is the translation of a curious Japanese word, hishiryo (非思量). Thinking is shiryo (思量), not-thinking is fushiryo (不思量). The prefix hi (非) implies negation and opposition (in- non- un-), and hishiryo is variously rendered by English translators as “beyond thinking,” “non-thinking” and “before thinking.”

One translation I especially like is “spacious thinking.”

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One of my favorite forms of attention during zazen is something like the free-floating attention described by Freud. He calls it an “evenly suspended attention,” (gleichschwebend) a field of attention that doesn’t concentrate or attempt to fix the mind on any particular thing.

For me, the experience is of hovering, of overhearing one’s own thoughts and sensations as if they are a conversation going on in another room. Sometimes I think of it as equalizing the pressure between inside and out. A feeling in my knee, a sound from outside, the fragment of a thought, light entering my pupils, an emotion rising in my chest.

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Floating, hovering.

“Sick on a journey, my dream hovers over withered fields” (Basho)

Dream self, ghost self.

A light awareness.

Thoughts and fragments of thoughts.

Butter yellow of the wood floor, thin pine boards.

Not one color, many yellows—amber, mustard, straw.

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Case 19 of the Gateless Gate

Joshu asked Nansen, “What is the Way?”

“Ordinary mind is the Way,” Nansen replied.

“Shall I try to seek after it?” Joshu asked.

“If you try for it, you will become separated from it,” responded Nansen

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“How can I know the Way unless I try for it?” persisted Joshu.

Nansen said, “The Way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is confusion. When you have really reached the true Way beyond doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can it be talked about on the level of right and wrong?”

With these words, Joshu came to a sudden realization.

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The Platform Sutra of Huineng (638-713), the sixth Chinese ancestor of Zen, says, “One Practice Samadhi means at all times, whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, always practicing with a straightforward mind.”

Samadhi is a Sanskrit word meaning awareness or absorption. In some meditation traditions, samadhi implies an intense and undistracted focus. In Zen, samadhi is straightforward mind, ordinary mind, the mind flowing freely.

Huineng says:

Deluded people who cling to the external attributes of a dharma get hold of One Practice Samadhi and just say that sitting motionless, eliminating delusions, and not thinking thoughts are One Practice Samadhi. But if that were true, a dharma like that would be the same as lifelessness and would constitute an obstruction of the Way instead. The Way has to flow freely. Why block it up? The Way flows freely when the mind doesn’t dwell on any dharma. Once it dwells on something, it becomes bound.

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One evening during sesshin I felt myself hot and messy over an incident. Self-justifying conversations were tumbling in my head. Each time these thoughts spoke they provoked more feeling, and the feeling, in turn, provoked more thoughts. I didn’t want to spend my evening in a cycle of silent imaginary conversations and intensified misery.

I rarely try to control my mind during zazen, but in this case, I wanted to do something. A passage from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind came to me. He says, “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” Give your animal, your mind, more space, not less.

He goes on to say, “to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense.”

In that moment on sesshin, I remembered his image not as a cow or sheep, but as a horse in a paddock. I pictured restive horses in a small fenced corral, unhappy at their confinement. I opened the gate and offered these horses a huge area, an expansive pasture, and they moved easily away from the troubling imagined conversations.

I asked myself what gave horses pleasure and ease, and I thought of lush grasses, of sun and shade, of the companionship of the herd, of a flowing stream of water. The horses became an image of my own attention, and at the same time they carried my attention with them as they ambled and snuffled in the grasses.

I let my attention loose to move freely towards the things which pleased it: the texture of the floor, the rustle of someone shifting nearby, the sound of my own breath. My attention wandered in its own wide pasture.

Naturally, there were moments when the conversations in my head began again, and I asked my horses why they wanted to go to the edge of the pasture where there were wolves just beyond the fence. Reminded of their sense of possibility, the horses naturally moved back towards the copse of trees and the deep grass. They settled again.

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Awareness of the room, of the space of the room, seated bodies in the room.

Hush of the ventilation system, a no-sound sound.

Breath coming in, breath coming out. Nothing moving except the breath.

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I feel there’s a good reason that attention and the experience of zazen are not much spoken of in Zen circles. Any description of one person’s experience is likely to seem as if it’s meant to be a model, a way for others to go forward, a kind of prescription.

Since the retreat, my horses have galloped off into unforeseen spaces. Herds and groupings have dissolved and reformed. Right now, even as I am writing this, I do not know where all of my attention is. Some of my attention is concentrated in my fingers typing, and on the words as they appear. Some of my mind is rehearsing or remembering my relationship to the School of Radical Attention, its people and its histories. Some of my awareness is in my bodily sensations and emotions. Some thread of curiosity is still puzzling out meanings from Zen texts. The horses are roaming, and I have no mind to hinder them.

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Where has your attention been roaming?

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Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement

Attensity!, a new book by the Friends of Attention will be out on January 20. Learn more and preorder here.

The Strother School of Radical Attention

The Strother School of Radical Attention was founded by the Friends of Attention and is dedicated to the work of attention activism. Learn more here.

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara