SQUARE ONE
For over 10 years, I’ve
lived in an apartment just a couple blocks away from the Hayward fault. There’s
been one serious quake during that time. It was a few years back, around 3 in
the morning. Waking up to an earthquake intensifies that special experience you
always have at the moment of waking. There’s always that moment when you have
no idea, when there’s nothing in your mind but “What?!”
The phrase that comes to my
mind is “back to square one.” As the room rolled back and forth, it was as if I
felt, “I can’t even count on the walls and floor staying still any more; so I
give up, I don’t know anything.” I had that clear, alert, immediate experience
of the rocking room for just seconds. Then thinking appeared, I understood what
was going on, and the square one mind was replaced by various wants, including
the most pressing want of staying alive and not getting buried in rubble.
The Zen teaching tradition
exists to point at this square one mind, the mind we have before thinking. In
simple terms, Buddha said that suffering is caused by desire; if you want
something, then you have a problem. Before thinking there’s no wanting, no
suffering. So it’s a mind worth looking at. You’ll see various stories of Zen
masters responding to a question by hitting someone with a stick, or shouting.
These actions are like the earthquake, something to give one the before-thinking
experience, at least for a moment.
People may talk about square
one in a negative sense, as in, “I’ve been trying to get ahead in life for
years, but now I’m back to square one.” But in Zen, returning to square one is
the practice. Day after day we accumulate ideas and opinions, things we think
we know, and it’s possible to practice putting all of that down and returning
to square one.
In sitting Zen and in life,
I’ve been noticing how these two minds alternate. Sometimes there’s square one,
nothing but open alertness. And at other times, there’s thinking about what I
want.
Some traditions suggest the
path of replacing bad wants with good wants. Some spiritual teachers will say
that since bad wants (materialism, sense desire, etc) cause suffering, the
solution is to replace them with good wants: “I want enlightenment,” “I desire
God,” etc. And there’s some point to this: during those years when I had a
strong desire for enlightenment and God, it’s true that all other desires
naturally receded into background. But Zen teaching is different. This teaching
says that good wants and bad wants are both wants, and as long as you want
something, you’ve got a problem.
You’ll hear that style of
teaching often in the Zen tradition. “Why do you make good and bad?” This is
the same as pointing to before-thinking mind, because thinking makes wanting,
and wanting makes good and bad. If I want something, then when the world gives
me what I want, I call it “good”; when the world gives me what I don’t want, I
call it “bad.” It’s an interesting practice; whenever I see good or bad, I know
I can trace it back to something I want.
Likewise with “God.” Most of
the world attaches great importance to the idea of God, and conceives of “God”
as the embodiment of absolute Good. But good and bad are made by wanting, so
wherever “God” appears, we know someone wants something.
I went to a fringe religious
ceremony that had a Christian form. A line from one of the hymns has stuck with
me. Addressing God, we sang, “You’re the one we wish to serve; you give to us
what we deserve.” And I thought, “Sweet Jesus! If I’m taking the trouble to
sing hymns to God, He sure as hell better be a God that gives me MORE than I
deserve!”
People call Buddhism
atheistic, since belief in God isn’t necessary. But it’s not that Buddhism says
you must believe there’s no God. Rather, it points to the possibility of
accepting what one deserves, of taking whatever comes through natural process.
If that’s the case, we don’t need to make ideas of God, because we don’t want
anything from him.
There’s a particular
practice in Zen called “kong-an” in Korean, or koan in Japanese. In this
practice, the teacher asks a question which the student is challenged to answer
from a clear mind, from a square one mind. The questions are designed to tempt
desires to appear, but once you want something, it creates a fog that makes a
clear answer impossible.
There are many hundreds of
kong-ans, and they can get awfully convoluted. But when I first met Zen master
Seung Sahn, his kong-an to me was simple and direct. I sat down for a formal
teaching interview with him, and he asked, “What do you want?”
How to find a clear answer?
Any time I stop and think about it, I can find dozens of things I want. “I want
a million dollars. I want world peace. I want everyone to like me. I want to
feel good all the time.” But all these answers are made by thinking. They’re
“wanting” answers; what would a clear mind, square one answer be?
I could say, “I don’t want anything.”
Not only is that likely dishonest, it’s what we call “attachment to emptiness.”
It’s like saying, “I want to not want anything”; it’s still not clear. But when
the teacher asks, “What do you want?”, there’s a particular, elegant, clear
answer. What is it?
I was recently reading an
essay written by a woman in therapy. She said that after months of
appointments, she said to her therapist, “Now I understand something. I see
that I had a certain relationship with my mother, and as an adult I often re-create
this relationship with others, and this makes problems. What I don’t see is,
how does this understanding change anything?”
The therapist replied, “You
think it’s supposed to change something?”