The first and perhaps the most difficult lesson to learn in Chan is to internalize and practice the skill of avoiding the rather automatic act of bringing the Teacher or Master's understanding of Buddha Dharma down to your level of conscious thought.
It is an automatic act, for it is the intention of the Self-directed human system to understand everything on its own terms. The problem is that the terms are those of Identity and the framework into which such understanding is then to be fixed is completely stained. It becomes then rather like trying to reduce the salt in the oceans of the world by adding pure water with an eye dropper.
Let us take as an example one of the first ideas to be internalized from early childhood, which is that Happiness co-exists with Suffering.
Since the human Identity is almost always in one way or another is search of greater happiness, then logically there are only two choices possible:
1. Reduce Suffering to the minimum or destroy it altogether.
2. Maximize happiness so that the Suffering is insignificant and acceptable.
The Buddha Dharma solution, in a nutshell, is to eliminate both Happiness and Suffering. The Master might well say then that Happiness and Suffering are generated by the mind and have duality as a base.
The intelligent student may see that when one invents the word concept of "Happiness", then automatically one invents the concept of "No Happiness."
This then in his mind becomes Unhappiness or Suffering, existing in varying degrees from the most minimal grain of Unconscious Suffering to the Suffering that accompanies the concepts of pain, aging, death and, of course, the failure of Identity to gain what it desires or maintain what it clings to.
But the concept presented by the master is that BOTH Happiness and Suffering must be eliminated.
The great Master Dogen in the Shobogenzo declared:
"One must never try to bring a Chan Masters teaching down to one's own level of understanding for, should you try to understand it from your own self-opinionated viewpoint, you will never understand.
"Before asking for the Truth from a Master you must make your body and mind pure and quieten your perceptions so that both your eyes and ears peceive and hear in peace; simply listen to the teaching and do not allow it to become soiled by your own thoughts.
"Your Body and Mind must be as one with each other as water is poured from one bowl to another. If you can achieve such a state of body and mind, the Truth that the master teaches can be made one with yourself."
The task then is to begin the difficult task of becoming "as one" not with the mind of the master, but with the EXPERIENCE he or she is trying to transmit of the absence of both Happiness and Suffering.
If you can capture that EXPERIENCE, then you will have no mental clinging to the concepts of either Happiness or Suffering and there will be no craving or clinging to Happiness and no rejection of Suffering.
Can you see now, how the stained mind may even half-grasp the idea of there being no clinging and craving of Happiness, but cannot grasp at all that there can be no rejection of Suffering?
You see, the stained mind is fighting. So the Master might try to convey the idea that all is Illusion and Nothing Exists and that therefore both Happiness and Suffering are Illusion.
That really spills the fat into the fire.
It is a hopeless battle unless the student is prepared, if not at the moment to reduce the strength of his Identity, at least to purify his mind of his own ideas and concepts and allow the water poured from a clean bowl to enter a bowl which has been washed and scoured a little.
"At the present time, the unwise memorise and cling to what they have heard and they try to equate such things with the Master's teaching; they therefore only re-hear their own opinions and those of others which do not equate with the teachings they have just received.
"Some are convinced that their own opinions are right and then memorise a few parts of sacred texts, calling this Buddhism.
"Should the teachings that you hear from Chan Master go against your own opinions he is probably a good Chan Master...
"... Presumption, discrimination, imagination, intellect, human understanding and the like have nothing to do with Buddha Dharma."
Conceptualizations, particularly of the unwise, are the enemy of Truth, for they only can produce at best an approximation to that Truth, and at worst sad ideas and concepts that are antagonistic to the freedom that Truth can bring.
Experiences that are untainted by the Mara identity, or his daughters staining of the natural system, capture at least the unconscious language that is the natural master of attitudes, intentions, the readiness to respond and actions that have natural virtue as their base.
IN CONSTRUCTION- DIFFICULT CONCEPTS