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The nature of our thinking mind is that it can't know the absolute. Even if it makes up something fantastic and spectacular, it is still made up out of memory. It is still simply a reworking of something the mind has already known. To realize not knowing, to realize that there is a phenomenon of existence that is completely ungraspable and there is nothing we can do-this is our practice. There is absolutely nothing you can do to adjust yourself, your position, your thinking, your mantra, your shikantaza, in order to understand it with your thinking mind. You can't bring it on board. It is like trying to take a pogo stick and get to the moon. There are principles of thrust that are parallel, but after that it's a whole different ball game. So we sit and there is that arrogant effort to make sense of it, to believe that one can actually control and figure it out with this rusty pocket calculator we call a brain. This linear tool is making some effort to try to know the nonlinear. Not possible. Hard to believe. Hard to accept. The mind wants to know, the mind thinks it can know, and so we reach a gate of impassability.
That, that very glance of recognition between you and a friend, is not separate from, is no different from, the manifestation of all existence itself. And the flash of awareness that is your own being is the flash of all of creation itself. It is the burst of time. It is the collision of your mother's egg with your father's sperm. It is the collision of all sperm and egg. It is the collision of all creativity, creation itself and the twinkle of your own breath. And if you try to tell anyone or talk about it, they will call you foolish. And you realize, in the hopelessness of your effort to know, that all that you can do, truly, is be loving and kind. That the bottom line is that one can't know, and all that one can do is be compassionate. That is the first gate. Not a small gate. To come up against the unworkability of the whole of it. And having come up against it again and again and again, we pass through that gate and settle into the immediacy of our practice. Just now, just this. No place to go, nothing to do. If it can't be realized here, then where? If it can't be realized in this, then in what? If it can't be realized now, then when?
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Poem for Zen Master Seung Sahn
Dear Great Wild Man Who runs shoeless through the castle throwing open every door, revealing the treasure that is human,
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The First Gate of Practice
Impassability, the Chinese character is "guan," impassability, the gate that can't be passed. We reach that completely frustrated. The mind cannot know. No matter how you adjust your mantra or how many kong-ans you pass, guess what? The bottom line is "don't know." Not knowing-and there is no knowing of not knowing: "Oh yes, I know. I know about this 'don't know.'" No, true "don't know" pervades every crack. You know eventually when you finally get it. When one really sees the hopelessness, that mind comes to a screeching halt and something else that has always been there is revealed. Not that it can be known. Not that it can be held, but there is something far beyond knowing. And then one begins to realize, make real, that the touch of a friend's hand, the sharing of a cup of tea, is not different from the swirl of two solar systems colliding.