Cracking the Walnut, page 10
Two factors influence our lives: the environment (nurture) and nature. You may be luckier than your mother; perhaps you have found a safe environment full of understanding and love and have had the chance to practice. In this environment your mother’s negative seeds will not have a chance to manifest, and you will not treat your children as she treated you. At the same time, you have been able to manifest the good seeds that your mother did not have the chance to develop in her lifetime, thanks to your positive environment. You have become a sweet person who can manifest love. When you see things in this way all of the resentment for your mother will vanish and your love for her will overflow. It is this love that transforms all your anger and hatred. You see clearly that you and your mother are not the same, but are also not different.
You think that you were born on that day, in that month and year, in that particular place, but in truth you were already in your mother before your birth. Birth is just an outer sign. Though a valid birth certificate may exist, what it certifies is just the sign of birth. After that you go through abiding, decaying, and ending, but these are all just signs. Your essence has never been born. You have always been present in your mother.
Look at a baby lemon tree. Although you cannot see lemon flowers and lemons, they are already there in the tree. The signs of the flowers and the lemons have not yet manifested, but with the eyes of the person who planted the tree—or with the eyes of someone who looks deeply—you know that the lemon tree will offer you flowers and lemons. You are the same.
Maybe as far as outer characteristics are concerned you do not yet have children, but your children are already there inside you. Outwardly you do not yet have disciples, but your disciples are already there, waiting to manifest. You have to see the no-birth nature of your children and disciples so that when they arise you will see that they are not a separate reality, but your own continuation.
As a son or daughter, you can see that you and your mother are both unborn and that you are not a reality isolated from her. You are the continuation of your mother, with all her positive and negative seeds. Her own negative seeds manifested while her positive seeds never had a chance to because she did not have a good environment. You no longer think that there is nothing good about your mother. You love your mother because you see that her good qualities did not have a chance to manifest. In this way you develop respect for her. In your mother there is a bodhisattva, there is a buddha, but the wholesome seeds that would allow the bodhisattva or the buddha to manifest were not watered in her life. This realization inspires you to live your own life so that the buddha nature arises. If you can help the bodhisattva and buddha nature in yourself to manifest, you are helping them manifest in your mother. This is the true way to love and respect your mother—just one example of how we can apply Nāgārjuna’s teachings.
The elm does not want to die and crush her children. Your mother did not want to suffer, to betray you, and to make you suffer. She did that because she was not lucky enough to have a good environment. Once her children see this, they will sympathize with her, transform their anger, and love her more. It is the people who suffer, the people who did not have a chance—who deserve your love the most. You have to practice to love. Love is not something just to enjoy, but a practice. The more you make love your practice, the more your understanding grows. The more you look deeply in the way Nāgārjuna teaches, the more your love grows. All that we have learned here about no birth and no death, about no arriving and no going, about not the same and not different, is deeply related to our happiness and to our suffering in daily life.
You have to be very careful when you hate someone. When you do not have a practice and do not look deeply, you will behave exactly as the person you hate. This is a real risk. Practicing and looking deeply you will see how the other continues in you. If you have thoughts of suicide, you should know that these thoughts have been transmitted to you by the people you continue. It could be your mother or your father. If you were to take your life, you would be doing as they had done; you would have failed to transform this genetic inheritance. Mindful of this fact, you know that these seeds of suicidal thoughts have not yet been transformed. What you need to do is to practice to transform them. If thoughts of running away from home or running away from the sangha come up in you, you know that they do not come from nowhere. These thoughts in the form of seeds have been transmitted to you from many generations of ancestors. Your part is to recognize and transform them.
Let us remind ourselves of the eleventh verse:
If you say that the goer goes
that would be a contradiction:
there would be a goer apart from the going
that the goer undertakes.
In the phrase the goer goes there is a contradiction that we do not see. When we say the goer goes, it is as if the goer is a reality that exists independently of the action of going and as if the going exists independently of the one who goes. This is irrational, but because we are used to thinking in this way it appears logical. For this reason Nāgārjuna needs to help us see the irrationality of our way of thinking. I like to think about what would have happened if Nāgārjuna had had a conversation with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, like Nāgārjuna, exposes for us our illogical ways of using words and thinking. The things we say are all wrong; we do not know what we are saying.
We believe that there is a person going who is separate from the action of going, and this is why we say the goer goes. This is ridiculous. Consider again the examples previously given: the cloud drifts, the flower blooms, the king kings, the citizen citizens, the father fathers, and the child childs. The reason why the king exists as a king is that he kings. If the king did not act as a king, how could he be a king? The reason why the subject exists as a subject is that they serve and obey the king. Otherwise they cannot be called subjects. This is the Confucian “rectification of names” (正名):using the proper name to call something by its true name. How could you call someone who was not acting as a king, a king?
To illustrate this point, let us analyze the phrase, “I know the wind is blowing.” If the wind is not blowing, how can you call it wind? Is there a wind that does not blow? Of course not! Without blowing, there is no wind. It is ridiculous to say the wind blows, yet we all say it. The verb blow is redundant because wind implies blowing. We do not need the word “blow.”
In the phrase “I know,” there is the subject I and the verb know. I know means I perceive or I am mindful of that fact. Perceiving or perception is one of the five universal mental formations (sarvatraga caitasika). This kind of mental formation happens all the time. The five universal mental formations are: contact, attention, feeling, perception, and volition. The manifestation of a mental formation includes the manifestation of a subject of that mental formation and an object of that mental formation. Everyone has the mental formation perception happening in them at every moment. The perception of wind is the awareness of wind. Wind is the object of perception. All you need is for perception to manifest and there will be the subject of perception and the object of perception. You do not need an “I” that stands outside of the perception in order for perception to arise. You do not need a perceiver, you only need the perceiving. It is as if the actor is already present in the action, which means that the subject that perceives and the perceived object are in the perception. According to the Verses on the Middle Way, the idea of an I that exists independently of the knowing is incorrect. So we could say: “know the wind blows”—where “the wind blows” is the object of perception. But “the wind blows” is still too much. Wind is quite enough. Then we have the wind as the object and knowing as the subject. What is known? The wind is known. However, “know wind” is still too many words. Wind is the object of perception, so it is enough if we keep the object; why do we have to say “know”? In the beginning we said, I know the wind is blowing. We have removed, one by one, all the unnecessary words and are left with just the word wind. When we hear the wind blowing, we just say, wind. That would be enough, do you see?
This is Nāgārjuna analyzing language to show us that our language and the way we think takes us far from reality. In “wind” there is consciousness, since wind is the object of consciousness. Actually, there is just the manifestation of consciousness. When we use the word wind with insight, we know that this word is a manifestation based on conditioned arising, which means there are countless conditions that come together to make the wind manifest. The wind is not an independent, permanent, and self-existent reality. The wind is a conventional designation, born of conditions. Its self-nature is empty. The wind is a reality that cannot be described with concepts like being and nonbeing, coming and going, same and different. Again, recall the famous verse in the Verses on the Middle Way:
I call empty
things that arise from conditions.
They are conventional designations
and they are the Middle Way.
In this verse there are four terms: arising from conditions, emptiness, conventional designation, and the Middle Way. Everything arises because of conditions, and we see that the true nature of everything is emptiness. Things are nothing more than names that have been established by convention. Looking deeply into them, we see they belong to the Middle Way: their nature is not being, nonbeing, coming, going, abiding, or being destroyed.
When we listen to the wind and see conditioned co-arising (pratītyasamutpāda), emptiness (śūnyatā), conventional designation (prajñapti), and the Middle Way (madhyamā pratipad), at that moment we realize the path of practice. We should be able to see these four qualities in everything we name.
The Chinese meditation master Zhiyi founded the famous Tiantai school based on this verse. Although this school practices meditation, it is not called one of the meditation (Chan)schools. Its practice is to contemplate the original nature of all things, namely emptiness (空),conventional designation (假), and the Middle Way (中). All the treatises of thisschool goback to this verse, and the school’s adherents practice contemplating these three characteristics. However, if we do not also take conditioned co-arising as the basis, then we shall certainly not have a clear insight into these three contemplations. Conditioned co-arising is the basis for the three contemplations on emptiness, conventional designation, and the Middle Way.
The Tiantai school was transmitted to Vietnam. When I was a young novice, I learned and practiced certain Tiantai teachings. In my first year at the Buddhist institute in Huế I studied the Tiantai book The Practice of Śamatha and Vipaśyanā for Young Beginners, which is also called The Smaller Book on Śamatha and Vipaśyanā (侗懵止觀) Since we now have other, better teachings, I have not taught this book in Plum Village. In the past, after studying The Smaller Book on Śamatha and Vipaśyanā, people studied The Larger Book on Śamatha and Vipaśyanā (摩訶止觀). In my class there were fifty novices who all learned The Smaller Book together. Later in my life as a monk, I discovered teachings that are better, and I wish to transmit to you these more appropriate Dharma doors. However, if you want to learn about what happened in the past and how your teacher studied, you would need to read The Smaller Book on Śamatha and Vipaśyanā.
If you say “I know the wind is blowing” it is excessively wordy and could give rise to a misleading perception of reality. Instead you can just say “Wind!” Wind can express the wonderful nature of reality, and help you avoid getting caught in the idea “I,” the idea “object of my perception” (i.e. the wind is blowing), or the idea “you”—the one listening to our declaration. If you know how to contemplate the wind in light of emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness, you can see the true nature of things. You are enlightened and overcome attachment and suffering.
If “the goer goes” is a contradiction, “the wind blows” is also a contradiction and quite strange! You create a goer apart from the going and a wind apart from the blowing—a wind that blows when it wants to blow and does not blow at other times. If the wind, however, does not blow, then it is no longer wind!
Verses 12–14 examine the starting of an action. Going must have a starting point and so must arriving. If we look for the beginning of the starting point, things become even more complicated and lead to endless recursion—the starting point must have a place where it has not yet begun. In these three verses, Nāgārjuna shows us, therefore, that the starting point is just an idea.
The next verse is about abiding. To abide means to stand still or stop in a place. It is the second of the four signs (arising, abiding, decaying, and ending) proposed by the Sarvāstivāda. We need to transcend all four.
15. The goer does not abide anywhere.
The non-goer does not abide anywhere either.
Apart from goer and non-goer
how could anything abide?
去者則不住
不去者不住
離去不去者
何有第三住
This is Nāgārjuna’s way. The goer is the person who goes. Someone who is going does not abide anywhere. The goer is different from the one who abides. It is obviously wrong to say that the goer is the abider. Admitting that the goer is not the abider, we also see that the non-goer does not abide anywhere. The non-goer is not the same as “the one who does not go,” and this is why I translate the second line as: “the non-goer does not abide.” Beside goer and non-goer, how could there be some third element that could play the role of abiding?
When we look deeply into the words go and abide, we see that our notions about going and abiding are incorrect. For example, if you are now sitting in the meditation hall, your five skandhas are different from the way they were before you came into the hall. You have sent forth thoughts and actions. You have breathed out carbon dioxide and toxins from your body, and your skin cells have died and fallen onto the lawn on your way here. There is not a single moment in your life when going is not happening in some way or another. According to the insight of impermanence and no-self, you are going in each moment, arriving in each moment, and abiding in each moment. The Buddha has said that we are reborn in each in-breath and out-breath. Looking deeply at yourself do you see going, abiding, or arriving? You could say that you are going, abiding, and arriving all at once. Master Guishan, in his Admonitions and Encouraging Words,* says:
One breath is the length of a lifetime. Why sit in idleness, allowing life to drift away, wasting time in a way that you will only regret?
A new lifetime begins during one in- and out-breath, so do not be lazy! Why do you allow time to drift away without training yourself more, practicing walking meditation, and dedicating yourself to the practice of mindfulness?
In the Sutra of Forty Two Chapters, the Buddha asks the monks:
“How long is a human lifespan?”
A monk replies:
“World-Honored one, one hundred years.”
The Buddha smiles. Another monk answers:
“A few decades.”
The Buddha smiles again. Another monk says:
“One day.”
The Buddha smiles yet again. Another monk says:
“The lifespan of a human is just one breath.”
The Buddha smiles and says:
“You are right. The lifespan of a human is just one breath.”
A new life begins with every breath. Life, death, and saṃsāra (arriving, going, and abiding) are all happening in each moment. Looking deeply, we see there is ultimately no arriving, no going, and no abiding.
Your loved one has not gone anywhere. With no going, there is no arriving. Without going and arriving, the matter of abiding is a non-issue. You have to transcend your ideas of going, arriving, and abiding to see your loved one’s and your own true nature. Nāgārjuna is trying to say that there is no starting point and no abiding. The ideas of someone who abides and someone who goes—along with our grief and feelings of loss—are wholly based on notions. Seeing this you realize what is called the Middle Way. You are able to touch the ultimate dimension and to see that the true nature of the wind and of your loved one neither arrives nor goes.
16. It would be absurd to say
that it is the goer that abides.
If the act of going is not
how can a goer be possible?
去者若當住
云何有此義
若當離於去
去者不可得
We say that the goer is abiding. How can someone who is going abide? It is absurd. How can this make sense at all? How can we be both going and abiding at the same time?
Let us look deeply and ask the question again. Who among us is not going? We are all going towards what we think is old age and death—the cemetery. In this way of thinking, everyone is going. Our goal is the burial ground or the crematorium. In the historical dimension, according to conventional truth, we are all heading in one direction; this direction is not our ideal, but the crematorium.
