Zen Mind...

I am a lineage Zen teacher from the school of Huineng, the school of sudden enlightenment. The principle of "no mind' is "wu hsin" in Chinese and "mu shin" in Japanese. It is a main principle of the teaching and points to the same result as does Nagarjuna.

The "mind" is samsara. With "no mind" there is no samsara, no confusion, no suffering.

What is mind? we can only find empty thoughts and stories. As we look at those thoughts and stories we find they are empty, both philosophically and as energy events that never actually attain "existence" in any kind of inherent or independent fashion. Our thoughts, concepts and stories are all empty and fictional by nature. Their subjects and objects don't exist other than as imputations.

Realizing this empty quality of all the mind's events, we realize the mind itself is empty as there is only its contents that make up the mind itself. We can't find this "mind" outside of empty thoughts. We discover the mind is "no mind". We then rest in "no mind", yet fully alert and vividly awake and naturally responsive in the most immediate way.

However to be authentic, the mind has to have dissolved, revealing its true emptiness, its true nature. The mind events may begin to arise again, but they release upon the arising and never get a foothold in consciousness. We discover Zen Mind, a knowing self-presence beyond the mind, that actually IS experience not a viewer of it.

Experience is realized to be "knowingness/experience". There isn't knowing awareness as a subject and phenomena as an object, but rather phenomena ARE knowing awareness. That's why you can never have experience without the knowing of the experience, because the experience itself is nothing more than the knowing of it. There aren't two pieces...


Jackson Peterson