Buddhism Topics:
Protecting the Spiritual Environment of the Mind
Move the body:
Some people think that meditation means sitting totally motionless and static but this is not necessarily the case. With a proper sitting and posture the body is active in its stillness. This relaxes the muscles of the whole body, the joints, the nervous system, and stimulates the endocrine, digestive, and circulation systems to promote overall health. People seek massage to relax their muscles but the mind may still be restless, whereas sitting meditation thoroughly relaxes the mind as well. Sitting meditation can have healing benefits for some conditions such as high-blood pressure, arthritis, and neurasthenia etc. It is not surgery or a panacea, but it can improve health without one’s being aware of it.
Nineteen years ago Mr. Wang Ming Yee, the translator for tonight’s talk, suffered from severe headaches and could not focus on reading or work. To relieve stress, he sought help from meditation. After practicing for about half a year, his troubling headaches were cured without medicine. Of course, his headache was a kind of expedient cause and condition which has been beneficial for him and me. If he had not come to learn Buddhism, I would not be benefiting from his translation skills.
Therefore, it may not be all bad to have an illness. You may suffer at first but with good causes and conditions, after appropriate treatment there may be an unexpected good ending. Therefore, do not complain when meeting adversity, simply face it and deal with it. This way, one can transform suffering into good causes and create a new situation.
Besides sitting meditation, there are also many other postures and exercises for Chan practitioners; for example, Indian yoga, Shaolin gong fu and Daoist taichi. Modern people view yoga simply as exercise and Shaolin gong fu as martial arts, but ignore their connection with meditation. This is really putting the cart before the horse. After they reach a certain level, many teachers of martial arts and yoga feel their insufficiency and yearn for meditation. Actually, whether it is yoga or Shaolin gong fu, they are movements that come out of stillness. With prolonged meditation, wandering thoughts will subside and the mind becomes concentrated. Then from stillness, movement comes naturally, which then further evolves into systematic gong fu or exercise.
When people hear about meditation, the image that may come to mind is of monasteries or ancient caves deep in the mountains. They forget that in ancient times there was no tap water, electricity, or gas, so the practitioners’ daily life would also include fetching water and gathering firewood. If you ask the monk in the mountain, “What do you do in the mountains?” He would tell you, “Nothing other than fetch water and gather firewood!” This is also practice. Chan Master Baizhang Huaihai (702-814) of the Tang Dynasty proposed “a day without work is a day without eating.” His work was farming and for him, farming was meditation. For a monk with the duties of managing a monastery, talking into and dealing with followers is meditation. Sometimes people ask me, “With the pace of modern life so fast, how do you find time to practice?” I usually tell them, “Daily life and work is practice.”
The mind should be aware of what the body is doing and what the mouth is saying; while doing chores, one’s mind should not wander from what the hands and feet are doing. Taking a walk, traveling, driving, even going to the washroom is practice; engaging in ordinary things with an ordinary mind is practice.
I remember a small but entertaining episode that happened on a Chan retreat. This practitioner was assigned the duty of cleaning the washroom. He became absorbed in his job, lost himself, and completely forgot about people waiting to use the lavatory. One practitioner who had waited a long time asked him, “Are you almost done?”
In his self-forgetting absorption, he said, “Oh, take it easy! I am enjoying my work.”
The other person asked: “So how long is it going to take you to finish it?”
He replied, “ I want to do this forever.”
The next morning at breakfast, he saw a paring knife on the dining table, and exclaimed: “What is this knife doing here?”
I asked him: “What’s the matter? Isn’t this knife used for cutting fruit?”
He covered his mouth and said: “Yesterday I used this knife to scrape the filthy stain on the toilet!”
Nobody scolded him because at the time, he did not realize that this knife was not supposed to be carried into the lavatory. However, you need not worry about this happening in your daily life; for the mind to enter that concentrated a state requires long practice. For most people, it would be good enough to focus the mind on one thing at a time. For example, when driving, do it with a focused mind, and one must be able to drive well this way. I usually advise people who have just finished a Chan retreat to avoid driving for two days if their mind is unified. Otherwise, they might follow in that practitioner’s footsteps and get lost.
Resources
Master Sheng Yen's Dharma Talks, Given at the Taipei Theater, New York, November 7, 1995
Liberated in Stillness and Motion, Chan and Spiritual Environmentalism , p. 56-58.
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