What Percentage of Thoughts Do You Believe?

In a previous post we got on the topic of thoughts and delusion. It included the following line from the Mirror of Zen:

If you know that the arising thought is already delusion, you are already free.

How does this work in real life? Can we use the mind to determine which thoughts are true and which are false? There is a great Koan about this:

Master Ruìyán Shīyan used to call to himself every day, “Master.”
He would answer, “Yes?”
“You must keep clear.”
“Yes!”
“Never be deceived by others, any day, any time.”
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
The question being "Which one is the true master?"

This is an excellent koan because it is so easy to identify with. Especially if we think that one of our thought streams is more reliable than the other(s).

The responses to the question "What percentage of thoughts do you believe?" are interesting. Most people [in a small survey] asked , respond with a question like "What do you mean?"

I asked a friend of mine who is respected along the Zen path this question. His response was fairly specific - and it was below 50%.

As taught in the Dropping Ashes on the Buddha class, the thoughts are always going to be there. It is simply our attachment to them that causes us so many problems.

As a practical means, it is easy to find thoughts that turned into actions that caused harm to ourselves or others. It is easy to find false beliefs regarding what we think we want, what we think will make us happy, and even what we even think of ourselves.

So we, as Zen students, pay attention to the thoughts that arise. We see where they come from and where they go. We learn to stop buying into them. Then we may know who is the true master.

Zen Master So Sahn and "The Work"

There are some popular "Enlightened" people out there. One of them is Byron Katie. After her experience (maybe realizing Mind Makes Everything), she came up with a means of dealing with thoughts, which she called "The Work." Essentially it boils down to investigating individual thoughts with the following four questions (paraphrased here).

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely be sure it is true?
3. How do you feel when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without that thought?

Then there is the idea of a turnaround to point to a true thought based on the original false thought.

Ms. Katie has turned these questions into big business. Spending time on Oprah, selling many books, and charging people thousands of dollars to spend a weekend with her and/or her trained people. Does she have something? Something that could help people wake up?

In The Mirror of Zen, Zen Master So Sahn picked several bits from the Zen cannon that he though best summed up Korean Zen. A favorite of mine is:

If you know that the arising thought is itself unreal delusion, you are already free. pg. 51.

The passage continues with

What need is there for employing skillful means? Freed from any delusion, you are already enlightened.

Of course, there is always going to be need for skillful means. If all it took were reading those words to wake up, we wouldn't need any Zen teachers! Delusion runs deep. Delusion and Karma are astonishingly difficult to cut through.

Zen is waking up to our true nature, which involves cutting through delusion. The four questions are for investigating thinking and seeing how we delude ourselves. They also rely on thought. This is using delusion to cut through delusion. Which is also mentioned in the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment. These ideas have been around for centuries, here they are being packaged in a different form.

Can "The Work" be useful for Zen students? It can be useful in a self-help kind of way. If we are hung up on money, relationships, other aspects of being a human being living on this planet. Just remember it is using delusion to cut through delusion.

Question four asks "Who would you be without that thought?" Zen Master Seung Sahn, and other Zen masters before him, asked students to keep the great question "What are You?"

The Mirror of Zen

At the College of Zen Buddhist Studies/Buddhist Studies Institute - LA, I teach a couple of classes. One of them uses "The Mirror of Zen" by Korean Zen Master So Sahn as the textbook. In the book, ZM So Sahn picked out 86 readings from various Buddhist texts. He then added some commentaries and a few capping verses. There are also a few Koans in there as well, so it really covers the gamut of Korean Buddhism.

Here is the way the class is described on the college web site:

From the preface: "If you were to comb the mountains and valleys of Korea, polling every meditating monk and nun and hermit and ascetic as to the most necessary, essential, inseparable compendium of teachings apart from the Buddha's sutras themselves, chances are that most of them would choose The Mirror of Zen. It is by far the most quoted, most cited, most referred-to text in the tea rooms and teaching halls of the Zen temples in Korea."

Its author was Zen Master So Sahn who was born in 1520 in what is now North Korea. He became a monk at 21 and during his lifetime he assumed leadership positions at both the Zen and Sutra schools of Korean Buddhism. For this book, he chose 86 teachings from the Buddhist canon as the essence of of Zen. He also added commentaries, gathas, and capping phrases for our benefit.

In this course we will study this great book. The class will consist of reading assignments, video lectures, forum activities, quizzes and of course, a professor will be available. The ultimate goals of this class are first introducing us to this great book and ultimately together we will learn from a great Zen Master of the past.

The purpose of this post is to briefly introduce this book. From time to time, I will be posting readings from this book and commenting on them. There is some really neat stuff in this text and I am very fortunate to be able to share it with others. Hopefully you will find it useful as well!