Baishui Zen

Continuing the theme from last time, I want to share a few useful meditations I have come across in my studies which address different kinds of fear. I can think of three different kinds of fear. In no particular order, these are:

1. Anxiety
2. Dread
3. Panic

I’m not sure that everyone uses these words in the exact same way, and I’m also not completely sure that this list is exhaustive. I also know there are some other words like “terror” or “horror,” but when I reflect on these, I’m not able to draw any distinction between these feelings and those. They seem to have more to do with intensity than a change in the nature of the feelings themselves. In any case, for clarity’s sake, I should start by saying what I mean by each of these feelings, describing the emotional state’s onset and the phenomenological components, either physically or mentally, so we can be sure that we are agreeing about what kinds of things these reflections are supposed to help address. Then I will try to offer some commentary on each of them, and maybe share a personal anecdote or two. This is a blog, after all. Let’s jump in.

Anxiety is the one that is closest to home for me. For me, anxiety refers to a kind of compulsive, repeated rumination. While it may have a specific source that causes it, it’s distinguished from others in this list in that it is more open-ended. For example, when I was in graduate school, I had great anxiety about my ability to finish my degree and transition to a career. It was not a question of whether or not my thesis would get accepted. I didn’t actually really care all that much about that. Anxiety sprung from all the uncertainties which followed from the outcome. The inability to know what kind of job I might find without finishing the degree, the inability to predict where I would live, if I would be able to see my friends and family or have to move far away, and the inability to know what kinds of time or energy I would have for passion projects in that kind of life were all sources of great worry. I described it to a friend by saying that I was accustomed to being able to “see the future,” to a limited extent, in normal life. I could predict what would happen in the calm and stable life of an academic job and lifestyle. Anxiety took away this ability to “see.” As the day rolled closer to depart from graduate school, uncertainty only increased, and it was the open-ended and seemingly endless collection of “what-ifs” that I associate with anxiety.

Just as we wrote last time, a significant portion of this kind of anxiety stems from the underlying attachment. Finding inner peace and resilience from the anxiety is about two main teachings. The first is to return to the attachment understanding. A significant part of the suffering I experienced from this anxiety came from the self. It wasn’t just about the job, the job was the proximal thing at hand that was forcing me to reckon with, or not reckon with, as it turned out, the deeper issue of “academic” working its way into a part of my identity. I’ve often said that the life of an academic is not that different from monastic life. During graduate school, you live with these other people who all care about the same very specific thing you care about, and it is almost your entire life. You are surrounded by your thing, dedicated to it, and you spend huge portions of life thinking about it, reading about it, presenting material to friends or an academic adviser, and so on. I liked that life. I’m a decent enough teacher and researcher to make it work. This “crisis” of identity was one of the things that lead me to Chan in the first place, and its response cuts to the heart of the matter – there simply is no crisis.

This is a pretty tough pill for us to swallow though. If you’ve ever had these kinds of difficult fears, it’s completely unhelpful for someone to say something to the effect of “just get over it,” but I can think of at least two different ways to package that idea differently so you can sort of, slip the pill to yourself. The first is to lean on the idea of a lack of self. In a very real sense, the things that stress us do so because we are concerned about the consequences as they impact us in particular. When I’m anxious about not finding an academic job, I’m worrying because it’s me who does the wanting. Returning to selflessness regularly helps me put that into context. And to be clear, it’s not that wanting an academic job is bad. Unless you’re a monastic, you’re going to have to have a job, and it’s reasonable to want a certain quality of life from your job. But you will never attain that kind of job, or even find the path to such a job, if you’re sweating bullets and paralyzed the entire time. So if being detached from the outcome helps you to keep moving forward as it did for me, then you’ve successfully given the cat the pill, so to speak.

The second approach doesn’t deal with any particular anxiety, but echoes mainstream psychology, even though the parable surely goes back thousands of years. It also works with the kind of fear I’ll call dread. By that I mean the kind of precise fear of something looming in our future. Anxiety and dread often go together. Anxiety is general and nebulous, while dread is something specific, either coming at a set time, or happening in a very particular way, and so on. Anxiety can give rise to dread when it is confronted. If we focus our attention on the thing that gives us fear, it can change from something amorphous to a very specific thing that we need to confront. In either case, the second approach is the same, it’s called “avoiding the second arrow.” Arrow here refers to something which injures or hurts us, which includes being emotionally hurt. When something bad is coming out way, we can think of it as like an arrow which has been shot in our direction. The Buddhist teaching is that along with this first and most obvious arrow, is a second arrow hiding with it, which represents our reaction to the first. The second arrow is significantly more optional. How do we avoid getting hit with it?

The first step is to recognize the first arrow and understand the extent of the damage it’s done to us thoroughly. In other words, we need to recognize what’s happened or will happen, but not catastrophize it. Awareness without exaggeration. With a correct understanding, we can allow ourselves to feel our genuine feelings about the issue. If we catastrophize, then the fears creep back in, and we are unable to adequately give ourselves room to process what we’re going through. Moreover, this is exactly where the second arrow will strike if we are not careful. If our anxieties cause us to want to yell at others, or become frustrated with things, especially if we’re frustrated with ourselves, then we can beat ourselves up, and we’ve been shot again. Similarly if the fear paralyzes us into total inaction, then surely whatever the consequences are will come to pass, and we’re shot again. Therefore, the correct response is to allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling, and just be honest with yourself about what it is. One of the most central teachings in all of Buddhism is compassion, and it’s easy when we are feeling anxiety or dread to forget that that compassion applies to ourselves insofar as we are not yet rid of our self-nature. And if we are anxious or fearful, we will never be rid of our self-nature, because fears are great at making us think about bad things that happen to the body, even if they cannot possibly reach the buddha mind.

So to summarize, we can deal with these first two kinds of fear by trying to deepen our practice in general, so that fears do not afflict us as badly. If we have no self-nature, then nothing can harm us. Second, while we are not yet able to see emptiness yet, we should nurture our own compassion for ourselves, and give ourselves room to process and heal from the first arrow as the main method of avoiding the second arrow.

A parable from the Transmission of the Lamp:

Master Yuan-kuei of Mount Sung used divination to choose a cottage in a valley deep in the mountains as a site to practice a life of reclusion. One day, a strange man appeared in the deep mountains wearing formal attire and accompanied by a large retinue of attendants. He demanded to see the master. Yuan-kuei, noticing that his visitor had a strange and unusual manner, greet him, “Welcome, friend, why have you come here?”

The man answered, “Master, don’t you recognize me?” The master replied, “I view Buddha and all sentient beings equally. Why should I distinguish you from the rest of them?” The man declared, “I am the god of the mountain, and can make people live or die. How can you regard me as just one more being?”

The master said, “I am originally unborn. You claim to be able to make me die, but I see you beyond any discrimination as empty of selfhood, and you see me beyond any discrimination as empty of selfhood. Even if you can destroy emptiness and yourself, I will remain unborn and undying, so why should I accept your claim to control my living and dying?”

The god bowed down to the floor in reverence.

This was one of the parables from relatively early on in my own Chan journey that really helped me with anxiety. Something about this story solidified some resolve I had not to catastrophize when things are uncertain. This requires some degree of faith, because after all, there is no way to verify these ancient stories, and many western readers will have some degree of hesitation about a story involving a mountain god. Nevertheless, we should focus our attention primarily on the line, “I will remain unborn and undying.” One must internalize the idea that Mind is Buddha, and that this is the eternal Mind that existed before any of us were born. This Mind is carried with us always, will persist long after this lifetime, and is merely obscured by the defilements. Taking refuge here gives us a place to put faith that the catastrophes that lurk just outside our perception and cause us so much anxiety are part of those defilements, a kind of mental poison which we can resolve to rid ourselves of.

The next kind of fear I want to discuss is panic. Panic is everything we just discussed about anxiety and dread, but cranked up to 11 and fueled by a powerful dose of adrenaline. It is anxiety that demands action, the fight or flight instinct that will be obeyed. Since it comes from a lot of the same places, the underlying approach to dealing with it is the same. But unlike a chronic anxiety, which for me, manifested as more of a slow and persistent feeling, panic feels fast. The approach I want to show is a preventative measure that I think is reasonably supported by psychology as an approach to panic attacks – grounding. It is a preventative measure because with proper training, you will become equipped to re-ground yourself at any time, so during attacks, you will always have something with you that you can use to recenter. On the other hand, just because this worked for me, doesn’t mean this constitutes any sort of medical advice.

The technique is called “hearing meditation.” The thing we are going to practice hearing is called “the inner sound,” or sometimes known as the “Surangama sound.” It is also “the sound of silence,” which will sound familiar to anyone already familiar with Chan teachings who is reading along. First, one must find this sound. This is best done in a dark and quiet space. It can even help to plug one’s ears or wear noise cancelling headphones. We want to begin with a mind devoid of external stimulation. The sound we are searching for can be described as a very high-pitched but bell-like sound. If you’ve heard Tibetan bells before in your meditation practice, it has the same timbre, but a very high pitch, near the auditory limit. You will know you are “hearing” the inner sound when you find it, because it seems to have no perceptible source, not even “in” your ear. This sound is always there, it is the empty sound, so it is accessible to you at all times, when one is experienced with finding and listening to it.

So the meditation is to sit in a quiet and undisturbed place, and to practice finding this sound, placing your attention on it while keeping the mind still. Just practicing the ability to locate the sound will allow you to reground yourself when under intense duress, because you can look for the sound under increasingly “normal” circumstances. We can move from the cushion to a quiet outdoor space, to hearing it when coming and going about our day, and so on. Bringing Chan “off the cushion” is one of the primary goals of all meditation training, so this is a natural extension. On the other hand, we can do more than just listen to this curious inner sound, there are some different ways we can engage with it that can be used as the object of further meditations. For example, for me, I feel that my inner sound is actually somewhat harmonious, being comprised of a few different tones. Intentionally pointing my mind to the more subtle components allows my meditation sessions to have a sense of direction. If my mind wanders, I can return to the sound, and inspect it again.

Another relevant component of this meditation is that the sound, by virtue of being a sound but not a word or a melody, does not really have a conceptual component. Resting within this place is a good way to practice gentle contemplation because it gives the mind the opportunity to practice awareness, but non-grasping. The goal of practicing in this way is to become as intimately familiar with these different features as possible. For myself, the more familiar I became with the sound, the more practice I had returning to it, the easier it was to use as a weapon against panic attacks. At some point, my own anxiety and panic attacks halted entirely, and I think this and other related grounding techniques were a useful tool in the process (but I also think professional help for serious cases is instrumental as well, again, not medical advice).

In your own life, if you feel that sometimes everything is just a lot all at once, and it is difficult to handle all your thoughts and feelings, then I encourage you to remember that what you do on the cushion is the training for what you do off the cushion. Mathematician George Polya famously said “if you there is a problem you cannot solve, there is a simpler problem you can solve. Find it.” In this way, spending the time to investigate your feelings on the cushion can give you a space to train yourself. Getting a handle on these negative feelings is a prerequisite for investigating Mind (capital M intentional, the buddha mind or buddha nature), and so in some sense, these articles continue to help us lay groundwork.