The problem I have of leaning slightly to the right during meditation began to concern me more deeply, This problem comes from years of sitting in meditation alone, with no one to correct my physical posture. But it is more than that. It dramatizes the deepest level of personal illusion, because when I am leaning to the right, I feel confident that I am perfectly upright. This illusion persists not only with eyes closed but also with my eyes completely open. Suddenly, I felt deep sadness that I do not know who I really am, that the ideas and perceptions about which I was so sure were not true. As I continued to ask the question "Who-am-I?" I shed tears of sadness from the heart rather than tears of determination from the will. I was asking the question more deeply than ever before. When I reported this experience to Master Sheng-Yen in his interview room, far from consoling me, he intensified my mood by stating clearly and convincingly that every thought and action since my very birth had been similarly off the mark-that I had lived my entire life in the realm of the false, imagining it to be true.

I accepted his statement and immediately felt a burden of intellectual and spiritual pride, that I was not even aware of carrying, fall away. With his subtle perception, Shih-fu saw that this purification had been accomplished, and he told me to forget the whole thing, that it was merely a mood, and I should simply return to the practice of "Who-am-I?"

Pushing forward more and more strongly with the kung-an, I often experienced the flames of determination raging for several hours on end. Finally, on the morning of the sixth day, with not only my whole mind but my whole body, with all its muscles and nerves, riveted on the question "Who-am-I?" there was a sudden release. The words clearly presented themselves: "There is nothing there." All tension dissolved as the phrase repeated itself: "There is nothing. There is nothing." There was a direct experience of what the Prajnaparamita Sutra teaches: there is really no body, no mind, no universe. I both laughed and wept as I experienced the radical nature of this resolution, or disappearance, of the question "Who-am-l?" A totally new realm presented itself, the realm of prajnaparamita or Perfect Wisdom. For several hours I sat in utterly quiet and balanced meditation, but there was no I, no body sitting in the zendo, no process of meditation, no universe. As the Heart Sutra expresses it: "No wisdom, no attainment, no path." I felt no need to report this to Shih-fu, because it was perfectly clear and self-authenticating, and there really was no Shih-fu and nothing to report.