STAGES OF EMPTINESS

Emptiness and existence are coextensive; there is no barrier between the two. Yet practitioners have difficulty finding their way from existence to emptiness. They can't go from phenomena back to the basis of their being: emptiness. In meditation, we go from phenomena to emptiness by progressively voiding our mental states.

When you came to this retreat, I told you to bundle up all your everyday thoughts and habits ─ everything connected to your life ─ and leave them outside. This is the first kind of voiding ─ leaving behind your preoccupations. Now I will talk about a deeper level of voiding. On the first day I said that we have a very noisy environment for practice ─ cars, radios, kids, and so on ─ and I asked if the noises outside would bother you. Most people said "No." Later, one student said that the outside sounds didn't bother her, only my words did. She couldn't stop thinking about them. If I told everyone to relax, she would just sit there saying to herself: "Relax, relax, relax." If I told everyone to be like a corpse, she would think, "I am dead, I am dead." She said, "I can put down everything except Shih-fu's words." I told her she had to learn to put that down too. Similarly, I told you to bow to your cushion before you sit and vow to sit well. But after you sit, forget it. Another student, while sitting, kept wishing to meditate well. Well, as long as he was wishing, he was not meditating, much less meditating well. So the second level is to void out thoughts that come up in the course of the retreat.