You’ve Already Arrived

As a young Buddhist student, I was a little bit disillusioned, because all different traditions want to say their tradition is number one. The Tibetan tradition says their path is the highest and quickest way to obtain buddhahood, and the Zen tradition also says contemplating koans is the quickest, best path. I’m sure the Theravada traditions also have their own bias. They are all very proud of their own tradition. They should be! 

But I was wondering why on earth Zen traditions would claim that their path is the quickest. Then, after thirty years of my practice, I can tell you this: The reason it is quickest is that the beginning point of koan contemplation is the very end point, the very destination that you want to arrive at. 

What is that? That is the experience of the unknown. 

The experience of the unknown, the don’t-know mind, is the ultimate destination that we want to arrive at. 

No Cause

The problem is our mind always wants to question, conceptualize, and compare from this tradition to another tradition, this teacher’s teaching to another teacher’s teachings. [It wants to ask], “How does that fit into what I already know?” We want to find the answer to the koan that has been presented. 

So insofar as we are struggling to know, although the answer, which is the experience of the unknown, is already presented to us, we refuse [to accept] that is it. We imagine that something better, something grander, more blissful, more amazing, more spectacular and otherworldly is waiting for us. But what happens to whatever emerges? That experience will also disappear. All of it is impermanent. 

No matter how spectacular, blissful, or “enlightened” the experience is, where you want to arrive is unconditional freedom. Not those conditional experiences but unconditional freedom. That’s where you want to arrive. 

Another way of saying “unconditional freedom” is uncaused freedom. There is no cause for this liberation. 

Some call it uncaused joy, or happiness without a cause. There is no reason that you become happy. There should be no manipulation or mental striving, because all of those experiences are impermanent. They come and go.

Then, what is that which is unconditional and uncaused? Or what is unborn? If something is unborn, it is also deathless. What is that? 

Anything that has a limit, anything that has a boundary, we can know. But that which does not have a boundary, that which does not have a name or form, we cannot know. However, when we say “the experience of the unknown,” our habitual conceptual mind feels frustrated, like that’s not enough. “There has to be something better, something grander, something that I can understand.” But once that kind of struggle—to go to something other than what is, beside what is here and now—when all the struggles stop, or pause, through the power of koan meditation, then you realize the experience of the unknown is the experience of love. 

No Division

In the experience of the unknown, there is no division. 

Only when you know something is there a division. Let’s say I say, “I know that I’m Asian,” for example. So I know that I’m Asian. As soon as you say, “I know that I’m Asian,” then what you are saying is, “There is non-Asian.” You assume that somehow Asian can be independent, can stand alone and be Asian. Whereas the truth is, both these realities appear at the same time, and you artificially draw the boundary, saying that “This is Asian.” Seeing the empty nature of that line, the boundary itself was just artificially drawn. It is just heuristically, we are creating it so that we can communicate. But, in reality, there is no boundary. It is just conceptually existing but not in reality. 

That’s what experience is. This no division. When you say, I love you, there is no division between me and you. 

For example, only when we accept the fact that I don’t know [everything] about another person can we remain curious. We can ask questions about who that person is and what that person did this week. But if you think you already know everything there is to know about that person, what do you do? We tend to make a judgment about that person. We stop being curious. Rather than try to understand, we think we already know. So we don’t give them time and space for them to talk. Instead, we already assume that we already know. That’s not love. 

One of the reasons our children don’t want to communicate with their parents is that they feel frustrated. “No matter what I say, you are not going to listen to me anyway.” Why not? Because some parents can assume that they already know everything there is to know about children. And then children feel no love. 

So when we bring ourselves to the mind of not-knowing, there is openness. There is no division. There is room to understand. There is the experience of oneness. 

No Conflict 

Another name for experiencing the unknown is peace. Because there is no division, there is no potential conflict. 

When you feel very peaceful, what happens? Do you have a lot of judging thoughts in your mind? Or after all those thoughts of discontentment or judgment, what happens? You momentarily pause and become quiet. That’s why another name for this experience of the unknown is peace. 

It is a little bit like when you are listening to music, and you can listen to different notes: high pitch or low pitch, or loud sound or very small, quiet sound. Somebody’s singing, for example. But when those songs become quiet, when the song stops, what happens? An underlying silence is revealed. Everything appears: All this music appears within the underlying experience of silence. This silence is uncaused, unconditional. 

Can you do something to cause silence to emerge? No, you can’t. It’s always there. It’s just that we make a lot of noise and sound, and thereby we think that silence is not there. But it is unconditional, like the very ground of all sound.