The Wall

A close friend, whom my wife and I have seen regularly over decades, began to experience catastrophic memory loss. He could still drive in his hometown; he could manage social conversation with pleasure, but there were many slippages that disturbed him. And he knew where this would lead. His father had remained in good humor and had been able to perform most routine tasks until near the end of his life. But he no longer recognized anyone and frequently got lost in the small rural town where he had lived all his life. He became, in effect, a cheerful tourist in an unknown land.

Thus, our friend had few illusions and approached his increasing deficits as directly as he could. He kept busy and enrolled in experimental programs on memory at the nearby state university. I wanted to understand, as much as I could, what he was going through and what modern medicine could offer. It occurred to me that although we forget many specific things, we do not lose some larger sense of being aware. Our consciousness does not disappear even when we forget something important. Was there anyone investigating this larger, if less specific, awareness?

A memory, even a crucial one, may disappear when we want it, but our minds—our mind streams—do not.

I wrote doctors working on memory, asking about the field and their research: While obviously they were exploring the circumstances and conditions affecting specific memory loss, had anyone investigated ongoing background awareness? That is, even when we lose access to a specific memory and experience irritation, frustration, panic, we do not go blank. We are aware that there is a deficit, a blockage, a lacuna in some aspect of mind over which we believe we have control, and we set out to repair that gap. We want to make ourselves whole. We want to recover the person whose faculties we have always taken for granted. So some kind of broader awareness is clearly continuing, even on a level that may be wordless. The researchers wrote back: No, they all said, there is no work on such a thing. Clinicians in Canada and Norway gave the same response. They thought it was a little interesting; that’s all.

So I asked my friend whether he could make sense of some notion of background awareness. He considered and searched for a kind of continuum he was struggling to hold on to. “Yes! Hackberry!” he said almost instantly. “I keep forgetting, but I’ve known that shrub by name all my life.” Clearly, at that point, he relied on specifics and definitions to provide an anchor for his overall awareness.

But I know that if I were diagnosed with a profoundly mind-altering disease, I would find cultivating a different and broader kind of mental engagement more encouraging than struggling against encroaching deficits by playing Sudoku and doing crossword puzzles. In theory, this kind of background awareness is present in anyone, but perhaps, it is Buddhist practice that has made this more accessible.

❸

In the Buddhist tradition, the mind stream is not simply the continuity of an individual stream of consciousness, or the succession of feelings, sensations, memories, hopes, fears, dreams, subconscious gossip, tensions, releases, and so forth, all centered and bounded by what we consider our own bodies, histories, and habitual character. The mind stream moves beyond individual identity. It is the total continuum of mind, the universe of all that presents itself within mind, the cosmos of all that was, is, and will be sensed, felt, known, intuited, experienced, forgotten, invented. Though we may experience memory losses, we do not lose the total array of our mental functioning or our awareness altogether. A memory, even a crucial one, may disappear when we want it, but our minds—our mind streams—do not.

Bodhidharma was the founder of Chan (Zen), or the path principally reliant on meditation practice rather than on study, ritual, good behavior, and pious deeds. A solitary wanderer, he came to China from the West and, around 520 CE, had an audience with the great patron of Buddhism, Emperor Wu. The emperor asked how much merit he had achieved by his great generosity. “None,” said Bodhidharma. “What, then, is the essence of Buddhism?” “Infinite expanse. Nothing else.” “Who is it, then, who stands before me?” “Not to be known” was the sage’s final reply before leaving.

The practice for which Bodhidharma was renowned was simple continuous sitting, looking at the wall in front of him. He looked directly at the obstacle, never turning away. In the “Bloodstream Sermon,” he said: “Everything that appears in the three realms comes from mind. Hence buddhas of past and future teach mind to mind without bothering about definitions.”

His student then asked: “But if they don’t define it, what do they mean by mind?” Bodhidharma replied:

“You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. . . . Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. . . . The truth is, there’s nothing to find. . . . [Mind is] like space. You can’t possess it and you can’t lose it. . . . [E]very moment or state is all your mind. At every moment, where language can’t go, that’s your mind.”

And in the “Breakthrough Sermon,” he said: “Realization is now. Why worry about old age? But the true door is hidden and can’t be revealed. I have only touched upon beholding the mind.”

❹

The sudden disappearance of a routine memory: I cannot remember the name and even the atmosphere of a nearby street I walk on regularly. I can see it as I look down through leafless trees from the window in my high-rise apartment, but I no longer know what I’m looking at. It is a blank, a gap.

I sit and wait. Inwardly, I move around the gap left by the missing word, look at the shape of the lacuna. And often, it’s as if I am looking at the edge of a pond or lake. A profusion of unsought images grows around these gaps. A pond in summer, green, thick water, a cloud of insects hovering, golden in the late afternoon light, the smell of plant rot. The street name does not return, but the street itself does. And then a name emerges. Something brown. A color. A tree. Walnut—Walnut Street.

I am taking a French lesson on Zoom. The topic of study is the subjunctive mood. Often, I can use this sheerly by instinct, but suddenly, I can’t remember at all how it works.

The feeling that I am losing a whole linguistic structure, and with it my connection to how a language functions, is deeply upsetting. It is a feeling of falling back into an incommunicable and inward terrain where the outer world cannot reach me but where I am crumbling and nothing, neither body nor mind, is secure.

At the same time, the empty space around me is alive. Senses and inferences moving through, articulating that space. And resting within that, letting one’s whole mind take its ease there—is this attenuating the access one has to the routine and familiar world of words and things? I do not know. The world around me, the mountains and clouds outside, this is more vivid than ever. Mountains change hue and outcroppings once invisible come into prominence, others disappear and clouds dissolve, reform; all this seems to hint at meanings unsuspected and unimagined. The structure of language, the meanings it articulates, is part of something we see and seem to know and cannot hold.

❺

A central practice for which Zen is famed is koan (literally “public notice”). This is an interaction between teacher and student—sometimes a question, sometimes a provocative statement. Either requires a response. The 20th-century Jesuit theologian Heinrich Dumoulin wrote that a koan “confronts the listener or reader with a perplexing puzzle. One becomes confused, and the more one tries to come up with an answer and search for a solution, the more confused one gets.”

The experience of being confronted with a koan is a feeling that one knows how to respond intuitively and immediately yet somehow, at the same time, one is frozen, stopped. It is not entirely different from the feeling we have when suddenly a familiar word escapes us. There is a loss, an obstruction. Some genuine part of ourselves has become inaccessible, perhaps even lost. As we search for the lost word, the lost moment of understanding, we are looking both for what we feel we know and—this is the deeper cause of anxiety here—the self who used to know it. We seek to restore the knowledge and the continuum of the knower.

As the great Chan master Yunmen Wenyan (862–949) says in The Blue Cliff Record: “Since the question has the source, the answer is also in the same place.”

❻

My neighbor is a renowned physicist who, after retirement, took up painting with great success. Alzheimer’s began when he was in his late 70s. I noticed more hesitation—a kind of anxiousness that followed forgetting something, a kind of struggle. But then I saw things move to a different terrain. I stood beside him at his window, which had a view over the city and the six or more cranes evidencing its sudden growth. “So much too,” he said before launching into a quietly urgent harangue. “No or slavery comment quick and cloud think I think I think,” and from there the words themselves became incomprehensible. He was not at all upset and continued on as if he were making perfect sense.

Soon, he could not speak at all, and all the forms of self-control that he’d learned from infancy were gone. But he walked, and he looked out. Sometimes bored, sometimes curious, making puffing sounds, occasionally smiling; diction and syntax were gone, and with them, meaning and connection.

We assume that even mice and turtles and mosquitoes and birds are pursuing their lives in some form that we can generally understand, but here with my friend, this is not so. Someone is still in there doing something, but he is someone else, somewhere else. He reminds us by his very being how close we all are to this edge—how close meaning is to meaninglessness, and how hard we work, even without knowing it, to maintain a framework that makes our inner lives accessible to others and to ourselves, thus producing our world.

He is now for us a question, even as he is no doubt still trying to find some answer to something we don’t know. He reminds us that the world is itself a koan, confronting us, revealing our reliance on conventional thinking even as we know it fails. We cannot turn away.

Our sense perceptions take us forward. They draw us out into time and space, ceaselessly reborn, continuously new, where nothing is entirely familiar or utterly unknown. This moment that we are now seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling is not restricted by any reference points. Thus, for nine years, Bodhidharma stared at an unmoving wall of stone, watching the vastness of reality unfold.

A disciple came to him and said that his mind was not yet at peace. Bodhidharma said: “Bring the mind to me and I will set it at rest.” This and successive interchanges were said to be the beginning of koan practice in the Zen tradition. It may seem that a koan is a device to discover something. More accurately, it is a sensibility of sudden and shocking aliveness that is marked by obstacles, nervousness, uncertainty. This is at the core of our being in the world, our existence moment to moment. It is not something that can be resolved. It is the continuum of mind and the gateway to the continuum of mind. It is our continuum, and whether we remember or do not remember, this goes on. Perhaps we could have confidence in this.

Bodhidharma stared at this moment opening before us. He did not look back or aside. He gazed at this bright, impenetrable, slightly vertiginous expanse until he was not afraid.

Awareness drops into itself.
There is the reality of silent stillness.
And with that, deep unsettledness,
an absence of structure or of resting
point.
The pain of constant alteration,
Changes large and tiny,
fear
Unresolved.

And again, the vast panorama,
the shifting densities of desire,
the histories that do not end.
And now, the non-history of winter
ice.