A Mind Like a Wall Leads to the Path

Question: One night, I entered meditative concentration in my sleep. My mind was perfectly clear and lucid, fully aware of the people and things around me, yet I felt as though these matters had no connection to me and could not affect me. It was as if I were in a vacuum, without a single distracting thought in my mind—only one thought contemplating the Dharma (though I can no longer recall the specific teaching). It felt like a solitary sun shining in the sky without a trace of cloud. Simultaneously, my entire body and mind experienced incomparable lightness, ease, and comfort. I finally understood how profoundly comfortable meditative concentration can be! Even after waking, I could still feel that comfort. If such meditative concentration exists, I truly would no longer crave worldly pleasures. That feeling of lightness, ease, and freedom is beyond comparison with the pleasures of the five worldly desires. Master, please teach me: Why did this state, which I’ve never experienced in waking life, appear in a dream?

Answer: This dream state reflects the condition of meditative contemplation within samadhi—a union of stillness (śamatha) and insight (vipaśyanā). You practiced this samadhi in a past life; it is the "access concentration" (anāgamya-samādhi). Your mental faculty (manas) experienced it before and retains the memory. Now, your mind yearns for it and wishes to re-experience this state of samadhi. However, your present life is busy, and the conditions for cultivating concentration are not yet complete. Thus, your mental faculty resorts to dreaming, enjoying the bliss of samadhi and contemplation in the dream. It seems your mental faculty is rather pitiable and helpless—modern society is too chaotic, making it impossible to renounce the clamor of life and wholeheartedly pursue the path.

In the dream, your consciousness was in a clear, thoughtless state—utterly lucid and without discursive thoughts. This likely corresponds to the access concentration. However, your mental faculty was actively engaged in investigating the Dharma, contemplating the Buddha’s teachings. Only through such contemplation can the fundamental problems be resolved and realization attained. Investigating Chan (參禪) is precisely this state: not a single distracting thought in the mind, external objects not entering the heart, the mind unmoving like a solid wall. The Patriarch Bodhidharma said, "When the mind is like a wall, one may enter the path." This is what he meant. If your samadhi and contemplation do not reach this degree, do not expect to attain realization.

This state of contemplative investigation by the mental faculty can only arise and remain uninterrupted under extremely quiet environmental conditions. Only then can it probe the profound and subtle principles of the Dharma to the finest degree. Therefore, genuine practitioners renounce all external entanglements, embracing absolute solitude and stillness—utterly without companions. Cultivating the path is the great work of a solitary individual; it cannot be accomplished amid noise or in the company of others. Those who cannot endure solitude will not tread the true path. Samadhi subdues and severs afflictions, bringing pliancy (praśrabdhi), joy, and happiness. Nothing brings greater happiness than cultivating the path. Thus, those with samadhi do not delight in worldly dharmas; their minds do not cling to the world. They do not pursue wealth, sensual pleasures, fame, food, sleep, reputation, or gain, nor do they crave power, status, or position. Clinging to worldly dharmas is truly unwise.

Some say that merely ten or so minutes of undistracted contemplation of the Dharma can lead to realizing the fruit and awakening the mind. To say this is utterly absurd. Such a short period of contemplating the Dharma cannot possibly lead to profound, subtle reflection, nor can it cultivate the state of meditative equipoise (samādhi-prajñā) in Chan investigation. It is like trying to boil a large pot of water: it requires an hour. If you heat it for five or ten minutes and then stop, resuming the next day, even after a year or a decade of such intermittent heating, the water will never boil. To treat the Dharma so frivolously, to toy with it, brings exceedingly unwholesome karmic retribution. If the Dharma were so easy to cultivate and realize, how could there be so many beings in the three lower realms? People of the world love to cut corners, but the result of cutting corners only harms themselves. You reap what you sow. To achieve anything, you must relinquish body and mind and be willing to put in the effort.