How to Practice Chan Meditation

In the past, students asked Chan masters: How should one apply the mind when practicing Chan? The Chan master replied: Investigate apart from mind, manas, and consciousness.

May I ask: What does it mean to investigate apart from mind, manas, and consciousness?

Buddhist practitioners of the past almost all possessed meditative concentration (samādhi). Those with meditative concentration could practice with relative ease and knew how to practice, so the conditions for awakening could easily mature. Therefore, although the Chan masters did not understand the nature of the manas, they knew how to investigate Chan, and they told their disciples the knack of investigating Chan: do not speculate beneath the mind, do not indulge in emotional thinking and intellectual understanding; leave behind the mind consciousness and use the mind consciousness sparingly for pondering and reasoning. This way of applying the mind in investigating Chan was very deep, and their practice was solid. When the Chan master ascended the hall to give a Dharma talk, those below could awaken at any moment. To others it may have seemed easy, but their practice was done thoroughly. Throughout the six periods of the day, they applied their minds without distraction, entirely devoted to investigating Chan—including laboring in the fields, lighting fires and cooking meals, and even while sleeping they could continue their practice. If the mind consciousness does the work, the practice breaks off when one falls asleep; but when the manas does the work, sleeping does not interfere.

Later, some people stopped practicing earnestly. They gathered in groups of twos and threes to study and discuss gong'ans. When the Chan masters saw this, they would strike them apart with a blow of the staff, forbidding study and discussion, and even forbidding reading books—not even Buddhist sutras could be read. One must devote body and mind entirely to investigating Chan.

Later still, the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch spread widely, and those engaged in genuine practice gradually grew fewer. Everyone took up the Platform Sutra and began to speak with a glib tongue and eloquent rhetoric, all believing they had attained the Way, and so the Chan school declined and withered. People nowadays are even more glib and eloquent than those of that time, surpassing them in this regard. Everyone can talk, parroting like a myna bird, yet no one has any real skill. They shout about genuine practice and realization with their mouths, while their feet tread upon the clouds—without a ladder to heaven, yet all of them claim they can ascend.