Totally Knurd

Zen talk 2013

Three verses from the ‘Hymn to the Wisdom beyond all wisdom’ by Rahulabhadra:

All mental fabrications dissolve,
the moment we come to touch You,
as drops of dew disappear,
once the rays of the sun warm them.

You who appear fearsome to us
only when we are caught in ignorance.
For in wisdom and the certainty of the heart
You appear always as love, as bestowing grace.

Mother and primordial ground of all that is.
If we are not carried by love toward You,
our dealings with the ten thousand things
will remain captive in the web of desire and aversion.

Have you ever been afraid to sit down to meditate? Ever felt anxious setting off for a retreat? Ever had the feeling: ‘Not today, I’d rather have a drink’? Ever thought: ‘This is too much to let in, I don’t dare face this?

Rahulabhadra is apparently familiar with this fear when he writes:

You who appear fearsome to us, only when we are caught in ignorance.

Sometimes fear comes over us. Sometimes we avoid our cushion like the plague. Ignorance, avidya, also means: not seeing, not wanting to see. The fantasy author Terry Pratchett describes a state he calls ‘knurd’. He defines it as: “The opposite of being drunk, it’s as sober as you can ever be. It strips away all the illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then, after they’ve screamed a bit, they make sure they never get knurd again”.

With his remarkable combination of humor and depth, Pratchett gives words to this fear. Reality is too terrible. Without illusions we cannot bear it.

I remember a discussion with a theologian who maintained that people need religion because they cannot live without illusions. I remember a perpetrator of sexual offenses who said in a lucid moment: ‘If the world were to pause for even a moment and look at itself, it would collapse under the weight of remorse.’ A brief moment of knurd.

In the Pali Canon, King Ajatasattu confesses to the Buddha that he murdered his father, King Bimbisara, in order to ascend the throne. After the conversation, the Buddha says to his monks: ‘The king is in distress. Had he not murdered his father, he could have attained liberation right here on this spot.’

Can we bear it? Can we bear our own pain? Can we bear our remorse? Can we bear the pain of the people around us? And how far does ‘around us’ extend? As far as the Middle-East? And what are we then supposed to do with that?

The ‘only when’ in Rahulabhadra’s verse indicates that looking away is not the solution. More than that:

For in wisdom and the certainty of the heart
You appear always as Love, as bestowing grace.

This is self-evident. Prajnaparamita is love, grace. If only it could be self-evident for everyone. In reality, for many people this sounds counterintuitive, even absurd.

In our meditation instruction the point is to hold on to nothing. Therein lies liberation, we say. Liberation is found in that open space in which we are willing to allow whatever arises to be present. Liberation is where we are willing not to look away.

Our fear keeps us from liberation. So what do we do with fear? It is sometimes said that we must break through that fear in order to attain awakening. In some traditions strong pressure is applied to force a breakthrough. As a psychiatrist I have seen too many people who, with the best of intentions, in a therapeutic or spiritual context, were pressured to ‘break through’ something (just the aggressive language alone!) and who ended up in serious difficulty as a result. We have good reasons to be afraid. Emotions are highly flammable and explosive material. Knurd is no less dangerous than drunk.

And yet, and yet, there is that invitation not to turn away, to look and to keep looking. Rahulabhadra even says:

All mental fabrications dissolve,
the moment we come to touch You,
as drops of dew disappear,
once the rays of the sun warm them.

This too sounds entirely counterintuitive. Dissolve? Nothing dissolves at all. My mind just keeps spinning when I sit on my cushion. It is the most common misunderstanding about meditation: that our thoughts will stop.

But it is like the drops of dew being warmed by the sun. The water molecules do not disappear. Through the warmth they gain great freedom, so that they no longer condense into a drop. Once the air cools, they become drops again. In the same way we give all mental fabrications their freedom. To put it in a contemporary verse:

Three thousand bees
buzzing in my head
I let the sun of awareness shine
to set them free

Or in the words of Shunryu Suzuki: ‘To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control them.’ Thoughts do not stop. They keep spinning quietly, but we do not solidify them.

Our most solidified mental fabrication is probably ‘I’. As in: ‘I am sitting here, I am meditating, I am doing well, I am making a mess of it, I am fantastic, I am a complete failure…’ And our brain shows no hesitation in spinning the following paradox: ‘I ought to have less ego’. When we begin to meditate, we have the sense of: ‘I am looking at my experience’. If you keep looking, you discover that the notions ‘I’ and ‘my’ are equally constructions that appear in that vast open space.

How do our mental fabrications solidify? What makes them hard?

Mother and Primordial Ground of all that is.
If we are not carried by love toward You,
our dealings with the ten thousand things
will remain captive in the web of desire and aversion.

It is through desire and aversion that mental fabrications solidify. Desire and aversion are not in themselves the culprits. Without desire and aversion we would not even survive. It is our entanglement with them that makes life miserable.

This is also why compassion is the essence of meditation. Desire and aversion cause us to push certain things away and pull others toward us. ‘This I like, this doesn’t belong, I want this, I want to get rid of that.’ Compassion is the willingness to allow whatever comes toward you. It is the warmth of compassion that causes the mental fabrications to melt.

Joko Beck describes how Zen students come to her hard as deep-frozen ice cubes, and how they slowly melt through the warmth of mindfulness in meditation. People who meditate over a long period of time, I see them soften year by year. Sometimes, sadly, you also see people harden when they meditate without compassion, without warmth, without kindness. I have known teachers with whom you simply enjoyed being, because of their warmth, and I have known teachers with whom you always had the feeling of falling short. When meditation becomes a harsh practice, it leads not to wisdom but to harshness. Wisdom flows from compassion.

It is all very easy to say: ‘Liberation is found in that open space in which we are willing to allow whatever arises to be present.’ But what if something terrible happens to us, if our world collapses? Does this reasoning still hold then? It is precisely in those moments that we realize what this practice means to us. Only then do we understand why we have been sitting on a cushion all this time. That is the moment when you say: ‘I don’t know how I could have survived this without meditation.’ In those moments we are so grateful that meditation once found its way onto our path.

But the most essential thing is this: it is a path of compassion. Allowing what is, without illusion, is only possible with boundless kindness, with love, with compassion, with warmth. Only then can we be, fearlessly and unabashedly, totally knurd.