What on Earth Are Thoughts and Ideas?

Contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) log of June 2nd by Ru Ben:

During these days when sitting in meditation, in the process of taming body and mind, I have used various methods—contemplative recollection of the Buddha (buddhānusmṛti), silently reciting the Heart Sutra, silently reciting the Buddha's name, reciting the Śūraṅgama Mantra, contemplating the thirty-two bodily parts, contemplating the arising and ceasing changes of mental sense-objects (dharma-viṣaya)—to make the mind focused and no longer restless and unsettled. It is like taming a wild horse: one needs to use various methods to find out what it likes, what it wants, and why it likes these things, identify the cause, and then resolve that cause; only then can the desires and thoughts in this regard be eliminated. 

From my personal experience, after sitting down, contemplating one by one the arising and ceasing changes of the thirty-two bodily parts is very effective. As soon as I begin to apply attention (manaskāra) to the "hair" of "hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin"…, the mind begins to quiet down. After roughly contemplating the thirty-two bodily parts once through, I then introspectively examine this mind that can feel, observe, and discriminate: what does it look like, where is it, what does it depend on and take as object, what is its scope of function, and what are its differences from mind consciousness.

During contemplative practice, as long as I maintain one questioning doubt: "Who am I?", then repeatedly experience and discriminate, one dharma at a time, the state and characteristics, scope of function, conditions, distinctions, and so forth of each dharma within the physical body and mind consciousness, then at some unknown moment it suddenly coincides with the dharma teachings I have learned. Then one understands that the intellectual understanding of learned knowledge and the feeling after contemplative experiential realization are different, even though the conclusions are the same. 

Sometimes when wandering thoughts suddenly arise, instead of suppressing them, my method is to contemplate the causes of these mental sense-objects surfacing, to contemplate their essence, origin, what they depend on and take as object. Later I discovered that I had attached a label to all of them: you, me, him; then I weighed them as right or wrong, true or false, good or bad, and following that, emotions that could not be relinquished emerged—joy and anger, agitation, depression and discontent, anxiety and craving—like dust covering, suppressing, binding, and tying up the originally pure mind. It is truly like a silkworm binding itself in its own cocoon. It turns out these are merely mental sense-objects left behind by past memories; they are not the mind, yet they do not exist apart from the mind; they inherently have no self-nature—they are merely memory and names-and-forms in one's own mind-field. Having resolved the mental sense-objects, I then came to know the essence, origin, dependence, and objects of the other four sense-objects—material form, sound, and tangibles—as well.

 This is the cause of the arising of wandering thoughts. In the beginning, one must repeatedly come to know and discriminate the mental sense-objects, and only then can the grasping (upādāna) in the mind be relinquished; only after relinquishing can there be relief and gathering in. The method of suppression cannot solve the root problem—it is like knowing that something is so without knowing why it is so—and then wandering thoughts are hard to subdue. 

Next, before contemplative practice, one's study and reflection must be mature; otherwise wisdom cannot arise, and one will not know how to contemplate and discriminate—there is meditative concentration (śamatha) but no wisdom of contemplation (vipaśyanā). For example, every doctor has a certain degree of direct perception of the body's birth, change, aging, and death, but the notion that the body is the self remains unchanged; without wisdom, one does not know to investigate the essence of life. So personally I feel that mature study and reflection before contemplative practice is the foundation. Then one contemplates the mutual influence between the physical body and mind consciousness, and then deeply believes that every arising of thought and mental activity has karmic retribution, that all is self-created and self-received, and the mind becomes more and more peaceful. 

Finally, I rest attention on the breath at the nostrils. Sometimes when the breath is faint, I only feel that the entire physical body is breathing, with no boundary between inside and outside the body. When the power of meditative concentration is good, I feel that body and mind are in a state without self and without a master, gradually no longer having the concept of a body. Currently, with half-lotus posture I can basically hold for one hour without changing legs, and after rising from the seat I feel full of energy. However, when the legs become numb, swollen, and painful, the mental strength weakens, and I need to change legs in order to continue.

After rising from the seat I go out to move about, practicing Tai Chi, and I feel it is the same as sitting meditation and contemplative practice—very quietly, very slowly, very easily I enter the state of contemplative practice. Body and mind are in a state without self and without a master, the breath is even, no one is there, only arms and legs slowly moving in the air, only birdsong rising and falling in the empty stillness, only the formless, unlocatable mind knowing—no one is there. 

In daily life, I try to keep in mind the physical body of the thirty-two bodily parts and the mental activities, not looking at the body as a whole, thus observing the impermanence and masterlessness of the physical body. Currently I cannot yet form continuous, unbroken applied attention (manaskāra). 

Assessment: All thoughts, ideas, and notions come from ignorance (avidyā), and ignorance has no place of origin and no place of destination—it is a illusory dharma. Since wandering thoughts, ideas, and notions come from ignorance that has no place of origin, there is no need to take them seriously; see through them and see them thoroughly, do not follow the wandering thoughts as they rise and fall, remain suchness is immovable (tathatā-acalita), and gradually these ignorant thoughts will disappear on their own, and the mind will become pure and peaceful. Then, when contemplating the object again, it is luminously clear, and ignorance becomes thin. Human ideas and notions come and go; even if you want to keep them, they cannot be kept—they are always changing ceaselessly and cannot be fixed. See through them, pay them no heed, do not move along with them, and the mind will naturally be cool and tranquil.