The Progress of Chan Doesn’t Obey a Clock

Rev. Heng Sure: My experience is progress in Chan goes like plateaus like you're traveling on what seems like an endless plateau akin to the Great Plains. Then at some point before you know it, you're going up. And if you stop for a second and look back, wow, I was way down there before and how did I get up here? And then another plateau.

These plateaus don't obey a clock. They have their own time. And the time is how think is the layers of affliction in our minds. The huatou (Ch. 話頭）of a Chan master of the past was “Who's dragging this corpse here?” (Ch. 拖死屍的是誰?) He got enlightened, he woke up. But it took him thirty years and in a finger snap his mind tallied with the minds of the sages. Thirty years of asking the very same question.

You said, I've been reciting for a year. Congratulations. That's a year well used. But come back in another year and you're going to be asking a different question. If you are on that plateau and some point you stop and say, you know, I'm gonna go get my master's degree. Then it’s you who wasted a year of effort. So do continue and don’t quit. In another year you will be asked in a very different question.

[Edited from talks given on December 28, 2021]