Understanding Cannot Help You

Question: The attempt to “resolve” the problem is already the problem in action. Even refined forms —acceptance, non-seeking, letting go—can turn into strategies that secretly aim at a different state. Is there a practice instruction you would recommend for working with this—living the insight in everyday life?

Full Question

Zen Master Tan Wol: Thank you for your good question. Our founding teacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn used to say, “Don’t make anything and you already have everything. If you make something, you lose everything.” The true meaning of the teaching words means that everything is already complete and the truth. But when you start checking, holding and finally attaching to anything, you will have problems and be suffering.

In our daily life, especially in lay people’s life, bills, shopping, managing are necessary. There is nothing wrong with those activities, and it’s right that you try to deal with them in better ways. That means ‘you don’t make anything, but you Just Do It!’.

Even after you have got a task done well, you check yourself thinking, “this is not true liberation because I still had to follow a certain mechanism.” And if you hold that kind of idea and become attached to it, confusion, ego, and suffering will wait for you.

“Don’t make anything” doesn’t mean that you become like a stone or a piece of wood. The true meaning of the teaching words means, ‘when you do something, just do it’. Don’t get trapped by your own ideas, opinions, and checking, which are often not necessary.

If you don’t know how to take a pause in your endless checking mind, even the great Buddha’s teachings can not help you. It’s because they are only your intellectual understanding. That’s why, in Zen, practice doesn’t mean understanding but it means doing and attaining.

If you attain your mind – in other words, if your mind becomes simple and clear – a goal, an evaluator, and a project of self-correction will become the truth and they are all complete.

That’s why we emphasize practice rather than just understanding in Zen. Only understanding can never help you. All the teaching words you understand merely with your logic will confuse you soon or later when you encounter smarter words and theories. You have to digest it!

Here is a poem for you I would like to share. It’s written by Zen Master Man Gong who is the grand teacher of Zen Master Seung Sahn.

Everything is impermanent, but there is truth.

You and I are not two, not one;

Only your stupid thinking is nonstop.

Already alive in the Prajna ship.