Jun Po Roshi (Interview Archive)
Erik: Some people listening to us right now have never meditated, and Zen can feel strange from the outside, koan work most of all. So I want to ask you something plain. If a person wanted to touch that awareness you keep describing, touch it immediately, what would they actually do?
Jun Po: Shut up. Shut up. That's the koan. Shut up, shut up, shut up. In our Mondo dialogue the opening question is simple to state and hard to meet: are you able to listen purely? Can you listen with no opinion stirring? Is there a receptive quiet way down inside you that just takes in sound? We sit with that for a while, and the instruction you hand yourself is one word, repeated. Listen, listen, listen. The mind keeps saying it, and the word works like an arrow aimed at the bare fact of your own receptivity. The arrow points at the moonlight sitting at the center of who you are. Listen, listen, listen. If your head is noisy, speed the repetition up. As things begin to settle, you let the word thin out and you simply listen. We run the listening practice as a koan to carry you down into silence, further each time. That is the first one.
The point of the word could just as well be nonsense. Yabba-dabba-do, if you like. The real question is what you are doing to gather the mind and set yourself right here. The Soto people will tell you to do nothing at all, to sit and drop into stillness. Fine, go ahead, sit and drop into stillness. It never worked for me, and it didn't work for most of the friends I practiced with, so we turned to the older concentration methods, the Hindustani ones.
There was a great yogi, Sarafa Katama, who spent eight years with two famous teachers in his line and learned the vinyasa process from the ground up. He was schooled in concentration practices that open into insight, Dharana ripening into Dhyana. So I ask a student: what is the form you're using, and understand it can be almost anything. If someone insists a mantra carries no meaning, then don't bother with it. Mantra, a tomb for the mind, or a focus for it. Repeat a mantra and you're already doing a koan, except the koan is only the finger pointing at the moon. People say the sound holds some mystical charge. It doesn't matter what the charge is. If you're going to do it, why not know what you're doing while you do it?
I'm not interested in anyone sitting and chanting yabba-dabba-do for forty years with no idea why. What is the mechanism here? How is this supposed to work on you? Once you grasp that, you can hand yourself over to it completely. Is it hard? Yes. Worthwhile things usually are. Shift how you look at the difficulty while you're at it. Is this hard? Completely.