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Shenshan was mending clothes when Dongshan asked,
“What are you doing?”
“Mending,” said Shenshan.
“How is it going?” asked Dongshan.
“One stitch follows another,” said Shenshan.
“We’ve been traveling together for twenty years and that’s all you have to say?” said Dongshan. “How can you be so clueless?”
“How do you mend, then?”
“With each stitch the whole earth is spewing flames.”

Shenshan’s “one stitch follows another” style of practice/mending reminds me of the way I approached my meditation practice at the beginning. There’s another translation that has  Shenshan saying, “One stitch is like the next,” and that translation also reflects my attitude at the beginning; I assumed meditation was about stability, equanimity, control. Like the beginning of the Ox-herding pictures, I had to tame and train my mind/ox. The structure of the Tibetan sadhana, the methodical practice of meditation and the repetition, one mantra after the other, each like the next, gave me a sense of control and groundedness.

Then I encountered koan practice and my mind spewed flames. The serenity I had been cultivating melted in the heat of the flames spewing forth. Though it was hot and uncomfortable, the heat loosened everything. Hakuin’s words come to mind, “Awakening in the midst of chaos is a million times more powerful than awakening in the midst of serenity.”

Where Dongshan calls Shenshan “clueless,” in another translation it is rendered as, “How can there be such craftiness?” And I find myself appreciating the difference between a craft and an art. Shenshan, and I, at the beginning, were practicing as craftspeople; Dongshan was an artist who let the heat of the flames spewing forth kill him. How about you?

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—David