Rare Communication ...

BASSUI'S FOURTH LETTER 

TO THE ZEN PRIEST IGUCHI

I am glad to learn how ardently you are practicing zazen. What you have reported to me is a little like a Zen experience, but it is essentially what you have understood with your intellect.

The Great Question cannot be resolved by the discursive mind. Even what becomes clear through realization is delusion of a kind. In a previous letter, I wrote you that only when you have come back from the dead, so to speak, will that which hears manifest itself. Your persistent inquiry "What is it that hears?" will eventually lead you to awareness of nothing but the questioning itself. You must not, however, be misled into thinking this is the subject which hears.
You say that in working on this koan you feel as though you have taken hold of a sword and cut away every idea in your mind, including the impression of emptiness, and that questioning alone remains.
But what is doing all this?

Delve to your inmost being and you will discover it is precisely that which hears.

Even though you experience your Self-nature again and again, and understand Buddhism well enough to discourse upon it, your delusive thoughts will survive, inevitably precipitating you into the Three Evil Paths in your next life, unless their root is severed through perfect enlightenment. If, on the other hand, still unsatisfied, you persevere in your self-inquiry even to your deathbed, you will unquestionably come to full enlightenment in your next existence.

Don't allow yourself to become discouraged and don't fritter away your time, just concentrate with all your heart on your koan. Now, your physical being doesn't hear, nor does the void. Then what does?

Strive to find out. Put aside your rational intellect, give up all techniques [to induce enlightenment], abandon the desire for Self-realization, and renounce every other motivation. Your mind will then come to a standstill, and you won't know what to do. No longer possessing the desire to attain enlightenment or to use your powers of reason, you will feel like a tree or a stone. But go further yet and question yourself exhaustively for days on end, and you will surely attain deep enlightenment, cutting away the undermost roots of birth and death and coming to the realm of the non¬ self-conscious Mind.

The undermost roots of birth and death are the delusive thoughts and feelings arising from the self-conscious mind, the mind of ego. A Zen master [Rinzai] once said: "There is nothing in particular to realize. Only get rid of [the idea of a] Buddha and sentient beings."
The essential thing for enlightenment is to empty the mind of the notion of self.

To write in such detail is unwise, but as you have written me so often I feel obliged to reply in tins way.

- Bassui Tokusho, The Three Pillars of Zen