Chan Practice to Primordial Awareness

We held a three-day meditation program at the Chientan Youth Activity Center in Taipei. This event is to welcome people to learn about the Peace Meditation of Ling Jiou Mountain. Our mind sways with external phenomena before learning about Chan practice. Our inner thoughts are connected and mixed that we label phenomena with provisional designations. Our awareness wanders in the waves of phenomena. Our mind couldn't find its way home.

Chan practice is to forsake these swirling thoughts, so our mind returns to its origin, a state that never changes. It is a state of unarising and unceasing. The worldly knowledge we pursue is not our mind. The mind is devoid of any forms and phenomena. It is spontaneously at ease. Nothing can confine it.

Our thoughts create substances and materials. Birth takes place based on karmic memories. This memory drive stores up the network of connection between sentient beings and oneself. There are positivities and negativity within this network. They make up the fluctuation in life with all kinds of events.

The way for us to part from these changes of the samsaric memories is to become “awakened”. Let’s return to the nature of our awareness, which is luminous and undefiled. Before we thoroughly recognize our awareness, our mind is defiled and unclear. Once we realize that our awareness isn’t substances or phenomena, we can approach emptiness and uncover our primordial awareness that is already perfect.

This very awareness of ours is peaceful, clear, and noble. How do we stop the awareness from catching more adventitious defilements? The Four-step Technique of Ling Jiou Mountain’s Peace Meditation will slow down the wandering habit of our mind. This is a way to let our minds rest and become stabilized. Once the mind settles down, we’d return to the nature of our mind.

If the mind returns to nature, it is returning to our awareness. It is oneness after all. Chan practice allows one to merge with the life of the universe. Let's enter our innate awareness and become an entity of interdependence with the universe.