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the Buddha continues, “Past mind cannot be grasped, neither can present mind, nor future mind.”40
These “minds” cannot be grasped because they are completely empty. This is also why they can be called “past mind,” “present mind,” and “future mind”—these being precisely differentiated names for the timeless realm where there are no names at all. 

 Even after a deep realization, we feel that it is not enough. Actually, that is a measure of its depth: the deeper the realization, the deeper the sense that it is not enough.
“Harboring the elegance of former days” can also refer to our tendency to cling to the experience of emptiness after awakening, like someone waking from sleep but still being in the spell of a dream. Clinging to emptiness is understandable. I’ve known people who have wept at the receding of the experience. But if we cling to the experience of emptiness, it ossifies into our thinking about it. Under the spell of our “achievement,” we cannot move on, and our practice, and indeed our life, stagnates. And yet, clinging—even that stultified condition itself—is an expression of the timeless eternal realm, too. Although we may regard an experience of awakening to emptiness as complete, it is at the same time only a first step on the path. It is important to let go of whatever experiences we may have had, and to open ourselves to uncertainty again, leaving behind any knowledge of the Way we think we may have acquired.
Heraclitus, describing soul, says that she is so vast that you could journey many days without reaching the end of her. For days, let’s read years or decades. The undertaking of coming to know who you are, and your deep connection to all that is, is endless. The darkened mirror of the first mode yearns for the clear, bright mirror of the second. At each stage of the Way it is “Not enough. Not yet enough. Never enough.” And this is the deepest encouragement of all.

When we encounter the precious mirror we awaken to the fact that those we meet are precisely us, though we are in the same breath distinct from them. When identity is asserted, difference is not being denied. Correspondingly, by dint of engagement with others in the rough and the smooth of it, we come to experience our ever-changing circumstances as awakening. We can’t contrive this. However, by remaining open to the challenges posed by natural differences and disagreements, along with their attendant fear, rage, and humiliation, we slowly come to understand that what is hardest to bear can also be, in fact, our true and original face. This is a path for a lifetime.
This is clearly meeting face-to-face—only then is it genuine.

“This is clearly meeting face-to-face—nothing more.” In other words, if the encounter is genuine, that’s it. No need to think about it, interpret it, or add anything to it. To do so would only ossify the encounter into ideas and stories. And stories and ideas are merely shadows.
Don’t lose your head by validating shadows.

d. After a genuine awakening, I doubt that we can ever quite go back to how we were. Something has changed in our depths, and although none of us are immune from getting it terribly wrong (we’re not meant to be proof against that), after awakening we come from a different place to make peace, or to make trouble. Our suffering is held differently, or not even held at all: just that disappointment, just that heartache.

Still, even after the deepest of awakening experiences, habitual ways of thinking and feeling do return. Given the extensive connotations of “shadow” we could drag in the darkness of a lifetime here. But my sense is that Dongshan is specifically concerned with “shadows” such as the all-too-human tendency to mull over an insight, particularly in an attempt to recreate it.

It is also possible to translate this line about losing your head as “Don’t lose your head by validating images.” Specifically, this focuses the matter of not attaching to an experience of enlightenment. When we do this we reify what is transient and turn it into our story about it. In terms of the path to be traveled, it is important to let go of an experience of emptiness and allow it to do its work in our depths. If it is genuine it effects its changes out of reach of our acquisitive mind. When students would come to Shunryu Suzuki to report “a profound awakening experience,” he would say to them, “You have five minutes.” Indeed, our next task is already at hand.

Catching a glimpse of our true nature is just the beginning. Such experiences can move us in our depths, but if we are going to be able to embody the Way and convey it to others, we must take the longer journey of coming to know our selves. I remember my bewilderment in the face of Socrates’ “Know thyself” cut into one of the limestone portals of the university where I studied as a young man. Without self-knowledge, at the very least, we run the risk of releasing our own darkness on others.

 When we can see through our fear—fear of loss of control, fear of being shamed, fear of the unknown parts of ourselves—we reduce the need to hang on so tightly to our assumed roles, as well as the need to control how others relate to them.
We come away from our encounter with the ancient mirror with the means to look more deeply into who we are. This means that we get to know the lesser in the light of the greater. When the boundedness of who we take ourselves to be recedes, the possibilities for deeper self-knowledge and acceptance appear. Seen thus, our inward cowering is our enlightened self-nature and ancient remorse is also our true face, no less than bells, stars, and the cries of water birds.

With the changes that flow from an experience of awakening we learn to more readily include much that we would have formerly found unbearable: malicious gossip being spread about us, humiliation, even betrayal.
In the light of the greater we come to see ourselves for who we are, and over time, the matter of me grows less solid. With this, we grow less preoccupied with our issues—our fear of others, and of ourselves—and can meet whatever comes with a measure of equanimity, if not acceptance.

When we awaken to the emptiness of words and language (the theme of this mode of Arriving within the Essential), we are released from the restrictive attitudes and from the stories that close us down. In particular, we are released from the stranglehold of literalism. Words mean, but they can also go beyond meaning to encode the universe.
We conventionally regard words and language as bearers of dualistic baggage. Now, however, even that baggage shines. 

insight into the profound nature of words delivers us freedom from abuse. This doesn’t mean that we won’t feel the pain of abuse; rather, what is hurtful is carried differently, if at all. When we open to insult or malicious gossip as just those words, we come to experience abusive words as the timeless void of our true nature, without remainder. To practice thus is to walk the path of liberation.

As we deepen in the mystery, our limited preoccupations are put ruthlessly into perspective—as a vanishing point. As we take responsibility for them, our personal dramas seem less solid, and we are less fixated on them. There’s less tendency to sweat the small, or to make an enduring saga out of our pain. These represent the fruits of our deepening experience of the empty Way

We need to move on from an experience of the void, for it can be so compellingly marvelous that we end up clinging to it. We must emerge from the featureless dark. There’s no way that we can live there, although I’ve met earnest seekers who are still regaling anyone who will listen with stories about their experience, twenty years on—hopelessly circling the inexplicable. Even if they are genuine, such experiences coagulate immediately into our ideas about them, so that we can remain unknowingly entrapped in our rehashing of them—unavailable to others, unavailable for life. If we hoard our experience of emptiness, like a miser his gold, what is insubstantial as a dream ossifies into our ideas about it, and we end by living our life at a deep remove

The image of the crossed swords may also symbolize a dilemma: we encounter the crumbling edges of our life and practice, where we sense that whatever we’ve realized can’t light up the darkness and grief of estrangement, or magically resolve our inability to forgive. We must respond by allowing this dilemma, filled with painful confusion and uncertainty, to be just what it is. This is the crux of the matter of not dodging when swords are crossed.
When we are at odds with our environment, we don’t need to dodge, which is to say that we needn’t look elsewhere for awakening. 

the deeper sense of his question is, “Show me how to realize emptiness in order that I can find release from suffering and discomfort.”
Dongshan sets the monk right. We don’t need to go anywhere. We—just as we are, right where we are—should let heat kill off our ideas about it; let there be nothing but heat. Then the entirety of things sweats and complains.

 I feel that it will be particularly helpful to consider envy in this role, because it is so seldom addressed in Zen, probably because it is so deeply nestled in shame.

For our purposes, I imagine the life of Baizhang’s head monk Hua Linjue following his losing encounter with Guishan Lingyou (771–853). Coming out second best is a typical scenario for experiencing envy, and we rightly fear its invasion. It can paralyze our life and make us prey to sickening fantasies. In its pathological form we would willingly derail and subvert our own life, if only we could thwart the other’s success. Envy makes us feel shameful, absurd, grotesque, and ridiculous.
In an age in which we are constantly measuring ourselves against others, it seems particularly pertinent to examine the way in which even an emotion as poisonous and unrelenting as envy can be worked with to yield profound awakening.

Because he would have rather died than taken the brunt of such envy and self-hatred, he retired to the mountains, far from the solicitations and knowing smiles of the junior monks, and safe from Baizhang’s penetrating questions concerning how he felt about Guishan’s appointment. Anything but that!
Hua built his hermitage deep in the mountains. The hard physical labor of building in extremes of heat and cold provided a measure of respite from his envy and resentment. But they were not gone. They returned, especially in his meditations, and because he was high-minded, he struggled with them, thinking, “I should be better than this. I should be beyond this.” This doubled his agony.

Yet even news of Guishan’s difficulties did nothing to ease the envy Hua felt. Even the complete abandonment of the Mt. Gui project wouldn’t have done that.
Sitting late one night trying to practice sympathetic joy for Guishan with Baizhang’s words circling in his mind, Hua suddenly heard the words “The Head Monk loses” as if for the first time. They were no longer directed at him, circumscribing his life as abject and infantile. They were just “The Head Monk loses,” like a wave crashing on the beach, or the clouds silvered by moonlight just visible through the back window of his hermitage.
Hua wept and bowed in the direction of Baizhang’s monastery. Then, in the immensity of his relief, he bowed in the direction of Mt. Gui.

Having done the hard work of bearing with what is hardest to bear, we emerge blinking in the sunlight and find that the tigers come at our bidding and enjoy our company. 

Each time we touch envy, or its underlying sorrow and barrenness, we encourage release. With release we can weep a while, and breathe a little deeper. In time we grow less preoccupied with ourselves, and our passions—the prevailing moods of the soul—roll through like the seasons.
This is the dawn at the end of a long and arduous journey with difficult emotions, noticing them, opening to them, and including them. It’s also the fruit of experiencing emptiness. Such work, whether with envy or any other karmic tendency, enables the mutual integration of darkness and light, understood here as the mutual integration of the essential and the contingent.
Sometimes our hearts are open, and sometimes, with the best will in the world, they remain clenched tightly shut. We are all suffering bodies on the long path to liberation.

In Buddhist teachings, the mundane stream traditionally corresponds with change and impermanence. More precisely, it is the stream of birth and death where, fed by ignorance and craving, we fabricate the self and become entangled in its dramas.
We long to leave the mundane stream because we suffer there. Our longing to escape the stream of birth and death is the deep impulse that underlies our seeking the Way. We want what is changeless and pure—really an indefinite extension of our best moments—rather than the vicissitudes of our lives. We long to experience that still point at the heart of everything changing

Not advancing, not retreating,
not empty, not real; there is an ocean of bright clouds:
there is an ocean of solemn clouds.59

Thus is our passionate life, experienced, seen into, and seen through—all preoccupations and concepts burned away—with eyes of emptiness. That gaze takes in our life with its suffering and delight, without fuss or concern. Whose providence is this long beautiful evening? Whose providence is this year of failed enterprises? Whose providence is this great earth, which rolls through space with its living and its dead, its marriages and burials? We take on the mystery of that. We live out, and die into, the mystery of that

Taking up the bodhisattva precepts68 is also an expression of our commitment to the Way and should help us to reduce the harm we do to others and ourselves. We come to know ourselves through the challenge of trying to keep the precepts, because they make us more conscious of our motives and help us to know our own hearts. Regardless of our commitment to keep the precepts, we can still hurt others and cause harm. We aren’t proof against that. To live is to hurt and to be hurt, and making apology, forgiving, and being forgiven remain at the core of our relationships with others.
As regards that core, it is important that we know our own hearts. Our loves and our fears are also our true nature in its unfolding. We serve the essential when we allow the presence of those feelings. Otherwise we run the risk of divorcing what we mistakenly take to be the purity of the essential from the messiness of our lives.
In Dongshan’s verse the voice of the cuckoo calls us into greater depth, and we enter the jumbled peaks of passion and suffering to find that they too are expressions of awakened mind and heart.

Regarding our suffering, and our journey with it, it is important to get to know our propensities and our demons, and to learn to work with them. This process usually entails fear: of the journey itself, and of what we might discover. When I touch on the topic of fear when giving a Dharma talk, I feel the atmosphere in the zendo change, and I have the sense that everyone’s on board for this bit. Fear seems so fundamental to how many of us feel much of the time.
We are often more afraid of life than death. This isn’t reasoned or even reasonable. We fear shame, in particular. And shame surely can feel like a death. My mother used to say, “I could have died!” or “I felt as big as sixpence!”70 Contrariwise, we often need signs of respect from others in order to behave tolerably toward ourselves, even to feel that we are alive in a way that’s worth the living.
When we learn to acknowledge our fear, we also learn a lot about the sources of our aggression, manifested both as lashing out and as being uncooperative. We see how painful it is when we allow fear to shape our lives, as when we constantly contort ourselves trying to avoid others. If we could see the tracks of our avoidance from above, what a confusing maze of scuffmarks that would be!
By attending to our fear and anger, over time we are changed. This is not least because with attention to our fear and anger we are more in touch with our sorrow and vulnerability. We can then connect with the world from a much more settled, open place. When we speak, our words have much more heart and body in them, and our compassion feels less entangled with our codependent need to please others.
Even a moment free from attachment to our isolated self can release helpful energies and abundant love that many can share in, without quite knowing what draws and holds them. Groups form and benefit from this. Over time, as we settle into such communities, our less appealing traits get unerringly reflected back to us (our more appealing traits having mostly shown up earlier).