To Forget the Breath

To forget the breath one must first know the breath

I always laugh a little inside when I hear a dharma teacher or meditation teacher say, “don’t think about your breath, just let it come naturally.” All right — and how exactly does one not think about the breath? It is like being told not to think about a pink elephant. Super unhelpful.

None of us learn anything without first learning the basics and slowly building skills until they combine into the complex behavior we were after. I used to train and handle search and rescue dogs. The goal was a dog who would work tirelessly over hours to find a missing person — a genuinely complex task. So we broke it into its smallest discrete learnable behaviors and then, over many repetitions, linked them into a whole. And it all started with one thing. Engagement. Look at me. From there to a working dog could take two years.

Meditation on the breath is no different. We first have to have a fairly complete acquaintance with the breath. You cannot forget something you never knew in the first place.

Buddhist practice has a few devices for this, and versions of them turn up across traditions. Zhiyi, the Tiantai master, set out the one most of us have met, usually in three parts. Count the breaths, one through ten, then start again at one. When the counting steadies, drop it and simply follow — the belly rising, the turn at the top, the long fall out. Then let following go too, and just sit. Fifteen centuries later the sequence has not needed improving. Zhiyi in fact carries it further, past stopping into contemplating and returning; the first three steps are simply where most of us live.

What is easy to miss is that the third step is the whole point of the first two. You count in order to arrive somewhere counting is no longer needed. The counting is not an inferior version of the sitting, or a crutch for people who cannot yet do the real thing. It is the road, and there is no other road. The forgetting that comes at the end is not the same as never having known. A person who has never counted a breath in his life is also not counting. He is not, on that account, meditating.

First there is a mountain

Back in the sixties, when Zen was reaching a wide English readership through Suzuki and Watts, the Scottish singer Donovan sang of:

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

The original comes from the Ch’an master Qingyuan Weixin:

Before I had studied Ch’an for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance, I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.

He ends the same passage with a challenge to the room:

Are these three views the same or different? If anyone here can tell the black from the white, I will grant that you have met me face to face.

That challenge is the crux, and it is usually skipped over, because it is much harder and doesn’t land as a clean and glib soundbite. Qingyuan is not offering a tidy progression to be admired. He is asking whether you can tell his first mountain from his third — because from the outside they are indistinguishable. Both are a man looking at a mountain and calling it a mountain. The difference is not in the mountain. It is not even what he says about the mountain. It is in what had to happen to him before he could say it again.

The middle stage is not a destination

The doctrinal map is familiar enough — the solid mountain is the provisional, the dissolved mountain is emptiness, the mountain seen again is the Middle — and it is also the least useful thing about the passage, because a map of a road does not tell you what it costs to travel it. What the passage actually says is that the second stage is a passage and not an address. There are practitioners who arrive at no mountain and set up house. It is an intoxicating place to live. Everything can be dissolved from there — every attachment, every claim, every earnest belief someone brings to you. Nothing is what it appears to be, and the person who has learned this can say so about anything, endlessly, and never be wrong. It is a position that cannot lose an argument.

It is also a kind of arrested development. Emptiness held as a permanent posture becomes just another thing to hold, and the tradition is blunt about this: to be attached to emptiness is worse than to be attached to existence, because the person attached to existence at least knows he is holding something. The corrective is not to retreat back into the first mountain. It is to go through, until the mountain comes back — not as a concession or a compromise but as what was there the entire time, now seen without the film over it.

The counterfeit third stage

Here is where Qingyuan Weixin’s challenge to the room becomes practical, because the third stage has an imitator that is very hard to detect from outside, including from inside your own head.

The imitation goes like this. Someone hears that the destination is ordinary. Mountains are just mountains. Chop wood, carry water. Nothing special. And this is genuinely appealing, especially to a person who is tired, or who has decided that the middle stage looks like a lot of unpleasant work. So he skips it. He arrives at plainness by never having left it, and calls it arrival.

You cannot tell the difference by listening. Both men say the mountain is a mountain, and both may say it with the same untroubled face. The difference is that one of them has been through the dissolution and one has not — and this shows up not in what they say but in what happens when the ground moves. When something genuinely breaks — an illness, a betrayal, a death, a doctrine that stops working — the man who skipped the middle has nothing under him. His plainness was never tested. It was a preference.

This is why the sequence cannot be run out of order, and why no teacher can hand you the third stage. It is not information. It is the result of having done something.

The daimoku, three times

I have watched this play out in chanting for close to fifty years, in myself and in others.

A person begins chanting Namu Myoho Renge Kyo without knowing what the words mean or where they came from. The syllables are simply what one does. This is the first mountain, and there is nothing deficient about it. Nichiren was clear that the beginner who chants with faith alone is not practicing a truncated dharma; he is standing at the source and drinking.

Then, if he keeps going, the questions arrive. What is this, actually? Who receives it? Is anything out there listening? He learns that the daimoku is not a request submitted to an office, that there is no one on the other end taking orders, that the syllables have no magic in them, that the Buddha is not a person who intervenes. Whatever he thought he was doing, he was not doing that. The mountain is not a mountain. This stage is not comfortable and it should not be. Anything that survives it has earned its keep.

And then, some morning, he chants. The same seven syllables. The same breath, the same tempo, the same three or four recitations on the out-breath. From across the room it looks exactly like the first year. It is not the first year. Nothing has been added and a great deal has been removed.

And then there is

One caution, which I offer mostly to myself. The third mountain is not tenure. Qingyuan says he is at rest, and I believe him, but I notice he does not say the first two views were destroyed — only that he passed through them. Certainty attained in a good hour should be checked against a dry morning some weeks later, and on that dry morning a person may find himself back at the base of the first mountain, counting breaths again, one through ten, beginning again at one.

Which is not failure. It is the road. It is the only road there is. It is what I used to tell handlers whose dogs had come apart in the field and would not be recalled to the work — go back to the beginning, and start with engagement. Look at me. Everything else is built out of that one small thing, and it is never beneath you to return to it.

To forget the breath, one must first know the breath. And having forgotten it, one may need to learn it again.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo