The absence of thought
Chen-Huei says:
“The absence of thought is instantaneous thought, and instantaneous thought is omniscience. Thought in the absence of thought is the manifestation, the activity of the absolute.”
“Absence of thought is instantaneous thought.” Now, the mistake would be to think that absence of thought here means not thinking about anything. This is a misunderstanding that can often be made and in fact it is so. But this is about something else. Forcing thoughts into silence is the result of a contrastive, reactively and violently concentrated attitude: it is a path followed by certain meditative traditions, but not by Zen. The non-thought that Zen speaks of does not exclude anything; in a certain sense it is the opposite: it is an openness, it is a non-discriminatory attitude. It is a path towards abandonment, towards surrender. Thoughts remain in their naturalness, they follow one another in their fresh instantaneity. If I want to reach the absolute silence of thoughts, then my attitude is unnatural and dualistic: my mind is full of thoughts and I want to reach who knows what mystical emptiness!
“Instant thought is omniscience.” So it is obvious that when I let go, when I shake off the tenacious will to free my mind of its contents, what remains is the thought thought in this moment, in this precise instant, in its cleanliness, in its absolute presence. In the here and now of thought I am alone and simply in that very thought which is instantaneously passing through me: to be alone in that thought means omniscience. A total, unlimited knowledge, because no longer constrained by separative limits, but rather coinciding with the knowing mind and the object of thought. Knowledge, acquaintance, known are the same: it is like saying freedom, or even infinity.
“Thought in the absence of thought is the manifestation, the activity of the absolute.” At this point there is no longer anyone who thinks and faces something else. There is no longer a mind that has a thought within itself. If you are penetrated by that thought, that of this moment and nothing else; if you are so simple as not to complicate everything by building your infinite internal ramblings; if you do not place yourself with a tense and reactive attitude, then you have come out of the subject-object dualism, even that present in the mind-thought pair. You are in a dimension to which you cannot give a definite name; yet the activity of thinking still exists, but it is no longer objectified, no longer originated by acts of will or in a state of unawareness. It gives itself spontaneously, freely: it is a “manifestation”, rather than an object; it is the “activity of the absolute”, and no longer a subjective, personalistic, egoistic choice or option.
