by Tang Huyen

Getting to the bottom of it drops the bottom out and is Nirvāṇa.

The Chinese expressions hui guang fan zhao — "returning the
light to reflect backward" — and fan ben huan yuan —
"returning to the root and going back to the source" — mean
that in normal dispersion we disperse ourselves in objects of
thought, inner or outer, and let them carry us along. But these
techniques simply grab the attention, gather it up (and do not
let it disperse), and turn it inward and backward, to look at
mind itself, and especially at the origin of thought, where
thought comes from.

The most famous public case in Chinese Chan is "who is it
who is mindful of the Buddha?" — this inquiry is carried out
on top of the recitation of Amitabha's name, so that one
searches up the stream of consciousness and looks for the
arising of thought, where the mindfulness of the Buddha's
name originates. The two Chinese expressions are routine
Chinese Chan, and have no particular affiliation. They form
the foundation of Chan practice in China.

I don't claim expertise in the practice of "returning the light
to reflect backward" and "returning to the root and going back
to the source", even less perfection, but in those rare moments
that I can practice accordingly, I experience a thinning out of
thought, a transparency of the mind — both relative of course.
The quiescence of thought is a "patched bit" from me, but
extrapolating from whatever little I actually experience of the
thinning out of thought and transparency of the mind, I can
speculate that the quiescence of thought is possible, though of
course I have yet to verify it in person, a posteriori.

This inquiry is not done with thought but with close examination
without thought, or with as little thought as one can muster. It
plumbs the depth of thought as much as anyone could ever
want. When the examination is complete, the result is what
Krishnamurti calls choiceless awareness, and it is free of all
thought and all forms of thought. All methods, including these,
are mere expedient hooks, none is ultimate, and when the
source of thought has been attained and thought is quiesced,
they are all let go of. But of course I'm still in the "patched bit"
business here.

Buddhism is all about expanding one's balance and perspective,
softening them, loosening them, and in the end dropping them
altogether. In the meantime, this reversal of perspective —
almost in the literal sense, in the "returning the light to reflect
backward" and "returning to the root and going back to the
source" — offers a wonderful sense of the relativity of one's
perspective, of lightness of vision, of overall balance and
perspective. It is like a super-perspective of all perspectives,
which not only thing-events fall into but also perspectives fall
into — even if one hasn't quite got to the bottom of it all yet.
And getting to the bottom of it drops the bottom out and is
Nirvāṇa: which is why it is said that "All support is
unsupported", "All foundation is unfounded", "All basis is
baseless", "All establishment is unestablished", "All ground is
groundless", "All bottom is bottomless".

Now I may look obsessed about this point, but from such an
all-embracing perspective it would be very odd, weird, bizarre
to proclaim peremptorily that matter is all there is, that
everything can and should be reduced to just matter and
nothing else. Once one has experienced anything like that
no-concept state — everything all at once and yet nothing at
all, in no-time at all yet for all time — one comes back with
one's mentational baskets and cages softened and loosened
up when one reactivates one's mentational apparatus. So how
can one clamp down a narrow and unilateral straightjacket like
matter on the incommensurable richness of what happens?

I know, all this is useless verbiage from just such a point of
view, the view from nowhere, with nothing to stand on, but I
can't help myself.

Tang Huyen

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on May 29, 2005, in reply to "djinn" (Jen, a regular interlocutor) on the thread "Another Jen classic (was Re: Go away)." Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Jen had described the no-concept state as "thinking in reverse" — Tang Huyen picks up the phrase and grounds it in formal Chan terminology. Hui guang fan zhao (回光返照) is one of the foundational methods of Chinese Chan: the reversal of attention from outward dispersion to the source of thought itself. The "who is mindful of the Buddha?" hua-tou (話頭) inquiry is its most widely practised public form. Tang Huyen's personal account — thinning out of thought, transparency of mind, "patched bit" — is characteristic: he never claims attainment, only approximation. The closing series of paradoxes ("All support is unsupported... All bottom is bottomless") echoes Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and the Zen expression of śūnyatā as groundlessness. The final paragraphs extend the argument against matter-reductionism: after any genuine experience of this reversal, clamping a single category onto what happens becomes literally unthinkable.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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