by Tang Huyen
In March 2007, Tang Huyen posted to talk.religion.buddhism a meditation on two themes raised by another poster: "precipitative force" and "taking yourself by surprise." The response became a sustained analysis of how Buddhist cultivation works mechanically — gathering scattered fragments into a single unit — and then a striking reconstruction of the Buddha's own awakening as complete accident.
On koan meditation: Tang Huyen describes it as the deliberate cultivation of a "ball of tension" — a self-induced cocoon of total self-absorption — analogous to a mass of snow on a roof that falls off in a single block when it reaches critical mass. The doubt is self-generated; the trigger is typically something innocuous; the preparation is years or decades of invisible work. On the Buddha's awakening: after six years of Jaina self-mortification, the Buddha found by pure chance that mere relaxation and non-resistance — the exact opposite of everything he had been doing — produced awakening immediately on the first try. The teaching was not premeditated; it was wholly outside all his prior norms and frameworks. Hence the paradox of Buddhist practice: one is trying to recreate a total surprise to oneself. And awakening, when it occurs, occurs to nobody.
Nothing has changed about suffering and the ending of suffering. Anaesthetics can temporarily reduce or blot out bodily suffering, and psycho-active drugs can do the same with mental suffering, but they don't work in the long run, and can lead to massive problems, like habituation, dependency and addiction. The people who take prescribed psycho-active drugs long-term tend to become zombies with a silly smile.
East or west, in antiquity or modernity, the parameters of suffering and ending of suffering have not changed.
Gathering Into One Piece
If one is fragmented, to end suffering is nearly impossible. If one is scattered, as most people are, it is not so easy. If one has got oneself together, all in one single piece, and can act in total action, it is nearly automatic. Buddhist cultivation of the serious kind, regardless of externalities, converges on just this gathering in of one's forces into a single unit, more or less, so that one can act in total action, more or less.
Much of Buddhist practice is to help one manage reintegration and reconnection, so that one reintegrates one's bits and pieces, reconnects them into one single piece, and then acts in total action, as a single unit (and not in a scattered manner, even less in a fragmented manner, where one piece fights with other pieces for a piece of the action). Mindfulness is the most powerful tool in that respect. In fact scarcely nothing else is needed. Many of the techniques that look fancy, like meditation on public cases, are actually variations of mindfulness, under slight disguises.
This orientation entails that when one engages, one engages with the whole of oneself (and not with a mere bit and piece, surely not with a mere bit and piece that has to fight with other mere bits and pieces) in total action, and when one's engagement is over, it is over in a flash, with no remainders. The farther along one is in Buddhist training, the faster one can start and stop, and outside of engagements, one is calm, peaceful, empty, free.
The Koan as Ball of Tension
In public case meditation the meditator strives with all his might in dead earnest to turn himself — the whole of himself — into a ball of seizure, a ball of tension, so that it can fall off by itself when it is "seized" (thingified) enough. While it is going on, it is a cocoon of its own making, a purely self-induced effort to wrap oneself up into a ball of sheer blockage, to stop all flow and freeze oneself into a solid wall of attention, which when ripe (when it has attained to a critical mass) will fall off in a single block, the way a mass of snow falls off a roof in a single block when it has reached a critical mass.
An additional motive is doubt, which the meditator arouses, in that the greater the doubt the greater the awakening. This is the buildup of tension well-known to Protestant preachers of fire-and-brimstone sermons who liberally stoke sin to rouse the congregation to near-apoplectic levels of emotional arousal, and who then invoke God's mercy to release mass tension — but the buildup of tension in public case meditation is purely self-induced. If it came from the outside it would not work. A cocoon of its own making, a way to wrap oneself up in total self-absorption, is a way to attain to what you call "precipitative force." Then a sight, or a sound, or something innocuous will trigger awakening.
Many accounts of awakening look abrupt, but what prepares them behind the scenes are years or decades of suchlike concentration and congealing into a ball of tension, a ball of seizure, and it can look like dumb, blind work, until it brings fruit.
Taking Oneself by Surprise
As to taking oneself by surprise: when one is frozen into one single block, almost anything can take one by surprise. When one is concentrated on something, anything outside of that concentration will surprise one. When one is scattered, one aspect thinks on something and another aspect thinks on something else, simultaneously and in parallel, but none of those aspects has the critical mass to effect any substantial change; and even all of them together still don't, because they are scattered and splayed in all directions.
The Buddha's Awakening as Pure Chance
It is said that after six years of rigorous Jaina self-mortification and self-starvation, the Bodhisattva had experimented with most of the spiritual methods available to him in his world. He then found in pure happenstance something that he had never heard of such a teaching. It was so simple that he had never even thought of it on his own.
Any norm and mold that one tries to fit what happens into no longer leaves what happens to be just what happens, but bends it the way of said norm and mold, imposes said norm and mold on what happens. The most severe form of such imposition was the exhausting, unyielding Jaina self-mortification and self-starvation that he had just pursued diligently for six years, but all the other forms of pursuit that he had explored involved imposition, and he had never heard or thought of absence of imposition, pure non-resistance, the leaving what happens to be just what happens (and not what one wants it to be or thinks it to be). The moment he tried it the first time, he awoke. There was no other requirement. It was so to speak the default, but nobody thought of it.
In other words, he had been a control freak and had tried to impose the strictest regimen of self-control on himself, namely the exhausting, unyielding Jaina self-mortification and self-starvation that he had just pursued diligently for six years, and all it did was wreck him. He then changed course totally, relaxed, took milk (which led his five fellow Jaina monks to think that he had fallen back to luxury, and after his awakening they would become his first five disciples), and relaxed. He didn't do anything in the positive, didn't exercise thought to find solutions to his problems, but merely relaxed, went all the way in that direction (which was the exact opposite to his strenuous, unrelenting exercise of the previous six years), and awoke.
He first decided to enjoy his awakening in peace and quiet, then reversed himself and wanted to teach the few with but a little dust in their eye, and he was very pragmatic in his teaching.
His awakening had nothing premeditated about it. It was a total surprise to him. It was wholly outside all his norms and standards, completely foreign to his mental toolbox. Nothing had prepared him for it. It was strictly in the order of happenstance, of raw happening untrammeled by human planning. And it happened because it was outside of human planning.
Awakening Occurs to Nobody
Which is why it is so hard to recreate it in oneself, as one is trying to recreate a total surprise to oneself. One is trying to step out of one's whole mental toolbox (in which the biggest and baddest tool is the self or "I"), yet knowing that what remains when one's mental toolbox collapses is not annihilation but redemption. The exploration is "worth it." However the finding is that there is no self in there to awaken. Awakening occurs, but it occurs to nobody. That's how it occurs, otherwise it would not be awakening.
Colophon
Originally posted to talk.religion.buddhism, alt.zen, alt.philosophy.zen, and alt.buddha.short.fat.guy by Tang Huyen, March 4, 2007. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
One of Tang Huyen's most vivid and accessible essays. The description of koan meditation as a self-induced "ball of tension" — analogous to a mass of snow on a roof that must reach critical mass before falling — is a memorable pedagogical account of the mechanics of public case (kung-an) practice. The reconstruction of the Buddha's awakening as pure happenstance after the abandonment of six years of Jaina austerities frames the central paradox: Buddhist practice is the attempt to recreate, deliberately, something that can only occur as total surprise. The closing formulation — "Awakening occurs, but it occurs to nobody" — is among Tang Huyen's most quoted lines.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
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