Direct Perception
I heard or read an anecdote some time ago about two Zen teachers. They were lounging about in a clearing outside their monastery, which was within a forest. After a while, one of them said, “They call those things trees.” These teachers were looking at the forest in a mode of direct perception, which is perception of anything without applying name or concept to it. One of the teachers dropped this mode for a moment and supplied the concept and name of “trees.”
It is the thinking mind that applies names and concepts to things so that it can reason about them, compare them, evaluate them, and so on. The thinking mind may suppose that it is dealing with things in themselves whereas it is merely touching ideas about them. For example, suppose a number of people are sitting in a circle looking at an elaborately decorative vase placed in the middle. If these people are asked what they are looking at, they will say “a vase,” as though they are all seeing the same thing. However, each person is looking at the vase from his or her own angle and is therefore seeing something different from everyone else. Each says he is looking at the same thing because he is applying the concept of “vase” to it. He is looking at a concept in his head and not at what he is actually seeing.
In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, the great Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, says that when the world is seen through an overlay of concept, “we are no longer able to perceive things as they are.” We can learn to see things as they are through an understanding of shunyata or “emptiness,” Trungpa says, which is “space, the absence of all conceptualized attitudes.”[1] He continues, “The experience of shunyata [is] seeing precisely and clearly what is.”[2]
When seen through direct perception, the world is a new world. Trungpa says, “If we see a red flower . . . in the absence of preconceived names and forms, . . . we also see the brilliance of that flower. If the filter of confusion between us and the flower is suddenly removed, automatically the air becomes quite clear and vision is very precise and vivid.”[3] In another collection of Trungpa’s talks I don’t remember, Trungpa speaks of “the blue of blue, the green of green,” and so on, as though in the new world you can see into the essence of color. Objects are also sharper, more defined; each flower, bush, lamp post is individual, not flattened out by concept into looking like every other bush or lamp post. If the world was drab before, it is not anymore. It is bright and dazzling, a substantial, luminous reality.
In zazen, the practitioner is used to putting the thinking, conceptualizing mind aside when it appears and returning to the focus on breathing. This means that any zazen practitioner can easily learn to enter a mode of direct perception whenever he or she likes just by dropping the conceptualizing mind. Try it when you are out for a rural walk, for example. Just switch your mind off, as you are used to doing in meditation, and note the change in what you are seeing. Direct perception is an activity well worth trying.
Footnotes
- Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala, Boston and London, 2002, pp. 197-198.
- Ibid., p. 200
- Ibid., p. 217