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by Sevan Sensei
Doubt: (O.E.D.) Uncertainty as to the truth or the reality of something, or as to the wisdom of a course of action; occasion or room for uncertainty; be undecided in opinion or belief.
I had studied all the right chess openings. I was confident. I had the twelve common openings down and I could follow almost all of these through the first ten moves or so. This had taken all summer. My marriage was questionable, my job a mess, but I could play chess now. At least through the opening. After that? What, me worry? I would think of something!
The tournament begins. My opponent hits his clock, thus starting mine, and the pressure’s on. I open with pawn to king 4, a classic; he does the same, also classic. I move up my next pawn with confidence, within range of his. OH NO!! It can’t be!! I’ve moved up the wrong pawn!! He will simply take it and proceed to wipe the board! Move after move I will shrink into a defeated and cornered insurgency, my king finally waving the white flag; and then over coffee, as we review the game ( a tradition here at the USCF club), he will explain in a fatherly way how that move was my blunder, as if I didn’t know. My heart sinks. All that memorization gone to waste. A summer burned looking at a chess set, and now for what -- so that I could be laughed off the board after three moves?
But he didn’t take the pawn. He didn’t make any other move either. He sat there. He sat there and stared at that move for a very long time. I watched his clock (we each having 30 min. on our respective clocks to complete all our moves -- one can easily lose by running out of time). Five minutes went by. Ten. I had a long conversation with him without saying a word (no talking allowed once the clocks start). “You idiot --Take the pawn!! This was just a mistake. I moved the wrong piece. A chess Freudian slip. I said to myself not to move that pawn out and then I went right ahead and did it! I’m the idiot!! . . .” At fifteen minutes, I realized that he was stumped. He thought I had a plan which I did not have. Maybe I would win on time (his clock running down). Wow!
And then he took the pawn, and he used no more than three more minutes of his allotted time for the rest of the moves he needed to crush me. Over coffee near the vending machines, as I started to set up the chess board so we could do the normal post mortem, he stopped me, saying we didn’t need to do that. He leaned into me across the snack table and said only one thing about the game, one piece of advice from a 50 year old chess veteran to a young man just starting out. And that one thing changed my life. He said this: “The secret is using your doubt to shape your actions. Learn to live with the tension. The tension is normal, and release of tension is only momentary.”
This is great chess advice. It really is. Chess is all about living with, and even seeking to increase, the tension on the board. And so it is with many things, things far more important than chess. Take, for example, our work on the mat. The tension we refer to here is simply the most visible form of our natural doubt. We shouldn’t differentiate between “small doubt” and “Great Doubt” so quickly. While it is true that one is wrapped around the conduct and preservation of the Self as we have come to accept that entity, still and all, Great Doubt has as its root the psychological and fundamental doubts about this Self too. Who among us has not gotten into the world of Zen practice partly motivated by our doubts about our day-to-day selves, and how we have come to conduct ourselves in the world? Many, if not most, of us come to Zen with only the most vague grip on Great Doubt -- the large questions loom indeed, but they are occluded by the lesser ones.
We start out with something like, “Will I win this chess game?” (Read, get married, get a promotion, get over my anxieties, etc.) But after following the breath a while, (Read, SLOW DOWN!!) and after hanging around the better chess players, (Read, interacting with senior students of Zen, including the Teacher) we allow that the win/lose level doubt may have a deeper sister doubt, and this may be something like, “What am I, win or lose?”
After enough sesshin and sittings pass, after enough slowing and clearing and interacting with real practitioners, after we quiet, our unshaped fundamental doubt arises. At this level, words will not do, and even “Great Doubt” falls short. Instead of losing at chess, or at home, or on the job, we discover the chasm of the loss of ALL. And this fundamental questioning allows for absolutely zero assumptions. Here we enter the land of no labels, no definitions, no assumptions. Everything is unsafe.
And our instinct is to run away. We twist and turn to re-establish Self. We will take any Self we can find, and this may be the cause of those truly deep and abiding makyo found later in sesshin. Many of can attest to the “bouncing” action of going deep into the practice, only to hit a wall of doubt that is so impregnable that we are repelled back to our sets of assumptions. And this process may happen so many times that it becomes all but habit, and acquires a vague familiarity about it. Again and again we hit our wall of doubt, and again and again we flee back to the “known.”
But what of my chess opponent’s advice? Can we simply accept the tension of doubt as part of the spiritual quest? The landscape of spiritual inquiry is indeed simply made out of doubt, so we should expect to truck in tension all the way down. Fear, worry, anxiety -- all symptoms of doubt both great and small -- litter the inner landscape of the quest like so many rocks and boulders. So why not train ourselves to accept these conditions? Why not council ourselves to be ready for the tension, to accept it, and to even use it?
“Use your doubt to shape your actions” does not mean allowing doubt to rule one as a king does a subject. It means that we need to pick up those very rocks and boulders of the anxiety field and throw them at the wall of doubt before us. How does one actually do such a thing? Concentrate. Question. Examine. Get curious. Doubt and tension can quickly be converted, as it were, into inquiry itself. They are made of the same stuff, but only look different. Once one is truly engaged in deep inquiry, one discovers that the lack of definition and solidness of assumption becomes the very vehicle of practice, and that it is not to be feared or escaped, but sought.
“The secret is using your doubt to shape your actions. Learn to live with the tension. The tension is normal, and release of tension is only momentary.” Indeed.
Doubt: (O.E.D.) Uncertainty as to the truth or the reality of something, or as to the wisdom of a course of action; occasion or room for uncertainty; be undecided in opinion or belief.
I had studied all the right chess openings. I was confident. I had the twelve common openings down and I could follow almost all of these through the first ten moves or so. This had taken all summer. My marriage was questionable, my job a mess, but I could play chess now. At least through the opening. After that? What, me worry? I would think of something!
The tournament begins. My opponent hits his clock, thus starting mine, and the pressure’s on. I open with pawn to king 4, a classic; he does the same, also classic. I move up my next pawn with confidence, within range of his. OH NO!! It can’t be!! I’ve moved up the wrong pawn!! He will simply take it and proceed to wipe the board! Move after move I will shrink into a defeated and cornered insurgency, my king finally waving the white flag; and then over coffee, as we review the game ( a tradition here at the USCF club), he will explain in a fatherly way how that move was my blunder, as if I didn’t know. My heart sinks. All that memorization gone to waste. A summer burned looking at a chess set, and now for what -- so that I could be laughed off the board after three moves?
But he didn’t take the pawn. He didn’t make any other move either. He sat there. He sat there and stared at that move for a very long time. I watched his clock (we each having 30 min. on our respective clocks to complete all our moves -- one can easily lose by running out of time). Five minutes went by. Ten. I had a long conversation with him without saying a word (no talking allowed once the clocks start). “You idiot --Take the pawn!! This was just a mistake. I moved the wrong piece. A chess Freudian slip. I said to myself not to move that pawn out and then I went right ahead and did it! I’m the idiot!! . . .” At fifteen minutes, I realized that he was stumped. He thought I had a plan which I did not have. Maybe I would win on time (his clock running down). Wow!
And then he took the pawn, and he used no more than three more minutes of his allotted time for the rest of the moves he needed to crush me. Over coffee near the vending machines, as I started to set up the chess board so we could do the normal post mortem, he stopped me, saying we didn’t need to do that. He leaned into me across the snack table and said only one thing about the game, one piece of advice from a 50 year old chess veteran to a young man just starting out. And that one thing changed my life. He said this: “The secret is using your doubt to shape your actions. Learn to live with the tension. The tension is normal, and release of tension is only momentary.”
This is great chess advice. It really is. Chess is all about living with, and even seeking to increase, the tension on the board. And so it is with many things, things far more important than chess. Take, for example, our work on the mat. The tension we refer to here is simply the most visible form of our natural doubt. We shouldn’t differentiate between “small doubt” and “Great Doubt” so quickly. While it is true that one is wrapped around the conduct and preservation of the Self as we have come to accept that entity, still and all, Great Doubt has as its root the psychological and fundamental doubts about this Self too. Who among us has not gotten into the world of Zen practice partly motivated by our doubts about our day-to-day selves, and how we have come to conduct ourselves in the world? Many, if not most, of us come to Zen with only the most vague grip on Great Doubt -- the large questions loom indeed, but they are occluded by the lesser ones.
We start out with something like, “Will I win this chess game?” (Read, get married, get a promotion, get over my anxieties, etc.) But after following the breath a while, (Read, SLOW DOWN!!) and after hanging around the better chess players, (Read, interacting with senior students of Zen, including the Teacher) we allow that the win/lose level doubt may have a deeper sister doubt, and this may be something like, “What am I, win or lose?”
After enough sesshin and sittings pass, after enough slowing and clearing and interacting with real practitioners, after we quiet, our unshaped fundamental doubt arises. At this level, words will not do, and even “Great Doubt” falls short. Instead of losing at chess, or at home, or on the job, we discover the chasm of the loss of ALL. And this fundamental questioning allows for absolutely zero assumptions. Here we enter the land of no labels, no definitions, no assumptions. Everything is unsafe.
And our instinct is to run away. We twist and turn to re-establish Self. We will take any Self we can find, and this may be the cause of those truly deep and abiding makyo found later in sesshin. Many of can attest to the “bouncing” action of going deep into the practice, only to hit a wall of doubt that is so impregnable that we are repelled back to our sets of assumptions. And this process may happen so many times that it becomes all but habit, and acquires a vague familiarity about it. Again and again we hit our wall of doubt, and again and again we flee back to the “known.”
But what of my chess opponent’s advice? Can we simply accept the tension of doubt as part of the spiritual quest? The landscape of spiritual inquiry is indeed simply made out of doubt, so we should expect to truck in tension all the way down. Fear, worry, anxiety -- all symptoms of doubt both great and small -- litter the inner landscape of the quest like so many rocks and boulders. So why not train ourselves to accept these conditions? Why not council ourselves to be ready for the tension, to accept it, and to even use it?
“Use your doubt to shape your actions” does not mean allowing doubt to rule one as a king does a subject. It means that we need to pick up those very rocks and boulders of the anxiety field and throw them at the wall of doubt before us. How does one actually do such a thing? Concentrate. Question. Examine. Get curious. Doubt and tension can quickly be converted, as it were, into inquiry itself. They are made of the same stuff, but only look different. Once one is truly engaged in deep inquiry, one discovers that the lack of definition and solidness of assumption becomes the very vehicle of practice, and that it is not to be feared or escaped, but sought.
“The secret is using your doubt to shape your actions. Learn to live with the tension. The tension is normal, and release of tension is only momentary.” Indeed.
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