Practical Hua-Tou
Tomo, I know Stuart pretty well. We've been corresponding off and on over the last few years via email. I gave the hua-tou practice a concerted effort for a while, and he was a dependable and skillful coach.Though it's not my specialty, I am familiar with the practice to some degree. One thing Stuart made clear to me was that the purpose of the hua-tou is to cultivate a strong sense of doubt - that feeling of not knowing. It's not investigation leading to any sort of intellectual conclusion. The mind will conjure up all kinds of solutions to the conundrum, but they are to be left by the wayside. The point is for the doubt to grow and grow, like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It begins to build an immense amount of force, like a freight train speeding toward the edge of a cliff. It can be unsettling. All of the classic dark night symptoms arise. It can get really, realy intense.You don't want to push too hard, so as to short ciruit your mind and leave yourself in a stupor. But you do want the doubt/not-knowing to build and build...... and it's best not to speak about what might happen as a result ;-)Another thing Stuart stressed about this practice was not to engage in it while doing something that demands a lot of attention, such as riding a bike or driving a car. He knows of an individual who was not so careful, and crashed their bike. But, when your safety is more assured, keep the questioning mind active persistently, consistently.Don't try to answer the question. Just build the doubt.Also, I think it's really cool that you're giving this a shot
-awouldbehipster
Stuart has been gracious enough to agree to help me out with this, and so I have started this thread as, not so much a practice journal, but a place to discuss the practical aspects of hua-tou as I stumble along. Please feel free to offer any input.I have been doing this practice for a little over a week now, and my first observation is that it is a very simple practice, but it is far, far (far, far, far) from being easy. As Jackson notes above, one of the key things to try and achieve is doubt, but IMO that is pretty advanced too. My major stumbling block at this point is to simply treat the h-t as a genuine question as opposed to a mantra. Try it. Say a question over and over again, and see how long you can keep that up without it transforming from a genuine question to just words. Not easy.I don't want to reproduce private correspondence here, but Stuart uses the following teaching example:
I have found the example of being interested in the person living in the the next apartment coming home. You hear the door slam and hear footsteps and sounds coming through the wall, but you are not sure exactly what is going on. Was that the closet door or the bedroom door that slammed? That last sound was that package being put on the table or some thing dropped on the floor? As intently as you listen, you are still uncertain of exactly what you are hearing, but you still listen intently and still want to know even more. Try approaching the h-t like this but gently asking, "Who is dragging this body around?" "Who?" "Who?" ....keep it gentle but keep asking.
Right now, that is not working for me but I am still hacking away at it, once or twice a day seated, and as often as I can during the day. What jazzes me about the practice is its potential for doing it during dog walking, which is a good 45m each night that, up until now, has been wasted practice-wise.I will also add (if it is not clear from the above) that the practice is pretty frustrating right now. While I certainly did not expect fireworks, the difficulty of keeping the question fresh and not mantra-like was unexpected. ETA: WTF is up with the formatting here??? There should be paragraphs.
-- tomo
Your're right - keeping the doubt fresh in experience is difficult. As you aluded to, simply repeating (silently) the word "who" is not enough. There's a certainly quality of genuine questioning that must accompany the word. That's what I think Stuart is pointing to. It's bona fide curiosity.
If you can keep it going, it will gain momentum. It's hard to trust this when you haven't experienced any building effect, but that's where "faith" comes in; that is, the kind of faith that say, "People I know and have some confidence in have done this practice, and they have seen a result. I can do the practice, too, and also see the results." The important thing is just to keep doing the practice, instead of trying to do the result. Make sense?
Growing the doubt during dog walking is a terrific idea, as long as you remember to snap out of it before crossing the street. Otherwise, the corpse being dragged around may end up... well, just a corpse
