I have been stopped in my tracks only a few times in this life, stunned and then grateful for an instruction landing at exactly the right moment. This was one of them.
I was listening to an old talk given by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, sometime in the early 1970s. A student asked him about enlightenment, about progress on the path. He answered:
Each of you is perfect the way you are —
and, he added, each of you could still use a little polishing.
You cannot push the river, the old Zen masters liked to say.
And how I have tried anyway. Reading, studying the Dharma, going on retreat, fasting now and then. And here I still am. Little old me, unenlightened, worn out from all that effort.
I wanted to let the river flow.
So I went back to that line. If I am perfect just as I am, what improvement is left, and how exactly am I supposed to get it?
Maybe the “I” just needs to step out of the way. Let the river flow. Let go of the pushing.
Pema Chödrön makes a similar point. The natural mind, she says, already holds its own peace, openness, and clarity, just as it is. Nothing needs to shift or change.
The only task, while watching the mind, is to recognize the qualities already there.
She leaves a clue in that last part. We are not trying to get something we lack. We are recognizing something already present in the mind, exactly as it stands right now.
This is my mind, right now, just as it is.
That is a big reorientation. Not chasing some elusive gain, but noticing the qualities that were never missing.
It follows, maybe, that all we need to do is observe. The mind, its moods, its likes and dislikes, its whole weather system, just as it comes.
I cannot tweak this, and do not need to.
In that observing, something relaxes. The urge to modify the mind, or its experience, loosens its grip.
Maybe all our effort is what hides these qualities in the first place. Maybe the over-exertion is exactly what keeps the practice spinning on its hamster wheel, going nowhere in particular.
U Tejaniya taught relaxed effort.
Alexis Santos, who trained as a monk under the Burmese teacher U Tejaniya Sayadaw, found his own way off that wheel, through a simple image.
A sunflower does not go looking for the light.
It just turns, and receives what comes.
Can practice work the same way? Relaxed, open to whatever arrives, with no urge to tweak it?
This is simple, natural awareness — the kind that notices even the subtle static of striving, wanting, or trying to force something into being. U Tejaniya called that static a deeper layer of holding.
Can we just stay there, in that plain awareness, knowing the present moment the way it knows itself? The way a sunflower turns, so gently, toward the sun.