Ignorance is the Opposite of Doubt. Ignorance is a Concrete Mind

In Zen we often talk about ignorance, or an ignorant mind. Ignorance in mindfulness doesn’t always mean not knowing things or being "as thick as two short planks" - which was one definition I came across this morning. :) Ignorance in mindfulness means having a concrete or closed mind. Which is an obstacle to anyone who is sincerely interested in generating awareness or spiritual growth. The opposite to this kind of ignorance is to question, to doubt.

Some religions or practices teach that it is necessary to have absolute faith and not to question. So for this reason, you might feel it is difficult to question how we do our practice or to have doubts about a certain part of the philosophy which underpins our practice because we consider it to be “wrong”.

But in Zen, and in our sitting practice, an open mind which questions and doesn’t accept everything on face value, is an excellent thing. We should investigate and see for ourself whether a practice or teaching is right, whether is resonates. We like a question mark, we can be happy about having a doubt. It keeps our mind elastic and awake.

The instruction of the Kalamas (Kalama Suttra) in the ancient Buddhist writings encourages free inquiry, and the spirit of the suttra encourages a teaching that is exempt from fanaticism, bigotry, dogmatism, and intolerance. "The Kalama Suttra is used for advocating prudence by using sound logical reasoning arguments for inquiries in the practice that relates to the discipline of seeking truth, wisdom and knowledge whether it is religious or not."

All the teachings of Zen or Mindfulness point towards a very simple concept: open our mind, drop our conditioning, try not to see life through the filter of our past experiences. Shunruy Suzuki teaches often about how to throw away this filter. His teachings often point towards dropping all our accumulated beliefs and looking at things from a blank state of mind.

We don’t have to know everything about sitting or meditation, we only have to keep our mind open.

Shunryu Suzuki says: “There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen, or to believe in anything special.” In fact, he says: “I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing”

Basically what this means is “not knowing” and we should always ask the question” “What is this?” “What am I?”. But instead of doing this to accumulate knowledge, we should use it to clear our mind of “knowing”. If our mind is clear, we can move into that space where true knowledge is already ours. He says: "We should forget day by day what we have done. This is true non attachment. And we should do something new. To do something new, of course, we must know our past, and this is all right. But we should not keep holding onto anything we have done, we should only reflect on it. It is necessary to remember what we have done, but we should not become attached to it in some special sense."

A famous Suzuki quote explains it well: “The practice of Zen Mind is beginners mind. This is also the secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very careful about this point. If you start to practice Zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginners mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.”