Q: Master Hsin Tao, are you saying that each person should contemplate his own questions?

A: I provide the guidance, and you find your own answers.

Q: What would you say is your signature teaching?

A: That there’s no free lunch.

Q: Do you also use Mazu Daoyi’s gongan about listening to an egg talk?

A: That! That’s something to use when the mind is so agitated that it can’t understand anything, let alone solve the problem. So to calm the mind, you “listen to the sound of an egg talking.”

Q: So your signature teachings are “no free lunch” and “listen to an egg talking”?

A: And the third step is compassion.

Q: How do you make the leap from “listening to an egg talking” to “compassion”?

A: Compassion is essential. You have to know why you are listening to an egg talking. You have to have a navigation system leading you in the direction of righteousness, caring for others, and generosity.

Q: Is this where the power of meditation comes from?

A: Meditation is a way transforming yourself into a compassionate person with a kind heart, and helping others to do the same.

Q: So, if compassion is the third step, then what is the fourth?

A: The fourth step is being satisfied with everything, being free of aversion.

Q: Is there a fifth step?

A: The fifth step is dying a good death. Ha-ha!

Q: How do you die a good death?

A: You die a good death when you are profoundly grateful at the time of passing. If you die unwillingly or in a negative state of mind, then you’ll lose your way. At the time of death you need to keep the mind focused on goodness, and that’s what gratitude is for. So when you are dying you should gratefully recollect everything you have received from others. So the fifth step is learning to be grateful and dying a good death.

Q: So then, that’s the complete system? There’s no sixth step?

A: Then it’s something quite different! Now you should create a rainbow, and hurry up and find it.

Q: So the seventh step is seeing a rainbow?

A: Okay, it goes from meditation to compassion. But why is compassion essential? Because meditation is a form of mental karma; as is the DNA of the mind, so will be the results. That’s why it’s essential to be compassionate and generous.

Now in Chan there is the principle of involution and evolution. Involution is returning to the source, where everything disappears; evolution is spreading out, so that everything is visible. Meditation takes you inwards, back to your original essence. You could say that it’s not a thing, yet it manifests everything; or you could say that it exists, but you can’t see it. Yet it’s endowed with the two powers of loving kindness and compassion, as stated in the Surangama Sutra:

First, my mind ascended to unite with the fundamental, wondrous, enlightened mind of all the buddhas of the ten directions, and my power of compassion became the same as theirs.Second, my mind descended to unite with all beings of the six destinies in the ten directions, such that I felt their sorrows as my own.

This is the interconnectedness we realize in meditation; it’s the nonduality of self and other; I’m in you, and you’re in me; your difficulty is my difficulty; there is no problem that has nothing to do with me. From this perspective, solving everyone’s problems is really solving my own problems.

(Excerpt from Master Hsin Tao’s new book The Power of Meditation, to be released in September by Tianxia Publishing; to be continued in future installments of “The Way of the Heart.”)