In the beginning and gradual refinement of the sound of any letter, awake.
- Every sound has two poles of silence: the pre-sound state (before it is struck) and the after-sound state (after it dissolves). Stay awake at both poles and through the whole ‘gradual refinement’ in between, missing nothing.
- Outer practice first: Take a bell or gong. Before striking, wait until thought has stopped and the mind is vacant — be alert ‘as if someone is going to kill you this very moment’ (with thought still running you are still asleep). Only from that vacant alertness, strike, and follow the sound from its first instant down to the last trace of its dissolution.
- Then inward: Once you can do it with an outer instrument, repeat it with any inwardly intoned sound — wait for the vacant moment, create the sound, accompany it to its vanishing point. Do the outer first because the inner is harder.
- It only looks simple: About three months of steady practice are needed, through which one becomes ‘a totally different person.’ Test the difficulty now — try to count ten breaths with unbroken awareness; most people drift off by two or three. We are all sleepwalkers performing complex acts in sleep.
- Alertness is the single thing being trained; every technique in the whole system is only a device to grow it. Anything can be done in sleep — the one real difficulty is the condition that it be done alertly.
- A Zen master’s sudden scream uses the same link — a sudden sound jolts one awake; this technique trains that wakefulness deliberately, at the birth and death of a sound.