What This Concept Is Actually Saying
To hear the word *zuò wàng* properly, you have to start with the man who used it most deliberately in Chan (Zen) literature: Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智禪師 (1091–1157), a great figure of the Caodong lineage — the same stream of Chan that flowed later into Japanese Sōtō Zen. Hongzhi's *Recorded Sayings* (《宏智禪師廣錄》) is the seedbed of the term as I want to look at it here.
He opens one passage with a very physical image: a monk coming in from a long road, legs folded on a stone bed, the road's weight slowly dispersing. The line is 「道境洗心聊坐忘」 — "the way-ground washes the mind; for a while, *zuò wàng*." Note the small word 聊 (*liáo*) — "for now," "lightly," "temporarily." This is not a permanent state being claimed. It is something that happens to a body and a mind when conditions are right, and you let it happen.
So *zuò wàng* — literally "seated forgetting" — is neither a fancy nor a state of trance. It is the name for a particular quality of sitting in which the body's weight settles, the mind's accumulated dust washes off, and the constant machinery of judgment and comparison goes quiet for a stretch. Hongzhi uses it as both a 工夫 (gōngfu, practice) and a 境界 (jìngjiè, the experiential character of that practice). They are not two things: the practice is the practice of letting this quality arise and stay.
Now, the term has had other lives in Chinese culture — most famously in Daoist self-cultivation, where 坐忘 names a method of merging with the Dao. Hongzhi plants it in Chan soil, where it takes on a distinct coloration. The shape of what he means has several layers, and you have to feel each one to get the whole.
Layer 1: The body settles (坐). 坐 is not posture alone. It is what the body does when it stops being in transit. The road's fatigue, the day's carrying, the muscle-tone of "I have to be ready for the next thing" — these disperse. *Zuò wàng* begins with the body knowing it is, for this stretch, off-duty.
Layer 2: The mind washes (洗心). Hongzhi calls it 道境洗心 — the *way-ground* washes the mind. The mind does not wash itself by effort. The whole situation, the room, the day's ending, the silence, the body's release, does the washing. You are not cleaning the mind; you are in conditions where the mind can clean itself.
Layer 3: Right-and-wrong judgment forgets (忘是非). This is the most precise and most misunderstood layer. 忘是非 is not "everything is fine," "I no longer have preferences," or "I am now above morality." It is the *constant internal tribunal* — the running narration that says *this is good / this is bad / that person was wrong / I was right / this shouldn't be happening* — quiets. Not by suppression. By not being needed.
Layer 4: Self-and-other distinction rests (彼我無差別相). Hongzhi says that in this settling, the shape of "I" weighed against "you" or "them" loses its hard edge. This is not loss of self in the dissociative sense — it is that the constant comparing and measuring of *me against the world* relaxes. There is just this: the room, the breath, the moment.
Layer 5: No thought arises, and the features exhaust (一念不生, 諸相皆盡). When the one mind is still, all features (the constructed appearances of things) are exhausted. This sounds like the language of many Chan and Buddhist texts. Hongzhi is using it carefully — not to say thoughts vanish forever, but that the thinking apparatus quiets; the river of conceptual formation becomes shallow enough that you can see the bottom.
Layer 6 — and this is the one most easily dropped, so I'll dwell on it: silent luminous knowing remains (默默靈光). The pair 「堆堆坐忘，默默靈光」 is Hongzhi's signature line — "stacked, settled, seated forgetting; silent, luminous light." The two halves of the line are not optional. The forgetting is not a sinking into blankness or unconsciousness. In the middle of the stilling, something is awake — and not awake in the busy, evaluative way. Awake in a way that doesn't grasp.
Hongzhi has names for it: 妙存而無像 — wonderfully present, without image. 真聞而無響 — truly heard, without sound. 自知 — self-knowing. 本得 — originally attained. 親證 — personally verified.
This last triplet is doing important work. *Originally attained* (本得) means: you are not producing this knowing; you are uncovering what was already there. *Self-knowing* (自知) means: it knows itself, no outside witness required. *Personally verified* (親證) means: this is not a teaching you receive from another; it is something your own sitting confirms.
So the layers stack like this:
坐 (body settles) → 洗心 (mind washes) → 忘是非 (judgment quiets) → 彼我 (self/other relaxes) → 一念不生 (conceptual formation thins) → 默默靈光 (silent luminous knowing remains).
If you take any one of these layers and drop the others, you get something Hongzhi is explicitly warning against, as we'll see in the misreadings.
The dynamic: empty yet responsive (中虛而有容，外應而不擾).
This is the second hinge of Hongzhi's 坐忘, and the one his contemporaries most often misread (his great contemporary Dahui Zonggao accused "silent illumination" Chan of "dead sitting," and Hongzhi's 坐忘 vocabulary is essentially his defense).
Hongzhi insists over and over: the stilling is not stuck. 「中虛而有容」 — interiorly empty, yet spacious, has room. 「外應而不擾」 — outwardly responsive, without disturbance. 「中既空而能應」 — empty inside, yet able to respond. 「外既涉而常虛」 — engaged outside, yet constantly empty.
The image he reaches for is a clean mirror — it doesn't grab at what it reflects; it doesn't store what it has reflected. The reflections come and go; the mirror doesn't accumulate them.
Then comes the line that converts the whole practice from a contemplative withdrawal into something else entirely: 「坐得穩底，跨步轉身，應機入世」 — once sitting is stable, stride forth, turn around, respond opportunely, enter the world.
*Zuò wàng* is not the opposite of action. It is the ground from which unmanipulated action becomes possible.
Another pair of images drives this home. The first is 「諸塵說法諸塵聽」 — "every dust preaches the dharma, every dust listens." This is striking language. It means: the world does not go silent in *zuò wàng*; rather, the world becomes eloquent. Each thing, each encounter, each moment, can be heard as teaching if the internal chatter is not drowning it out. The second is 「潭空月沈」 — "the moon sinks into the empty pool." When the pool of the mind is truly empty, the moon (the real, the awakened) descends into it — without being called.
**The warnings: what it is *not*.**
Hongzhi is unusually explicit, which suggests these were live dangers in his teaching context. Two warnings come up repeatedly:
- 「莫行心處路」 — don't walk the path that the mind walks. This is a warning against trying to engineer *zuò wàng* through more thinking. If you sit down and think *very hard* about how to stop thinking, you are still on the mind's road. You have not stepped off. - 「莫坐無處功」 — don't sit in the "work" of no-place. Don't make an object out of emptiness and then cling to it as a meditation achievement. This is the warning against 頑空 — "dead emptiness," the trap of treating absence as substance.
The two warnings are paired for a reason. The first error is over-effort: trying to force the stilling by mental labor. The second is under-effort masquerading as attainment: sitting in a blank and calling it liberation. Hongzhi wants the middle: no chasing, no clinging, but also no falling asleep.
The fruit of this balance is named with characteristic Chan bluntness: 「廓然天地空」 — "vastly empty, heaven-and-earth empty." Note that this is not a private mystical experience; it is 天地 — heaven and earth. The horizon opens. The room of the world becomes spacious.
Life Walk-Through: Mapping *Zuò Wàng* Onto the Texture of an Actual Day
A lot of writing on Chan practice stays abstract. Let's take four ordinary scenes — situations any contemporary adult will recognize — and walk each one through the layers of *zuò wàng* carefully, noting where the classical definition lands and where the most common mis-mappings happen.
Scene 1 — The Train Ride Home After a Hard Day
You're on the commuter train, headphones in, body slumped. The day is still running through you — the meeting that went badly, the email you wish you hadn't sent, the small comment from your partner that stung more than it should have. There's an inner voice scoring everything: *I should have said X. Why did they say Y. I'm failing at Z.* The body is tense even though the train is moving you.
What the default mode does here: spins 是非 (right/wrong judgments about the day, about self, about others), keeps 彼我 (self vs. them) hard-edged, the body never settles (坐 fails), the washing doesn't happen.
**Walking *zuò wàng* through the scene:** - 坐 — the body does not have to be on a cushion. *Zuò* here means the train is moving; you are not. You let the motion of the train replace the inner motion. The shoulder blades drop. The jaw unclenches. You notice you were clenching. - 洗心 — you let the situation do the washing. The dimmed cabin, the rumble, the fact that nothing is being asked of you right now — these are the 道境, the way-ground. - 忘是非 — the running tribunal does not have to keep scoring. This is not suppressing the thoughts. It's letting the narration be heard without being required to act on it. *I should have said X* — heard. *Why did they say Y* — heard. *I'm failing at Z* — heard. Not argued with, not obeyed, not pushed away. Just heard, as events in the mind rather than as verdicts. - 彼我 — the people who populate the narration (your boss, your partner, your past self) are no longer opponents or judges. They are just figures in the day that happened. The hardness goes out of "I vs. they." - 一念不生 — the river of conceptual formation thins. Not frozen, not zero, but shallow. You can feel the bottom of the moment. - 默默靈光 — and here is the part people miss. Something is awake in this. Not the spinning voice — that has gone quiet. Something quieter. The window, your reflection in it, the light on the platform arriving — these are *preached*, and you are listening. This is 「諸塵說法諸塵聽」 lived, not as a slogan but as a felt texture.
Most common mis-mapping here: people think *zuò wàng* means "I checked out." They let the body slump, the eyes glaze, and they zone into their phone. That is not *zuò wàng*; it is 昏沉 (hūnchén, dullness/sleepiness) with a screen. Hongzhi's term for what you're missing is the one he refuses to compromise on: 默默靈光. Silent, yes. Luminous, also yes. If there's no luminosity — no wakefulness, no aliveness to what's there — you didn't *zuò wàng*, you escaped.
Scene 2 — The Late-Night Anxiety Loop
It's 1:40 a.m. You should be asleep. The mind is doing tomorrow. Tomorrow's meeting, tomorrow's call, the thing you might forget, the thing you might say wrong. The thoughts are not particularly dramatic; they're spinning — small, repetitive, granular. Every time you try to stop them, they come back. You are, in a real sense, walking the mind's road.
What the default mode does here: spins 是非 continuously (the meeting will go well / badly / I am prepared / not prepared), keeps 彼我 active (the people you'll face tomorrow, scored against your imagined performance), the body stays tense, the washing cannot happen because the thinker is also the thought.
**Walking *zuò wàng* through the scene:** - 坐 — and here is the real test. *Zuò* in this context often means lying down and letting the body actually be in bed. Many people's bodies aren't in bed at 1:40 a.m.; their bodies are still in tomorrow. The first movement is to let the weight of the body return to the mattress. - 洗心 — the darkness, the breath, the absence of demand — these are the 道境. You are not generating the washing. - 莫行心處路 — the crucial line. The error here is fighting the thoughts. Every attempt to *think the thoughts away* is still walking the mind's road. You are still using the mind to manage the mind. Hongzhi's warning is exact: don't walk that path. - 默默靈光 — what you actually do is notice that the awareness is not the thoughts. The thoughts are spinning in the awareness. The awareness is not spinning. This is 靈光 — luminous, awake, not grabbing at the contents.
Most common mis-mapping here: people try to use *zuò wàng* as a tool against insomnia. They sit (or lie), try to force the mind blank, fail, get frustrated, sleep worse. This is exactly 莫行心處路 — still on the mind's road, just trying to drive faster. The actual movement is much gentler: you stop driving. The awareness was never going anywhere.
A subtle clarification: 忘是非 here does not mean "I'm fine with whatever happens tomorrow." It means the spinning evaluative layer stops being the operating system. The legitimate cares (preparing the meeting, making the call) are not erased; they are returned to their proper size. You might find after a stretch of *zuò wàng* that you actually remember the thing you were trying to remember — not because you chased it, but because the noise that was burying it cleared.
Scene 3 — The Argument With Your Partner
You and your partner are mid-argument. The same three points have been made four times each. The case is being built — internally, by both of you. There's the past ("you always do this"), the comparison ("my friend would never"), the verdict ("you don't care about me"). The body is hot. The voice has gone louder and tighter. You are both, in different ways, building a *case* in a courtroom that has no judge.
What the default mode does here: maximum 是非 (right/wrong scoring), maximum 彼我 (I against you, hard-edged, the case), zero 坐 (the body is up and armoring), zero 洗心 (the mind is constructing, not washing), and — if you look — 默默靈光 is still there underneath, but drowned.
**Walking *zuò wàng* through the scene:**
Here's where 坐忘 gets tested in real life, because the canonical text says sitting stably, you then 跨步轉身應機入世 — you stride into the world. The sitting is the ground; the world is where you live it. So:
- 坐 in this context means: not the case. Stop building the case. The case is exactly 是非 operating at maximum intensity. *Zuò* here is the radical act of not continuing the courtroom. - 洗心 — you cannot wash another person's mind, but you can stop pouring more dirty water into your own. The 道境 in this moment might be very small: a single breath, a glass of water, the feel of your feet on the floor. - 忘是非 — you do not concede the point. You are not saying "you're right" or "I'm wrong." You are letting the scoring function suspend — the part of you that needs to *win this*, that needs the case to be valid, that needs the verdict to land. - 彼我 — "you" stops being an opponent and starts being a person. This is the hardest layer in this scene and the one most often misread as weakness or surrender. - 默默靈光 — and this is where something unexpected often happens. When the courtroom goes quiet, what was actually being said becomes audible — underneath the case, there was usually a request, or a fear, or a loneliness. *Zuò wàng* doesn't fix the argument. It lets you hear what the argument was *about*.
Most common mis-mapping here: people think 忘是非 means "I agree to disagree, everything is fine, I'm above this." That's 頑空 (dead emptiness) — flat, cold, dismissive. Real 忘是非 in this scene means the scoring stops, but the caring stays. 中既空而能應 — empty, yet able to respond. The response from a quiet ground is different from the response from a defended one. One is reactive, one is responsive. They feel entirely different to receive.
Scene 4 — The Work Meeting You're Half-Present In
You're on a Zoom call. Three people are talking. Your camera is on but you're also answering emails. Or you're physically present but the inner narrator is composing what you'll say next, scoring what someone just said, comparing yourself to the person presenting. The words are reaching your ears but the meeting is not reaching you.
What the default mode does here: the inner narrator runs, building 是非 ("that's a good point / that's a bad point / I should say something smart / I shouldn't say anything"), keeps 彼我 active ("they are doing well / I am doing poorly"), never settles 坐, never washes. The body is technically in the room but the awareness is somewhere else.
**Walking *zuò wàng* through the scene: - 坐 — you let the body be there. Two feet on the floor (if standing), or weight in the chair, breath at the belly. The body can be a way in. - 洗心 — the way-ground here is: someone is talking. The washing is to let their words arrive before your response is composed. Receive before you reply.** - 忘是非 — for the duration of this stretch, you stop scoring. Not "I have no opinions now," but "my opinion is not yet due." The opinion can come later, after I've actually heard. - 默默靈光 — and now, paradoxically, you may notice more about what's actually being said. Subtle things. The thing they said between the lines. The hesitation. The thing they're protecting.
Most common mis-mapping here: people think *zuò wàng* means being a passive, vague, "spiritual" presence who doesn't engage. Hongzhi's whole point is the opposite. Once sitting is stable — 坐得穩底 — you 跨步轉身應機入世 (stride forth, turn around, respond opportunely, enter the world). The person who has let the inner chatter quiet is more responsive, not less. They hear more. They sense more. Their response, when it comes, is not a defensive move in a chess game; it's an actual human response to an actual human moment. This is 中虛而有容, 外應而不擾. Empty, spacious, responsive, undisturbed.
Why Contemporary People Need This
There is a case to be made that the conditions of contemporary life make *zuò wàng* both harder to access and more necessary than when Hongzhi wrote it down in 12th-century China.
The condition: a culture that runs on 是非.
Look at how a contemporary day is structured. Every feed — social media, news, work chat — runs on right/wrong, agree/disagree, share/condemn. The activity is perpetual judgment. You are not asked to *have* views; you are asked to *perform* them, instantly, publicly. The default mode of the modern attention environment is essentially 是非 at industrial scale. Hongzhi's 忘是非 is not an abstract spiritual achievement; it is a specific antidote to a specific affliction.
The condition: 彼我 at algorithmic intensity.
Every interaction is now scored against an imagined audience. The self is constantly calibrating against imagined others. The 自 vs. 他 distinction has become hyper-active, performed, monitored. Hongzhi's 彼我無差別相 — the relaxation of self against other — speaks directly to this.
The condition: no 坐.
Contemporary life has engineered out the conditions for the body to be off-duty. Notifications, on-call expectations, the dissolving of work-life boundaries, the ubiquity of screens — these keep the body in transit even when nominally at rest. We lie in bed scrolling, sit on the sofa scrolling, eat while scrolling. *Zuò* in Hongzhi's sense — the body's release from being-on-call — is structurally scarce. The first task of *zuò wàng* in our context is often just to make 坐 possible.
The condition: the 洗心 function outsourced.
Hongzhi's image is that the situation washes the mind. The room, the silence, the body's settling, the night, the empty pool — these are doing the work. Contemporary life has engineered conditions that resist washing. Stimulation is constant. The room is rarely silent. The night has its own glow. The empty pool has its own reflection (the phone screen). Hongzhi's way-ground is harder to find.
What about the science?
There is now decades of neuroscience research on meditation and contemplative practice (much of it still debated methodologically, with active disagreements about what specific practices produce what specific effects). Findings that are reasonably robust include:
- Experienced meditators show reduced activity in the default mode network (DMN) — the brain's "self-referential" network that is active when we are not focused on a task but is busily evaluating, reminiscing, projecting, judging. This DMN activity is correlated with mind-wandering and with certain kinds of psychological suffering. - Long-term meditators show changes in attentional control, including the ability to notice when attention has drifted without being captured by it. - Practices emphasizing open, non-judgmental awareness (as opposed to concentrative focus) show particular effects on the way the brain relates to internal experience.
The resonance with Hongzhi's *zuò wàng* is striking, but the parallels are parallels, not proofs. Neuroscience can describe what happens in a brain during certain practices; it cannot tell you whether the 默默靈光 Hongzhi describes is the same as anything the brain does, nor whether a particular brain-state is what he means by 本得 (originally attained). Hongzhi is making claims about the structure of experience itself; neuroscience is making claims about measurable correlates. These overlap in interesting places, but they are not the same project, and treating them as the same is sloppy in either direction.
What is fair to say: the contemporary difficulty (perpetual DMN-style self-referential activity, attention fragmented by design, judgment amplified by feedback loops) is precisely the texture of the difficulty Hongzhi's 坐忘 is structured to address. The specific body-and-mind training he is describing may be one of the better-developed historical answers to that difficulty.
The AI / algorithmic angle, briefly.
There is something worth naming. Generative AI tools and recommendation algorithms have created a new version of the 是非 problem. The recommendation engine asks, implicitly and constantly: *is this interesting? do you agree? will you engage?* The mind trained by these tools gets very good at the scoring function — and very bad at letting it suspend. AI assistants that perform the "give me the answer" function can also deepen the habit of outsourcing 靈光 to a tool. *Zuò wàng* in this context is not a rejection of these tools; it is a way of keeping the inner stillness from being colonized by the constant demand to score. The mirror stays clean; the reflections keep passing through.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
Because the term 坐忘 has been used in many registers across Chinese culture, and because the concept is genuinely subtle, the misreadings are numerous and consequential. Here are the most common, with careful corrections.
Misreading 1: "Seated forgetting means spacing out or dissociating."
This is the most common and the most damaging. People read 忘 as "checked out" and 坐 as "still." So they think the practice is to dissociate — go blank, leave the body, stop being present. This is exactly the opposite of what Hongzhi describes. 默默靈光 is his signature term for what remains when the forgetting happens. Silent — yes. Luminous — also yes. Awake without grasping. If there's no luminosity, no wakefulness, no aliveness to what's happening, you didn't do *zuò wàng*; you did 昏沉 (dullness) or 枯坐 (dead sitting). The line 「堆堆坐忘，默默靈光」 only makes sense as a pair.
Misreading 2: "Seated forgetting means stopping thoughts by force."
This is the trap of 莫行心處路 in reverse. People think 坐忘 is the achievement of a thoughtless state, achieved by aggressive mental discipline. They try to push thoughts away. They try to make the mind blank by effort. Every act of pushing thoughts away is itself a thought. You are still walking the mind's road, just trying to drive it harder. Hongzhi's warning is exact: don't walk that path. The forgetting is not produced; it is allowed. The 道境洗心 — the situation does the washing, not your willpower.
Misreading 3: "Seated forgetting means emptiness is nothingness."
This is the trap of 頑空 — dead emptiness, void-as-substance. People think "the features are exhausted, the distinctions have collapsed, so reality is empty and that's that." They sit in a flat blank, call it enlightenment, and become unreachable. Hongzhi's language here is precise and devastating: 「中既空而能應」 — empty, yet able to respond. 「外既涉而常虛」 — engaged outside, constantly empty. 「諸塵說法諸塵聽」 — every dust preaches, every dust listens. Emptiness in this teaching is not the absence of things; it is the absence of obstruction to things. The mirror is empty of images and that is precisely why it can reflect all images. If your "emptiness" is the absence of responsiveness, that is not what Hongzhi means by 坐忘; that is its dead cousin.
Misreading 4: "Seated forgetting is escapism — withdrawing from the world."
This is the misreading Hongzhi's own contemporaries pressed on him, and it's the one his 「跨步轉身應機入世」 line is most directly answering. People assume that a practice emphasizing stillness, forgetting, washing, and quieting is a withdrawal from life. Hongzhi is emphatic: it is the ground of life, not its opposite. Once sitting is stable, you stride forth. The sitting is what makes the striding unmanipulated. The person who has let the inner tribunal go quiet is the person who can show up in the world without bringing the tribunal along. This is not withdrawal; it is the opposite of withdrawal, properly understood.
Misreading 5: "Seated forgetting is a peak experience you have once and then describe."
This is the misreading that comes from taking 「廓然天地空」 — "vastly empty, heaven-and-earth empty" — as a one-time event. Hongzhi's 聊 — "for now, lightly, temporarily" — is doing important work in the opening line. *Zuò wàng* is not a peak; it is a way of sitting that can be returned to. It has the character of a practice, which is to say, it is taken up repeatedly, in various conditions, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower. The 一心寂 of one sitting is not the 一心寂 of another. The 默默靈光 may be very quiet in one sitting and very luminous in another. The practice is to keep taking it up; the "experience" is not the point.
Misreading 6: "Seated forgetting is the same as moral neutrality — anything goes."
Because 忘是非 (forgetting right/wrong) can be misread as "I no longer have preferences, no judgment, no discrimination," people sometimes conclude that *zuò wàng* licenses a kind of blank permissiveness. It does not. 忘是非 is about the internal tribunal — the constant scoring mechanism. It is not about preferences, discernment, or the capacity to choose. A person who has genuinely practiced *zuò wàng* is often more discerning, not less — because their discernment is no longer driven by anxiety. The 「外應而不擾」 — outwardly responsive without disturbance — is a person who can respond clearly and appropriately, not a person who has lost the capacity to tell things apart.
Misreading 7 (a more subtle one): "Seated forgetting = just relax / take a bath / meditate to calm down."
This is the contemporary wellness reading. People hear "seated forgetting" and translate it as "self-care," "stress relief," "calming down." Stress relief is not nothing — there is real benefit in reducing the constant sympathetic-nervous-system activation of modern life. But stress relief is a much narrower goal than *zuò wàng*. Stress relief wants the body to calm down. *Zuò wàng* wants the operating system to change. The body may indeed calm down as a side effect. The aim is not the calm. The aim is the 中虛而有容 — interiorly empty, with spacious room — which is a structural change in how experience is being processed, not a temporary quieting of it.
A Closing Image
Hongzhi writes 「潭空月沈」 — "the moon sinks into the empty pool." It is one of the loveliest images in the *Recorded Sayings*. A still pool. No wind, no ripples. The moon — far away, impossibly far — descends into it, is reflected in it perfectly, because the pool is empty enough to receive it.
This is what *zuò wàng* is structured to make possible: a stillness that is not emptiness-as-loss but emptiness-as-room. A forgetting that is not erasure but release of the constant noise. A knowing that is not the busy knowing of the scoring mind but the quiet, original, self-verifying knowing Hongzhi calls 靈光, 本得, 自知.
You don't have to be on a stone bed in 12th-century China. You have to be in conditions where the body can be off-duty, the mind can let the dust wash, the tribunal can stop, the self can stop defending, the conceptual river can thin — and where, in the middle of all that, something quietly awake remains. That is what Hongzhi is pointing at, over and over, with the same patient images: the empty pool, the silent light, the mirror, the clean heart.
坐忘 is not a peak experience to chase. It is a way of being available — to your own awareness, to the people around you, to the texture of the moment — that the conditions of contemporary life make structurally rare and structurally necessary. The practice, in any form that genuinely corresponds to what Hongzhi is describing, is the recovery of that availability.
Or, in his own words, in the line that names both the practice and its fruit together:
堆堆坐忘，默默靈光。應物空三世，隨緣遍十方。
*Stacked and settled, seated in forgetting; silent, luminous light. Responding to phenomena, empty through the three times; following conditions, pervading the ten directions.*