Walk without Walking

Awareness has been a hot issue for spiritual seekers, reaching the extreme of intellectualizing the phrase “I am awareness,” making it a pop mantra of modern day spirituality. Importance about being aware is often emphasized, but later in this post, we’ll have a look at what it is when we aren’t even “aware.”

Today’s Koan is not a dialogue, but actually a set of questions. The first question goes like this:

“Why can’t a man of greatest strength lift his own leg?”

You may imagine a sumo wrestler to hear the phrase “a man of great strength,” but it also sounds like a man with great spiritual power, or the one who is fully awakened. Either way, the essential point about the question, if translated into an imperative sentence, is this: “walk without using your legs.”

Impossible! It may be, but if so, is this phrase a total nonsense or something like a riddle? Why don’t we examine it together? And we start not from someone else but from ourselves, trying to walk without the legs, or rather, trying to observe what we call “walking.”

Try an experiment of walking slowly around the room you are now. Break what you call “walking” into the level of bare sensations. You may feel the coolness of the floor, the subtle muscle tension, and many more that you usually don’t notice. Now ask these example questions with curiosity: “Who (what) is it that’s walking?” “Am I walking?” “What is this?" “Where are the feet”? “Where do these sensations come from, and where do they go?” You could even come up with your own inquiry questions.

This brings down to the place where you don’t know anymore if you are lifting the leg. As illogical as the phrase “walking without legs” may sound, something will come down that is enough to make you doubt the too common notion that “you” “use“ “your” “legs” to “walk.” Look at these labels (concepts) and the corresponding sensations, one by one. Peel off the labels and observe the raw sensations that come and go. This is the very basic practice of direct observation.

One last but not least important point that I mentioned in the beginning of this post. When you observe the sensations, also investigate the state of being aware of the sensations. Compare the “legs” when you are aware of them and when you aren’t aware of them. You will come to an astounding fact about being aware, but I won’t say what that is, as it may lead to what I write becoming another concept for those who read it, which is totally useless.

The latter half of this Koan brings another question as below:

“How come one doesn’t talk using his mouth?”

This is an invitation to do another experiment, this time uttering random words and observing all the components to which the label “talking” refers to. I will omit the instructions, as it is basically the same as the walking experiment with a different object of inquiry. Have fun, and see what comes up.