Shattering the Great Doubt: The Chan Practice of Huatou

Ask yourself a question without an answer. Keep asking it. Don’t let it go. That, in a nutshell, is the Chinese Zen practice called huatou. It’s a traditional method for breaking through the trap of our habitual thinking into the spacious mind of enlightenment. In this book, Chan Master Sheng Yen brings huatou practice to life. Huatou is similar to the better-known Zen discipline of koan practice, the key difference being that the person meditating on a huatou (‘What is mu [nothingness]?’ is the classic one) is not concerned with coming up with an answer to the question, but simply with concentrating on the very quality of doubt that arises from asking it. The practice then leads to a shattering of doubt and thus to the deep realization that there is no separate, independently existing ‘self’.