Effortless

Effortless

Effortlessness here does not mean passivity or drifting, but the absence of straining and contrivance in practice. It shows up when view and non-grasping are sufficiently stable that practice feels like allowing rather than forcing.

Chandrakīrti / Madhyamaka flavor

• When the emptiness of self and phenomena is understood, there is less to defend or manipulate.
• Meditation can become a natural settling into how things already are, rather than an effort to manufacture special states.

Bankei’s Unborn

• Bankei emphasizes an effortless stance very explicitly:
  • We are already in the Unborn; there is nothing to fabricate.
  • The "effort" is simply not to abandon the Unborn by following habits and secondary reactions.
• Practice becomes a relaxed, immediate recognition of the Unborn in all activities.

Effortlessness, in this sense, is the texture of practice when view and non-grasping are alive in experience.