http://hsuyun.org/chan/en/essays/bychuanzhi/759-huatoupractice.html
The Hua-Tou Practice
Written by Chuan
Zhi Tuesday, 04 October 2011 00:00 
Zen’s hua-tou practice recently
seems to be enjoying a renaissance among the normal contingent of
Zen Buddhists speckling the globe. In part, this may be due
to the growing awareness that this was Hsu Yun’s personal favorite
Zen practice that he spent much of his life advocating. One
of the best contemporary descriptions of hua-tou practice
has recently come from Stuart Lachs who offers his personal
experience with it and suggestions for anyone wanting to try
it.[Note
1]
In the Buddhist world, other techniques are far more popular
than the hua-tou: gong-an (koan) study,
sutra study, Pure Land (e.g., reciting the name of the Buddha),
Vipassana, mind-blanking or void meditation,
pranayama, sound meditation, etc. While these are
all fine practices, and all give the same results if they are done
correctly, each is unique in that it “fits”, to a lesser or greater
degree, with each individual’s personality and mental
framework. Some will find it more expedient to practice Pure
Land, for example, than to practice Zen, and some who practice Zen
will find it more expedient to practice sound-meditation than the
hua-tou method.[Note
2] What makes hua-tou practice distinct as
a practice is that it engages us to look directly into the nature
of Being.
While I would like to try to make this practice as simple as
possible to encourage everyone to give it a try, I feel it
necessary to list a few pre-requisites for, as simple as the
practice is, it requires that we bring to it a few essential
ingredients: great motivation, great concentration, and great
desire. Our motivation must be such that we are willing and
eager to change the priorities in our lives to take up this
practice which will engage us throughout the day for weeks or
months. Our concentration must be such that we can hold onto
a topic and concentrate on it for an extended period of time
without being easily distracted by other thoughts, sounds,
sensations, etc., and our desire to understand who we are as
living, sentient, beings must be strong and unwavering. If
these conditions aren’t in place when we start the practice, we are
better suited to cultivate them first through beginning Zen
training exercises: to learn to concentrate, for example, we might
do breathe counting exercises, yoga, the Healing Breath or other
pranayama exercises (for those with academic aspirations, study
math, the sciences, philosophy, arts, etc.). As for having
strong motivation and desire, that is something that we either have
or don’t, and only we can know. Most often these qualities
are generated from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with our life
and a strong urge to want to change it (i.e., suffering and desire
to escape from suffering). Without these pre-requisites in
place, attempting the hua-tou will likely be, at best, an
intellectual exercise and, at worst, make us frustrated to the
point that we give up before we gain its fruit.
I should also mention that Hsu Yun stressed the importance of
having great faith in the method. This will be necessary for
some who might otherwise dismiss the practice as being too
difficult for a perceived questionable outcome, but for others who
bring sufficient desire it will be irrelevant. In my case, I
found the practice itself to be immensely compelling and that was
what spurned me to start it and to continue with it.
Huà-tόu { 話頭 } is literally translated as “word
head” but is also translated as “critical phrase”. Before the
term was appropriated by Zen teachers it was used to refer to the
main idea of a literary passage. In Zen, it refers to the
nature of the origin or source of a thought, word, or phrase that
arises in one’s mind, or, more poetically, to “the mind before it
is stirred”.[Note
3]
All hua-tous have one thing in common. See if you
can figure out what it is from these six common ones:
Obviously, they are all questions: what they all have in
common is a “?” … which is, of itself, also a
hua-tou. Hua-tou practice is about looking
deeply into the nature of being by asking ourselves an open-ended
question which we lock into our brains and return to again and
again. The objective is not to answer it, but to play with
it, letting it taunt, tease, and torment us.
If you think you’re ready to begin the practice, here are the
rules:
Feel free to post questions or related topics for open
discussion below.
Note 1. See
The Hua-Tou practice: perspectives and examples of an ancient and
potent Chinese Chan practice
Note 2. Actually, the hua tou method stands alone as a practice
and is not dependent on any particular religion or
philosophy. It’s available for anyone to try.
Note 3. Empty Cloud, The Autobiography of the Chinese Zen
Master Xu Yun, translated by Charles Luk, Element Books
Limited, 1988, p. 229.
