Koans | StoneWater Zen Centre: Recent Episodes
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It was while I was a resident at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center that I completed the Blue Cliff Record (J: Hekiganroku), the classic koan collection compiled by Setchō Jusen (980–1052). I decided it might be useful to collate my numerous scribbled notes, phrases and poetic allegories into some cohesive order. With time and study, I managed to clarify these strange texts to a degree in the language that I would use. It became something of a project, even something that others might find useful. A tall order to be sure, so I figured it was best to see what developed, forgetting any lofty ambitions about publication.
As we know, much of the language is famously abstract—almost unintelligible at times, and this is part of the problem. The main cases themselves don’t need to be analysed; we just absorb them to the point where the koan works on us. But it might help to interpret Engo’s prefaces and Setchō’s verses to make them more accessible to the average Westerner. After all, the prefaces are effectively introductions, and the verses act like summaries, so this became my goal.
Eventually, I learned that much of the language used is part of the Chinese poetic tradition and would have been readily understandable to most people at the time. Not so for the modern Western practitioner. For example, what do you make of this, the preface to Case 4, ‘Tokusan’s Bundle and All’:
Under the blue sky, in the bright sunlight, you don’t have to point out the east or define the west anymore; but under the conditions of a particular time, it is still necessary to give medicine according to the illness. But tell me, is it better to let go or to hold still?
At first glance, it’s not that clear what Engo is telling us, is it? Why would I feel the need to point out east or west, ‘under the blue sky?’ What’s all this about medicine and illness? Let go of what? When I look at this paragraph, it tells me when someone is ill, they need the right medicine. A devastating insight, I’m sure you’ll agree, but is there more to this? As soon as I see words like ‘bright,’ I think of yang, which means literally ‘brightness.’ This word is also associated with ‘heaven’ because light comes from the heavens: the sun (which is also mentioned), the moon and the stars: the three celestial sources of light. But we also know that yang refers to the oneness aspect of our being, the ‘absolute,’ and yin refers to the relative state of our being, so now a different picture is emerging.
The first couple of lines, therefore, could read: in a state of oneness, there is no ‘east’ or ‘west’ because duality doesn’t exist. The next lines could be: but as a teacher, one must identify the student’s relative problem or illness. Maybe it is necessary to ‘let go’ of some dreamy notion or a conflicting thought. On the other hand, sometimes it’s necessary to investigate our own attachment or ‘hold still’ to a decision that one has made. Another interpretation might be we must let go of our notions of ‘Zen,’ and hold still to our one true state. The problem here is, what if I’m wrong? What if my opinion, my assessment, and my understanding are simply incorrect? Am I not just adding confusion to the already confusing nature of koan study?
Yes. Then again, as Katagiri Roshi once said, ‘You have to say something.’ My commentaries are always going to be subjective. After all, every koan is about you, so in the above case, we have Tokusan arriving with his ‘bundle.’ If I said his ‘baggage,’ is that easier? What about me turning up with my baggage? Tokusan walks ‘east to west and west to east’ across the hall. If you didn’t know, walking from west to east is a metaphor for the journey to enlightenment. The author of Siddartha, Herman Hesse, wrote a short story called Journey to the East, in which he writes:
Our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country … but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.
The ‘heavenly’ sun rises in the East, and Oestre (where the words ‘east’ and ‘oestrogen’ come from) is the Germanic Goddess of the Dawn and Spring. Spring is the time of rebirth, new life and resurrection and in the Bible, the East represents heaven. Tokusan’s story is developing.
There were strict rules for arrival at a temple, and as Katsuki Sekida (1893–1987) tells us:
The attire of a monk visiting a teacher for an interview was formally specified. But Tokusan disregarded the regulation and, carrying his bundle under his arm, intruded into the lecture hall…
Matthew Juksun Sullivan states:
According to the Chanyuan Qinggui (the oldest complete monastic code we still possess), when entering a hall, a monk “should not cross in front of the altar … and should not walk from the right side to the left.” But Denshan (Tokusan) carts his rucksack into the Dharma Hall and, without bowing, parades around the room like a fire inspector.
Tokusan’s rebellious theatrics result in Setchō commenting, ‘exposed.’ What has been exposed? Later, Tokusan returned, ‘immediately shouted,’ and left. Setchō again says, ‘Exposed.’ Is there a difference between the first and second ‘exposed?’ Master Isan later comments that Tokusan will one day ‘build a grass hut atop a solitary peak and scold Buddhas and revile Zen Masters,’ but Setchō wearily (it seems) just says: ‘He adds frost on top of snow.’ He’s young; he’s had some insight, and maybe he’s a bit arrogant, but after all, we can only be who we are.
The post Too Much Baggage – Mokuin Sensei first appeared on StoneWater Zen Centre.
A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature or not?”
Jōshū answered, “Mu!”
Joshu’s Mu is the first of 48 cases or kōan appearing in the Gateless Gate kōan collection (the Mumonkan) complied by Mumon Ekai (1183-1260), in 1228. It’s also the first case in the 200 introductory kōan studied by students working with teachers in Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s White Plum lineage; and it appears in the Rinzai Zen Shumon Kattoshu (Vines and Entanglements) and in the Sōtõ Zen Shoyoroku (Book of Equanimity). In the White Plum curriculum this kōan is studied three times. So, it’s a first and fundamental case for study, to which we keep coming back. Mumo considered this kōan the barrier of the ancestors, perhaps because we entrap ourselves by its seeming obscurity. We overthink its meaning and look for its resolution in the wrong place. Since Mu cannot be thought out and explained away, its resolution demands a leap beyond personal, dualistic perspective, even as we begin by grasping at shadows in a search for some grammatical means to articulate its unconditioned significance. The resolution of this kōan comes from a profound change in our appreciation of our own being in relation to the teaching of Buddha Nature. Mumon Ekai said of this kōan:
“To realize Zen, one has to pass through the barrier of the ancestors. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, or if your path of discursive reasoning is not blocked off, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like an entangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a ancestors? It’s just this, “Mu!” This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it, you will see Jōshū face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of ancestors. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”
The kōan’s significance arises from the question Joshu was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature, or not?” The monk asks the question because, in the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, the Buddha teaches that all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, which is nevertheless indistinguishable from conditioned existence and the monk wanted to understand what Buddha Nature was. The question was not an idle speculation. Seeing a dog in the temple courtyard perhaps, the monk intently wondered something along these lines:
“If, as the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra says, all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, then I must have it; and that dog in the courtyard must have it. So, what is it? Why can’t I find it? Do I really have it, or not? Does that dog have it?”
The teaching that all beings have the Buddha Nature had considerable traction in the development of Buddhism in east Asia and many of the principal sects of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, were fundamentally shaped by it. The thrust of the teaching is that Buddha Nature or Enlightenment is not something we acquire from practice, it is our original nature. We have always been fully endowed with Buddha Nature from the beginning of everything.
It is one thing, however, to read and understand the words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, and perhaps also to have a certain amount of faith that the Buddha Nature teaching must be true; and quite another to experience the teaching as true for oneself, as one’s own life. The central concern of Buddhism is not merely that we believe the teachings but that we test them out, practice them and find them to be true for ourselves. It’s imaginable then, that during the heyday of Buddhism in China countless Buddhists devotedly learned, copied out, studied and chanted the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra with the intention to see directly for themselves that all beings have the Buddha Nature, and that many of these people, try as they might, could not get a handle on what Buddha Nature was.
Chapter 27 the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra suggested an approach to understanding Buddha Nature offered a clue to the realisation of Buddha Nature:
Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature,
We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances.
When the time has come,
The Buddha Nature is manifest before us.
There must have been many earnest Buddhist practitioners who studied this verse and prayed ardently that their time would come, and Buddha Nature would be made manifest before them. It’s exceptional however that persistent and ardent desire alone delivers to us what we want. More commonly we need help and guidance in our endeavours and we need the right tool to break down the obstacles to obtaining what we want. The monk who asked Joshu whether a dog had Buddha Nature or not might have watched the dog intently, as it carried on in real time conditions and circumstances, and wondered when the time would come for it Buddha Nature to be manifest before him
As Zen became established in China, it offered the person-to-person transmission of a direct, intimate understanding of the meaning of the Buddha’s teachings, without reliance on the words of sutra study. To many renowned exegetes of the sutras, the Zen teachers making such claims would have seemed like fraudsters, however, there were many monks and nuns who turned to Zen from a desperate need for the personal experience of Buddha Nature they lacked from the study of the mere words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra. The monk questioning Joshu would have been like this.
However, when the monk put his question to Master Joshu, he received the answer “Mu!” We may wonder how that helped him. The point however of the kōan is that is if we penetrate the meaning of Mu we ourselves will be helped, immeasurably.
There are two recorded versions of the dialogue about the dog and Buddha Nature in the record of Master Joshu, although it’s only the first one, in which he answered “Mu!” (“No!”), which was incorporated by later teachers into the classical kōan collections. The full record of Master Joshu reads like this:
A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”
Joshu answered, “Mu! [no]”
The monk replied, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature. Why would a dog not have it?”
Joshu said, “Because it has karmic consciousness.”
A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”
Joshu answered, “Yu! [yes]”
The monk replied, “If it has, why then is it still stuffed into a bag of skin?”
Joshu said, ”Because though it knows, it deliberately transgresses.”
It does not particularly matter whether it was the same monk or two different monks who asked these two questions. What’s interesting is that on the first occasion Joshu answered in the negative; and on the second, in the affirmative. His first answer denied that the conditioned existence of a dog could be anything apart from its dog nature. If the monk thought its Buddha Nature would be something other than its karmic consciousness, or dog nature, he didn’t understand what Buddha Nature was. Joshu invited the monk to see the dog as a dog, rather than try to make it conform to some invocation of an idealised Buddha Nature. In the second case, Joshu affirmed that even in its conditioned existence as a dog, the dog was nevertheless nothing other than Buddha Nature; because, in the dog’s case, Buddha Nature was nothing other than the bag of skin making up the dog’s conditioned existence, as a dog.
In both answers, the issue at stake was not the affirmative or the negative answer, it was the monks’ misidentifications of the Buddha Nature as other than conditioned existence. It’s unimportant whether Joshu said, “No!” rather than “Yes!” or “Yes!” rather “No!” in as much as neither answer denied the phenomenal nature of the dog as a dog; and both answers threw the monk the bare bone of the dog’s facticity, as an invitation to see what the Buddha Nature of a dog therefore amounted to. Joshu’s intention was, of course, that the monk should see for himself what his own Buddha Nature amounted to. This is also precisely the point encapsulated in the verse:
Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature,
We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances.
When the time has come,
The Buddha Nature is manifest before us.
The kōan of the nonsensical answer “Mu!” throws us up against the boundaries of real time, conditions and circumstances in order to that we might appreciate what we amounts to. For the purposes of kōan study, we could say that the words of the sūtra “We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances” match up with the advice of Master Mumon Ekai,
“Just concentrate your whole energy into Mu!, and do not allow any discontinuation.”
Master Mumon Ekai also said that to pass through the barrier of the kōan Mu, realise Buddha Nature and see Joshu face to face, it’s necessary to study,
“…through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night.”
If we are willing to muster the determination to do as Master Mumon Ekai advises then the real time, conditions and circumstances of our lives become transparent and Mu appears. It is not nothingness, and nor is it merely the real time, conditions and circumstances as we ordinarily think of them. From study of Mu the realisation of Buddha Nature dawns, and a treasure store of abundance, which is the birth right of us all is found to be spread out, all around. In the meantime, Master Mumon Ekai advised that the question “What is Mu?” should be pursued unremittingly, as if,
“…you had taken into your mouth, “a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.”
Imagine the visceral discomfort conjured up by this image! Mumon Ekai urges the abandonment of all swallowing and spitting out, which is to say all preconceived ideas and beliefs about Mu, or Buddha Nature. The resolution of the kōan is not to be found in evasive and mediated interpretations of its meaning. All our usual stratagems and explanations for containing doubt must all be thrown out, and the dark significance of Mu itself must be fearlessly embraced. Master Dōgen expressed the same perspective when he said that where the sutra says, Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, it includes wanting to forget. So saying, Dōgen was hinting at a heuristically embodied understanding of the nature of existence, in which knowledge harvested from books and scholarly research is laid to one side. In the study of Mu, “wanting to forget” is to put aside everything we think we know about Buddha Nature, or the kōan itself, together with everything we think might be a potential answer to the kōan. We need to throw ourselves into an investigation of Mu with an expansive and open-minded doubt.
The sūtra’s admonition that We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances csan be considered together with Joshu’s two answers to the same question, both of refer to the real time, conditions and circumstances of a dog being a dog. Master Dōgen said that that the wanting to know exhibited in both questions is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, which in terms of the koan is equivalent to saying that the question, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature of not?” is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, and indeed that everything in the kōan is not different from, real time, conditions and circumstances. The monk, Joshu, the dog, Buddha Nature, the question, the answer Mu, or any other answer, are none other than real time, conditions and circumstances.
Such an understanding follows because the expression, real time, conditions and circumstances, refers to the conditioned nature of all existence: i.e., as insubstantial, contingent and impermanent. There is no stepping outside of this law, which is all
we find when we look for the cause, essence or ground of phenomenal existence. One of the Buddha’s most accomplished contemporary followers, the venerable Saripūtra, is recorded to have said that whomsoever understands the teaching of real time, conditions and circumstances realises the essence of Buddhism, and whomsoever understands the essence of the Buddhism realises this teaching. It’s therefore perfectly consistent that
Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature,
We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances.
and so too Joshu’s utterance Mu and its helpfulness as a barrier koan.
There is however something rather important, and perhaps startling, that we need to register about the identification of “wanting to know” with “real time, conditions and circumstances. Look again at these lines:
Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature,
We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances.
Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances are identical. Buddha Nature and Mu are identical. Mu and the dog are identical. If, we understand Buddhism to mean that the practice of the Way will lead us away from dukkha (suffering) and samudaya (its cause) to a new and different place, nibbana (release from suffering) via marga (the eightfold path), then we overlook the identify of Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances, and Dogen cautioned that the effect would actually be to perpetuate our suffering and bring about its continued cultivation! Suffering and its cause arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. Release from suffering and a path to the release from suffering also arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. It isn’t possible to escape real time conditions and circumstances by means of real time conditions and circumstances. We always remain in the feedback loop of real time conditions and circumstances. We need to remember this, as we grapple after the resolution of the kōan, and begin to chase the shadows of all sorts of metaphysical ideas about what Mu might be.
What then is the solution? How do we penetrate the barrier of Mu and see the Buddha Nature?
Dogen said the words, we should just reflect, in the line, We should just reflect real time, causes and circumstances make it clear that the real time, conditions and circumstances of everyday life, with all its highs and lows, can nevertheless provide us with a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature. Why was he able to say that?
Real time, conditions and circumstances offer a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature if we work with our lives in an embodied and enacted way, rather than by imagining Buddha Nature as an intellectual construct. To just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances is to allow the whole of our sensory apparatus to engage with the whole of life as-it-is, effortlessly and transparently. Engaging with life in this way then, as the sutra says, the time has come, and Buddha Nature is manifest before us. To put it differently, and in terms of the kōan, we penetrate the barrier of Mu when we embody it, rather than merely think about it.
A mirror might be a good analogy for an embodied and enactive understanding of Mu (in the sense that Dōgen suggests to be the meaning of just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances). However, an important difference between a human being and a mirror is that a mirror isn’t busy. A mirror mindlessly and passively reflects. Human beings, by contrast, are always busy, hurrying from one thing to the next. So, in a way, we’re like distorted mirrors. We don’t reflect the arising, duration and departure of things all that clearly, because we’re relentlessly impelled either to hang on to, or move on from, real time, conditions and circumstances. Remembering the last thing and anticipating the next, we’re seldom passive; and we’re not so good at remaining more than fleetingly attentive to the present moment. In this way, we tend to overlook much of what’s presented to our senses and we don’t often take the trouble to examine what real time, conditions and circumstances say about the nature of momentary experience, as it arises. Instead, we dwell on what is already in the past, or our expectations about the future. In this way, we miss the subtle revelation behind the words, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which Master Tōzan Ryōkai (807–869) described, in these lines from his Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi,
Like facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other.
You are not it, but in truth it is you.
This is the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances direct us, and the intimate experience of the kōan of Joshu’s Mu.
Wanting to know Mu, Mumon Ekai urges us to earnestly raise the doubt, “What is Mu?” during housework, walking to the bus and other day to day real time, conditions and circumstances. Doing so, we just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which is to say we unselfconsciously move beyond the dualistic subject – object paradigm that infects and distorts our understanding of the distinction between delusion and enlightenment. To just reflect, or to be lost in the question, “What is Mu?” is a transparent interaction with real time, conditions and circumstances. To put it differently, to lose ourselves in the doubt about the nature of Mu, is a transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances. In the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances, is the moment of
When the time has come,
The Buddha Nature is manifest before us.
Dōgen Zenji said that, When the time is come means this time.
To raise the doubt about Mu is the catalyst that enables to us ascertain the significance of reflecting real time, conditions and circumstances as the Buddha Nature of our own lives. When the time has come, in the present moment, the reality of The Buddha Nature is immediately manifest before us, appears, like a clear reflection in the mirror. When the barrier of Mu is pierced, it is seen in its entirety, and there is no doubt what Mu is. Dōgen said:
“There has never been any time which was not time having come nor any Buddha Nature which was not the Buddha Nature manifesting before us.”
There is therefore nothing in real time, conditions and circumstances from which we should feel any need for retreat or disengagement, or indeed any aspect of real time, conditions and circumstances from which retreat or disengagement is actually possible. Nothing impedes us from appreciating that in the present moment of real time, conditions and circumstances the lived-experience of Buddha Nature is
manifesting. There was nothing to impede the monk’s sight when he questioned Joshu about the Buddha Nature of a dog and there is nothing impeding us from penetrating the barrier of Mu. If the kōan blocks us, and generally it does, it’s because we hide from ourselves in an inattentive reluctance to reflect real time conditions and circumstances, as they are.
Note
There are a few published translations of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra available in book format and online. For consistency and ease of reading I have adapted the verses I have used to align with the terminology in other translated materials I have used. I have referred to the Nishijima and Cross translation of Eihei Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo (and in particular the Busshō fascicle). The quotation from the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi is from the translation by Taigen Dan Leighton, published in Cultivating the Empty Field. The edition of the Mumonkan I referred to is The Gateless Barrier, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, by Zenkei Shiayama Roshi. The two dialogues about the Buddha Nature of a dog can be found in The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, by James Green.
The post Mu, Dogs and Buddha Nature – Tony Shinro Doubleday Sensei first appeared on StoneWater Zen Centre.
This was a teisho given 26th October, 2023 at Fell End
Thank you for your welcome, it’s such joy to be among you as part of the StoneWater sangha, thank you for the beautiful open heartedness you offered in Daisan, it feels like something of the measure of practice here and says something deeply wonderful about the culture of StoneWater encouraged by Roshi to encounter such wonderful honesty, and vulnerability and openness. Thank you, Roshi. My dharma talk is about intimacy, the intimacy of our practice. We might consider Suigen’s talk yesterday, that encounter between Bodhidharma and the Emperor Wu as being about intimacy, not an easy intimacy, but no doubt the reason the story has survived down the generations is because something went in, something passed between Bodhidharma and the Emperor, that had electric in it, the electric of intimacy, and what better definition of intimacy is there than that? It doesn’t exhaust our definitions by any means, and it was a hard intimacy but intimacy it was – and I’d like to say a little more.
Roshi asked me to say something about myself. So let me give you an early memory, not the earliest but sometime between the age of two or three I’d say. Lying in bed with my mother, I’m on my back and she’s nuzzling me and making endearing throaty noises. I feel overwhelmed and push her away, the feeling of that push feels itself down through the years, I wonder why. A line from an old Cream song, the ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ comes to mind… Another baby might have welcomed their mother’s endearments right in, my older brother John certainly did, and she loved him with a devoted tenderness for that.
So there’s this form of intimacy, I’m almost tempted to say, this simple form of intimacy between two people, but it’s not at all simple, is it? We don’t really know ourselves until we are in relationship, do we? And then all sorts of confusions ensue, but these can be clarified, and I’d say as a psychotherapist who’s absorbed Zen through the years, that’s where this practice of Zen fits in. But where’s the bridge between these two domains, between Zen and our lives in relationship, in the world at large, is there one? Well of course. Let’s see – in the precepts, it says in the tenth precept, the last one: Experience the intimacy of things: do not defile the Three Treasures. The three treasures: Buddha, dharma, sangha – that’s called covering all our bases!
Bodhidharma says:
Self-nature is subtle and mysterious.
In the realm of the One,
Not holding dualistic concepts of ordinary beings and Buddhas,
Is called the Precept of Not Defaming the Three Treasures.
Here we are – most deeply and intimately, ordinary beings and Buddhas.
Dōgen Zenji says:
To expound the Dharma with this body
Is the harbour and weir of this world.
This is the most important thing in the world.
Its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature.
It is beyond explanation.
Wholeheartedly revere and serve it.
To repeat:
To expound the Dharma with this body
Is the harbour and weir of this world.
Those lines conjure up a place of safety, and a place where everything is gathered up, a place where the head of a mighty river is slowed, where the might of it, its realisation is caught and slowed, but flows through with definition and power, like this practice we’re engaged in which slows everything down, the head rivers of our life, caught behind a mighty dam, this Zazen breathing into them slowing it all down, so it opens up to being felt, experienced and re-re-experienced, enquired into, insofar as it’s conscious.
And then Dogen goes on:
This is the most important thing in the world.
Its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature.
It is beyond explanation.
Wholeheartedly revere and serve it.
Here is that sense, the inkling, that the river of our life flows into the ocean of essential nature, it’s one with it, entirely one with it. Completely, intimately one with it. Isn’t that beautiful, almost too sublime to grasp, as Dogen often is. But elsewhere he casts further light on this comment:
The way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent upon practice and realization? The dharma-vehicle is free and untrammelled. What need is there for concentrated effort? Indeed, the whole body is far beyond the world’s dust. [And here’s a question – take hold of that phrase, the world’s dust, what does it produce in your heart and mind? We’ll come back to it later for sure.]
But Dogen goes on:
Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from one, right where one is. What is the use of going off here and there to practise? And yet [and here’s the killer line because we sort of live in that “and yet” don’t we?], if there is the slightest discrepancy, the way is as distant as heaven from earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion.
If the least like or dislike arises, and I’d say this isn’t just like or dislike at the level of thought, I’d say it’s the much more primitive stuff too, unconscious, repressed, avoided, the stuff we step back from, the pain we would wish to avoid, infantile stuff that sets us on course across a lifetime and is later so difficult to grasp, just like that moment when I pushed my mother away. What hope is there for us?
But here Dogen comes again, clarifying it all:
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.
The myriad things – the world’s dust, and much, much more besides. Buddha, dharma sangha – the invitation is to become intimate with ourselves.
How does this arise, how do we move from our narrow scaredy cat selves to containing worlds? How do we do this?
In Cultivating the Empty Field, The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi, he echoes the words of Shitou’s “Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage,” and says, “take the backward step and directly reach the middle of the circle from where light issues forth.”
He is the precursor to Dogen and he’s simply saying that, take to your mat, crack your knees: In such moments the mind stills and takes on the qualities of its surroundings, as it melds with what is, without distinction or categorisation, we become the distant temple bell, the wind soughing through the trees, the car passing on the road, the creak of the house – our life lays itself at our feet as we become one with the bell, the light shining out of the flower, we step beyond thinking. That is deep intimacy; becoming one with our body, its aches and pains and desires, its grief, its anger, it’s unknownness which discloses itself to us sometimes oh so painfully, don’t we know this? Thinking of someone facing a trial in their life and the anxiety of that; a first job or a new job; a first child, or a child or aged parent changing in unanticipated ways as they move through a life-cycle transition, the loss of a loved or beloved one – becoming one with the sensations that arise in our body as those challenges close in on us: becoming intimate to your own experience, letting in the experience, without judgement: it is what it is.
In sitting silent illumination, we allow the first thought to pass without settling into it; we allow the second sensation to evanesce without labelling it; we allow images to arise without pursuing them, however enchanting or erotic, we allow an emotion to flourish like smoke to be carried away on the breath without being captured by it; we drop down through our consciousness like a stone settling into the lucent clear sea, if we can, as in that famous koan. Let me remind you of it:
In the sea of Ise,
ten thousand feet down, lies a single stone
I want to pick up that stone
without getting my hands wet.
These are the opening lines of that beautiful koan.
And the question is, whose name is on that stone?
Can you reach with real compassion into depth, into the depths of the Sea of Ise, into the depths of your being, that are in fact so deep, they are depthless, a depth that reaches through into thevery depths of the myriad things, beyond reckoning, into the one you most surely are, not merely a part of, but the whole of you, go to that depth and take hold of that stone, that name, what name is it? It’s your uniqueness, the wonder of you, the pain and anguish and joys of you. The invitation of silent illumination, don’t get your hand wet, let go of all names, labels, categories, recollections, dive deep into freedom. What emerges can be described as concentration, still-pointedness, illumination. And I would say that silent illumination is a way of and unto itself: for some practitioners it is the supreme way to the unfolding of ourselves. For others it delivers us into the place where koans unfold in depth and clarity. We peer into our life as if under the eyebrows of the patriarchs. Let me push this further:
In the Book of Equanimity Case No 20: Jizo’s Not Knowing is the Most Intimate.
Main Case
Attention! Master Jizo asked Hogen, “Where have you come from?”. “I pilgrimage aimlessly,” replied Hogen. “What is the matter of your pilgrimage?” asked Jizo. “I don’t know,” replied Hogen. “Not knowing is the most intimate,” remarked Jizo. At that, Hogen experienced great enlightenment. As Gerry Shiskin Wick, Abbot of Great Mountain Zen Center, says in his translation and commentary, ‘‘ ‘I don’t know’ could also be translated as ‘not knowing’. Not knowing is most intimate. As soon as we really know something it becomes separate. It becomes a piece of knowledge or understanding that we can manipulate. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. It’s just not intimate.” (Wick, The Book of Equanimity, case 20). If we can stay in courage and compassion in that place of not knowing, if we can manage to find a place, which an old colleague of mine describes as a place of ‘safe uncertainty’, a place where instead of knowing, curiosity can flourish, then, according to Gerry Shiskin Wick’s interpretation of this koan, what can arise is a place of deep intimacy. In this view of things, knowing, being sure, locking uncertainty out because it’s frightening, or irritating or unthinkable can be replaced – if we can gradually tolerate the negative and all its implications – by safe uncertainty, a place of curiosity where compassion arises. Knowing can also be a form of defensiveness, of not letting the other in, of not letting parts of ourselves be known, parts that annoy or shame us – these are the lovely bad places Jeanette and I go to when we argue. She knows herself better than I do, of course she does, and I know myself better than she does – but hell is that place where you really, really believe that; where there’s not a crack of allowing the other into the marketplace of your heart and mind, where self-knowledge is not held with an open hand, or open heart, but in the middle of a raging argument when my dudgeon’s up, my mind inflamed, I’m in fight mode, and it’s the most basic part of my reptilian brain that’s got the upper hand.
“Ah, sweetheart Ryōkan”, she should say, but I might add what a terrible, most inflammatory moment to remind me, that I’m a Zen teacher, so no doubt best delivered to me in an arch and teasing way, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.”
At this moment I can imagine her rocking back on her feet and laughing uproariously! But seriously, what I’m suggesting here is that intimacy is a place of not judging – taking note that, when we judge ourselves or others, we move away to take stock, to judge; whereas intimacy is a place of greater enlightenment: as my first teacher in India used to say, intimacy, or enlightenment, is that moment of “coming home and gently resting”.
Intimacy is also to let ourselves into the hidden, subjugated, shadow parts of ourselves. The parts we hide from others but also the parts that as very little things we learned to hide from others’ judgment and disapproval and over time, as that became habit, we have hidden those parts even from ourselves. Here I think of the places that koans take us, with their potential to crack open the nut of who we are, what a discovery they have been!
And then there’s anger, that almost forbidden emotion in Buddhism, fronting up the Gatha of Atonement – I think in some way it equates to what Christian contemplatives describe as the Dark Night of the Soul, a place where God is absent, and yet She is longed for, a place of aridness. Anger when it endures seems sometimes to take that place, the joys of Buddha nature are absent. And yet it needs to be embraced with love and compassion, not to be acted out if we can, but so often that’s how it shows itself, and then the need to seek forgiveness and reparation. But there are worlds within anger, don’t be afraid, plunge into its dark depths, know it is part of you, a whole territory to be breathed into with compassion, sat with and allowed to unfold, and often underneath it in the depths, fear, abandonment, loneliness, these are places to know with compassion.
And then there are the precepts and so we come full circle back to Dogen’s comments on the Tenth precept. Kant, the 18th C German philosopher, offered that the categorical imperative, what he considered to be the cornerstone of our moral sensibility, runs something like this: the good is rational, and the rational is good, at the heart of the good is the imperative to harm neither others nor oneself, to treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated. He famously said something like, even a shepherd boy knows the good, it’s inside us all, intrinsic to our sense of being human. And here we can agree, because as we descend through the layers, as if down through the sea of Ise something profoundly intrinsic to us greater than humanness offers glimpses to us; I might call it Buddha Nature, dharmadhatu, the intrinsic more-than-self, the utterly deeply interconnected nature of reality, the Jizo who cries with the cries of the world and with our own pain and tenderness, which opens us up to the whole – the whole of which we are both the whole of and the tiniest fragment of in the self-same moment. So as I have found, studying the precepts, and taking the precepts is an invitation to freedom.
Thus the precepts are not an outside in experience, like “Thou shalt not…”, but an inside out experience that unfolds within us. As Diane Eshin Rizetto puts it in her beautiful book, Waking Up to What You Do, she interprets one of the precepts: “I vow to meet others on equal ground”. That’s so beautiful – and not just our human others but the whole damn shooting match (and here Dogen shoots across my mind again), the spider in the bath, the grasses in the field, the wood being stacked for the fire – hold the heft of it in your hand, feels its weight, it’s part of you – these are the blessings of intimacy, our tenderness, our sorrows, our joys, the weight of a block of wood in your hand, the onion under your knife, everything opens itself up to you, these are the beautiful intimate blessings of our practice. Thank you for your time.
The post Intimacy – Jeremy Ryōkan Sensei, 26th October, 2023 at Fell End, Teisho. first appeared on StoneWater Zen Centre.
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