Kodō Sawaki was a famously tough Japanese Zen master of the 20th century. He died in 1965. His successor was Kosho Uchiyama, who wrote ‘Opening the hand of thought’ and the wonderful contemporary teacher Shōhaku Okumura is a successor to Uchiyama.
So he’s a really influential guy. He was famously anti idealistic, which was a general trait, I think, of Japanese Zen teachers after the second world war, when an inflated, idealistic language of Buddhism had unhelpfully colluded with the inflated, self serving idealistic language of Japanese imperialism.
So the postwar environment really encouraged Japanese teachers to present Zen as being something very down to earth, something almost mundane, ordinary. And one of Kodō Sawaki’s most famous quotes was when he said that satori, enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house.
You can understand what he’s trying to get at. When we start practice, we might start with the idea that somehow we’re going to get something marvellous. We’re going to get compassion. We’re going to get wisdom. We’re going to get tranquility. We’re going to be able to break into this treasure house, and wear a crown of enlightenment on our foolish head.
And so the phrase is a sort of antidote to that. And I think you can take it in quite a number of different ways. But one of the ways that you can take it is that we don’t gain anything in zazen because we don’t need to gain anything. We are already complete. But we don’t understand that because we’re always viewing everything from our karmic position of needs, desires, dissatisfactions.
So we can look at it that way. But the phrase I think, and the way that Kodō Sawaki expresses himself generally, has often been used, in the West, to present Zen in an anti idealist way, about it being really about everyday tasks like washing the dishes, attending to your normal life. All of which is true, but unfortunately diminishes something.
The quote is often attributed as a re-quote of a famous Chinese zen master of the eighth century Sekisō. Sekisō is most famous for case 46 of The Gateless Gate where he talks about stepping off the hundred foot pole. And it’s interesting because it shows how the zen currency of trading in quotes and then reflections on quotes and quotes about quotes can often get very confused.
So the source of it isn’t actually Sekisō, it’s an exchange involving another master Ryūge, who knew Sekisō. And Ryūge is asked, “how did the ancient master” -that’s the reference to Sekisō-, “finally cease doing things and completely settle down?”. And Ryūge’s reply is It was like a thief slipping into an empty house. So you notice the word used: to slip in, not break into an empty house. So the thief just, in one interpretation, happens to find himself in this empty house which, from the perspective of the thief, is empty.
Dōgen, right at the end of the Fukanzazengi, his instruction for zazen, talks about ‘the treasure house’. And by the treasure house, he’s talking about, as it were, both something which is and always has been there, and what zazen does.The final sentence of the Fukanzazengi goes something like “the treasure house will open of its own accord. And you can do with it what you wish”. I suspect the Japanese is more vague than that, but pay attention to the first part. The treasure house will open of its own accord. In other words, we don’t need to break into the house of emptiness. We don’t need to break into the treasure house. And the reason why we don’t is that the treasure house opens up from the inside. From our sincerely and wholeheartedly doing zazen.
In the quote we might make a false assumption that there’s just this person, this thief, this clown, this idiot, this self-centered person. There’s just this person who somehow has to cure himself. But that is a completely absurd notion. The idea of using the self to change the self is as ridiculous as someone trying to pull their own head off: it is impossible.
The fact is that when we’re sitting there are two things. There is this karmic self. And there is also the treasure house, a treasure house which cannot be seen by the karmic self [and hence is ‘empty’]. And that treasure house we could call the whole of existence. But we could also call it the true body. So when we’re sitting, we don’t need to give attention to the endless drivel that is generated by our mind. We just need to fully sit in the context of zazen. The treasure house is your true body, and will open up of its own accord. You don’t need to intend it. You don’t need to will it. That’s what practice enlightenment means.