Category: Kusen

The case:

Master Sozan asked Master Toku, “The Buddha’s true body is just like space. Manifesting its form according to circumstances, it is like the moon in water. How do you understand it?”

Toku said, “It’s like a donkey looking down a well (seeing his own reflection).”

Sozan said, “You aren’t quite there.”

Toku said, “Well, how do you understand it?”

Sozan said, “It’s like the well looking up at the donkey.”

To have any understanding of these stories, two things are essential. First, we need to take the image seriously, not see it as code, or immediately try to convert it into something else. The image is the whole picture. Second, we need to be keenly aware of our own tendency towards dualism. So, in this first image, we might think there are three things: the moon, the moonlight and the water. But there’s only two, our mind wants to insert a moon when none is there. Likewise, in all the images concerning mirrors – a way of talking about differentiation within wholeness- we want to insert the owner of the reflection.

The image of the moon in water is a very old one. It’s originally a way of describing the relationship between the mind and awareness/insight. When the mind is still, we can see things as they are. But it keeps being creatively reinterpreted, so here Sozan is using it as a way to describe the complete inter penetration of wholeness/Buddha and differentiation/myriad things.

Toku takes an image which is very traditional and beautiful, and brings it down to earth. The donkey – this practitioner – is looking down the well of all things, right to the bottom, and sees that he is not separate from anything.

But there is a risk: if we just think from this perspective, our minds can insinuate the self back into the picture, and then people can make absurd statements like “I am all existence”, when really, the whole Universe is expressing itself through this donkey.

This donkey.

The case:

The Buddha was walking with his sangha. He pointed to the ground and said, ‘This is where the temple should be built’. The God Indra took a stalk of grass and replanted it in the ground, saying, ‘There, the temple is built.’

It is clear from the story that the stalk of grass is the practitioner, but what is the ground, and why is it not a person but a divinity who places the stalk of grass there?

We re-enact this story when we place a stalk of incense in the incense bowl: the burning stick is each of us in this Dharma position. This incense stick, held by the ash so it will not fall.

Isn’t the ash all beings? Isn’t the ground all beings?

Book of Serenity, Case 63

The case:

Joshu asked master Touzi: “When someone who has undergone the great death returns to life, how is it?”

Master Touzi said, “He can’t go by night, he should arrive in daylight.”

Commentary:

Enlightenment is often referred to as the great death, particularly in Rinzai. Practitioners in that tradition are encouraged to have dramatic and extreme experiences. Likewise, ‘night’ or ‘darkness’ is often used in Koan stories as a way of talking about non-duality. In the dark we can’t see individual things, so everything is whole; likewise in the non-dual state, although the metaphor is not exact: in the non dual state, this and that don’t disappear into an ambient mush, yet things cease to exist in the familiar way. So Joshu’s question is: how does the person who has experienced non duality function in the world?

The tone of ‘great death’ and ‘night’ however is different. In Joshu’s question, there is the seed of our self sickness. The assumption that practice is to get something, some special experience. Master Touzi’s answer is less dramatic, more realistic: night and day balance each other, duality and non duality are in a dance of forward and backward.

We call it the great death because the experience does not belong to the self.

Book of Serenity, Case 98

The case:

A monk asked Dongshan “Among the three Buddha Bodies, which one does not fall into any category?”

Dongshan said, “I am always intimate with this.”

Commentary:

In Mahayana Buddhism, the three bodies of the Buddha are the dharmakaya, which is identified with all existence, the sambhokaya, which is identified with practice and the fruits of practice, and the nirmanakaya, which is the body of the historical Buddha. It is quite conceptual, and the monk’s question seems be be enquiring into the relationship between the conceptual (“category”) and the ineffable.

What should be make of Dongshan’s reply? What is the ‘this’ that he is always intimate with?

Frequently in Chinese Buddhism, words like ‘this’ or ‘what’ or ‘that’ refer to ineffable reality, reality before thinking. So we might imagine Dongshan’s response means something like ‘unlike you, with your conceptual question, I am always intimate with the ineffable’. But I don’t think that is what he means. Dongshan is making a point about practice. So, when we sit, often we imagine that thinking is bad; but that feeling sensing, being-ness is good. The ineffable is good. But somehow we can’t stop thinking. We could say that Dongshan’s intimacy is with both the conceptual, exemplified here by the schema the monk is putting forth, and also ineffable reality. And that the conceptual and the ineffable are intimate with each other.

This is a very important point about practice. The head is not suspended in mid-air, and practice is not nullified by the natural movements of the karmic mind. But, as it were, we see the smoke of our thoughts through the flames of our being.