Tag: Koan and Other Commentary

The most famous Koan in the literature is Joshu’s Mu Koan. Its best known form is Case 1 of the Gateless Gate which (in the Robert Aiken translation) is: 

“A monk asked Joshu “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not? “

 Joshu said “Mu.”

The koan also exists in a longer form in Case 18 of the earlier Book of Serenity, which is in two parts. Two monks ask Joshu the same question. 

A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?” 

Joshu said,”Yes.”

The monk said, “Since it has, why is it then in this skin bag?”

Joshu said, “Because he knows he deliberately transgresses.”

Another Monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”

Joshu said, “No.”

The monk said, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature,  why does a dog not?”

Joshu said, “Because he still has karmic consciousness.”

In the Book of Serenity it’s the second question which is better known, so that’s the part which I’ll focus on.

A way of looking at these koans, which I think is a mistake, is that the teacher is wise and the student is ignorant and so they show the student being corrected by the teacher.

That perspective is very damaging for practitioners. It makes an effigy of the teachers, who become impossibly lofty, ahistorical figures, rather than flawed human beings sincerely engaged in practice.

A much better perspective is to re-see them as master and student together attempting to clarify aspects of this life. 

That being said, what do we make of this koan?

First off there’s the question,  “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”

It’s an odd question, because more than 100 years before this dialogue (if it ever was a historical dialogue) Chinese Buddhism had settled the issue of Buddha nature. There had been an argument whether all beings had Buddha nature or if some beings did not. It was resolved in favour of the more generous interpretation—that all beings had Buddha nature.

So in a way, the question is disingenuous.

Also the Chinese is terse, so it’s not clear from the Chinese if the monk is referring to an objective dog or if he’s referring to himself—does this dog have Buddha nature? The answer that Joshu gives, is either (in the Cleary translation of the Book of Serenity), ‘No’ or ‘Mu’.

‘No’ is not an accurate translation. Chinese and Japanese have three options to a question whereas we have only two. Both obviously have yes & no but they have a third option. In Chinese that third option is ‘Mu’ and in Japanese that third option is ‘hi’, as in ‘hishiryo’.

‘Mu’ is not the direct negative. It means something like —that’s not it or it’s different from that.

It tends to indicate some conceptual confusion with the question. For example if someone were to ask, “is the mountain flat?” then the answer would be ’no’ but if the question was, “is the mountain an introvert?”, the answer would be ‘Mu’ because the questioner misunderstood the nature of mountains, which don’t have psychological characteristics. Joshu’s answer  of Mu to the monk’s (apparent) question indicates that there’s a conceptual confusion.

In the question, I think the monk isn’t ignorant; he’s  inviting Joshu to confirm that there’s a common conceptual confusion with Buddha Nature. The question is brought out in the second half of the exchange when the monk asks his supplementary question,  “.. all beings have Buddha nature, why doesn’t a dog have Buddha nature?”.

The Chinese is more terse than the translation; it’s simply ‘karmic nature.’

I think this exchange isn’t about whether the dog has karmic nature in place of Buddha nature or that the dog (or monk) has  two Natures, that are somehow contesting the existential space of the dog, but rather that the phrasing of the initial question (intentionally) has an error in it.

That error is that the world is made up of dogs and human beings and walls and all the rest of it. Each of which has Buddha nature.  It’s an individual quality, like height, or dog-ness. 

With the Buddha Eye, all of existence is seen as a dynamic, interdependent and vivid whole. 

It’s our karmic nature which splits up the world for us into dogs and human beings and so on.

The monk is intentionally asking Aunt Sally questions to clarify that Buddha nature is not a personal quality and by implication, that Enlightenment is not a personal quality either. We go astray when we take the world as it presents itself to our karmic consciousness. Or, if you prefer a more familiar language, the world as it presents itself to our socially and historically conditioned self.

We mistake those parts for reality and then attempt to impose qualities on them. Like asking how much the fat man in a dream weighs.

The Gateless Gate—case two,  Pai-chang’s fox.

The Case:

Each day when Master Pai-chang entered the lecture hall to speak to his monks, an old man was there. When the monks left, the old man left. One day the old man remained. 

Pai-chang approached him and asked, “Who are you?” 

The old man said, “I’m not really a human being.  Many, many lifetimes ago I was the abbot here and a monk asked me, “Does a great person fall into cause and effect or not?”

I said,”Does not”. In consequence I fell into the body of a wild fox for 500 lifetimes. Please say something which will release me from this body.” 

The old man then asked Pai-chang, “Does a great person fall into cause and effect or not?”

Pai-chang said “Do not be unclear about cause and effect.”

Satisfied, the old man said, “Now I have been released from the body of the wild fox. Please give me a monk’s burial.”

Pai-chang later called his monks together and they went to the far side of the mountain where they found the body of a fox, which they then buried with full monk’s honours.

That evening Pai-chang related to his students what had  happened.

Obaku, his senior disciple said, “I wonder what would have happened if the master had always given correct answers?”

Pai-chang said, “Come up here and I’ll show you.”

Obaku approached Pai-chang, but before Pai-Chang could do anything, Obaku slapped his face. Pai-chang was delighted and said words to the effect,”I always knew you were a red-bearded barbarian”.

That’s the story.

How many people are in this story?

It is obviously in two parts. In the second part there’s clearly two: Pai-chang and Obaku.

How many are in the first part? Potentially there are quite a lot: there’s the fox spirit; there’s the old man; there’s the earlier and later Pai-chang; there’s the monk that asked the earlier Pai-chang the question; there’s the mountain and potentially there’s others.

But really, I think there’s only one person—Pai-chang.

This story is primarily about Sangha—how we should be together. 

If a person says “I am a master” he will fall into foxness for 500 lifetimes.

If he says “I am not yet the master” likewise he will fall into foxness for 500 lifetimes.

The fundamental point is that the master and the fox are always both present. It’s not simply the fox who is the shape-shifter—both are.

The monk who asks the earlier Pai-chang the question is not strong enough to stop Pai-chang falling unbalancingly into foxness. By contrast, Obaku is. And the symbiotic arising of the fox and the master is recognized by Pai-chang in his remark. 

The reference to ‘red bearded barbarian’ is a reference to Bodhidharma, but the redness is also a reference to the fox— to fox nature. There’s also other interesting word plays in Chinese which I won’t go into at the moment.

How as practitioners together, visible and invisible, should we be with each other? 

How?

That is the fundamental question.

“One night, a great storm

broke off the highest branch

of the tallest tree in my garden.

It’s still there.

Even though it’s withered now

The living branches

will not let it fall.”  

The Gateless Gate Case Five: 

The Case (adapted):

Kyogen said,”It is as though you were up a tree, hanging from a branch over a ravine with your teeth; your hands and feet can’t touch any branch.

Someone then appears beneath the tree and asks, “What is the meaning of Bodhidarma’s coming from the west?”

If you do not answer, you evade your responsibility; if you do answer, you lose your life.

What do you do?”

Commentary:

How many people are in this story? It seems there are two, but is that correct?

The metaphor of the tree is significant, quite apart from the obvious reference to the tree that the Buddha sat under at the time of his enlightenment. ‘Trunk’ and ‘Branches’ were a common way for the Chinese to talk about Principle and Phenomena.

Branching streams, as in the Sandokai, is another way of talking about the same thing. 

The man – each of us – is hanging by his teeth. He can’t move closer to the trunk or along the branch or anything else. Why not? Because he’s in his own dharma position. He can’t move along the branch towards the trunk any more than he can move backwards in time towards Buddha. He’s just there in his dharma position now, practicing Zazen. He can move neither forward nor backward and doesn’t require to. He’s hanging over this precipice of emptiness. The effort which he’s making is a complete effort; “anything else” arises within this effort.

It seems to me that the person who asks the question about Bodhidharma is not, in the strict sense, a person different from the person making this whole hearted effort. It’s another aspect of the same person. The second person appears within the first person’s Zazen.

This Case raises a more general question—how do we talk about our practice? 

If we talk about practice with another person who’s unfamiliar with Buddhism and we use language which makes our practice understandable to that person, then it’s likely that what we convey isn’t Zen. If we speak from our heart then we’re like a little bird singing; we make no sense to that person at all. If, to avoid feeling foolish, we say nothing, then we repudiate our vow to save all beings.

The way out of this, I think, is just to see the man hanging from the tree, his total effort in the moment, in itself as complete expression. How we are, not what we say, is a complete expression of our practice. Expression isn’t enunciation: it’s manifestation.

We’re not brought into practice by someone giving us an articulate exposition of Buddhism and then us thinking Aha! I must practice that. We’re brought into practice by random, arbitrary things.

I remember when I started practice I stumbled sleepily and malcontentedly into the Salisbury Centre in Edinburgh for Zazen – which I knew nothing at all about – at about 6.00am into a very, very unfamiliar, ritualised space. I wandered towards the nearest cushion. An elderly French gentleman,who I later learnt was the teacher, just pushed me in the opposite direction. I later found out that I was crossing the front of the altar, which wasn’t allowed, but he didn’t say anything, or smile apologetically; there was none of “I wonder if you’d mind terribly..”: he just pushed me vigorously, without giving any explanation. I was very impressed. Someone else may have thought his behaviour was proof that the whole thing was crazy.

His complete expression pushed me into Zen.

The Gateless Gate, Case Three: Chu-Chih raises one finger

The Case

Whenever Chu-Chih (J: Gutei) was asked a question, he simply raised one finger. One day a visitor asked Chu-Chih’s attendant what his master preached. The boy raised a finger. Hearing of this, Chu-Chih cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. As the boy ran from the room, Chu-Chih called to him. When the boy turned his head Chu-Chih raised a finger. The boy was suddenly enlightened.

When Chu-Chih was about to die he said to his assembled monks, “I received this one finger Zen from T’ien-lung. I used it all my life but never used it up.”

Commentary

This is a koan story that is greatly commented on in the Rinzai tradition and the focus of that commentary is usually suchness. When we make a gesture such as raising our finger, we’re not doing it in a symbolic or representative way – it’s just natural. It’s a complete expression of our present state. That perspective is part of a wider discussion within the Zen tradition about the uses and dangers of language.

However, the key to understanding this story is understanding the background detail. Which, given this case also appears as case 19 in the Blue Cliff Record, is available to us. In that background detail, we’re told that prior to his enlightenment, Chu-Chih assiduously practised zazen by himself. One day he was visited by a nun who demanded of him that he say something appropriate but he was unable to do so. And so the nun left. The name of that nun was True Encounter.

Chu-Chih was upset by this. He intended to go and find a master but he heard a voice saying that, in fact, a master would come to him. And several days later that’s exactly what happened. Chu-Chih related the story to this person who in response simply held up one finger. And that resulted in Chu-Chih becoming enlightened.

In his subsequent teaching, was Chu-Chih holding up his own finger? Or was he holding up his master’s finger? And what are we to make of him simply teaching in this one way?

In the incident in question why was it that in this situation the boy was enlightened, but on previous occasions when he witnessed the teaching he was not? And whose finger this time was Chu-Chih holding up? Was it his finger? The boy’s finger? His master’s finger? Or all three? Or something else? Classical Chinese leaves all these interpretations open.

I think this is a teaching about interdependence. So when we lift our finger, or an eyebrow, or our heart – then we are also lifting the fabric of the whole universe – all being, all space, all time – because we’re part of that fabric. The severed finger (whether or not Chu-Chih is holding that finger up and that’s what causes the boy to become enlightened) similarly is not separate from this fabric of being. And is always communicating and expressing: severed or unsevered.

Nothing is severed.

For further information and references on this kusen, please click this link.

The Case:

A monk asked Master Tozan, “When heat and cold come, how can we avoid them?” Tozan said, “Why don’t you go to the place where there is no heat or cold?” The monk asked, “How do I get to that place?” Tozan said, “When it is hot, heat kills the monk. When it’s cold, cold kills the monk.”

Tozan perhaps could have added, zazen kills the monk. And zazen kills zazen.

This koan, which is very well known, is symptomatic of a difficulty in Zen. It isn’t that there isn’t an enormous amount of commentary on this and the other well-known koans. It’s just that a lot of that commentary, to us at least, is grand but empty; sonorous but meaningless. 

And the reason for that is that we fundamentally misunderstand these various Masters. We imagine that Baso, Tozan and all the other great Tang Dynasty Zen monks represent a rupture with Buddhism up to that point. When in fact they copiously quote from sutras and other sources, but they tend to have assumed that their audience was aware of the source. And so, the quote isn’t specifically referenced.

In this case Tozan is directly alluding to a passage which the Buddha talked about our state in meditation where he said: our state of perception is not no-perception. It isn’t disordered perception. And it isn’t ordinary perception. So the question obviously remains: what is it?

After zazen we chant the Heart Sutra, where we refer to the five skandhas. They are form, sensation, perception, mental fabrication and consciousness; they describe the human being. And, as in lots of Buddhist formulations, they build on each other.

Because our society has such a psychological bent we’re inclined to think that non-attachment occurs at the level of the fourth skandha (mental fabrication). So in the case of the monk, for instance, we might imagine that he should say, “Oh I’m sitting zazen. I’m very hot. Oh, I notice that’s making me irritable. I shouldn’t attach to that. I shouldn’t go off into a trail of thoughts and emotions. I shouldn’t love or hate the condition.” And so on. So, we locate non-attachment there. We don’t go off into mental fabrication. Our perception of thoughts, feelings, objects and actions is there, but we try not to do anything with them. This is often how people (mis)understand mindfulness.

Non attachment to our perceptions is helpful as a preliminary practice – one that can go on for years, and which, in some sense, is always with us as our preliminary practice today – because it steadies us. But if we think that’s what zazen is, we’re completely wasting our time. And if I tell other people that’s what zazen is, I’m completely wasting their time.

The non-attachment which Tozan is referring to is at the level of the earlier skandha ( sensation ). So we’re not saying, “Oh I’m sitting in a room in a blue chair, with the sunlight coming through the window, feeling a bit melancholy, hearing birdsong, having intermittent thoughts about yesterday, practising non-attachment.” No: we are not at the level of perception. We are not sitting in the world constructed and pictured by our mind and culture, yet maintaining detachment from it. We’re at the skandha below that: the skandha of sensation. Obviously, we bounce around through all of them. We can’t stop having thoughts. We can’t stop having thoughts about thoughts. But we can let them go.

So, at the level of the second skandha, we’re feeling, we’re sensing all this activity and expression in ourselves and the world. But we’re not fixing it, we’re not conceptualizing it, we’re not picturing it. We’re not within our familiar world. We’re just feeling what we feel. And when  – as they must – perceptions of objects and thoughts arise,  and thoughts about those thoughts and objects and emotions arise, we have the space of embodiment in which they can come and go freely. Which is why we emphasise the importance of the body so much. If we practice zazen but we’re not embodied, our experience can’t be earthed. There isn’t the spacious container of body, breath and space, there’s just the mind, with an unavoidable focus on and attachment to the level and type of mental charge, which is often accompanied by an acquisitive spirituality, the quest for enlightenment, higher states, evolved consciousness, and the various other bright things in the junk shop of spiritual capitalism.

But it’s important to note that the state that Tozan is referring to isn’t a final state. There isn’t a final state. All five skandhas are empty. We understand that our perceptions are constructions (and doubly so for what we then weave with these perceptions) and hence empty, but the two earlier skandhas, Form and Sensation, are empty too, but in a slightly different way. It’s plain that our sensations are coming and going within this greater body of alive embodiment, and hence are ‘empty‘, but the first skandha, Form, is empty too. How so? Because the body in Zazen, in its spacious, balanced aliveness, is not separate. We do not experience our body as a lump of form, or as a parcel of energy, separate from all beings, but, indeterminately, part. Not as something thought, but as something experienced.

For further information and references on this kusen, please click this link.

The case:

One day Dogo asked Sekito, “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” 

Sekito said, “It isn’t obtainable. It isn’t knowable.”

Dogo said, “Is there a more realistic expression?” 

Sekito said, “The wide sky does not hinder the flying white clouds.”

Commentary:

The metaphor of sky (spacious awareness) and clouds (thoughts) is very common in Zen. Originally the meaning was fairly specific: just as the sun may be temporarily obscured by clouds yet we know it’s always there,  likewise, although our mind may be in turmoil, we can sit in confident faith in our intrinsic Buddha Nature.

That came from the East Mountain School of seventh century Zen. But the metaphor gradually changed. Instead of a specific faith in our intrinsic Buddha Nature, the faith became that when we do zazen (no matter how turbulent our mind is) we can always rest within this great expanse of spacious awareness, which does not belong just  to us, but to all beings. Clouds don’t hinder the sky.

In Japanese there’s a play on words, because the word for ‘sky’ and the word for ‘emptiness’ is the same word, ‘ku’.

In his response, Sekito seems to be turning that around by saying that the wide sky doesn’t hinder the clouds. What’s he getting at?

In our normal karmic experience, when thoughts and emotions arise we want to identify them and we want to interpret them. We want to stop them in their tracks, as it were, so we can work out what the thought or the emotion is about. And when we do that, we no longer have clouds (thoughts and feelings) freely coming and going and living their own life. It’s as if we freeze the clouds to scrutinize them, and collapse the sky. We attach to our thoughts. We hinder the clouds.

In zazen we don’t do this, because we drop our tendency to fix, to conceptualise, to like, to dislike, to interpret – all of that. Then the clouds can manifest freely. And when they manifest freely we see, not just that the sky makes the clouds possible, but that the clouds make the sky possible. Without clouds there’s no sky. There’s no emptiness without form.

This apparently simple picture that Sekito paints has a lot packed into it. So it’s urging us not to cast out what we think and feel, what is living through us at each moment, for a picture of quietism and tranquility, as that’s just a more subtle form of attachment.

We just allow this life and this space flooding through us to live.

For further information and references on this kusen, please click this link.

A monk asked Tonzan, “What is Buddha?”

Tozan replied, “ three pounds of flax.”

Three pounds of flax is the amount of material required to make a monk’s robe. But Tozan didn’t say the Buddha was a monk’s robe, he said, ‘3lbs of flax’.

Three pounds of flax is limitless in its expression and application; it could be a garment for a monk, but equally a garment for a warrior or for a merchant, a shroud for a dead person, and so on.The fourth of the five skandas is translated – usually badly – as ‘will’ or ‘mental fabrication’ but it’s a very important element of the human being; it’s that aspect of us which takes this experience here and now and makes something out of it. We literally fabricate something.

We do this because what we always want to do is to grasp each aspect of the world as it appears and make it something specific. ‘Buddha’ is prior to this fabrication. We can grasp a monk’s robe, but we can’t grasp the fabric of emptiness.

For further information and references on this kusen, please click this link.

Book of Serenity, Case 47.

The case: Master Joshu is asked, “What is the true meaning of Zen?” And he replies, “The cypress tree in the courtyard.”

This is a variant of a question he was frequently asked: “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?” Joshu, famously, is often asked questions about Buddha nature. The best known koan of all is probably the question to him: “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”

And not just a dog. In his recorded sayings (no. 305), a monk asked Joshu, “Does the cypress tree have Buddha nature or not?” 

Joshu said, “It does.” 

The monk said, “When will it become Buddha?” 

Joshu said, “When the sky falls to the ground.” 

The monk said, “When will the sky fall to the ground?” 

The Master said, “When the cypress tree becomes Buddha.”

What are we to take from that?

What do we understand the cypress tree to be? It seems easy enough for us to see how the roots of the cypress tree extend into the deep ground underneath our constructed world. 

But it’s harder for us to see how the branches of the tree vigorously extend into space, into ‘emptiness’. 

Yet when we talk of the empty sky or space falling to the ground, isn’t that the real experience of the cypress tree? 

The cypress tree, in its wholehearted, undivided activity, is both fully engaged with this ground of all being, and equally is fully engaged with emptiness, and makes both intimate within its undivided activity. Likewise the practitioner.

For further information and references on this kusen, please click this link.

The Gateless Gate, Case 2 also appears as Case 8 in the Book of Serenity, which was compiled about 100 years before it. But the interesting thing is that the case in the Book of Serenity is truncated, so it doesn’t have the section about the deceased Monk/Fox being given a Buddhist burial. And it doesn’t, crucially, have this final exchange between Hyakujō and Ōbaku.

But before getting to that, I think it’s helpful to clarify a couple of things that make this story a little bit more comprehensible. Firstly, in East Asian folklore, the Fox is a shapeshifter. So a fox can assume, among other things, the form of a human being and successfully pass himself off as a human being. 

Secondly, the abbot of a monastery will be named after the mountain on which the monastery is. So both the Fox/Monk, who was the abbot in a previous life, and the present Hyakujō, are called Hyakujō. Which obviously leads one to question how many people are appearing in this initial part of the story.

The other funny thing is that the Fox appears to have knowledge of the 500 lifetimes in which he was incarnated in the body of a Fox. But this is curious, as traditionally only the Buddha, or arguably an enlightened person –  a great person – has knowledge of their past lives. And of course the 500 lives that the Fox says that he’s been within a Fox body mirrors the 500 lives which the Buddha is said to have had before attaining Buddhahood.  

It’s also helpful to know that in Zen parlance, somebody falsely claiming enlightenment, falsely claiming to be a great person, or who is enlightened or wise but is unbalanced by that, for reasons that we’ll come to, is referred to as a Wild Fox. 

The general commentary in this story focuses on the two answers given by the earlier Hyakujō and the later Hyakujō. That commentary doesn’t say that the first answer is wrong, but somehow that it’s incomplete. So the two answers are often referred to as two sides of the one coin.

If we take the first Hyakujō’s answer literally, that a great person doesn’t fall into cause and effect, then an enlightened person could do whatever they liked without consequence. That’s plainly wrong, but that’s not generally the meaning that’s ascribed to the answer. The suggestion is that a great person cannot fall into cause and effect is because  a great person is never separate from cause and effect. There is no illusion of Self separate from cause and effect.

But of course that answer is vulnerable to misinterpretation, because a naive person could think that an enlightened person is capable of acting without consequence. So the second Hyakujō’s balancing answer is necessary because it makes clear, not that cause and effect doesn’t exist for the enlightened person, but rather that for the enlightened person there is no enlightened person.  

With that in mind, here is my take on what I think is the hidden message within the story, which is clarified by the addition of these two sections of the Gateless Gate. And that message, which I think is hiding in plain sight, concerns the difference in the relationship between the first Hyakujō and the Monk who asks the original question, and the relationship between the second Hyakujō, our Hyakujō, and Ōbaku, in the exchange at the end. 

In the earlier exchange between the Monk and first Hyakujō, so far as we can see, the Monk simply respectfully asks a question and accepts the answer. There’s a kind of hierarchical relationship between the Teacher and the Monk. The Teacher is the guy that knows, and he’s giving the benefit of his wisdom to the Monk, the guy that doesn’t know. Teachers are very vulnerable to falling into the body of a Wild Fox if the relationship they have with their students is one of unquestioning acceptance.

Moving on from that, there’s a homonym in Mandarin; the word for “beard” and the word for “fox” have the same sound. And of course, a Fox is red-cloured. So there’s a suggestion in the final exchange between Hyakujō and Ōbaku that both the Great Teacher (Bodhidharma being a red bearded barbarian) and the Wild Fox exist within the one person. And existing within the one person, yet being able to recognise that, stops the emergence of the Wild Fox usurping the Teacher. Your teacher is a fox if they are operating under the illusion that the Teacher is the Great Person, because the Great Person is the whole body of the Sangha, which is carrying the Buddhist teaching forward.

And I think that this is the symbolic function of the funeral, that it’s a collective effort that Hyakujō and the monks are all making, to recognise the body of the Fox. And in accepting  it, giving  it Buddhist funerary rites, is also to cast it out. For now.

For further information and references on this kusen, please click this link.