Tag: Koan and Other Commentary

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Book Of Serenity, Case 36: Master Ma Is Unwell

Book Of Serenity, Case 36: Master Ma Is Unwell

The Case: Master Ma was unwell. The monastery superintendent asked, “Master, how is your venerable state these days?”
The Great Teacher said, “Sun face buddha, Moon face buddha”

Commentary: “unwell” is a euphemism. Master Ma (Baso) was mortally ill, and died the following day.

Sun Face Buddha was said to have a lifespan of 1800 years. Moon Face Buddha lived only one day and one night. Baso is talking about two aspects of experience, once our egoic self concern has dropped away.

The Universe can only express itself through each thing. If there were no things, there would be no light.

Sometimes, we are very aware that we are expressing something universal through this fragile, transient body. The Moon illuminates itself, and everything it casts its light on becomes part of it.

Other times, we forget this body, and are simply part of this illuminated world.

The light can only shine through each thing, and each thing will break.

The light will not break.

Artwork by Blair Thomson
Artwork by Blair Thomson
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Book of Serenity, Case 9 (adapted)

If we imagine that we have to excise our delusion, we are already divided. How can more cutting make us whole?

Book of Serenity, Case 9 (adapted)

The Case: Two sets of monks were arguing over a cat. Master Nansen, seeing this, held up the cat and said “If you can express something, I won’t cut it”

The monks said nothing. Nansen cut the cat in two.

That evening Nansen told Joshu what had happened. Joshu removed his sandals, put them on his head and left the room. Nansen said “If you had been there, the cat would have been spared”

Commentary: Dogen talks about this koan with Ejo in the Zuimonki. There’s no doubt that Dogen thinks that Nansen’s killing of the cat was regrettable, and he imagines, if he had been one of the monks, what he would have said in response to Nansen’s challenge. He says that he would have asked Nansen “Why don’t you cut the cat in one?” It’s such a brilliant remark that Ejo doesn’t understand it. The One-ness alludes to dependent origination obviously, both in terms of the cat, and in Nansen’s obligation as a teacher to unfragment his monks.

Both Nansen and the monks are caught: the monks are caught in duality: Because of their anxiety to say the ‘right’ thing to save the cat, true expression is impossible. But Nansen is trapped into carrying out his threat: unlike Joshu, his lack of flexibility necessitates him doing what he said he would: so we can’t say that if one of the monks had been like Joshu the cat would have been saved, because we can equally say that if Nansen had been like Joshu, the cat would have been saved too. Joshu demonstrates a deficiency in expression in both Nansen and the monks.

In Dogen’s remark, we can see a similarity with his interpretation of the polishing a tile story: activity and expression are two aspects of wholeness. Manjusri’s sword isn’t separating; it’s the whole active Universe expressing itself as a sword, as a cat, as undivided activity, as expression.

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Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 1, Case 8 (abbreviated and adapted)

Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 1, Case 8.

The Case (abbreviated and adapted):

One day Master Nangaku saw Master Baso practicing zazen and asked him, “What is your intention doing zazen?”

Baso said, “My intention is to become a Buddha”

Nangaku picked up a tile and started to polish it on a rock. Baso, astonished, asked what he was doing.

Nangaku said, ” I am polishing the tile to make a mirror”

Baso said ” How can polishing a tile make it a mirror?”

Nangaku said, ” How can sitting make you a Buddha?”

Commentary:

This is a very significant story, covering a mass of issues: intention, original enlightenment, time, cause and effect, and many others, but I would like to comment simply on Nangaku’s action.

A mirror is often used in Chinese Buddhism as a symbol of dependent origination. Just as when we look in the mirror and see lots of apparently distinct and separate things, when really it’s all the wholeness of the mirror, so it is with reality.

Nangaku doesn’t say he’s making the tile into a mirror, he says that he is making a mirror. The wholehearted act of polishing, or sitting, makes the mirror. Is the mirror. The static nature of the symbol is made dynamic. The tile stays a tile, yet the mirror is actualised, even although the tile can’t see it.

The tile can never see it. Other than with the mute eyes of the heart.

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The Blue Cliff Record, Case 23

The Case:
Once, when Pao Fu and Ch’ang Ch’ing were wondering in the mountains, Pao Fu pointed and said “Right here is the summit of the mystic peak”.
Ch’ang Ch’ing said “Indeed it is. What a pity”.

Pointing has a chequered history in zen, fingers pointing to the moon, and suchlike. It’s said that the ideogram for zen represents an eye on the end of a pointed finger. Given that meditation is often described in terms of seeing, seeing things as they are, then the temptation is to see the eye of meditation and the eye of zen as the same eye, the difference being that zen is an actional ‘seeing’ rather than a contemplative one, but still attending to how things are.

From this perspective, Pao Fu is pointing at suchness.

But what if the eye on the pointed finger isn’t seeing how things are, but is seeing the pointing? Given that Pao Fu isn’t pointing at anything -and who, or what else is ‘right here’ if it isn’t him? –
couldn’t we say that he is pointing at his nature – which is pointing? Hence Ch’ang Ch’ing’s ‘disappointment’.

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95. Hsiang Lin

Master Dogen said that the way to realisation was through the body. But which body?

Blue Cliff Record, Case 17:

A monk asked Hsiang Lin, “What was the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?”

The Master said, “Sitting for a long time is hard, isn’t it?”

Bodhidharma famously sat facing the wall at Shaolin Temple for nine years. In answering the monk, the Master is drawing a comparison between his body, practicing, and the body of practice of Bodhidharma.

And given that we always sit with the body of practice, how can we say either that this body is the same, or different?

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James Green, The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, page 73

A monk asked, “I wonder if a man of true practice can be perceived by gods or demons or not?”

The master said, “They can perceive him”

The monk said “Where is his fault?”

The master said, “Faults are wherever they are looked for”

The monk said, “In that case, it is not practice”

The master said, “It is practice”

Commentary:

Joshu is difficult to understand because the exchanges are deceptively ordinary, and appear to be nothing much, when actually they are life and death exchanges about the essence of buddhism.

In this case, the monk’s question is rhetorical. “gods and demons” refers to 2 of the 6 realms of samsara, so what the monk is really saying -dressed up as a question – is that zazen is a special state outside samsara. There are similarities with the famous question “does an enlightened person fall into cause and effect or not?”; that is, is an enlightened person free from karma?

In turn, what underpins this is the question “Why do we practice?” The monk’s position would be that the point of practice is personal liberation. And in that one can succeed, or one can fail.
Joshu’s position is radically different; it is that zazen is not a personal practice. It cannot be seen in terms of personal gain or loss. To think that there is a special state is to be blind to the full dynamic functioning of everything- the ‘internality’ which is the imagined site of the special state is as much a part of this as the trees or the traffic. It isn’t a matter of trying and failing, but understanding, through faith, that zazen is the enactment and expression of this dynamic functioning.

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From The Recorded Sayings of Zen master Joshu by James Green, page 91, adapted

A monk asked Joshu, “The many blind men felt the elephant and each one spoke about a different part of it. What is the true elephant”

The Master said, “Nothing is unreal. ‘True’ is a dream”

The monk is making reference to a famous passage in the Nirvana Sutra, where various blind men feel different parts of an elephant. One feels the trunk, and believes he is touching a snake. Another feels the leg, and believes he is touching a tree, and so on. The suggestion is that the awakened person would simply see the elephant. That is, he would see reality as it is. The polarity is delusion/ enlightenment.

Joshu’s position is different. For him, it is our nature as human beings to be ‘blind’. That is what we need to wake up to. If we imagine that what we see is ‘true’ then we suffer through our arrogance. If we imagine that what we see is ‘false’ then the self asserts a sovereignty over experience which involves similar arrogance, though hidden, and similar suffering. If all our experience is held like something beautiful and precious, then suffering is diminished.

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The Gateless Barrier, Case 1, Joshu’s Dog

The Gateless Barrier, Case 1, Joshu’s Dog

The case:
A monk asked Joshu “Does a dog have Buddha Nature?”
Joshu said “Mu” [no]

Commentary:

Case 18 in The Book of Serenity has a longer version of this story. In that version, Joshu is asked the same question by two monks. To the first he answers ‘Yes’. To the second, he answers ‘No’.

You can see in this a characteristic way of talking about Emptiness, similar to the apparent negations that appear in the Heart Sutra.

In early buddhism in India, Buddha Nature, the potential to become enlightened, is restricted to human and similar beings. Dogs don’t have it. When buddhism develops in China, there’s a change. All living things have Buddha Nature, and, eventually, all things have Buddha Nature, which is taken to its logical end point in Dogen’s reworking of ‘All things have Buddha Nature’ to ‘All existence is Buddha Nature’. Enlightenment ceases to be a personal quality or possibility, and becomes universal. Every window springs open.

On the one side people, insects, birds and grasses. On the other, the Universal Body of the Buddha. On the one side your karmic consciousness, on the other side Buddha. On the one side form, on the other side emptiness. On the one side the complete exertion of a single thing, on the other the complete dynamic functioning of all things.

And although these two sides are the same, they don’t encounter each other. When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.

So, the dog doesn’t have Buddha Nature.

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Case 47 of The Blue Cliff Record

Case 47 of The Blue Cliff Record is usually rendered as follows:

A monk asked Master Yunmen: What is the Buddha’s Dharma Body? Yunmen replied ” The six (senses) cannot grasp it”

However, it can also be rendered as an exchange between the two, the monk making a statement “The Buddha’s Dharma Body Is What (Suchness)” and Master Yunmen, by implication, affirming the statement.

The temptation is for us to think that the Dharmakaya is ‘real’ and that the world of sensory grasping, the one we immediately recognise, is illusory. And, because we find contradiction and paradox difficult to bear, we imagine that to get the one, we must exclude the other. And because we never can, we suffer.

That is why the most common Buddhist metaphor is space, because it accommodates everything.

If someone asked you “Does the birdsong fill the space, or not?”, you wouldn’t answer yes or no, you would tell them to re-frame their question.

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Master Yakusan Is Dying

Master Yakusan Is Dying

The Case:
When Master Yakusan was dying, his monks gathered around him. He said to them “The Dharma Hall is falling down!”, whereupon the monks rushed to the Dharma Hall and held themselves against the pillars and the walls. Master Yakusan said “You don’t understand me”, and died.

Commentary

1. We think there is a pre-existing world which we enter and leave, but that’s not so. Our world is like a picture in water. We think there are two things, but really there is just pictured water. Millions of worlds. Millions of Dharma Halls. Our own, and others. Master Yakusan is dying. The Dharma Hall is falling down. The world is falling down.

2. Master Yakusan was able to die because the monks did understand. They understood that the Dharma Hall was not a thing in a world of other things, but their own complete effort, moment to moment. And because they enacted this with their whole body and mind, there was no separation between them and Yakusan, between his words and their deeds. And so, they did not ‘understand’

3. In the layout of a Chinese Zen monastery, the Buddha Hall, the place of formal teaching, is at the head, and the Dharma Hall is at the heart. The essence of Yakusan’s teaching was not where his head lay, or where his body lay, or where his words lay. Both the monks and Yakusan freely jumped in and out of his heart.