Tag: The Zen Lineage

The Gateless Gate, Case 30.

The Case: A monk asked Baso, “What is Buddha?”

Baso said, “This very mind is Buddha”

Commentary: Baso’s ‘Mind is Buddha’ has been persistently misunderstood. People might think there is a special state of mind free from delusion, or a mind realm of Buddha, or that mind is true reality, or similar, but they are mistaken.

Baso said “This very mind”. That is: your mind now, your experience now, but unconstellated by the self, not stained by attachment or aversion. When we sit, we wobble between self and buddha.

The crucial issue is not what is true and what is false, but how we live.

Picture vigorous fish in the ocean: they might want to see the water clearly but they can’t: their activity blurs and distorts it. But this same activity is the ocean’s life. It is nowhere else.

The Gateless Gate, Case 37

The Case: A monk asked Joshu: “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”

Joshu said “The cypress tree in the courtyard”

Commentary: The standard interpretation of this koan is that the questioner was caught by language. He thought the tree was an objective thing. He couldn’t see the being- ness of the tree, and so he couldn’t see the dynamic being- ness of everything.

But there is something else hidden in there. In our usual way of thinking, Bodhidharma travelled from India to China. The tree didn’t move at all. Likewise, we may act as if we are the subject and the world is the object; we are active and ‘things’ are passive.

If we look at a clutch of trees, we can often see the oldest tree, then, a little distance away, another tree, derived from the first, and so on. The tree is walking through time. We don’t see it, the tree doesn’t see it, but it’s there.

The path is walking and we are walking. Everything is expressing and exerting itself, together.

The Gateless Gate, Case 1.

The case: A monk asked Joshu “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”

Joshu said “Mu” (no).

Commentary: There is an assumption buried within the question, which isn’t immediately obvious. But consider: why didn’t the monk ask ” Does Buddha nature have the dog?” ” Does Buddha nature have you?”, “Is Buddha nature all of creation?” or similar?

He did not because he assumed that the aim of spiritual life is the enhancement and enlightenment of the self, the steady or sudden uncovering of a jewel within us.

This colossal mistake is endemic. We need to understand that the aim of practice isn’t the liberation of the self from the world, but the liberation of the world – all of it – from the self. Enlightenment is universal, not personal.

We are like snow falling.

The Gateless Gate, Case 5.

The case: Hsiang- yen said: “It is just as though you were up a tree, hanging from a branch with your teeth. Your hands and feet can’t touch any branch. Someone appears beneath the tree and asks, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma 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 are in this story: two, one, or many?

Sometimes, when we sit, we feel completely concentrated and unified. Like the man holding onto the branch with his teeth, our complete effort in this moment occupies the whole space.

Then, it is as if, from within our experience someone, someone just like us, asks a question, makes a statement, or something similar. It is as if we are suddenly divided. Do we ignore it? Do we engage with it? Either way, we appear to fall into duality.

We need to understand that just as the man holding onto the branch is making a complete effort, just as the branch and the tree are making a complete effort, so the questioner is making a complete effort, entirely expressing his nature. We imagine a response is called for, but we are mistaken.

Likewise with delusion.

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.

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.