The well-known Zen phrase “the relative within the absolute and the absolute within the relative” is a cornerstone of Zen. It contains nearly all of Zen since its meaning points to many other famous sentences which have exactly the same message. It points for instance also to Samsara is Nirvana and Nirvana is Samsara, it also points to form is emptiness and emptiness is form, to is and is not, to the middle Way, to the sacred within the profane and the profane within the sacred. What they all have in common is the notion of oneness.


The experience of this non-duality of Nirvana within Samsara is actually the experience of Zen’s enlightenment as formulated indirectly by Lin-chi:

If you love the sacred and hate the secular you’ll float and sink in the
birth-and-death sea.

Thus, if one is non-attached to Nirvana as well as to Samsara, that is to say, if one’s mind is no-mind, one goes beyond the duality of relativity (the secular) and the absolute (the sacred). This is a formal description of enlightenment since it points to the experience of the absolute truth within the concrete what-is, and of the concrete what-is within the absolute truth. Enlightenment is thus neither abstract nor concrete. It is beyond words since it is non-dual. Simply put, there is no secular and there is no sacred, there is only “oneness”, reality just so.

I have picked up a so-called “Nanto Koan” namely Enkan’s Rhinoceros-Horn Fan which points to the oneness of the sacred and the profane, teaching us how to discern the relative within the absolute and the absolute within the relative..

Book of Equanimity Case 25

Enkan’s Rhinoceros-Horn Fan

Preface to the Assembly

Lands and seas are boundless, yet they are not apart from right here. Things and previous kalpas, numerous as the dust, all exist right now. As when one is asked to show it face to face, being caught unprepared, one cannot present it. Tell me. Where is the fault?

Main Case

Attention: One day Enkan summoned the attendant and told him, “Go out and fetch the rhinoceros-horn fan. The attendant replied, “The fan is broken”. Enkan said, “If the fan is broken, bring me back the rhinoceros.”The attendant made no reply.

Later commenting on this case Shifuku drew a circle and wrote within it the character for “ox”.

Appreciatory Verse

Break the fan and look for the rhinoceros.

The word within the circle has prior significance.

Who knows the thousand years’ darkness of the new moon?

It subtly turns into autumns’ harvest moon.

Comment

The rhinoceros-horn fan does not exist. It is not since a “rhinoceros-horn fan” is a name, a construction. So what is it?

The koan points to the relative within the absolute and the absolute within the relative. The Buddhist logic is: the rhinoceros-horn FAN is a fabrication, hence relative, but the essence of it is the absolute since it points to a rhinoceros-horn which is a manifestation of the Buddha, since it is pure form, not fabricated.

A broken rhinoceros-horn fan is thus”removed relativity”. It is now empty, that is, worthless, priceless, useless, meaningless and it cannot be classified because it does not belong anywhere, just like the Buddha. The broken rhinoceros-horn fan is now Mu since it is a rhino yet not a rhino, a fan yet not a fan. Hence “then bring me the rhinoceros itself” means bring back the absolute which is the broken fan.

To underline this Shifuku draws a circle and write the ideograph “ox” which points to the Buddha. A perfect (man-made) rhinoceros-horn-fan is an illusion but a broken one is the truth since it is what-is and nothing more. Pure what-is (the rhino) and nothing more than that (thusness) is the absolute, the true reality.

Master Enkan thus examines the Prajna wisdom of his attendant.

Setcho’s verse on the koan reads:

The Rhinoceros-horn fan

Has long been in use,

But when a question is asked,

No one knows in truth what it is.

The boundless fresh breeze

And the horn on the head.

just as rain clouds that have passed.

Are difficult to pursue.

Comment

The koan points to the necessity of freeing oneself from forms and sounds. One must give up the belief in labels and words. Had the attendant been enlightened he would have brought back the broken rhinoceros-horn fan since he would have known that the fan is a fabrication within the Buddha and the Buddha within the fabrication. Nothing is separated from what-is (nature) not even a fan. Buddha is always here.

The koan is about discerning the absolute within the relative. ALL sayings and koans teach us how to discern “the Buddha within the ten thousand things”. Koans and sayings are Buddha-mind “filters” (the mind of the ancients) pointing to relative and/or absolute concreteness. The sayings are purifiers of our delusional minds, showing us (not teachings us!) how to discern the absolute and the relative of what-is, thus allowing our own Buddha- mind to arise.

The absolute within the relative and the relative within the absolute is actually the intertwining of Buddha-mind and life as it unfolds (Samsara). The sacred lies within the profane and vice versa. Seeing this wholeness of Samsara and Nirvana from moment to moment is what the sayings are trying to transmit us: This is the wisdom of Zen. Here are some example of this intertwining:

Discerning the Absolute as the Dharmakaya

Monks are not “monks”, they are “buddha-nature”, that is, the clouds, the mountains, the flowers, they are anything yet not anything. This is the Dharmakaya. Zen master Zhaozhou knows his true nature:

A monk asked Zhaozhou, “What is Zhaozhou?”

Zhaozhou said, “East gate, south gate, west gate, north gate”.

The monk said, “That is not what I asked”.

Zhaozhou said, “Didn’t you ask about Zhaozhou?”

Thus Zhaozhou is east gate, south gate, west gate, north gate which simply means “what-is”. He is clouds, the sun, wind, a drop of rain, the ocean because there is no Zhaozhou. Yet there is the Zen master Zhaozhou. The difference between us and Zhaozhou is only that he knows that he is and is not. He is relative within the absolute ( Zhaozhou), and absolute within the relative(a Buddha). As one can see, being a Buddha is not being a phantom but a living person (Samsara) hence one does not become a Buddha, one awakens to buddha-hood and the answer of Zhaozhou is the answer of a Buddha.

Discerning the Absolute as the Nirmanakaya

When monks talk or chant they don’t “talk” nor “chant”, they convey the voice of the Buddha, the wind in the trees and the songs of the birds. This is the Nirmanakaya, here expressed by Dogen:

Having enough gruel and rice is the wondrous function of the spiritual power. Cloud and water monks arrive and manifest Buddha’s body to express the Dharma.

When clouds and waters are sufficient, they arrive wether it is from near or far. When gruel and rice are sufficient, right at this time we have our life. The clouds flow through the mountains, the waters are boundless in the ocean. Everywhere monks enter this essential teaching, how could there be a different Dharma for each of them? Right at this time, can you clearly understand? Students with eyes wide open throughout their bodies encounter me. Kichijo [the mountain name for Eiheiji], a person of clouds and waters.

Comment

The gruel and rice are pointers to the spiritual powers (Nirmanakaya) which are the clouds, the skies, the earth which cannot be separated from rice, gruel, harvesting, cooking and eating. Also, the remark by Dogen about these “wondrous functions” points to these activities as the pure Buddha Dharma. This way of seeing is in complete alignment with the koan “Enkan’s Rhinoceros-Horn Fan ” since the teaching of Dogen points to the absolute within the relative very clearly stated in his remark about himself as a person(relativity) of clouds and waters (the absolute). He and Zhaozhou are both Buddhas.

Realizing the Absolute as the Sambogakaya

When monks drop their illusions of being monks and individuals (dropping body and mind), and realize they are a drop of water, a rooster crowing, a thundering storm, old pines falling, the whole universe, the smallest particle of nothing, then they are buddhas.They are beyond relativity since they know where the absolute is and is not, and where the relative is and is not. Thus they are beyond the dualism of the absolute and the relative (Nirvana and Samsara) and therefore free (blissed). The sayings and the words of the ancients are not needed anymore since they are now realized. This is the Sambogakaya.

The little story below illustrates this ultimate goal of an insight where even the notion of Buddha-mind has been dropped completely thus pointing to ultimate realization. The answer of Dizang is the answer of a completely enlightened person:

I can remember, Dizang [Luohan Guichen] asked Mountain Master [Longi Shao]xiu, “Where are you from?”

Longi Shaoxiu said, “From the south.”

Dizang asked, “In the south these days, how is the Buddha Dharma?”

Shaoxiu said, “There is extensive deliberation.”

Dizang said, “It is better for me to stay here and sow the fields, make rice balls and eat.”

Shaoxiu asked, “What will you do about the triple world?”

Dizang said, “What is it you call the triple world?”

Note

The triple world is Mind-only (Dharmakaya, Nirmanakaya, Sambogakaya).

After his enlightenment Dogen actually says what Dizang says:

Recently, I returned to my homeland (from China) with empty hands. And so this mountain monk has no Buddha Dharma. Trusting faith. I just spend my time. Morning after morning, the sun rises in the east. Evening of evening, the moon sets in the west. The clouds disperse and mountain valleys are still. After the rain, the moon. A rooster crows towards sunrise.

Some Remarks on Sitting Meditation and the Absolute Within the Relative

There is no “inside” or “outside” gates in Zen practice since Buddha-mind is one. Practicing koans and sayings is seeing what-is as one’s own Buddha mind and practicing sitting meditation is seeing one’s own Buddha-mind as what-is. In sitting meditation thoughts are thus “birds” and a quite mind is “the sky”. The dichotomies of objects/subjects are illusional.

Sitting meditation is thus a practice in full accordance with the practice of discerning sayings. One’s empty mind is the Dharmakaya (emptiness), the flowing of thoughts is the Nirmanakaya (flow and transformation) and forgetting one’s self during sitting is the Sambogakaya (awakening). Thus the sitting meditation of Zen is dynamic yet quite, since it reflects emptiness and flowing forms, that is to say, the Buddha-mind. It is not a frozen state of emptiness, that would be a reification. Reality is alive not a state. The “inner” Mind must be in alignment with the “outer” Mind since there is only one Mind. This little (formidable) story demonstrate the importance of “living” meditation:

Addressing the assembly at the end of the summer sojourn, Suigan said, ” My brothers, since the beginning of the summer I have done a lot of talking. Look, have I any eyebrows left?”

Hofuku said, “The robber has a coward’s heart.”

Chokei said, “Growing!”

Ummon said, “KAN!”

Comment

Hofuku points to emptiness. There are no eyebrows left, they have been stolen. However a person who just meditates on emptiness has a coward’s heart since he stays in his empty realm without daring to drop his body and mind, his self. In other words realizing only emptiness is not full enlightenment.

Chokei points to form, that is, to the flow and the dynamism of life (the growing eyebrows). Realizing beyond emptiness, daring to leave the “safety of emptiness” is Zen’s enlightenment, hence the “KAN!” of Ummon. The point is: no genuine enlightenment (Nirvana) without Samsara (growing).

On Dynamic Sitting

Here is a saying. The ancient Buddha Hongzhi, while residing at Tiantong, in a New Year’s Dharma Hall Discourse said,

In New Year’s morning zazen, the myriad things are natural. Mind after mind is beyond dichotomies: Buddha after Buddha manifests presently.(Nirmanakaya)

The snow on the river is completely pure and white (Dharmakaya)

Comment

Buddha-mind must be discerned not analyzed. Why talk about something which one can see directly? The Dharmakaya is the snow, the sky and the ocean, the Nirmanakaya is the songs of the birds, the chanting of the monks and the Sambogakaya is knowing all this by forgetting the self. Zen is that simple, so it is a paradox with all this pondering when the message of Zen is a no-message since no words are needed when one can see it right in front of one’s eyes. Words seem to alienate us. Perceptions apparently cover our direct seeing and that is exactly what the koan Enkan’s Rhinoceros-Horn Fan points to.

Dogen writes:

” ‘Also the entire universe is the gate of liberation’ means that you are not at all entangled or captivated. What is called ‘the entire universe’ is undivided from the moment, the ages and words. This limitless and boundless experience is the ‘entire universe’”.

And:

The great way of buddha ancestors is to penetrate the ultimate realm, soaring with no strings attached or like clouds shooting below your feet.

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Below is a collection of seventeen dialogues from “The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu”. Zhaozhou (Joshu in Jap.) was an incredible gifted Zen master who had an ability to convey the unspeakable Buddha-mind through his succinct and often humorous dialogues and sayings. Everything he utters is pure Prajna wisdom that is, the cutting all relativity, and Zhaozhou is really a master of using the sword of Prajna.


Note on the image

Wú (無) is a Chinese word which can be roughly translated as without.

Also Japanese Zen Mu.

The sayings of Zhaozhou have two qualities which are very important as for grasping Zen, namely a deep spiritual touch that “goes beyond” and an innocent pure naturalness. Zen is best grasped when all bloated “holy” feelings (karma) are cut off and “sacred” texts and institutions are interpreted in a de-reified manner (texts ARE not reality, they are only symbolic tools). Then, and first then, is it possible for the spirit of Zen to blossom. Zhaozhou is (with Lin-chi) a personification of this spirit.

Some Facts on Zhaozhou

Zhàozhōu Cōngshěn (Chinese: 趙州從諗; Wade-Giles: Chao-chou Ts’ung-shen; Japanese: Jōshū Jūshin) (778–897), was a Chán (Zen) Buddhist master. He became ordained as a monk at an early age. At the age of 18, he met Nánquán Pǔyuàn (南泉普願 748–835; J: Nansen Fugan) and eventually received the Dharma from him.

Zhaozhou is sometimes touted as the greatest Chan master of Tang dynasty .Many koans in both the Blue Cliff Record and The Gateless Gate concern Zhaozhou, with twelve cases in the former and five in the latter being attributed to him.

A COLLECTION OF ZHAOZHOU DIALOGUES

BODHISATTVA

A monk asked, “What is a bodhisattva?”

The master said, “Right here is an icchantika.”

Note

An icchantika is a person who has absolutely no good in them and who is unable to believe anything. It means someone who is lacking in Buddha-nature.

Comment

By saying “Right here is an icchantika” Zhaozhou points to himself not to the monk, since that would be dualism. Hence Zhaozhou is an icehantika. Had the monk grasped the non-duality of Zhaozhou’s answer, he would know what a bodisattva was.

Zhaozhou “is” the monk (here the icehantika) the moment he hears him. This is the Dharmakaya of Buddha-mind, where there is nothing between the seer and the seen. A Bodhisattva is a person yet not a person since he is the environment yet not the environment since he is a person. He is in the middle of the two opposites of person and environment. This “unified being” is a bodhisattva. (The mondo is incredible!)

BUDDHA-NATURE

A monk asked, “What about it when the clear moon is in the sky?”

The master said, “What’s your name?”

The monk said, “Me.”

The master said, “Where is ‘the clear moon in the sky’?”

Comment

You are the clear moon yourself.

Zhaozhou points to the Dharmakaya, that is to say, to the no-self (the Buddha-mind) of the monk. The monk is not a “me”, since a “me” is an illusion since all is emptiness. The monk is what he encounters no matter what it is, the moon, the river, the trees or the birds.

ESSENCE AND FUNCTION ARE ONE

A monk asked, “What is the Dharmakaya?”

The master said, “The Nirmanakaya.”

The monk said, “I am not asking about the Nirmanakaya.”

The master said, ” Just pay attention to the Nirmanakaya”.

Comment

The essence of Buddha-nature (the Dharmakaya) is unsuited as a gate to insight (Lin-chi) so attention must be paid to the visible manifestations of Buddha-nature, the Nirmanakaya, the function. Since the Dharmakaya (emptiness) is the Nirmanakaya (form) and the Nirmanakaya (form) is the Dharmakaya (emptiness) it is possible to enter the Dharmakaya (Buddha-Mind) through attention to the Nirmanakaya.

Since the Dharmakaya is impossible to get hold on, the attention must be paid to the Nirmanakaya, that is, to form or function,which is visible through the concrete manifestations of for instance sounds, smells or movements. In Chinese Zen, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, so emphasis on form is not neglecting emptiness since form and emptiness are different yet the same. This approach lies behind “everyday Zen” and the method of no-mind (wu-hsin), Daily activities and experiences are seen as a platform for Samadhi/Prajna meditation where forms and emptiness are seen as one.

SEEKING YET NOT SEEKING

Another time the master said, “I can make one blade of grass be a sixteen-foot golden Buddha, and I can make a sixteen-foot gold Buddha be one blade of grass. Buddha is compulsive passions, compulsive passions are Buddha”

A monk asked” For the sake of whom does Buddha become compulsive passions?”

The master said, “For the sake of all people Buddha becomes compulsive passions.”

The monk said, “How can they be escaped?”

The master said, “What’s the use of escaping?”

Comment

Compulsive passions lead nowhere, not compulsive passions lead nowhere. Giving up the thoughts of compulsive passions is the Way.

The problem of seeking or not seeking is a main issue in Zen. Seeking creates karma but no-seeking leads nowhere. Zhaozhou points to the middle way between the two opposites, that is, seek yet do not seek which points to the emptiness of words and passions, since one must not choose between seek or not seek. Don’t settle on seeking or not seeking, instead be in accordance with what person you are and practice this in no-mind, that is to say be what you are. According to Zhaozhou, it is the division of oneself that is the problem. If one refrains from choosing and picking between ideas, there is no conflict.

NIRVANA IS HERE

A monk asked, “What about it, when the True Realm of Reality have no dust upon it?”

The master said, “Everything is right here”.

Comment

Nirvana is concrete, it is here. When one sees with no dust one sees Nirvana.

Nirvana is Samsara and Samsara is Nirvana. Zen’s notion of Nirvana is not otherworldly. There is only this world, this moment and to imagine Nirvana as a state, a realm, as world of salvation, is to divide the world into two or more. Reality is one and it is concrete and it is a now-presence. To think of Nirvana as divided from Samsara is dualism. When Zhaozhou says everything is right here he means Everything is right here.

EMPTINESS

A monk asked “‘The Dharma is not a special Dharma’. What is the Dharma?”

The master said, “Nothing outside, nothing inside. Nothing inside or outside.”

Comment

The essence is beyond grasping. The only way to reach it is by not grasping. The silence that follows is the true Dharma. One must bow to the beyond.

The Dharma of emptiness (the Dharmakaya) is the point between contrasting words and concepts (dualism) which our mind constructs to bring order and logic, for instance high, low, fast, slow, hot, warm, is, is not etc. To avoid this thought based dualism one most cut off values, judgments, comparisons and so on. This negation of words confronts one with emptiness, which is the absolute, since it is beyond the relativity (opposites) of thought. Hence nothing inside (mind) nothing outside (environment).

PERSON OF NO RANK

A monk asked, “What is the true master of Chao-chou (Joshu)?”

The master said, “I’m Ts’ung-shen.”

Comment

Zhaozhou is not a “master”. He is Ts’ung-shen. A child of his father and mother.

Chinese Zen is “natural” Zen and very conscience of not reifying social roles, institutions, symbols, words and all the other social and cultural constructions.The person of no rank is the true human being. A father, a mother and a child are “true” but not a so-called Zen Master who is a cultural fabrication, hence not real.

AWAY WITH HABITS

The master was leaving the main hall when he saw a monk bowing to him.

The master struck him with his stick.

The monk said “But bowing is a good thing!”

The master said, “A good thing is not as good as nothing.”

Comment

Liberaration from social constructed habits is essential. Habits are unreal, even the good ones. Acting spontaneously is a reflection of true reality. Cut social roles and their frozen habits.

With his struck Zhaozhou points to liberation. When Buddhist rituals and conventions become routinized, stiff unreal worlds arise. Reality is not “Buddhist”, it is empty and spontaneous. Bowing is not just bowing, bowing only to obey monastic rules is habit. Zen is liberation from mechanical activity and bowing must come from the heart.

FORM IS EMPTINESS AND EMPTINESS IS FORM

There was a young official who, upon seeing the master, praised him saying, “You are an old Buddha.”

The master said, “You are a young Tathatagata

Note

Tathatagata is a thusgoer, a Buddha.

Comment

Zhaozhou says” I’m a Tathagata (old Buddha). You are young. When I see you, I see you as myself yet not as myself, hence I see the old Tathagata yet a young man.”

Zhaozhou points to the Dharmakaya and the Nirmanakaya as one. Emptiness (Zhaozhou) is form (the young man) and form (the young man) is emptiness (Zhaozhou). This is the way a Buddha sees. A Buddha does not think about emptiness and form, he sees it as visible actuality. Old and young point to form and Buddha and Tathatagata point to emptiness. Zhaozhou sees the young man as himself yet not as himself. He sees him in thusness (tathat).

NO-MIND

A monk asked, “What is a man of no knowledge?”

The master said, “What are you talking about?”

Comment

MU. Cut questions and answers.

This is a masterful example of how precise Zhaozhou is when teaching Zen. He gives an answer by asking, thus placing the question right into the middle of the opposites of knowing, not knowing. Zhaozhou points to emptiness.

THE SPIRITUAL IS HERE

A monk asked, “What is that which is spiritual?”

The masters said, “A puddle of piss in the Pure Land”.

The monk said, “I ask you to reveal it to me”.

The master said, “Don’t tempt me”.

Comment

The spiritual does not exist by itself. There is no “God” in Zen. Spirituality is the Buddha-mind of essence (the Dharmakaya) and its function (the Nirmanakaya). Spirituality is thus “beyond” and concrete at the same time. All activities seen in the perspective of the absolute can be reduced to essence and function, that is to say Buddha-mind. Quite understandable the master hesitates to demonstrate the mundane concreteness of the Buddha. (The master pissing).

“A puddle of piss in the Pure Land” points to Samsara is within Nirvana and Nirvana is within Samsara. There is no “independent spirituality or realm in Zen. Nirvana is dependent on Samsara and Samsara is dependent on Nirvana. Nothing, not even Nirvana, can stand alone, hence Nirvana does not exist. Buddha is emptiness (Nirvana) and the spirituality of emptiness appears when forms arise (Samsara). Thus spiritulity is yet is not.

BUDDHA DOES NOT EXIST.

The monk said, “What is Buddha, and what is all living things?”

The master said, “All living things are Buddha, Buddha is all living things”.

The monk asked, “It is not yet clear to me, of those two which is ‘all living things’”

The master said, “Ask me.”

Comment

There is no Buddha. There are no “living things”. Questions about the absolute is beyond questions and answers. If asked then answer with a question if answered then ask with a question. This is dualiy ad infinitum. Zhaozhou negates until only emptiness is left as an answer.

“All living things are Buddhas, Buddha is all living things” points to: form (All living things) is emptiness (Buddha) and emptiness (Buddha) is form (All living things). Hence you cannot point to what Buddha is or what all living things are. One cannot say this is Buddha by pointing to Buddha since Buddha is all living things and one cannot say this is “all living things” since they are the Buddha. Buddha is and is not. Buddha is beyond words and logic. Zen de-reifies All reality, since reality is relative hence completely empty. Emptiness is the absolute, not “Buddha”, nor “all living things”.

FAITH IN MIND

A monk asked, “What is an icchantika?”

The master said, “Why don’t you ask about bodhi?”

The monk said, “What is bodhi?”

The master said, “Just that is being an icchantika.”

Comment

Asking about spiritual matters is lack of faith in Mind, hence one is an icchantika when asking.

Zhaozhou shows here his deep genuine spirituality. Asking, questioning, debating religious thoughts is in his eyes demonstrating doubt, hence lack of faith. Seeking the truth through religious doctrines, rituals and debates are blasphemy since it is outside Mind. Zen is about spiritual purity not about scholarship.

THE NATURAL SCHOOL OF ZHAOZHOU

A monk asked, “What is your “family custom?”

The master said, “In the vast boundlessness of time and space there are numerous people.”

The monk said, “I asked, but you did not answer me.”

The master said, “I have obviously done so.”

The Buddha-mind is the school of Zhaozhou. Intellectualization is not the Way. Practice and realizing the boundless forms in the vast space is his Zen.

Zhaozhou’s Zen is every day Zen, where Nirvana is Samsara and Samsara is Nirvana, where Buddha is all living things and where all living things are the Buddha. Where the sacred is the secular and the secular is the sacred, where an emperor is a person of no rank and where a person of no rank is an emperor, where oneself is the blue sky and the blue sky is oneself, where wisdom is emptiness and emptiness is wisdom,where what-is is not and yet is, Zhaozhou is environment and environment is Zhaozhou. Zhaozhou exists yet does not exist. Zhaozhou is a Buddha.

TIME IS AN ILLUSION

A layperson came to present a robe to the master and asked, “To wear such a robe is wronging the people of the past isn’t it?”

The master threw down his whisk and said, “Is this past or present?”

Comment

Time and memories are illusions created by habits and clinging. There is only the now which cannot even be grasped. Hence there can not be any wrong doing in relation to past or future. Forget all (yourself) and do not try to grasp the now (clinging). That is the way of handling the illusion of time. The whisk is a Buddha, just so, coming and going, with no knowledge of past or future. This is the time of Zen.

Zen’s notion of time is time is and is not. Time is thus emptiness. Time is something human beings create to bring order into their lives. The notion of time is the result of “biographical clinging”, a clinging rooted in fear of forgetting ourselves. For many a world without history and biographies seems terrifying empty. The problem however, is that the notion of time is a barrier to acceptance of and unification with reality as it is, in the now. In the eyes of Zen time, history and biography are the dust of relativity, without genuine existence.

BUDDHA-MIND

A monk asked, “I ask you to say something apart from the four statements.”

The master said, “I am always here”.

Note

The four statements are “is”, “is not”, “both” is and “is not”, “neither is nor “is not”.

The four statements are words pointing to the Middle way and the Middle way again points to the one reality and that is “I am always here” which is the Buddha-mind.

The four statements are four negations. No words or logic will ever be able to convey or mirror the reality beyond thought. This ungraspable reality is the Buddha. The negations of the statements points to emptiness, the Dharmakaya of the Buddha-mind which any living creature is born with. Hence, the Buddha Zhaozhou says:”I am always here”. He points to the Buddha-mind as the sole reality.

HOW TO READ SUTRAS

A monk asked, “Are the mind of the Patriarch and the mind of the scriptures the same or different?”

The master said, “If you can understand the mind of the Patriarchs, you will understand the mind of the scriptures.”

Comment

There is no difference between what the Patriarchs say and what the scriptures say. They are different yet the same. However, it is not about grasping the text but the meaning or Mind of the text. The texts differ but not their pointing. If one reads the scriptures with the Mind of a Patriarch, one will never go astray.

The saying of the Ancients and the sutras are in fully accordance. The problem with sutra reading is the tendency among many students to reify the Buddhist texts instead of getting to the point of the sutras which is de-reification of what we think is real.

HOMMAGE TO ZHAOZHOU

Zhaozhou’s Buddha Case 80

The Capping Verse

This old Buddha has a way of teaching:

Thirty blows of the stick without raising a hand.

Directing yourself toward it, you move away from it.

What person’s life is lacking?

The verse is a great description of Zhaozhou, sharp yet soft, expert on cutting off thoughts and a with a great faith in the perfect- not perfect, hence perfect Buddha-mind.

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Haiku

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The use of Zen sayings and koans as a tool for teaching is a way of making Mahayana doctrines into pure intuitive experience by steering Buddhist teaching away from words to a direct awareness of Buddha-Mind. However, in order to grasp the sayings, one must have a elementary knowledge of Madhyamika philosophy (negation and dialectics) and know what the Trikaya doctrine (the three bodies of Buddha) is.


If one knows these rather uncomplicated principles, the world of the sayings and koans of the ancients is open and Buddhist knowledge is thus attainable to intuition since one is set free from the prison of scriptural intellectualization and entanglements.

Zen sayings and koans are not difficult, if one knows that they are expressions of the tree aspects of Buddha Mind, but lack of this distinct knowledge make them far more perplexing than they actually are. They are simply Buddhist logic and far from being riddles. Besides, why use unsolvable riddles as pedagogical tools? Zen aims at purifying the mind, not blowing it up. Zen master Dogen wrote during his stay in China:

“The illogical stories mentioned by you bald-headed fellows are only illogical for you, not for buddha ancestors.”

“How sad that they do not know about the phrases of logical thought, or penetrating logical thought in the phrases and stories”.

“When I laughed at them in China, they had no response and remained silent. Their idea about illogical words is only a distorted view.”

BUDDHA-MIND (the Trikaya)

The pure Dharmakaya is your nature, the perfect Sambogakaya is your wisdom, the myriad Nirmanakayas are your activities

Sokei Daishi

The Four Ways of Knowing

1. The Dharmakaya (realizing emptiness)

2. The Nirmanakaya (realizing function)

3. The Sambogakaya (realizing unity)

4. Prajna Wisdom (realizing the absolute within the relative)

*

1. THE DHARMAKAYA (REALIZING EMPTINESS)

Book of Equanimity – CASE 78

Ummon’s Farm Rice-Cake

Preface to the assembly

When you seek the cost all over heaven, you’ll be paid the price all over the earth. To seek after a hundred schemes is just a shame. Isn’t there somebody who knows to advance and retreat and who recognizes the duality?

Main Case

Attention! A monk asked Master Ummon, “What is speech that transcends the Buddhas and goes beyond the Ancestors?” Ummon replied, “Farm rice-cake”.

Appreciatory Verse

Farm rice-cake is speech transcending Buddhas and Ancestors.

In this phrase, there’s no flavor. How can you penetrate it?

Zen monks, who one day know satisfaction,

will see no shame on Ummon’s face.

Comment

Ummon points to a farm rice-cake since the cake points to emptiness is form and form is emptiness. (Farm rice-cakes (form) are tasteless (emptiness) and tastelessness (emptiness) is the Farm rice-cakes (form) Farm rice-cakes are tasteless yet they taste of something. A rice cake has no relish, it is quite, thus it has the taste of Dharmakaya Zen.

The tastelessness points to the Middle Way of is-is not, to flavor-no flavor, it points to no perceptions yet perceptions, to seeing yet not seeing. No one is attached to a rice cake, but no one dislikes it. One eats it when hungry, it is not something you chose, hence the cake is not a karma creator. A rice cake is just so, it is like pure, clear water since it is colorless and tasteless. It is nothing special. The answer of Ummon is a formidable pointer to the emptiness of Zen since the cake points to the Middle Way to the location between taste-no taste, that is, to is-is not, which is the Dharmakaya. Emptiness is not a static “thing”, but is-yet is not. Emptiness is beyond grasping and definition just like the taste of a farm rice-cake or water.

The koan is one of the best pointers to emptiness I know, since it, in a completely dry and precise manner, conveys a lot of connotations of Zen’s notions of emptiness thus it’s practice. The koan is a great starting point for getting a hold on Zen. Sometimes Zen sayings and koans have a emotional poetic touch (flowers, birds, sky) due to their beautiful depth which however, makes one forget that Zen fundamentally is about avoiding “karma generating” emotions and perceptions. Ummon hits the Dharmakaya directly, for him Zen is just a tool. Pure Zen is actually dry not poetic since dryness is closer to emptiness than emotions.

2. THE NIRMANAKAYA (REALIZING FUNCTION)

A monk asked Zen master Nanta, “Manjushri was the teacher of seven buddhas. Did Manjushri have a teacher or not?”

Nantu said, “Manjushri was subject to conditions, and therefore had a teacher.”

The monk said, “Who was Manjushri’s teacher?”

Nanta held up his whisk.

The monk said, “Is that all?”

Nanta put down his whisk and clasped his hands.

Comment

This answer of Nanto is an embodiment of suchness in a nutshell. When Nanta holds up his whisk he points to the nameless form of Buddha, the essence. Just so. The whisk is not a whisk it is a Buddha (quite and empty yet not empty) and when Nanta clasps his hands this is also Buddha (manifestation of sound-function).

Thus the whisk is a sitting bird, a forest, the sky, a river and the clasp is the singing of the birds, the smells of the forest, the darkening of the sky and the sound of the river. Nanto points to essence and function. Tathata is a way of seeing purely with all relativity cut off, so only the experience of essence and functions are left in one’s mind. Hence seeing the sky is seeing it without the relative word “the sky”, hearing the river is not “hearing” “the river”, Tathata is seeing and hearing the Buddha only.

The little dialogue demonstrates how it is possibly to explain rather complex Buddhist philosophy in a extremely efficient and simple manner. Why all these words which just feed the intellect instead of a straight pointer that can be grasped intuitively? The point is: when essence and function is seen as one, one sees the Buddha. Nanto makes the Buddha visible and as an old saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words.

Another Story on Tathata

Once a monk drew four lines in front of the Patriarch. The top one was long, the three below were short. He asked, “You may no say that there is one long line and three short lines. Without using the four phrases and the hundred negations please answer me.”

The Patriarch drew one line on the ground and said, “Without talking about long or short, I have answered you.”

Comment

This little story is also a pointer to suchness but it also points to Prajna, that is, on how to see what-is in a non-discriminative way. Prajna is non-relative, absolute knowledge. When forms are seen in Prajna, relative concepts about these are completely cut off. There are not “four”, not “long”, not “short” lines. Seen in suchness there is just what appears and that is what the Patriarch demonstrates by drawing a “nameless” line. In the world of relativity the lines are myriad of things, in the world of Buddha, which is beyond relativity, there is just “line”. “Line” is the manifestation of the Buddha. “Line” IS, “four” is not.

3. THE SAMBOGAKAYA (REALIZING UNITY)

Ch’an Master Hui-tsang of Shih-kung used to be a hunter. [before becoming a monk]. He disliked monks. One day, as he was chasing a herd of deer, he happened to pass in front of the Patriarch’s hermitage. The Patriarch greeted him. Hui-tsang asked, ” Has the Venerable seen a herd of deer passing nearby?”

The Patriarch asked him, “Who are you?”

Hui-tsang replied, “I am a hunter.”

The Patriarch asked, “Do you know how to shoot?”

Hui-tsang said, “Yes, I know.”

The Patriarch asked, “How many deer can you shoot with a single arrow?”

Hui-tsang said, “With a single arrow I can shoot only one deer.”

The Patriarch said, “You don’t know how to shoot.”

Then Hui-tsang asked, “Does the Venerable know how to shoot?”

The Patriarch said, “Yes, I know.”

Hui-tsang asked, “How many can the Venerable shoot with a single arrow?”

The Patriarch said, “With a single arrow I can shoot a whole herd.”

Hui-tsang said, “They also have life; why shoot the whole herd?”

The Patriarch said, “If you know that, then why don’t you shoot yourself?”

Hui-tsang replied, “If you ask me to shoot myself, I cannot do that.”

The Patriarch said, “Ah, this man. All his ignorance and defilements accumulated over vast kalpas have today suddenly come to an end.” At that point Hui-tsang destroyed his bow and arrows. He cut off his hair with a knife, and became a monk with the Patriarch.

One day, as Hui-tsang was working in the kitchen, the Patriarch asked him, “What are you doing?”

Hui-tsang replied, “I am tending and ox.”

The Patriarch asked, “How do you tend an ox?”

Hui-tsang replied, “When he wants to enter the grass, I grasp his nostrils and pull him away.”

“You are really tending an ox”, commented the Patriarch.

Note

The use of the image of tending an ox as an allegory for spiritual training is very common in the Ch’an school.

Comment

The Patriarch said, “With a single arrow I can shoot a whole herd.” points to the Sambogakaya. In Zen, enlightenment is realized when there is nothing between subject and object in the sense that there are absolutely no thoughts or perceptions, only PURE empty mind, that is, when one sees the environment as oneself, as “one’s own face”. The Sambogakaya is “knowing” the environment. One knows because there is unity that is, no division between environment and person and experiencing this unity is experiencing Buddha-mind. Looking into the eyes of the deers is looking at one’s own eyes, hence killing oneself is killing the whole herd. As formulated by Zen master Joshu:

The monks said, “What is the original thing?”

The master said, “Four eyes looking at each other. Outside of this, there is not a second controlling power”.

The Patriarch or Hui-tsang shooting themselves is hence shooting the whole herd since both the herd as well as the two men are buddhas. A Buddha cannot shoot himself without shooting the whole universe since the Buddha is one. “If you ask me to shoot myself, I cannot do that” points to Hui-tsang suddenly getting insight into the Sambogakaya. A Buddha cannot shoot a Buddha.

The practice of Chinese Zen is also indicated in the story. The ox is Hui-tsang and every time Hui-tsang seeks something (entering the grass) he consequently stops himself. The words “entering the grass” is a fine example of the speech of Zen. Actually the Patriarch asks Hui-tsang whether he still hunts deer and Hui-tsang answers in a typical Zen manner by pointing to no-seeking ((Wu-wei). Seeking Mind with mind is not pure Zen practice, only a state of perfect equilibrium of the Buddha-mind is the Way. Shooting dears and seeking Buddha-mind thus become the same. Hui-tsang confirms he is a flawless Buddhist thus not a hunter.

The story is a great example of how powerful Zen stories and koans can be when it comes to Zen teaching. A philosophical explanation on enlightenment and Zen practice would, as I see it, not be able to convey the same deep understanding of Zen’s goal, in the way this little story is capable of.

4. PRAJNA WISDOM (REALIZING THE ABSOLUTE WITHIN THE RELATIVE)

CASE 26. TWO MONKS ROLL UP THE BLINDS

The Case

The great Fayen Wenyi took the high seat before the midday meal to preach to his assembly. Raising his hand he pointed to the bamboo blinds. Two monks went and rolled them up in the same manner. Fayen said, ‘One gains; one loses.’

Wumen’s Comment

Tell me, which one gained? Which one lost? If you have the single eye regarding this, you will see where the National Teacher Qingliang failed. But I must warn you most firmly against arguing gain and loss.

Wumen’s Verse

When they are rolled up the great sky is bright and clear,
but the great sky still does not match our Way.
Why don’t you throw away that sky completely?
Then not a breath of wind will come through.

Comment

The key sentence in this koan is ‘One gains; one loses.’ Who is the one? They are both “the one”. This is non-discrimination. One gains, one loses, just so. No judgment, no classification, no comparison. The two are different yet the same. The winner is the looser and the looser is the winner. Picking a winner or a looser is relativity.Not picking is the cultivation of Prajna, absolute intuitive wisdom, where names and definitions are unreal. The wisdom of Prajna goes: two monks roll up the blinds in the same yet not the same manner. Why care about the words “winning” or “loosing”? Prajna is about reality not judgments, Prajna is direct, the way of words are in-explicit.

As formulated by Sengcan:

The duality of existence
is born from false discrimination,
Flourishing dreams and empty illusions,
Why try to grab them?
Gain and lose, true and false,
Drop them all in one moment.

Prajna is the perfection of Wisdom, the practice of insight into non-relative knowledge. It is a continuation of enlightenment through cultivation. One bamboo is tall, one is small, one bamboo is not taller, one bamboo is not smaller. Seeing the two bamboos as one yet different is the entrance into buddhahood.

Differentiation (Prajna) is as such not difficult to grasp but difficult to use, since our thoughts and logic are so pervaded by relativity. A great example of how puzzling the Zen training of Prajna can be lies in this little question: How do you run a horse in a bowel? The answer is: just get up an run around in circles. The answer is conveyed by cutting off the relativity by removing the names “horse” and “bowl”. What is left then, is something visible namely the Buddha function of “running in circles”.

Thus Prajna is about absolute seeing and the koan points to two ways are not two ways but one way since rolling up the blinds is the function of the Buddha. There is only one reality in the koan and that is the function”rolling”. Prajna is thus “reduction of relativity” until one sees the Buddha, the absolute. Cutting relativity (illusions) is “using the sword of Prajna”.

All the above analyses and text examples are upayic, that is, tools or fingers of truth as it is expressed by Zen. Below are some pomes on the result of using the fingers, that is to say, seeing the moon just so. The poems all contains Mind aspects, one weighs the Dharmakaya, one the Nirmanakaya, while one weighs the Sambogakaya but they all point to Buddha-mind, the hub of Zen.

KNOWING ENLIGHTENMENT (Satori, Wu)

The Unity Of Satori (Sambogakaya)

Earth, mountains, rivers – hidden in this nothingness.

In this nothingness – earth, mountains, rivers revealed.

Spring flowers,winter snows:

There’s no being nor non-being, nor denial of itself.

Comment

One is yet is not in the midst of birth and death and Nirvana.

Dharmakaya

The Emptiness Of Satori

The wind blows hard among the pines

Toward the beginning

Of an endless past

Listen: you’ve heard everything

Comment

One is yet is not, momentarily yet eternal, this is the knowing of emptiness

Nirmanakaya

The Suchness Of Satori

All’s harmony, yet everything is separate.

Once confirmed, mastery is yours.

Long I hovered on the Middle Way,

Today the very ice shoots flames.

Comment

One is yet is not in the wholeness of the myriad of things. The ice is so clear and sharp that it shoots flames.

Together the three poems convey a pointer to Buddha-Mind indicating the experience of enlightenment.

*

As anyone who has read the above koans and stories can see, they are not riddles at all. They are Buddhist common sense. However, what is a riddle to me is that so many scholars and Zennists are arguing so much about the nature of these koans and sayings, since there is nothing to argue about.

Simply put, they are just instructions on how to discern the Buddha-mind since they are concrete pointers to the Trikaya and Prajna. The use of sayings and koans are meant to make Zen more explicit and effecient by avoiding too much intellectual sutra reading. They are testing tools as well as teaching tools.One is tempted to call them Buddha-manuals.

What the Chinese Zen masters have contributed to Buddhism is invaluable and will never be surpassed by modern Zen. Modern Zen seems to have less faith, strength and patience to create such a treasure as the koans and the sayings of the ancients.

ZenFrog (ZenHsin)

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中文: 明文徵明拙政园图咏册页之小飞虹（与今拙政园中部小飞虹位置不同）Date
23 October 2009
Source
Scaned from WEN Zhengming (文徵明), An Old Chinese Garden : A Three-fold Masterpiece of Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, by Wen Chen Ming (《文待詔拙政園圖[全]》), studied by Kate Kerby, textes translated by MO Zung Chung, Shanghai上海, Chung Hwa Book Company (中華書局), 1922.
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According to the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng, Samadhi is Prajna and Prajna is Samadhi. The deeper the silence of purity (karma-erasing) becomes, the more absolute insight (Buddha-mind) is realized and the more absolute insight is realized, the deeper the silence of purity becomes. Zen expresses this Prajna/Samadhi oneness as “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” which points to Zen as a mediator of the sacred and the profane: Samsara (form) is Nirvana (emptiness) and Nirvana (emptiness) is Samsara (form). It is a pragmatic (realistic!) approach, where salvation is to be found here in this moment, in the concrete reality, not in a future realm. Zen is actuality, since time does not exist, only what-is here and now is real.


It is possible to systematize the well-known phase as:

“Form is emptiness” points to Sunyata (emptiness or wholeness). Not a thing is. (Samadhi)

“Emptiness is form” points to Tathata (emptiness of emptiness = forms) or Buddha-mind (Prajna).

The famous phrase from the Heart Sutra makes reference to the ultimate principle of Zen, which is “Mind”. The phrase can only be grasped if one views it as a non-dual principle of activity yet tranquility. Neither form nor emptiness are static substantial entities (Svabhava). Emptiness IS not since it transforms to form and form IS not since it transforms to emptiness.

Form and emptiness are thus conditioned by each other since nothing can stand alone.They are a coming and going, together they are a process. This principle of absolute flowing relativity is by Zen called “Buddha-function”, that is, the radiant vividness of is/is not, of birth/death, of being/non-being etc. Hence the form is within the void and the void is within the form. The process is radiant (Mind, spirituality) since interactions between form and emptiness are neither caused by mechanical entities (as in science) nor by chaotic coincidence. One is tempted to call Mind the laws yet not the laws of nature, since Mind is spontaneous adaptation to circumstances.

However, due to relativity, this Buddha-function cannot stand alone. As everything else it is dependent. The Buddha-function is dependent on its opposite, the non-function, that is to say, tranquility, the void of the Buddha which is the radiant tranquility of is-is not, of birth-death, of being-non-being etc. This pure radiance (Mind) is used relatively by forms (adaptation). Hence the less dependent form are on conditions, the more the forms shine (are enlightened). Thus liberating oneself from relativity/conditions is Enlightenment; one is nothing but pure light, one is the Buddha (Mind).

Thus Enlightenment or the Buddha appears when functions and essence are experienced as as a non-dual unity of ONE (Sambogakaya). Non-conditioned mind and non-condition activity is realizing the radiance of Mind.

Note

Sambogakaya: Sam= same, kaya = body. That is: when essence and function are one, they are of the same Buddha-body)

One sees clearly that Zen has reduced billions of variables to just two namely function and essence. It is a minimalist “philosophy” since the two concepts are meant to cover all of reality. Two concepts, that’s all. The universe is essence and function, a particle is essence and function, a flower is essence and function etc. One can even reduce the “philosophy” to one word: Everything is Mind.

Below are two koans pointing to “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. The first koan “Fuketsu’s Silence And Words” points to form is emptiness and the second koan “Kicking The Drinking Water Jar” is a pointer to emptiness is form. However, there is only a tiny difference between the sunyata perspective of the first koan and the Tathata perspective of the second koan. Sunyata and Tathata is the same, namely emptiness but slightly different when used as Zen methods, since Sunyata is linked to Samadhi and Tathata to Prajna.

KOAN POINTING TO FORM IS EMPTINESS

“Whatever can be conceptualized is therefore relative, and whatever is relative is Sunya, empty. Since absolute inconceivable truth is also Sunya, Sunyata or the void is shared by both Samsara and Nirvana. Ultimately, Nirvana truly realized is Samsara properly understood.”

Nagarjuna

Case. 24 Fuketsu’s Silence And Words

Amonk asked Fuketsu, “Without words or without silence transgressing, how can one be unmistakably one with the universe?” Fuketsu said, “I often think of March in Konan (Southern China). The birds sing among hundreds of flagrant flowers.”

Mumon’s Comments:

Fuketsu’s mind was quick as lightning, snatching the road and walking on it. Regrettably Fuketsu was not able to sit on the words of the “ancestors.” If anyone should penetrate into this, he would be absolutely free. Without words, without phrases, now say what Zen is.

Fuketsu did not say such a fine phrase, Without uttering words, he already let it be known. If Fuketsu had become talkative, You do not know what to do.

Comment

Fuketsu is one with the flagrant flowers, hence Buddha sings for him. Mumon praises him highly for not being scholarly. Fuketsu is not just repeating a saying of the ancients. Fuketsu’s answer comes spontaneously from his own heart (intuition). The shorter, the more pure and precise a pointer is, the better Zen, and Fuketsu’s answer demonstrates a shining example of Zen talk. No long sentences, no hesitation, no explanations. Just a precise pointer to the Dharmakaya (one with the flowers) within the Nirmanakaya (the singing birds) and the Sambogakaya (Fuketsu grasping the Buddha).

What is Fuketsu’s “universe”? It is the void, but one must intuitively grasp what this void or space is, to realize what it is. Seeing the void as such is impossible, since emptiness logically has no existence. However, when one sees the wholeness (Samadhi) YET the different forms (Prajna) at the same time, reality becomes unexplainable vacuum since there is nothing to hold on to. There is wholeness yet not wholeness. There are forms, yet there are no forms, there is one, yet there are many etc.

This collapse of dualism, hence of relativity, means that one has nothing to hold on to, thus no self, and this is realizing emptiness. However, when emptiness is realized, that is, when even the notion of it is removed, pure form appears since there is no thoughts or feelings between oneself and reality. “Realized emptiness” is thus form and realized form is thus emptiness. When Fuketsu says “The birds sing among hundreds of flagrant flowers” he expresses exactly the same point since he points to realization of pure what-is. There is nothing between himself and the birds and the flowers (emptiness) and this emptiness convey the flowers and the birds to “shine” (Mind) thus make him realize the purity (Buddha) of the birds and flowers (form).

The point is: “nothing to hold on to” is emptiness realized which can be experienced when one’s experience is totally released from relativity, that is to say, free of thoughts about”objects”, “subjects” and of all the usual classifications we construct to convey meaning. For Zen, emptiness is a concrete reality which can be grasped by intuition, it is not an idea, it is the radiant Buddha-mind.. Form is within emptiness and emptiness is within form. This within-ness is what the Zen masters call “essence” and essence or Mind can only be realized when one has given up holding on to anything. Zen thus avoids the mistake of philosophizing about the IDEA of “the great void”.

Dogen expresses this “space-like radiant Mind” within forms, the ultimate principle of essence as the Buddha within ourselves:

It is not only that there is water in the world, but there is a world in water. It is not just in water. There is also a world of sentient beings in clouds. There is a world of sentient beings in the air. There is a world of sentient beings in fire. There is a world of sentient beings on earth. There is a world of sentient beings in the phenomenal world. There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass. There is a world of sentient beings in one staff. Wherever there is a world of sentient beings, there is a world of Buddha ancestors. You should thoroughly examine the meaning of this.

Mountains and Waters Sutra

by Eihei Dogen Zenji

Comment

The core sentence of Dogen’s Buddha-discernment is “Wherever there is a world of sentient beings, there is a world of Buddha ancestors.” With these words Dogen tells us, that anyone has a Buddha-mind. Thus, there is a world of sentient beings in clouds, since clouds and sentient beings have the same Mind. So is it with fire, with a blade of grass, with birds and with anything in the phenomenal world. Dogen points to the Sambogakaya. to the radiant Mind shared by all “living” phenomena.

I found this enormously powerful Haiku by Basho where Basho points to essence, to the emptiness of all forms, of the small birds as well as of the huge empires:

Ah, summer grasses!

All that remains

Of the warriors dreams.

This haiku catches the essence so efficiently that one sees the emptiness within the form. The empires are not empires. They are summer grass, waiting for winter, they are dead trees, drifting clouds, streaming rivers and meadows turned into deserts. Empires are not ruled by laws or power, they are ruled by “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. They are contemporary (empty) just like summer grass.

KOAN POINTING TO EMPTINESS IS FORM

Clouds disappearing in the blue sky, a crane’s mind at ease;

Waves constant on the ancient shore, a fish swims slowly.

Who can focus their eyes on this vague edge?

From the hundred pole, take another step.

Dogen

“The vague edge” is a pointer to the coming and going of forms but how is it possible to hold on to something which is dynamic and changing hence vague? “From the hundred pole, take another step” points to zen’s view that emptiness must be emptied to realize what-is. Reality is eternal silence but also a dynamic flux of Buddha-functions. Experiencing emptiness, aloof and disconnected from the fluctuating life, is escaping life but the impulse to escape leads to life and death since it avoids true reality. One must realize Buddha-mind, that is, step into the spirituality of what-is of forms and the way to do this is through the practice of Tathata, suchness. One has to be a Tathagata, a “Thusgoer”, a Buddha.

Case 40. Kicking The Drinking Water Jar

During his stay under Master Hyakujo, Isan was a cooking monk. As Master Hyakujo wished to send a monk to found the new monastery called the Great Mount I, Maser Hyakujo told the chief monk and all other monks that he would choose the one who would demonstrate himself as the best among them. Then Master Hyakujo brought out a drinking water jar, put it down and said, “You cannot call it a water jar. Then, what will you call it?” The chief monk said, “One cannot call it a wooden stick.” Then, when Master Hyakujo turned to Isan, Isan kicked the jar and walked away. Master Hyakujo laughed and said, “The chief monk lost it to Isan.” He made Isan the founder of the Great I-san Monastery.

Mumon’s comments:

Master Isan had indeed rare courage, but he could not jump out of Master Hyakujo’s trap. After examination of the outcome, Isan took over the heavier burden for the easier job. Why? Look, Isan took off the cook’s headband and put himself in steel cuffs (of the founder of the monastery).

Throwing away strainers and cooking spoon, Isan kicks the jar and settles the disputes. Unhindered by the multiple hurdles, He gives a kick on the toe, Even Buddha becomes pieces.

Comment

Reality defined is not reality; it is a defined reality. One is tempted to say an imprisoned reality. It is a dream like word-construction built on perceptions, feelings and guesswork of what-is. For Zen, phenomena must be experienced directly, in suchness. The kicking of the water jug shows immediately what this object is, namely a “water jug” because the water pours out of it. There is a vast difference between a symbolic definition of the water jug and the “real thing” experienced directly. As Thich Nhat Hanh says:

Rather than give an answer, you have to section the tangerine and invite the questioner to have a taste. Doing this, you allow him or her to enter the suchness of the tangerine without any verbal or conceptual description.

It is an experience of oneness with the object, where neither subject nor object exist. No division between the seer and the seen.

Tathata is about removing explanations from one’s mind. As pointed out by Dogen:

In our life time, false and true, good and bad, are confused.

While playing with the moon, scorning the wind, and listening to the birds.

For many years, I merely saw that mountains had snow.

This winter, I suddenly realize that snow makes the mountains.

Dogen

Comment

Actually this verse is a very precis pointer to Tathata. “I suddenly realize that snow makes the mountain” is a reference to reality as something being created from moment to moment. Mountains having snow is not Tathata since it is a static picture of objects (mountains) having objects (snow). Tathat is “dynamic empty seeing”, that is, snow changes or builds the mountain.

The reality of things is how they appear in the moment. Suchness is removing static, frozen discriminating views on reality so we can see the pure reality of the moment, hence the flow of reality as demonstrated in this beautiful story which points suchness as innocence.:

Next to Dasui’s cottage there was a tortoise.

A monk asked, “Most beings grow bones inside their skin.

Why does this being grow skin inside it’s bones?”

Dasui took off his grass sandal and put it on the tortoise’s back.

The monk didn’t know what to say.

Suchness is seeing directly what-is. Grasping what-is in a second is suchness where reality conveys reality by itself. The tortoise with the sandal on it’s back is just so. It is not funny, different, interesting or wrong, it is what it is in this moment. Suchness is seeing anything just so, no matter what it is, hence the Zen phrase “everything is perfect”. A tortoise with a grass sandal on it’s back is perfect.

What is a bird? A bird is a nest-builder, a sky-piercer, a breadwinner, a flyer, an eater, a singer. A bird is not a “bird”, a bird is what one sees, when one sees a bird. A bird cannot fly, a bird flies when it flies. A bird is many yet one. A bird is the empty Buddha when it quietly sits on a branch with its feet in oneness with the tree. The bird is also a Buddha when it flies, thus manifesting itself as the Nirmanakaya-buddha through the various functions which reveals the bird as a “knower” (Mind). Where does this knowing come? Birds, after all do not have thoughts. A Zen answer would be contemplating the question by seeing and hearing the birds. in suchness.That is the answer.

A bird too chants sutras of salvation

Filling the trees with marvelous tones,/span>

Forest flowers are like Bodhisattvas,/span>

Surrounding a little bird-buddha./span>

Ikkyu

Tathata Is Discernment Of Reality Not Explaining It

Words, including sutra words (when grasped reified) are barriers to truth as demonstrated in this mondo:

A monk asked, “What about it when ‘external form is disregarded?’”

The master pointed to a water bottle and said, “What’s that?”

The monk said, “A water bottle.”

The master said, “A fine ‘disregarding external form’ that is.”

The point of this Joshu mondo and the Water Jug koan is precisely the same. Words no matter whether they are concrete, abstract, affirming or negating cannot reach reality. A bottle cannot be seen directly by concepts even when one negates words about it, since the negation then becomes the definition of the bottle as pointed to by the mondo. Reality must speak by itself. One must be in no-mind. Objects can only be experienced in emptiness (seeing the bottle as-is) or as function that is, by doing something to the bottle for instance by kicking it, drinking from it, smashing it, hitting it etc. The logic is: phenomena must be grasped directly through their activities not through words. They must tell their own story so to speak since they preach the Buddha-dharma. Dogen points to this by saying:

To carry yourself forward and experience the many things is delusion.

That the many things come forth and experience the self is awakening.

Here is a very humorous mondo on what true Zen language is:

A monk asked, “What is the meaning of ‘All dharmas are the Buddha-dharma?’”

Yunmen said, “Country grannies crowd the road.”

The monk said, “I don’t understand.”

Yunmen said, “Not only you. Many others don’t understand.”

The point is: Country grannies crowd the road and talk about absolutely nothing. They are just airing and enjoying their voices. Chatting is true Zen talk. They preach the Buddha-dharma by not saying anything so called meaningful at all. Country grannies are buddhas because they are the chirping sparrows, the sound of the rain and the stream of the river.

This verse by Layman Pang also points to no-meaning as the path to Zen wisdom:

No self, no other,

Then how could there be intimate and estranged?

I advise you to cease all your lectures.

They can’t compare with directly seeking truth.

The Diamond Wisdom nature Erases even a speck of dust.

“Thus I have heard”, and “This I believe.” Are but so many words.

Comment

All the above koans and interpretations are however fingers pointing to the moon. One easily reifies Zen sayings and phrases, thus creating some kind of philosophy of Buddha-mind. Here is a great direct ZEN answer to what “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” stands for by the iconoclastic and efficient Zen Master Lin Chi :

Sitting on the high rostrum, Lin Chi hit the stand with his Zen stick and said, ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.’ He hit it again, ‘No form, no emptiness.’ He hit it a third time, ‘Form is form, emptiness is emptiness. Which one is correct?’ Nobody understood. Then the Zen Master shouted ‘KATZ!’ and said, ‘The sky is blue, the tree is green.’ If you cannot answer in one word the question about your original clothes (or face), then, although you can get samadhi and nirvana, you cannot get freedom from life and death.

Lin Chi answers indirectly points to the famous saying of Ch’ing-Yüan Wei-Hsin:

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters.

(form is form and emptiness is emptiness: word dependent seeing)

When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters.

(No form, no emptiness: Samadhi, seeing emptiness)

But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

(Form is emptiness and emptiness is form: Prajna, seeing form AND emptiness in suchness, as empty pure forms)

The Answer “The sky is blue, the tree is green” by Lin Chi is a genuine Zen answer: No intellectualization, no interpretation, only straight pointing to what-is. With his “KATZ!” Lin Chi cuts off all relativity and philosophical pondering to pave the way for direct seeing the mountains and the blue sky in suchness. What Lin Chi means is that reality itself is not form or emptiness. Form and emptiness are constructions, they are pointing fingers, but why not go straight to the matter and just see what-is directly with an empty mind and let form appear by itself?

And here the same hint by Zen monk and poet Ikkyu

Every day, priests minutely examines the Dharma

And endlessly chant complicated sutras.

Before doing that, though, they should learn

How to read the love letters sent by the wind,

and rain, the snow and the moon.

ZenFrog (ZenHsin)

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All the writings and teachings of the great Japanese Zen Master Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師) (19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253) are deeply rooted in the Chinese Zen tradition. This is quite understandable considering that he travelled to China in 1323 where he met his Chinese teacher Tiantong Rujing.


I think there is too much misunderstanding of the teachings of Dogen. Many label him as a philosopher or “thinker”, but Dogen is far from being an “intellectual” in the Western sense of the word since Dogen is a Zen teacher. He transmits Buddha-mind, he is not philosophizing, that is, speculating on what Buddha is.

Moreover, to define Zen masters as philosophers is so contradictory to what Zen is (Zen is wordless) that it is a perfect example of Zen’s notion of illusions. Dogen wants us to see directly not to think. Zen is about intuition (Buddha Mind) not about intellect. A sudden flash of enlightenment cannot not run through a text-filter of 20000 words. It’s nonsense to talk about Zen as a philosophy since Zen uses words as tools, that is, as “pointing fingers” to lead us away from words and thoughts so we can experience reality as it appears to all of our senses. Unity with what-is, not enclosing our mind with words is Zen.

What-is, experienced as Mind, dictates the words and language of Zen, not the other way round. The words of Zen arise from the concrete experience of Buddha Mind. The living Buddhas, whether they are the flying birds or “the Minds of the Ancients”, are the sources of Zen teachings. The philosophical Mahayana background of Zen must also be dismissed as a philosophy since it is anti-philosophy.

As Dogen says:

Excerpts from “Talking the Flower of the Ancient Buddha”

12. Dharma Words.

The great way of all buddhas is profound, wondrous, and cannot be reached by thought or discussion.

Once they [the ancients] had joined somewhat with the way, they could hold up and twirl mountains and oceans to wonderfully make them into words, as well as holding up wind and rain to make them into into tongues and lips, thoroughly expressing great space and turning the unsurpassed Dharma wheel. What phenomena could they not turn? What dharmas have they yet not turned? Those who aspire to the way should follow such splendid dedication.

The shortcomings of learning Zen through words and concepts are one’s tendency to stay inside the text instead of using the text, for instance a saying, as a pointer to life itself. Discerning reality as it appears by the help of sayings and koans is the Way. Staying inside a text easily turn the words into a frozen abstract thought-realm. Look directly not indirectly as the masters say. Long sutras and Zen teachings are thus sometimes a barrier to grasping the “naked” reality and in his later years Dogen actually came to change his teaching style away from the longer Dharma texts (Shōbōgenzō) to the more classical direct Zen approach of sayings and koans.(Eihei Koroku).

The Boundless and All-including Buddha Mind

Here is an excerpt from the Shobogenzo which shows that even though the text by Dogen seems philosophical on the surface, it is pure Dharma talk, impossible to grasp without knowledge of what Zen’s concept of Mind is. In short, the text is a pure and simple discernment of what-is seen through one’s own Buddha Mind. The philosophical underpinning one finds in the text is the doctrine of the Trikaya from the Yogacara, but it is not “a philosophy of Dogen”. The text goes:

The old plum tree is boundless. All at once its blossoms open and of itself the fruit is born.

“The old plum tree is boundless” points to the dharmakaya, that is, boundless is emptiness and the old tree is form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

“All at once its blossoms open and of itself the fruit is born”. “All at once its blossoms open” is a pointer to the “natural” (it “knows when and how”) activity of the Buddha-function and “of itself the fruit is born” points to the awakening and the manifestation of the Buddha. The old plum tree thus realizes itself and Dogen actually says, that we are all old plum trees, since we all are buddhas.

It forms spring and it forms winter. It arouses wind and wild rain. It is the head of a patch-robed monk; it is the eyeball of an ancient buddha. It becomes grass and trees. It becomes pure fragrance. Its whirling, miraculous transformation has not limit. Furthermore, the treeness of the great earth, high sky, bright sun, and clear moon derives from the treeness of the old plum tree. They have always been entangled, vine with vine.

The text seems philosophical, but Dogen just points to the old plum tree as Buddha. He discerns reality as Buddha’s marvelous activity (change,flow) that is, the mind-creation of springs, winter, rain, etc. Reality (Buddha Mind) knows how to let the many forms play together. One function is all functions and all functions are one function. To get up from sitting is no different from spring coming.

“The treeness of the great earth, high sky, bright sun, and clear moon derives from the treeness of the old plum tree” is a pointer to the unity of all buddhas. All phenomena in the universe are related, hence all have “treeness”, “skyness”, sun-ness” etc.. The treeness thus points to wholeness, that is, to different yet the same. Dogen uses the word “treeness” to point to the unity of differences. The text as a whole discerns the all-including Buddha Mind of emptiness, awareness and flow.

Dogen thus want us to penetrate what-is through Buddha’s Mind, he is not trying to teach the monks something to ponder upon. He wants his monks to practice seeing directly with his words as a reference, as a Buddha tool. According to Dogen acting and seeing like a Buddha is the way to realize one’s original mind. Such an approach is far away from philosophy. Dogen’s writings are Zen tools.

DHARMA TALKS OF DOGEN

DOGEN’S COMMENTS ON HIS STYLE OF TEACHING

Demonstration of Practice Clarified in the Dawn wind

266. Dharma Hall Discourse

Sometimes, I Eihei, enter the ultimate state and offers profound discussion, simply wishing for you all to be steadily intimate you in your mind-field.

Sometimes, within the gates and gardens of the monastery, I offer my own style of practical instruction, simply wishing you all to disport and play freely with spiritual penetration.

Sometimes I spring quickly leaving no trace, simply wishing you all to drop body and mind.

Sometimes I enter the Samadhi of self-fulfillment, simply wishing you all to trust your hands can hold.

Suppose someone suddenly came forth and asked this mountain monk, “What would go beyond these [kinds of teaching]?”

I would simply say to him: Scrubbed clean by the dawn wind, the night mist clears. Dimly seen, the blue mountains form a single line.

Comment

L1. Teaching the monks to discern the all-including Buddha-mind.
L2. Direct instructions and answers to practice.
L3. Questions and answers to the sayings and koans of the ancients.
L4. The practice of Samadhi through Zazen and everyday life.

Beyond this teaching. Dogen says: When you are purified by the practice of Samadhi, thoughts disappear and forms arise just so. Samadhi is Prajna and Prajna is Samadhi. Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Everything is realized and all is one.

DOGEN’S VERSE ON TEACHING

Spring Crimson Penetrating All Minds

487. Dharma Hall Discourse

In both arousing the mind and the ultimate stage
how do we practice fully?
Engaging these two minds like this
is the style of buddha ancestors;
Forgetting self and freeing others
with the strength of merit and virtue,
My homeland’s spring color, peach blossom crimson.

This verse is the goal of the Zen teaching of Dogen. Dogen points to the arising and awakening of the inner Buddha of the monks so they can be of help to others. Dogen emphasizes the sayings and koans by the ancestors (the Chinese masters) as the foundation of Zen teaching. The sentence “My homeland’s spring color, peach blossom crimson” is a typical Dogen pointer to the goal of his teaching: the realization of the Dharmakaya (Homeland), the Nirmanakaya (spring color) and the Sambogakaya, Bliss (peach blossom crimson). Dogen is a classical Buddha-mind teacher deeply rooted in the Chinese Zen tradition.

THE ILLUMINATING AWARENESS OF BUDDHA-MIND

Beyond Knowing and Not Knowing

447. Dharma Hall Discourse

I can remember Guifeng Zongmi said, ” The quality of knowing is the gateway of all excellence”.

Zen Master Huanglong Sixin[ Wuxin] said, “The quality of knowing is the gateway of all evil”.

After a pause Dogen said, “If the great ocean knew it was full, the hundred of rivers would all flow upstream”.

Comment

The first line is a pointer to absolute knowing (Prajna), that is, to the enlightened Mind of pure awareness. The second line is a pointer to relative knowing, that is, to thought-based illusions. The two lines thus points to the difference between Prajna wisdom and knowing by thoughts.

Dogen’s answer “If the great ocean knew it was full, the hundred of rivers would all flow upstream” points to the absurdity of thinking oceans making decisions on some presumptions. However, that is what humans do. Dogen says, that man should follow the Buddha-Mind of the oceans which manages waves, winds and streams by “grasping” the situations of what-is, intuitively. Nature is neither mechanical nor analyzing, it is wisdom of know-how (Mind), and so is the original nature of humans also since we are nature ourselves; we are oceans and rivers.

PRAJNA IS NOT TEXT IT IS PRACTICE

Perfect Wisdom Drinks the Water and Carries Away

209. Dharma Hall Discourse

I can remember, Yunmen ascended the seat and said to the assembly, “Monks in training, you must clarify the nostrils of a patch-robed monk, and then you will finally get it. What are these nostrils of a patch-robed monk?” Then he said, “Mahaprajnaparamita. Today we have a great community work project”. Then he descended from his seat.

The teacher Dogen said, “Clouds and water assembly, you must clarify the nostrils of a patch- robed monk, and then you will finally get it. What are these nostrils of a patch-robed monk? Then Dogen said: Mahaprajnaparamita. What is this Mahaprajnaparamita?

Then Dogen said, “It is carrying water and gathering firewood. What is this carrying water? Those who drink of it all die. What is this gathering wood? Those who bear it have strength.”

Comment

The nostrils of a Zen monk are the Mahaprajnaparamita, since the direct wordless experience in no mind, that is, without defining reality, is the Way. To experience directly and purely through the senses and perceptions without the use of words is the use of Prajna. Hence the pointer “clarifying the nostrils”. These must be empty of perceptions, which points to Samadhi. One could also say that clarifying the nostrils is everyday life meditation.

The answer of Dogen is more concrete compared to that of Yunmen, whose answer is quite abstract since it refers to Mahaprajnaparamita as text. For Dogen it is important that one practices the Mahaprajnaparamita, thus realizing Zen instead of intellectualizing it. Hence he points to carrying water and gathering firewood as Mahaprajnaparamita, since such activity is a natural activity, thus a concrete expression of no-mind or no-word as Mahaprajnaparamita teaches.

The sentence “Those who drink of it all die” then becomes logical. Gathering woods with a “dead” ego is gathering strength. That is the Way. One could also say that living in detachment, no matter circumstances, is the true spirit of a Zen monk. Just do it with clarified nostrils. Just so.

This dharma distinctly confirms that Dogen is sometime even more concrete than the ancient Chinese masters. Dogen endeavors to remove any philosophical pondering to make the Dharma living and actual. Dogen wants Zen to be realized whether sitting, walking or standing, it must be realized as a concrete all-including matter beyond words from moment to moment.

SITTING LIKE A BUDDHA

Meting It Without Recognition

263. Dharma Hall Discourse

I can remember, a monk asked Shishuang[Qingzhu], “How is Buddha nature like empty space?”

Shishuang responded, “When we lie down it’s there, when we sit it’s not there”.

Today I, Eihei, will give you all a comment to break through this statement. What is the meaning of Shishuang’s saying, that it is there, when we lie down? When the jewel wheel of function and turns, we laugh loudly. What is the meaning of Shishuang’s saying that it is not there when we sit? Here we meet without knowing each other. Study this.

Comment

Lying down is a natural activity, with no “intellectual” purpose. Sitting (Zazen), however, aims at enlightenment, it has a meaning, it is also a construction, it is a tool, it is an image of Buddha, in short, sitting is not empty before it is as natural as lying. The story is a pointer to detachment as the way of Zen. The slightest seeking during Zazen will fill up the empty space with desire and karma.

Note

Rinzai Zen does not share this view of sitting as just sitting. There is some controversy between Rinzai and Soto Zen on effort versus detachment. Dogen was strongly opposed to striving in order to reach enlightenment. He emphasized that there was nothing to strive for, since we already are buddhas. At this point Rinzai is more dualistic and less “one” than Dogen.

HAVE FAITH IN MIND

Green Leaves Turn Red

526. Dharma Hall Discourse

You should know that becoming a buddha is not something new or ancient. How could practice-realization be within any boundary. Do not say that from the beginning not a single thing exists. The causes are complete and the results are fulfilled through time. Great assembly, please tell me, why is it like this?

After a pause Dogen said, Opening flowers will unfailing bear the genuine fruit; green leaves meeting autumn immediately turn red.

Comment

Dogen points to the naturalness of awakening. Anything on this planet awakens continually, otherwise there would be no life or death. Dogen indirectly says, that the monks themselves are buddhas, that everything right in front of them is perfect as it is. Practicing Zen, true to the spirit of Buddha-mind, will sooner or later effortlessly open their minds just like “flowers that unfailing open and bear the genuine fruit and like the green leaves meeting autumn immediately will turn red”. Dogen points to “have faith in Buddha mind”. Even the smallest flower has this faith. Don’t doubt, look directly and discern the Buddha of what-is.

TRUE KNOWLEDGE VERSUS SCHOLARLY

Harvesting Practice amid the Rainy Season

325. Dharma Hall Discourse on the First Day of the Fifth Month

When oxhide covers the temple pillars, the temple pillars cry, “Boo boo”. Someone crosses over the bridge: the bridge flows but the water flows not.

Although ancient worthies spoke like this, do people today understand or not? Patch-robed ones drop off body and mind within the fist of ignorant karmic conscienceness. Here at this mountain hut, amid the fifth month, plums, the rain falls. Under the heaven, right now, is harvest season for the new wheat.

Comment

This is certainly not “philosopher” Dogen answering. The sentence “when oxhide covers the temple pillars, the temple pillars cry, ‘Boo boo’” points to the ignorant karmic conscienceness of all kinds of social or religious institutions including those of Zen. Zen too easily becomes a prison of words. The word “oxhide” points to naturalness, and when such direct natural Zen of the ancient worthies comes in contact with institutionalized Zen (the pillars and Patch-robed monks), the latter is revealed as religiours engineers and world-view fabricators, hence their “crying”. The saying is a ridicule of intellectual (talking) Zen. “The bridge flows but the water flows not.” is a pointer and a homage to one of these “natural” Zen worthies namely Fuxi. You can find his famous and beloved poem here:

FUXI’S BRIDGE – FOUR LINES OF POETRY POINTING TO THE CORE OF ZEN

Notes

A monk asked Guizhong Zhichang, “This matter is never ending, how can we take care of it?” Guizhong Zhichang said, “When oxhide cover the temple pillars, the temple pillars cry ‘Boo,boo’”. He continued, “Ordinary people listen and do not hear, but all sages laugh joyfully.”

PRAJNA AND EMPTINESS ARE ONE

A Profusion of Weeds

51. Dharma Hall Discourse

[Fundamentally] all people are fully satisfied, each and every one with wholeness fulfilled. Why are the weeds seven feet deep throughout the Dharma hall? Do you want to understand this situation?

After a pause Dogen said: flowers fall in our attachments, weeds grow following our aversions.

Comment

Dogen says in the Shobogenzo: “The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one. Thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas.

Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.

What Dogen points to, is that monks staying inside their closed world after enlightenment is not living according to the true Buddhist way. The Way is “leaping clear of the many and the one” which points to the ability to live in the absolute within the relative, that is to say, without being caught by Zen or society. Don’t freeze to certain stereotyped roles Dogen says. In stead, remain a common man, a person of no rank, enlightened and true. Being attached to a religious role and to institutions is clinging, hence karma. Being averted to the outside world is also karma. Dogen is speaking about the genuine liberation after enlightenment. Dogen speaks of the total mental liberation from both Zen as well as society through the use of Prajna and discernment. Dogen points to the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) as the true life of a Buddhist after enlightenment, otherwise blossoms fall and weeds spread. Enlightenment is not static, it must be nourished, since it is “living”.

THE RELATIVE WITHIN THE ABSOLUTE AND THE ABSOLUTE WITHIN THE RELATIVE

226. Dharma Hall Discourse

Zhaozhou’s Dog and Dogen’s Cats

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

Zhaozhou said, “Yes.”

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

Zhaozhou said, “No.”

This single story has a truth to be studied. Do you want to thoroughly understand this truth?

After a pause Dogen said: Buddha nature has a nose to grasp, but a dog does not have a horn to [tho hold]. With [Buddha nature] not avoiding entry into a skin-bag, cats give birth to cats.

Comment

This story is on how to discern the relative within the absolute and the absolute within the relative. Buddha-nature is concrete, always here and can be seen but not explained.

When Zhaozhou says yes and no to the same question he points to dualism, since dualism is expressed through the logic of yes or no. If one says yes, one must say no if one wants to eliminate dualism. Zhaozhou tells the monks that the use of words consequently leads to dualism, hence answers based on words will never be valid. They will be choices.

There is only one way to realize the answer and that is through the use of Prajna, that is to say, through the use of detached no-word discernment of what-is. Zhaozhou actually points to the Buddha-nature not through his words but through the use of his voice. The sound of his voice is the Buddha.function, so in reality he says “yes” twice on the two questions. He just uses his voice to confirm that a dog has a Buddha-nature since Zhaozhou has sound and so has a dog. They are different (different forms) yet the same (share Buddha-function). Their Buddha-functions are the absolute and their forms are the relative. The story thus wants us to discern the Buddha, not explain him.

Dogen’s answer is more direct and concrete. “Buddha nature has a nose to grasp” is a pointer to dogs having Buddha mind, since they have a nose by which they can adapt to circumstances (Mind) yet dogs are also relative (karmic) which is expressed with the words “but a dog does not have a horn[to hold]. (that is, they are not buffaloes). This is the relative within the absolute. “With [Buddha nature] not avoiding entry into a skin-bag, cats give birth to cats.” is a pointer to the eternal Buddha mind within cats, that is, to the absolute within the relative. Zhaozhou and Dogen thus points to what Bodhidharma said, “Vast emptiness with nothing sacred in it.

DISCERNING BUDDHA-MIND

Rocks Nod and Sky Vanishes

194. Dharma Hall Discourse

As I remember, a monk asked and ancient worthy [Guizong Daoquan], “Is there Buddha Dharma or not on a steep cliff in the deep mountains?”

The worthy responded, “A large rock is large: a small one is small”.

My later teacher Tiangtong [Rujing] said, “The question about the steep cliff in the deep mountains was answered in terms of large and small rocks. The cliff collapsed, the rocks split, and the empty sky filled with a noisy clamor.”

The teacher Dogen said: Although these two venerable masters said it this way I Eihei, have another utterance to convey. If someone were to ask, “Is there Buddha Dharma or not on a steep cliff in the deep mountains?” I would simply say to him: The lifeless rocks nod their heads again and again.” The empty sky vanishes completely. This [kind of expression] is an affair existing within the realm of buddha ancestors. What is [the reality of] such an affair within the steep cliff in the deep mountains?”

Dogen ponded his staff once, and descended from his seat.

Comment

There are three answers in the story:

The first answer “A large rock is large: a small one is small” of the worthy is a discernment of reality, He gives a non-explanatory answer. It points to the facts just so, the Prajna way. This seeing what-is without words is seeing the Buddha. Large, small, all kind of different forms are manifestations of the Buddha. It is discerning the myriad of things within the wholeness and the wholeness within the myriad of things.

The second answer of Tiangtong is not a discerning answer, since it goes beyond discernment, that is to say, it points to Sunyata, emptiness. “The cliff collapsed, the rocks split, and the empty sky filled with a noisy clamor” points to a complete empty mind experiencing the rocks as the Dharmakaya of suchness. All perceptions have been shattered. Where the answer of the worthy pointed to Prajna, the answer of Tiangtong points to realization of emptiness.

Dogen’s Answer

The teachings of Dogen always points to Buddha-mind as a wholeness, he seldom uses abstract concepts such as emptiness or wisdom. This makes him more difficult to grasp but also more yielding as a Zen Master. Furthermore, Dogen tries to use pointers as concrete as possible so they can be practiced directly since Buddha mind is reality as it is, that is, what we see directly with our own eyes. Thus, reading Dogen is actually reading one’s own face.

The lifeless rocks nod their heads again and again.” “The empty sky vanishes completely” is the answer of Dogen. What he points to, is that everything that surrounds us preaches the Dharma. It is not about rocks or sky, it is about how we discern reality. The rocks nodding is a pointer to the realization of phenomena, to see these, no matter of what form they are, as Mind. Nodding is a hint to “living” thus Dogen removes thoughts about rocks as being dead objects.”The empty sky that vanishes” is oneself disappearing, it thus points to emptiness. The point of Dogen is, that when there is no self, all phenomena turn “living” (nodding), since there are no thoughts left to make objects out of what one experiences. The true Buddha Dharma is everywhere, we just have to learn to discern it through emptiness and living awareness.

“What is [the reality of] such an affair within the steep cliff in the deep mountains?” Dogen’s answer is to strike his his staff once, thus pointing to the reality of:

1. Emptiness. There is nothing between the Dogen and the staff
2. Mind. The sound of the staff is realized (recognized) immediately.
3. Form as Buddha:The staff thus manifests itself as living not as an object.

When there is emptiness, there is Mind and when there is Mind, reality is awakened. Dogen makes dead rocks and staffs alive. But it takes hard practice to reach this living “realm”.

Dogen’s teaching emphasizes that outside is inside and inside is outside. There must be no dualism between subjective and objective. Practicing Zen must be practicing Buddha-mind. One has to act like a Buddha, hence his focus on Zazen and the everyday life.Thoughts in Zen are no more than the activity of forms. How can so many see him as a philosopher? He is the opposite, since he teaches us to give up words and to live Zen.

SUCHNESS (TATHATA)

The Undeceiving Mirror

411. Dharma Hall Discourse

I can remember a monk asked Nanyue, “If the mirror is cast into an image, to where does the brightness return?”

Nanyue said, “Great worthy, your face before you left home, to where has it returned?”

The monk said, “After the image is completed, why does it not reflect and illuminate?”

Nanyue said, “Although it does not reflect and illuminate, it does not deceive at all.”

Dogen:

Twenty years ago, the situation of this story first pierced my ears. Since I realized its power, I have grasped it in my fist and never let it go. This mountain monk has a modest mountain verse.

After a pause Dogen said:

How can the mirror of suchness be cast
into ten thousand images?
The pure brightness has never been shattered.
Refined for ten thousand years,
melted down a hundred thousand times.
How could it create even a bit of deception?

Comment

The sentences “If the mirror is cast into an image”, “to where does the brightness return?” are not Zen. There is no “mirror”, nothing is “cast”, there is no “image” and there is no “brightness”. All these words are fabricated thought-objects. There is only Buddha-mind. The mirror is the Dharmakaya (emptiness) but this emptiness is not a mirror and not a state, but present from moment to moment when there is nothing between the observer and the observed.

The Dharmakaya is one’s own face since this face is what-is, right in front of one’s eyes, that is to say, when there is no split between oneself and the environment. Being aware of this wholeness of “I” and reality is Mind and this pure, non-divided Mind is the true non-deceptive brightness, Brightness is awareness. Deception can only take place when there are thoughts, hence pure Mind can never create deception. The point of the story is, when one looks for brightness it disappears, when one trust Mind, the brightness will come by itself as realization. The Dogen poem points to “faith in Mind”.

This spirit of simplicity can be seen in one version of Hui-neng’s rejoinder to Shen-hsiu:

Bodhi originally is no tree
Nor the mirror a stand
Buddha-nature is always pure and clear
Whence can the dust come?

Dogen is a true master of Zen. There is no philosophy whatsoever in these discourses, since they are all direct pointers to what-is. Dogen does not want to construct a Buddhist realm, instead he tries to convey a Buddhist view on reality as it is so it can be practiced. He is not a theorist, he is first and foremost a Zen master conveying Mind-only as efficiently as he is capable of. Dogen’s Zen is, like all Zen master’s, upayic, not theoretical since he wants us to grasp and practice Zen intuitively not to theorize upon it.

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Description
日本語: 美濃国養老の滝(みのこくようろうのたき)
Date
Source
http://www.mainichi-art.co.jp/pages/arcadelinks/hokusai-taki/taki.html
Author
毎日アート出版株式会社
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Koans and the sayings of the ancient Zen masters are tools for the perfection of Prajna wisdom and they are all pointing to one essential thing and that is Buddha-mind. An important concept to understand if one wants to grasp these sayings and koans is the concept of “discernment” (wu-chu in Chinese).

Discernment is one of the very few abstract concepts used in Zen but it is an important key to grasp if one wants to understand Buddha-mind conceptually. It is used by the Zen masters to maintain their own awareness as well as to convey their teachings.

A koan for instance is never meant to be explained. They must be discerned, that is seen directly with the eyes of Buddha-mind. Therefore koans are concrete pointers on how and what to see directly. An important point therefore is not to stay inside the koan but to use the koan as a pointer to the outside, to reality as-is. It is not “wisdom literature” but transmitting Buddha-pointers to discern what-is, not to pondering. Koans are Buddhist seeing-teachers. They are direct teachers not indirect as the sutras.

So preliminary to the three koans below the page, here is a basic analysis of Zen’s “discernment” which is just another name for Prajna-wisdom.

1. The Sambogakaya (discerning unity)

Tall yet not tall

No “tall” without “low” no “low” without “tall. Tall and low is dependent on each other. Seeing this directly is seeing relativity of “things”.

2. The Dharmakaya (discerning emptiness)

Empty yet not empty.

No form without emptiness, since form cannot stand alone. No emptiness without form since emptiness cannot stand alone. They are different yet the same. Therefore form is emptiness and emptiness is form.Seeing this directly is seeing relativity of form and emptiness.

3. The Nirmanakaya (discerning flow)

Is yet is not

No appearance without disappearance, no disappearance without appearance. Coming and going is what-is. Life is not static. Seeing this directly is seeing relativity of activity.

From abstract description to concrete pointing

The above analysis is abstract but a good underpinning of how to see what-is. For instance:

Sambogakaya: When one sees a vast mountain one also sees all the small mountains.(Mountains are mountains, not vast, not small)

Dharmakaya: Sitting in complete stillness in no-mind is being empty yet not empty.(body is emptiness, emptiness is body:nothing between the body and universe)

Nirmanakaya: When one hears a song of the bird one hears the silence. (All songs, all activities always die)

*

Such ways of experiencing reality is beyond words because it is beyond relativity, it reaches the absolute. It generates spirituality. That which conveys this spirituality is the “feeling” of relativity where everything is experience as is, yet is not. This “is-is not” is the flow of moments. Nothing in Zen’s view is static and independent. Not even mountains, since they are in unity with the turning wheel.

Discernment thus conveys an understanding of ABSOLUTE relativity. Cause and effect explanations lead to a SELECTED relative understanding, based on choose and pick explanations. For Zen cause and effect are discerned as different yet the same since all things operate simultaneously. When a flower blooms, the whole universe blooms since the universe and the flower are one. When I walk, the mountain walks since we are one. Zen cuts all relativity off, there is no I or mountain only what-is in the now. The three Kayas experienced as one (Mind) is the experience of Nirvana

*

The following three koans covers these three ways of discerning knowing. The Koans can be ordered as Hosshin (Dharmakaya) Kikan (Nirmanakaya) and Gonsen (Sambogakaya)

DISCERNING EMPTINESS

Zen koan on the Dharmakaya

CASE 38 Rinzai’s True Man

Preface to the assembly

Taking a thief for a son, perceiving a servant as master. A broken wooden ladle – how can this be the dried skull of an Ancestor? A donkey saddle cannot be the lower jaw of a grandfather. When the land is split up and the thatch roof is partitioned, how do we distinguish the master?

Main Case

Attention: Rinzai addressed the assembly saying, “There is a true person of no rank. He is always leaving and entering the gates of your face. You beginners have not witnessed him: Look! Look!” Thereupon, a monk asked, “How about this true man of no rank?” Rinzai got down from the seat and grabbed him. The monk hesitated, and Rinzai pushed him away. saying, “This true man of no rank, what a shit-stick he is”!

Appreciatory Verse

Delusion and enlightenment are mutually opposed.
Subtly conveyed it’s simple:
In spring, the hundred flowers bloom by a zephyr.
In strength, nine oxen are turned about with a jerk.
It’s hopeless to dig a hole in the mud – it won’t stay open.
Clearly the sweet spring’s eye has been closed
Suddenly dash out and it freely gushes forth.

Master Tendo added “Danger”.

Comment

I’ll let Caushan explain:

Yunmen’s Place of Great Intimacy

217, Dharma Hall Discourse

I can remember Yunmen asked Caoshan, “Why don’t we know that there is a place of great intimacy?”

Coashan said, “Just because it is greatly intimate, we do not know it is there”.

Comment

The monk does not realize that he, himself, is this true man of no rank, that is to say, the Buddha. We are all Buddhas, we just have to realize this “inner Buddha”. The monks see Buddha outside Mind, as an image, hence the scolding by Rinzai. The preface points to the entangled world of words. A quite thought-less mind until there is nothing between the body and the universe is all it takes to make the Dharmakaya of Buddha.Mind appear.

DISCERNING CHANGE OR FLOW

Zen koan on the Nirmanakaya

CASE 39 Joshu’ Bowl Washing

Preface to the assembly

When food comes, fill the mouth. When sleep comes close the eyes. When washing your face, you rub your nose. When taking off straw sandals, you touch your feet. At such times, if you miss the point, take a light and search hard the depths of the night. How will you meet this?

Main Case

Attention: A monk asked Joshu, “Your student has just entered the monastery. Please, Master instruct me”. Joshu said, “Did you finish your rice gruel?” The monk replied, “I have finished eating”. Joshu remarked, “Then wash your bowls”.

Appreciatory Verse

When the gruel finished, have him wash the bowl.
Suddenly the mind-ground naturally meets itself.
Right then the monastery’s guest is replete.
Tell me: Is any enlightenment in there or not?

Comment

Eating, washing, or any activity coming naturally by itself, and is intuitively grasped immediately, is the Nirmanakaya. Eating and washing the bowls are not different from a bird singing, or a river streaming. It is the natural “intelligent light” (Mind or Tao) with its spontaneous adaption to the flow of life. The sun rises, the sun goes down, there is birth there is death. This is also eating and washing the bowls. We just cannot see it, because of our interpretations, our relative constructions. Cut off all relativity and the absolute will opens by itself and show us, that one activity is all activities and all activities are one activity. That is the Nirmanakaya aspect of Mind. It is the function of Buddha.

DISCERNING ONENESS

Zen Koan on the Sambogakaya and Nirvana

CASE 31 – Free Standing Pillar

Preface to the assembly

The sole function of the ultimate: a crane soars in the firmament. The sole path of the evident: the falcon’s already passed Korea. Your eye may be a shooting star; still your mouth resembles a bent-down carrying pole. Tell me: What sort of Zen points to this?

Main Case

Attention: Ummon addressed the assembly. “The old Buddha and the free-standing pillar are mingled together. What level of activity is this?” The assembly said nothing. So Ummon himself answered. “In the South Mountain clouds rise. In the North Mountain, rain falls”.

Appreciatory Verse

The one way of divine light: it’s never been concealed. Transcending relative views, it’s affirmed without affirmation. Going beyond commonsense thought, it’s adequate without adequacy. The pollen of cliff flowers – hives of bees become honey. The nutrients of wild grasses – musk deer make their scent. Whatever you touch is brilliantly magnificent.

Comment

Ummon asks, “What level of activity is this?” and the answer is Nirvana. The pillar (what-is) stands on no firm ground since reality is not a thing, it has no substance. Mountains are mountains, just so, as they appear, not vast, not small, rivers are floating yet not “floating”, birth is death and death is birth, sound and silence are one. The koan points to the discernment-principle of “different yet the same”, that is to the relative within the absolute and the absolute within the relative. To reach this reality is to reach the other shore, “where water is still yet flows”. It is Nirvana. It is beyond Sambogakaya (enlightenment), it is liberation from all relativity. (Samsara)

In the South Mountain clouds rise. In the North Mountain, rain falls. This is seeing difference within sameness and this way of seeing is conveyed by detached discernment: JUST SO. There IS no difference between clouds and rain or North and South, WE discriminate because we try to explain things hence drive ourselves out of Nirvana. Clouds and rain are different yet the same, they are functioning manifestations of the wholeness. As Zen Master Huang-po says:

The essential Buddha-substance is a perfect whole, without superfluity or lack. It permeates the six states of existence and yet it is everywhere perfectly whole Thus, every single one of the myriads of phenomena in the universe is the Buddha(Absolute).

Nothing is Hidden

53. Dharma Hall Discourse

Directly it is said that not a single thing exists, and yet we see in the entire universe nothing has ever been hidden.

Dogen descend from the seat.

*

An example from a text of Dogen below demonstrates how Zen masters use discernment and not discriminating explanations when they point to reality as a functioning whole, where cause and effect have a playing, spontaneous character instead of a relative mechanical “scientific” one.

To form clouds and to create rain is the activity of plum blossoms. The movement of clouds and the movement of rains are a thousand shades and myriad forms, a thousand merits and myriad characteristics of plum blossoms. Throughout past and present is plum blossoms; plum blossoms are called past and present.

Dogen here points to the wheel of Samsara, where life is created from moment to moment and where everything on this earth is a co-creator of the universe from moment to moment operating simultaneously. Existence is not existence, it is birth and death, it is dynamic not static. It is the living Buddha “guiding” the relativity within the whole and the whole within relativity.

Dogen only discerns what one can see directly, he never explains. For instance “To form clouds and to create rain is the activity of plum blossoms” is a pure pointer to cause and effect grasped as a simultaneously phenomena just so. No reason to ponder whether the rain or the plum blossoms come first in the casual chain. That would be a construction of theory. Zen sees intuitively and directly by the way of discernment not explanation. In that way Dogen awakens plum blossoms, thus demonstrating they are buddhas.

The point is, when relativity is cut off, that is to say, when there is no classifications, no judgements, no comparison, no discriminations, in short, when conditioning thoughts and feelings have disappeared, then there is purity and all what is left is JUST THAT. A great example of how Zen masters teach their monks the difference between Nirvana and Samsara through discernment without entangling explanations is this discourse by Dogen:

A Golden Lotus

405. Dharma Hall Discourse

Atop Mount Wutai, the clouds are making steamed rice; below the steps to the Buddha hall, a dog urinates up toward the heavens. At the top of the flagpole dumplings are cooking; three monkeys are sorting coins in the night”.

The teacher Dogen said, “If you face this saying and can clearly comprehend, you are like the black dragon, who can create clouds and rain wherever it goes. Otherwise, if it is not like this, your are still delighted by the lotus in the cold of December. Study this.

Such a saying is surprisingly easy to grasp when it is discerned. The first three lines are pointers to Nirvana, the last sentence points to Samsara. The clouds steaming the rice, the dog urinating, and the three dumplings cooking are the natural activities of the Buddha. Rain, steam, urine, cooking, food are all different yet the same. They are manifestations of eternal buddha-functions, yet distinct in their manifestations. The last sentence “sorting coins in the night” is a pointer to the activity of the “dark” Samsara. Sorting coins points to the greed, attachment and discrimination among the unenlightened (the monkeys). The discourse is a short instruction on how to discern the absolute from the relative.

However what I write is explanation, which goes against the spirit of Zen. It is much much better to read and practice the sayings directly so they can be grasped intuitively and discernment is a great mediator that can pave the way from explanation to direct grasping of the sayings. As Dogen says:

Those who are truly endowed with both practice and discernment are called ancestral teachers. What is called practice is the intimate practice of the ancestral school. What is called discernment is the discerning understanding of the ancestral school.

Hakuin says:

One could say that knowing by way of discernment is like the flowers of complete awakening.

If you want to reach this realm. just refine your subtle, discerning knowledge through the discerning and difficult to pass-through koans, smelting and forging hundreds of times, over and over.

If you do not regress in your examination of the sayings of the ancients, someday you may come to know this bit of wonder.

Many Zennists seem to explain the moon away, not being aware that Zen is about discerning reality with four aspects of Buddha-mind. Take for example a Zen Masters like Dogen. The teaching of this unique Japanese master is actually nearly intellectualized away. Westerners see Dogen as a great philosopher who has an aversion to koans. Nothing could be further from the truth. His whole teaching is based upon koans and sayings of the ancient Chinese masters. Dogen is completely loyal to pure non-intellectual Zen and he is not a Buddhist philosopher. He is a preacher of the One Dharma. His writings and teaching style is based on discernment not on theory. Here is a short example of a Chinese saying typically used by Dogen. The saying is incredible sharp, succinct and can only be grasped with discernment, that is to say, with Buddha-mind. Such sayings lie behind the teachings of Dogen:

I rember that Yunju asked Xuefeng, “Has the snow outside the gate melted or not?”

Xuefeng said, “Not a single flake exists, how can it melt?”

Yunju said, “It’s melted”.

The saying is pointing to “emptiness is relativity” not a “state”. Hence the Dharmakay is empty yet not empty.

Note

Snow has no intrinsic nature. It is dependent on environemt, thus it is empty. It comes and goes. It is flowing since it melts.

As one can see there are no explanations of relativity as emptiness, only concrete discernment and logic. The answer “It’s melted” points to the emptiness of relativity. That is the way of Zen.

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nglish: Peonies and Daffodils, Wu Changshuo, Qing Dynasty, China, Jilin Provincial Museum
Date
1923
Source
http://www.tubaba.com/art/uploadfile/200705/20070523095464916.jpg
Author
Wu Changshuo
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The Japanese Zen master Bassui Tokusho, whose teachings are not only exceptional pure and deep but actually among the best explanatory Zen teachings due to his eloquent and poetic style has a somewhat clear description of what the experience of a satori is.

Normally, explaining Zen always somehow destroys the no-meaning of Zen, but Bassui really tackles the difficult task of conveying insight into the corners of satori via his exegesis. In some ways he resembles Zen master Hui-neng as regards clarity and simplicity but combines the clarity of Hui-neng with a living and poetic style of teaching.

Bassui also demonstrates how Zen masters consequently modify more or less philosophical Mahayana doctrines into pure phenomenology, that is to say, into the concept of Mind. Bassui transforms the philosophical notion of the “supernatural powers of the Buddha” into a Zen description of the illumination of satori, since the core of Zen is the Trikaya, intuitive knowledge or Mind not ideas of external of powers.

A formidable mondo from Joshu points to Zen’s rejection of external, idealistic doctrines about supernatural powers; it goes like this:

A monk asked, “T ‘a-erh San-tsang (Daiji Sanzo) tried to find the Natural Teacher three times, but couldn’t see him. It is not clear to me, where was the Natural Teacher?”

The master said, “In Sang-tsang’s nose”

Note

T ‘a-erh San-tsang was a monk who had come from India and was proficient in the three classes of scriptures (San-tsang) and reputed to have the power to read minds. Though he went to visit Nan-yang Hui-chung (Nanyo Echo), the National Teacher, he couldn’t penetrate his mind.

Comment

A person penetrating the mind of another is of cause an impossibility. The idea goes totally against Zen since it is a dual construction.There are no individual minds in Zen, hence it is not possible for San-tsang to carry out this mind-reading. Nan-yang Hui-chung however, knows how to do it since he knows that his own original mind is the same as the original mind of San-tsang because there is only One Mind.

To understand the logic of the “Mind reading” of the National Teacher one must recognize (realize) what Mind is:

1. First one has to grasp what emptiness is. It is not “emptiness”. True emptiness is not an idea but “not a thing”. This is demonstrated by the Zen masters through for instance twisting the nose of a monk. This is realizing emptiness, not talking about it, since there is nothing between the master and the monk.

2. This “not a thing” between the master and the monk conveys a  directly experience of  what-is, namely the nose as form, not as a nose. This is realizing what-is since the nose is what-is in the moment. The nose is thus realized intuitively not talked about.

3. The pain of the nose is the function of the nose. The nose is realized through its function. This is realization of flow or change. The main point is that realizing the nose is realizing its “aliveness”, that is, its pain, its smelling ability, its joy, its dissatisfaction, its expectations etc. This is realizing the Mind of the nose and hence one’s OWN mind.

Thus realizing emptiness, form and function of what-is in a flash is satori since it is beyond words. It is:

Earth, mountains, rivers – hidden in this nothingness.
In this nothingness – earth, mountains, rivers revealed.
Spring flowers, winter snows:
There’s no being or non-being, nor denial itself.

- Saisho (circa 1490) Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, p.32 Translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

Note on the Poem

L1. emptiness
L2.form
L.3 function
L.4.satori

What Joshu points to is that since we all share this Mind, having realized one’s nose is the realization of any other nose. The National Teacher is “In Sang-tsang’s nose” because he knows the Mind of Sang-tsang. Neither Sang-tsang nor the National Teachers have supernatural powers. What they have is the illuminating Buddha-mind but only the National Teacher knows it. He is the true “mind-reader”.

Dogen is eminent as a interpreter of awakening, since he is incredible gifted both as a Zen master but also as a poet. All his poems are Mind-poems which, through his use of the Zen concept of differentiation (wu-shieh in Chinese), convey pointers to enlightenment. Many see Dogen as a philosopher but he is actually not a philosopher, he is a One-Vehicle Dharma teacher and poet pointing to the One Mind. Not a word of Dogen is outside Mind, since he is a Zen Buddhist and his writings aim at strengthening our intuition not our concepts as he formulates it here:

When you investigate the flowing of a handful of water and the non-flowing of it, full mastery of all things is immediately present.

What Dogen says is actually a pointer to satori since he points to the Nirmanakaya (flowing) within the Dharmakaya (non-flowing) and the energy or spirituality within this moving/not-moving. This within-ness, is the Sambogakaya, the creative potential, which awakens water either to flow or not to flow.

It is also expressed here in this little mondo:

A monk asked, “What is the phrase that penetrates the dharmakaya?”

Yuanmi said, “A three-foot staff stirs the Yellow River”.

Realizing such Buddha-functions intuitively is awakening to not only what one’s own Mind “is” but to the Mind of everything since there is only one Mind. There is no difference between these natural functions and human thoughts, hence the word Mind. An experience of such a personal and environmental unity is satori.

As for useful concepts underpinning a more systematic interpretation of satori, there is Buddha-mind as defined by the Trikaya. Satori is actually a realization of Buddha-mind/Trikaya, hence it is possible to systematize the experience which may convey a better grasp of the nature of enlightenment. The Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng is very clear on what the basis of a satori is. It is first and foremost universal all-including knowledge:

“The knowledge like a mirror is purity of nature (the Dharmakaya,emptiness)

The knowledge of essential quality is mind without sickness (Sambogakaya, mind-essence)

The subtle observing knowledge sees without effort (Prajna wisdom, no relativity)

The knowledge of practicalities is the same as the mirror (the Nirmanakaya, change, function)

Five and eight, six and seven, transform in effect and cause (relativity, conditioning, precepts)

If you just use names and words, there’s no reality: (names, words create illusions)

If you do not keep feelings on the transformation. (detachment)

You’ll flourish and be ever in the dragon stability” (satori)

I have used the above verse of Hui-neng to systematize the Dogen poems and the short satori descriptions by Bassui to give an oversight and insight of a satori:

Clairvoyance

Hui-neng:

“The knowledge like a mirror is purity of nature (the Dharmakaya,emptiness)

Dogen:

In response to inspector Wang’s poem

Speech and silence – absolutely the same: extremely subtle and profound.
A good remedy was prescribed a long time ago.
Piercing the sky, embracing the earth – no end to it.
An immense escarpment glowing with mysterious light.

Bassui:

This infinite light shines of its own accord and watches over all. It is nothingness; it is wonder. It is silence: it illuminates. Though forms can bee seen, one is not deluded by them. This is CLAIRVOYENCE.

Notes on the Dogen Poem

line 1: Dharmakaya, emptiness
line 2: Meditation
line 3: Mind
line 4: The enlightenment of Buddha (CLAIRVOYENCE)

Clairaudience

Hui-neng

“The knowledge like a mirror is purity of nature (the Dharmakaya,emptiness)

Dogen

This slowly drifting clouds are pitiful.
What dreamwalkers men become.
Awakened I hear the one true thing -
Black rain on the roof of Fukakusa Temple.

Bassui:

Buddha-nature is pure and unstained. When sounds are heard through the ears, the echo of vibrations is clearly discerned, and yet there is no dependence on discriminating thoughts. This is called CLAIRAUDIENCE.

Notes on the Dogen Poem

l.1. Cloud gazers
l.2. illusions
l.3. enlightenment
l.4. Nirmanakaya, pure sound of Buddha (CLAIRAUDIENCE)

Mind-reading

Hui-neng

The knowledge of essential quality is mind without sickness (Sambogakaya, mind-essence)

Dogen:

Given to courier Nan

An explosive shout, cracks the great empty sky.
Immediately clear self-understanding.
Swallow up buddhas and ancestors of the past.
Without following other, realize complete penetration.

Bassui:

When you clearly understand the nature of your own mind, you will realize the oneness of the minds of the buddhas of the three worlds, the ancestors, and ordinary people of this world, and heavenly beings of other worlds. This is the power of MIND-READING.

Notes on the Dogen Poem

L1. The Nirmanakaya, change, suchness, function.
L2. The Sambogakaya Enlightenment in a flash, bliss body.
L.3. Word-less understanding of the universal mind, words of buddhas and
ancestors forgotten: universal mind.( MIND-READING)
L. 4. liberation from any conditioning.

Prajna

Hui-neng

The subtle observing knowledge sees without effort (Prajna wisdom, no relativity)

Dogen:

During Seclusion

All that’s visible springs from causes intimate to you.
While walking, sitting, lying down, the body itself is complete truth.
If someone asks the inner meaning of this;
“Inside the treasure of the dharma eye a single grain of dust”.

Bassui:

When you understand the nature of your own mind, delusions will turn into wisdom. Because BODHI is your original inherent nature it transcends delusions and enlightenment. You won’t exist among saints and sinners and won’t be stained by various phenomena. This is the power to stop deluded thoughts.(PRAJNA)

Notes on the Dogen Poem

L1. Seeing in suchness, relativity cut off.
L2. Activities of the Buddha. Absolute activities, not relative.
L3.-
L4. The relative within the absolute, the absolute within the relative. Buddha is here. Nothing outside Mind. No Prajna without something to cut off (relativity)

Power To Fly Through Air

Hui-neng

The knowledge of practicality (functionality) is the same as the mirror (the Nirmanakaya, change, function)

Dogen:

The point of zazen, after Zen master Hongzhi

The hub of buddha’s activity,
the turning of ancestor’s hub -
it moves along with your non-thinking
and is completed in the realm of non-emerging.
As it moves along with your non-thinking.
Its appearance is immediate.
As it is completed in the realm of nonmerging
completeness itself is realization.
If its appearance is immediate
you have no defilement.
When completeness is realization
you stay in neither the general nor the particular.
If you have immediacy without defilement
immediacy is “dropping away” with no obstacles.
Realization, neither general nor particular
is effort without desire.
Clear way all the way to the bottom;
a fish swims like a fish.
Vast sky transparent throughout;
a bird flies like a bird.

Bassui:

When you understand the nature of your own mind, it will thoroughly light up the dark cave of ignorance and the original natural beauty will manifest. In an instant you will pass through the ten directions without stopping in the blue sky. This is your inherent nature’s true POWER TO FLY THROUGH AIR.

Notes on the Dogen Poem

The power or energy of Mind, Intuitively knowing the “know how”- principle of eternal creation of momentary forms.

Knowing Past Lives

Hui-neng

If you just use names and words, there’s no reality: (names, words create illusions)

If you do not keep feelings on the transformation. (detachment)

You’ll flourish and be ever in the dragon stability” (dragons stability = the stability of a buddha)

Dogen:

The Body born before the parents
The village I finally reach
deeper than the deep mountains
indeed!
the capital
where I used to live!

Bassui:

From the moment you realize your inherent nature, your mind will penetrate through aeons of emptiness that precede creation through to the endless future. Clear and independent, it will not attach to the changing phenomena of life and death, past and future, but will remain constant without any obstructing doubts. This is the power of KNOWING PAST LIVES.

Notes on the Dogen Poem

L1. Emptiness
L1. Realization/Satori
L2. Beyond measurement
L 3. Suddenly knowing
L.4. The eternal home
L.4. Past life (all life in eternity)

Comments on Zen and Scholarly Buddhism

To grasp what satori means we must see all phenomena as the Trikaya, that is, with our intuitive mind. We must see the emptiness of the phenomena, the spirituality and the manifestation of change. Seeing these three aspects as one in suchness, in a flash, is experiencing or rather uniting with the universal reality which is our own Mind.

A satori mirrors that Mind is the world and the world is Mind. Hence, birds flying are your own thoughts flying, the vast forest is your own empty sitting, the cry of the heron is your own voice. The storm arising is your own walking, the disappearance of the clouds are your own forgotten thoughts. We are not independent from what-is. We are no more than momentary what-is of emptiness, change and intuitive (spiritual) energy. One could say we are situations reflecting all other situations in the universe, different yet the same.

Dogen says:

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking.

Comment

Mountains walking and human walking are the same since walking is the Nirmanakaya body of Buddha (change, flow). Mountains always move (walk) due to the perpetual creation of reality which is the Nirmanakaya.

For Zen, Mind is one. There is no “holy Mind” or “secular Mind”. In a way we all make use of Buddha-mind in our daily lives, because we don’t analyze or interpret our thoughts and doings, we act naturally by using our intuition or Mind. The everyday is in a way full of small awakenings apart from we don’t notice it, hence Zen’s view of the importance of “everyday life” which are seen as the first step towards enlightenment. The only difference between the every day Mind and the Satori mind is actually the depth of non-verbal awareness as expressed by Bankei:

“If a gong rings outside the temple, you know it’s a gong, if a drum sounds, you know it’s a drum. Your distinguishing everything you see and hear like this, without producing a single thought is the marvelously illuminating dynamic function, the Buddha Mind is unborn.”

The beauty of Zen is it’s systematic teaching and practice of UNIVERSAL INTUITION. Other forms of Buddhism too easily lead us away from wordless intuitive understanding due to the emphasis on sutra reading. Reality seems cut off when one attains a Buddhist world view constructed by doctrines. Buddhism becomes reality, not what it points to namely Buddha-Mind. As formulated below by Japanese Poet and Zen master Ikkyu:

Studying texts and stiff meditation can make
you loose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be
an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in
and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs
night after night.

And by this mondo where inside the room is the study of scripture, far away from what-is; a small world of abstractions.

A monk asked Xuefeng, “Is the teaching of our ancestors the same as the scriptural teaching or not?”

Xuefeng said, “The thunder sounds and the earth shakes. Inside the room nothing is heard.”

Xuefeng also said, “Why do you go on pilgrimage?”

Comment

Why go on pilgrimage when the mystery is right here?

It is, at least for me, a bit puzzling how simple Zen actually is and how complicated we tend to grasp it. In reality there are only three aspects that must be grasped to get hold on the innocent beauty of Zen:

1. Emptiness
2. Realization
3.appearance

That’s it. One can nearly see the core:

Forms appear from emptiness through realization/spirituality and manifest their Buddha-nature in suchness. The empty flower knows when and how to realize and manifest itself when spring arrives. So grasping the pain of the nose is grasping what-is.

Zen is all-including simplicity with just three Trikaya aspects that is, the body of Buddha. If Zen didn’t had this simplicity, knowing by intuition would be impossible. This all-including approach actually generates Zen phrases very easily. Here are some heuretic examples.( I’m not trying to be a poet)

The pain of the nose, are the songs of the birds, the sound of the pines and the walking of the mountains.(the function of Buddha).

Sitting is the empty sky, the stillness of the forest and the quite bird.( the emptiness of Buddha)

The mountain dances, the river sings and the pines bow, the clouds are painting the vast sky. (the bliss of Buddha, joyful energy)

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Image source

English: Describing the Doctrine Under a Tree, color on silk, 139 x 101.7 cm. The image was discovered at Dun Huang. Located at the British Museum Department of Asia.
中文: 樹下說法圖 – 絹本設色 – 纵139厘米 横101.7厘米 發現在敦煌. 大英博物館
Date
8th century
Source
Zhongguo gu dai shu hua jian ding zu (中国古代书画鑑定组). 1997. Zhongguo hui hua quan ji (中国绘画全集). Zhongguo mei shu fen lei quan ji. Beijing: Wen wu chu ban she. Volume 1.
Author
anonymous
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The Zen aversion towards words is for example clear cut in this short mondo:

A monk asked, “What are honest words?”

The master said, “Eat an iron stick!”

The point is: only when words convey no-meaning, nonsense, are they true. Words and concept are illusions. True words are sounds. They are MU as Joshu says.

The problem with doctrines and instructive information is that they CREATE a reality of their own and easily turn Zen into something theoretical, thus making buddhists dependent on the intellect which is totally contradictory to the goal of Buddhism which is the liberation from reason. Here expressed by the flamboyant Zen master Lin-chi:

“But students don’t push to the end. Because they seize on words and phrases and let words like common mortal or sage obstruct them, this blinds their eyes to the Way and they cannot perceive it clearly. Things like the twelve divisions of the scriptures all speak of surface or external matters. But students don’t realize this and immediately form their understanding on the basis of such surface and external words and phrases. All this is just depending on something and whoever does that falls into the realm of cause and effect and hasn’t yet escaped the threefold world of birth and death.”

Lin-chi

To hold that the world is eternal or to hold that it is not, or to agree to any other of the propositions you adduce, Vaccha, is the jungle of theorizing, the wilderness of theorizing, the tangle of theorizing, the bondage of theorizing and the shackles of theorizing attended by ill, distress, perturbation and fever; it conduces not to detachment, passionlessness, tranquility, peace, to knowledge of wisdom of Nirvana. This is the danger I perceive in these views which makes me discard them all.

Buddha – Majjh. N

The aversion of Zen towards this intellectualism lies behind the Zen concept of “living words”. The more abstract concepts become, the less concrete or “alive” they become as pointers. But life is concrete not abstract, so to solve this problem of lofty conceptual entanglement Chinese Zen turned to a method of conveying Buddhist scriptures to concrete Zen sayings and later koans, thus making the doctrines “vital” so they could be grasped more directly instead of intellectually.

The teaching therefore became increasingly based upon the minds of the ancient masters, that is to say, their sayings. Thus Zen actualized the Mahayana doctrines, that is, made them “breathe”. Chinese Zen conveyed the theoretical doctrines to concrete practice and pointing. Enlightenment not scholarship had first priority. Zen Doers not talkers became the credo.

In reality the only fruitful theoretical doctrine of Zen is the Trikaya (Buddha-mind), since the Trikaya, that is to say, the Dharmakaya, Sambogakaya and Nirmanakaya are the key concepts necessary to have knowledge of in order to to grasp the sayings of the ancients and the koans. Knowing and practicing Buddha-mind is the essential key to enlightenment and most Zen masters (particularly Rinzai) advocate to read Sutras and Buddhist scriptures AFTER enlightenment not before.

However, “the Three Bodies of the Buddha” from the point of view of Zen Buddhist thought are not to be taken as absolute, literal, or materialistic; they are expedient means that “are merely names or props” and only the play of light and shadow of the mind.

In the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Chan Master Hui-neng describes the SAMBOGHAKAYA as a state in which the practitioner continually and naturally produces good thoughts:

“Think not of the past but of the future. Constantly maintain the future thoughts to be good. This is what we call the Sambogakāya. “Just one single evil thought could destroy the good karma that has continued for one thousand years; and just one single good thought in turn could destroy the evil karma that has lived for one thousand years. “If the future thoughts are always good, you may call this the Sambogakāya. The discriminative thinking arising from the DHARMAKāYA (法身↔fashen “Truth body”) is called the NIRMANAKāYA (化身↔huashen “transformation body”). The successive thoughts that forever involve good are thus the Sambogakāya.”

With reference to Hui-neng it is possible to describe the core of the Trikaya concept (Buddha-mind) as:

1. The Dharmakaya = pure emptiness

2. The Sambogakaya = pure spirituality (or satori)

3. The Nirmanakaya = pure flow of concrete manifestations.

One can find at least one of these aspects in any Zen saying or koan. Sometimes all three. I have written “pure” thus pointing to the Trikaya as being “a pure experience of reality”. “Mind-only” is not a philosophy but a phenomenological pointer to how to reach the absolute, the “faceless Buddha”.

If one always have these three aspects in mind, Zen becomes self-evident. Let me give an example: Karma is just a distortion of the Sambogakaya, since attaching thoughts or feelings to pure spirituality covers Mind thus turns it away from transparent light to illusionary darkness. Hence you can actually see and control you own karma by dropping your thoughts and feelings or look forward as Hui-neng says.

Collection of Zen Sayings and Stories Conveying the Buddha (Trikaya)

Pointer to Mind-only as the only doctrine of Zen:

A monk asked” From long ago until now, it has been said that “mind is Buddha”. Will you allow me to discuss ‘not mind’ or not?”

The master said, “Setting aside mind what is there to discuss?”

*

Here is a mondo by Chao-chou which shows that the talk of the ancient Zen masters is always “a pointing language ” of Mind-only not a language of explanation. Their language is pure “One Vehicle Dharmatalk” that never tries to explain things but points to what-is. In the mondo below Chao-chou speaks “Trikaya-language” .

A monk asked, “I’ve heard that you met intimately with Nan-ch’uan (Nansen), is it not so?”

The master said, “In the province of Chen, large radishes are produced.”

Comment

This is the (beautiful) answer of a true Zen master. Chao-chou says yes to the answer by pointing to the Nirmanakaya. The radishes of Chen were famous for their quality and so is Nan-ch’uan. Nan-ch’uan and the radishes are different yet the same (Dharmakaya) and they both manifest the supreme function of the Buddha (Nirmanakaya). Supreme Radishes and supreme Zen masters are buddhas. Chao-cho actually says that he met the Buddha Nan-ch’uan.

Without any knowledge of Mind (Trikaya) the answer of Chao-chou would be incomprehensible or perceived as enigmatic or maybe as so-called “profound” but the mondo just demonstrates clear logical Zen talk based on the Trikaya.

*

Since not only Zen sayings but also many Haiku poems are founded on the Trikaya, I have picked the famous Haiku about the frog leaping to show how a Haiku can point to the Buddha mind. As I see it no sutra can match the insight contemplation on this Haiku by Zen monk and poet Basho can convey:

old pond

frog leaping

splash

The Haiku shows Buddha-mind in a flash. What is emptiness? What leaps? What is the splash? If one wants an absolute answer one goes instantly astray, since words are not capable of following the moment of actuality. Hence we use relativity, look back and begin to analyze and explain a dead static moment, a lost reality. In a way we are all historians, always too late, behind reality and the point is, that when one’s mind incessantly is behind what-is this mind is frozen even dead.

However, if one stops asking and instead experiences emptiness, one is the universe, if one stops asking about leaping and instead experiences leaping, one is the spiritual faculty of all living creatures and if one experiences the splash, one is all the manifestations appearing.

These three Mind experiences, which are the one Mind, are the cornerstones of Zen sayings, since the first line is the dharmakaya, the second the Sambogakaya and the third the Nirmanakaya. The Haiku is a living “suchness version” of the Trikaya of Mahayana Buddhism. It is a concrete demonstration of Buddha-mind where ones own mind is no different from the reality of the Haiku. One is what one experiences. One is no longer looking back, since one is united (satori) with what-is.

*

Don’t Hide the Buddha Behind Text

When the master arrived at Nan-ch’uan he saw the monks assembled together. Nan-ch’uan pointed to a pitcher, and said, “This bronze pitcher is an object. In the pitcher there is water. Without moving the object, bring the water to this old monk.”

The master took the pitcher and poured the water in front of Nan-ch’uan.

Nan-ch’uan did not say anything.

Comment

The point of the story is that Nan-ch’uan’s is testing the enlightenment and freedom of Mazu. The pitcher is the sutras, the teachings and the words hiding the Buddha, that is to say, the water. Nan-ch’uan’s asks Maztu to show him the Buddha without the use of words, that is, without moving the pitcher.

The master (Mazu) instantly sees what Nan-ch’uan means and shows him the Buddha by pouring the water in front of Nan-ch’uan. This act shows a concrete wordless and living Buddhist practice and understanding. If you want to see Buddha don’t try with words (moving the pitcher), instead experience the Buddha directly
(by pouring Buddha).

Discussing the pitcher and how to bring it to Nan-ch’uan without moving it is the way of sutras and Buddhist intellectualism. Religious “experts” spend years doing such exercises thus keeping Buddha in the pitcher forever. Zen is concrete and direct and ignores the pitcher because Buddha is right in front of you. Buddha is not hidden in a holy object.

*

One self is the Buddha: Nothing outside Mind

The master (Joshu) came to Pau-shou’s (Hojus’s)’ place.

Pau-shou saw him coming and sat down with his back to the master.

The master spread out his bowing cloth.

Pau-shou stood up.

The master left.

Comment

Pau-shou illustrates that the Buddha is faceless, he cannot be recognized. That’s it. There is no reason for Joshu coming here since Buddha is emptiness. Joshu fills up the emptiness with his coming.

Then Pau-shou manifests the faceless Buddha-function by getting up spontaneously thus revealing the spirit of the Sambogakaya, that is, pure Mind activity which transforms to a manifestation of Buddha (Nirmanakaya) by his standing. But why talk about the Buddha-function when one can see it directly? There is no reason for Joshu to say anything since talking puts and end to direct seeing thus to the insight into Zen.

Joshu sees Pau-shou is the Buddha and leaves. Practicing, not talking about Dharmakaya. Sambogakaya and Nirmanakaya is Zen. The story tells us to free ourselves from Zen masters and their words when time is ripe. Buddha is silence, that is the point of the story. Words are surface and silence is depth. When the goal has been reached (enlightenment), there is no more to talk about. Talking is intellectualizing reality away and is a barrier to enlightenment. Buddha does not talk.

On the Ku-su Terrace
We do not speak of the spring and autumn
In front of my face
How can you discuss the profoundly mysterious!

“Buddha nature grandly manifests,
But passions obscure abiding nature.
When the selfless nature of beings is realized,
How does my face differs from Buddha’s?”

Changsha

Here is a poem by Dogen that says exactly the same thing as the above mondo of Joshu. The poem also points the Trikaya as the ultimate aspects of Buddha-mind:

Evening Zazen hours advance. Sleep hasn’t come yet.
More and more I realize mountains forests are good for efforts in the way.
Sounds of the valley brook enter the ears, moonlight pierces the eyes.
Outside this, not one further instant of thought.

Comment

The forest and Pau-shou are the same. They are both “sitting” in vast emptiness (Dharmakaya). Pan-chou getting up and the receptiveness of the ears and eyes of Dogen are the same. They are both spontaneous “mind energy” (Sambogakaya, or Tao in Chinese). Pan-chou standing and the sounds of the brook are the same. They are both manifesting the Buddha (Nirmanakaya).

The Tathagata, O Vaccha is free from all theories. But this Vaccha, does the Tathagata know – the nature of form, and how form arises and how form perishes.

The Trikaya is a dynamic (living) doctrine, since reality is not static but an everlasting flowing creation and adaptation and life itself “knows” how to do this. It is this intelligent ability that is the Tao or Wu-hsing and to rise one’s mind to this “ultimate or universal intelligence” in a flash is enlightenment. It is through the use of “universal intelligence” it is possible to experience the vast universe as well as the smallest insect, since both share the same essence which is Mind (or Buddha).

*

Buddha is Naturalness not Scholarly Fabrications

A study director said, “The Three Vehicles and twelve divisions of the teaching make the Buddha- nature clear enough, don’t they?”

The Master (Lin-chi) said, “Wild grass – it’s never been cut.”

The study director said, “Surely the Buddha wouldn’t deceive people!”

The master said, “Buddha — where is he?”

The study director had no answer.

The master said, “Are you trying to dupe me right in front of the Constant Attendant? Step aside! You’re keeping other people from asking questions!”

Comment

The point of the story is “”Wild grass – it’s never been cut”. This is a pointer to Buddha-nature, to the Dharmakaya. Buddha could also be the wild rivers, the blooming flowers or the flying birds. The scholarly words of the study director is pointing to scholarship not to Buddha.

*

The Dharmakaya is complete inexpressible and cannot be conveyed by words as in this story:

Once the master said, “”Ma-tsu taught that mind is Buddha. Elder Master Wang does not say it that way. It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not a thing: is there still any fault in this statement?

Chau-chou (Joshu) bowed and left. One of the monks followed Chao-chou and asked him, “What did the Venerable mean by bowing and then going out?”

Chaou-chou said, “You can go ask the Abbot”.

The monk went back to Nan-ch’uan (Nansen), and asked, “What did Venerable Shen (Chaou-chou) mean by acting in this way?”

The master said, “He understood my meaning”.

Comment

Approvals or refutations are words and go against the spirit of Zen which is “don’t pick yes/no or chose no/yes”. Joshu demonstrates the spirit by bowing to what is. Buddha is “Mu” not the concept of “Mind” or the concept of “not a thing”. Eschewal of words and “bowing” to what-is, is the Way.

*

The following story is about mastering the Nirmanakaya through “suchness” (grasping with no-mind). It is a beautiful example of how sharp and humorous Zen teaching can be. If one grasps this story instantly one knows what the concept of Nirmanakaya stands for in a way which is direct but hard to explain. Suchness is a bit harder to grasp than emptiness. It goes like this:

Baufu saw a monk counting money. He held out his hand and said, “I beg you for a string of cash”.

The monk said, “How is it that the master could have fallen to such straits?”

Baufu said, “I have fallen to these straits”.

The monk said, “If it’s really so, then take a string of cash”.

Baufu said, “How have you fallen to such straits?”

Comment

The monk listens to the meaning of the words but the master is not begging, He is not saying anything at all. The master is using his voice. The sound of the voice of the master is the function of the Buddha (Nirmanakaya), but as soon as the mind turns the sound of Buddha into meaningfull words, Buddha disappears. Hence the remark of Baufu “How have you fallen to such straits?”, since the monk fails to hear the Nirmanakaya of the master. A Zen response by the monk when asked for money would have been a prostration before the master since one prostrates when faced with the Buddha.

The long night;
The sound of the water
Says what I think

Gochiku

In a way Zen sayings are not sayings as such but actually purifiers of thoughts. Too many sees Zen sayings as a kind of traditional Zen wisdom but the sayings actually stands for the opposite of such a “philosophical” definition. They are purifiers of knowledge, removers of words and concepts. They pave the way for Buddha-mind or Prajna, which is the same.

*

The mondo below is great since it with few clear words points to “Nothing outside Mind” and to the well-know Zen phrase ” Samsara within Nirvana and Nirvana within Samsara”.

A monk asked, “The ten-thousand dharmas return to the One. Where does the One return to?”

The master said, “When I was in Ch’ing-chou I made a hempen robe. It weighed seven pounds”.

Comment

Many have a tendency to read Zen questions as philosophical since a sentence like “Where does the One return to” somehow conveys philosophical pondering. However, “the one” is the empty mind of Joshu and “The ten-thousand dharmas” are the wisdom of Joshu. So when Joshu returns from the One, that is from enlightenment, he makes a hempen robe that weighs seven pounds.The mondo is pointing to the same as the phrase “After enlightenment the laundry”.

For Zen, supreme knowledge is to be found here on this planet, not in a distant realm. The absolute is within the relative and the relative is within the absolute. One’s ordinary mind is the Buddha-mind and the Buddha- mind is one’s own ordinary mind. The sacred and the profane are one. The mind of Joshu is Nirvana and Samsara, he is “The ten-thousand dharmas” and the One and he also owns a hempen robe that weighs seven pounds.

“After forty-eight years,
Sacred and mundane are completely killed off
Although not heroic,
The Longan road is slippery”

Doushuai Congyue

The Conquering Mind Versus the Bowing Mind

As I see it, analysis is a dead nominal way of getting insight. Do you pull apart a piano in order to understand music? Analysis and science actually make use of such an approach by fragmenting reality and then arrange the fragments to create dead theories. Such insights have absolutely no existential value at all. It is just craftsmanship which is acceptable, but western humanities, sociology, economics, theology etc, have all wrecked due to this scientism and that is a huge problem since it turns humans into objects.

Zen represents the opposite frame of mind , that is to say, Zen demonstrates a genuine respect for life based on a pure approach of intuitiveness as demonstrated below by the great Chaou-chou:

A monk asked, “What about it when the mind neither stops nor moves on?”

The master said, “It’s alive! But [saying] that is obviously making use of the intellect.”

The monk asked, “How can you not make use of it with the intellect?”

The master bowed his head.

Thus, Zen is unification, the intellect (e.g.science) is the separation.

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Image source

English: Yellow Crane Tower Book page. Color on silk. Length 33.2 cm, Width 30.4 cm. Located at the Shanghai Museum
中文: 黄鹤楼圖 – 頁 – 絹本設色 纵33.2 厘米 横30.4厘米 上海博物院藏
Date
Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)
Source
Zhongguo gu dai shu hua jian ding zu (中国古代书画鑑定组). 2000. Zhongguo hui hua quan ji (中国绘画全集). Zhongguo mei shu fen lei quan ji. Beijing: Wen wu chu ban she. Volume 10.
Author
Anonymous
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Mondo on sudden and gradual Zen

A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Zen?”

Xita replied, “You don’t have buddha-nature.”

The monk said, “What is sudden enlightenment?”

Xita drew a circle on the ground for the monk to see.

The monk asked, “What is gradual enlightenment?”

Xita poked the middle of the empty space three times with his hand.

Comment on the mondo

The answer “You don’t have buddha-nature” is the essential doctrine of Zen and not at all puzzling since Zen Buddhism is a “special transmission outside scriptures” which “does not stand upon words”. There IS no Buddha. All Zen schools share this doctrine. The label “Buddha” is a god-like concept, hence an illusion here articulated by Zen master Lin-chi:

A true student of the Way never concerns himself with the Buddha, never concerns himself with bodhisattvas or arhats, never concerns himself with the blessings of the threefold world. Far removed, alone and free, he is never entangled in things.

On the question about the sudden enlightenment Xita draws a circle. Many see the well-known Zen circle as a pointer to nothingness but if that were the case there would be no circle at all. There MUST be form, since nothingness cannot stand alone, because nothing in this universe has any matter. Nothingness is dependent. It is this form-dependent nothingness which Zen calls emptiness. Emptiness is just another word for relativity.

Moreover, the point of the Enso is not so much to be found in the circle itself but rather in Xita drawing the circle. The act of drawing refers to the living principle, the movement of life, to what Zen masters call the function. The circle must be grasped as dynamic, not as static. The function (the shape) upholds the void  (the content) and the void upholds the function. No function means no life. No space means no function. Reality is comings and goings which cannot function without space.

Zen’s actuality is relativity ad infinitum and seeing the absolute, the transcendental within the relative, as one, is going beyond Buddha. The round shape expresses “the function of the relative within the absolute” since the shape has no location due to the emptiness surrounding it, no fixed starting point, no fixed ending point. No matter where you locate yourself on the shape the value you assign it is nominal, not real. The real is the wholeness of the circle. Seeing this functioning (living) relativity of forms within the absolute void directly (in suchness), not analytical, is satori, here articulated by Zen monk Fuxi (497 – 569): “The bridge is flowing the water is still”

The circle thus depicts the famous Zen phrase “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” They are inseparable, that is to say one and conveys per se a natural style of medition. The empty content of the circle is a pointer to samadhi (no-mind, wu-hsin) and the functioning shape of the circle is a pointer to Prajna (Mind, function ). This style of meditation is not based on emptiness alone but includes meditation on the living spirituality (forms) of life (suchness). Thus it points to the Zen of Hui-neng and the later Chinese masters. Prajna and emptiness are one, like the circle is one.

Hence, the Zen circle is a pointer to an empty but functional “consciousness” of empty wholeness. So when Xita draws a circle to demonstrate what the Zen of the Sudden School is. he draws the Buddha-mind thus pointing to the One Vehicle Dharma of the Sudden School.

“The Mind is Buddha; Buddha is the Mind. All sentient beings and all Buddhas have the same Mind, which is without boundaries and void, without name and form and is immeasurable.” The word-less Mind is where the truth is to be found not via words like “Buddha”.

Huang po

“Unity of form and emptiness is Satori”

Zen Saying

The three times poking by Xita is a pointer to the Three Vehicles, the three types of teachings expounded for persons pursuing the paths of the arhat, the pratyekabuddha, and the bodhisattva respectively, that is, the gradual enlightenment. This type of enlightenment has focus on emptiness, that is, purification of Mind where the goal is a state of emptiness by itself leading to Prajna.

The mono is a beautiful demonstration of the difference between the sudden school and the gradual school of Chinese Zen, a split caused by the emphasis on emptiness by the gradual school versus emphasis on Mind by the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng. His emphasis on Mind (Prajna) was seen as the central key to enlightenment. According to Hui-neng the gradual school was idealistic hence dualistic in its approach since purification (emptiness) without insight into the spirituality of form (Prajna) was static and Utopian not concrete and actual Zen. As formulated by T.D, Suzuki:

In the dust-wiping type of meditation (tsa-ch’an), zazen) it is not easy to go further than the tranquilization of the mind; it is so apt to stop short of quite contemplation, which is designated by Hui-neng ‘ The practice of keeping watch over purity’. At best it ends in ecstasy, self-absorption, a temporary suspension of conscientiousness. There is no ’seeing’ in it, no knowing of itself, no active grasping of self-nature, no spontaneous functioning of it, no chen-hsin (Seeing into Nature) whatever. The dust-wiping type is therefore the art of binding oneself with a self-created rope, an artificial construction which obstructs the way to emancipation. No wonder that Hui-neng and his followers attacked the Purity school.

Suzuki – the Zen Doctrine of no-mind p. 43

“Followers of the Way, there is no Buddha to be gained, and the Three Vehicles, the five natures, the teaching of the perfect and immediate enlightenment are all simply medicines to cure diseases of the moment. None have any true reality. Even if they had, they would still all be mere shams, placards proclaiming superficial matters, so many words lined up, pronouncements of such kind.

— Lin chi

Those who are students of Prajna hold that there is nothing tangible whatever, so they so they cease thinking of the Tree Vehicles. There is only the one reality, neither to be realized nor attained.

The sutra of Hui-neng

The One Vehicle – the Sudden School

Learned Audience, the illimitable Void of the universe is capable of holding myriads of things of various shape and form, such as the sun, the moon, stars, mountains, rivers, men, Dharmas pertaining to goodness or badness, deva planes, hells, great oceans, and all the mountains of the Mahameru. Space takes in all of these, and so does the voidness of our nature. We say that the Essence of Mind is great because it embraces all things, since all things are within our nature. When we see the goodness or the badness of other people we are not attracted by it, nor repelled by it, nor attached to it; so that our attitude of mind is as void as space. In this way, we say our mind is great. Therefore we call it ‘Maha’.

Sutra of Hui Neng: Chapter 2: On Prajna

“When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to ‘come’ or to ‘go’, we attain Samadhi of Prajna, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of ‘thoughtlessness’. But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden, and this is an erroneous view.”

— Hui-Neng

Comment

Experiencing the sound of the stream, the blooming of the flowers or the drifting clouds is to learn the true Dharma since they are the Buddha manifestations and their spiritual workings coming from the void. But to experience this there must be Prajna/Samadhi simultaneously because to discern forms clearly, one’s mind must be soundless. There must be no “sounds”. The Dharma is silent because there are no messages, no holy words, no teachings only the emptiness of what-is. There is absolutely no reason behind the universe and the living life. Being aware of this meaninglessness (emptiness) of reality is “bowing one’s head” and is a way to experience its deepest no-meaning. The concrete Life itself is the meaning (or no-meaning), here beautifully expressed by Zen master Joshu:

A monk asked, ” What about it when the mind neither stops nor moves on?”

The master said, “It’s alive! But [saying] that is obviously making use of it with the intellect.”

The monk asked, “How can you not make use of it with the intellect?”

The master bowed his head.

The Zen circle is a formidable concentrated pointer to Zen. It can be viewed both philosophically and phenomenologically since it points to the Zen notion of the Buddha-mind as well as to the meditation style of Zen after Hui-neng.

Note – The Three Vehicles

1) Bodhisattva-vehicle (Mahayana – Paramitayana, Sutrayana and Vajrayana),

2) Pratyekabuddha-vehicle,

3) Shravaka- vehicle (Hinayana – Theravada).

In the Dharma Flower Sutra the Buddha reveals that his three teachings–the Shravaka vehicle that leads to Arhatship, the Pratyekabuddha-vehicle that leads to Pratyekabuddhahood, and the Bodhisattva-vehicle that traverses the stages (Ten Grounds – Dasha Bhumi) of the Bodhisattva Path — are all provisional, expedient (upaya paramita dharma) teachings. They lead to fruitions that have no reality in themselves. There is only one reality, and that is Buddhahood.

‘It’s like taking some milk and dividing it into three different glasses. Three people could each drink one glass, or one person could drink all three glasses, and it would be the same. It’s just that if his or her capacity was not that great it might burst his or her stomach. And so the Buddha starts by dividing things up into smaller amounts for you, and when you’ve polished that much off, he pours you out some more. That’s just what’s going on.’ (FAS-PII(1) 249)

Quote

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing.

Watts on suchness

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Calligraphy by Kanjuro Shibata XX “Enso”. From my personal collection. Uploaded by Jordan Langelier
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The similarity of the premises of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Zen is remarkable. They share for example the views that words and concepts are mental prisons and the meaning-systems of societies and cultures through history are illusions. Also that rationality is relative thus not true, that liberation and morality is an individual natural affaire and social and cultural meaning-systems are protecting “umbrellas” that veil the meaninglessness of the void. Furthermore that “will” is spontaneous action and social morality is fabrications. One could go on.


Below are some examples of Zen sayings and quotes from Nietzsche demonstrating the strong affinity between the German philosopher and ancient Chinese Zen. There is a gap of more than a thousand years between Zen and Nietzsche which let us know that skepticism towards frozen words and concept seems universal, a liberating thought.

I have commented the somehow tricky Zen sayings to make a bridge to the quotes of Nietzsche.

Knowledge

On that day, in front of the lecture hall, Tokusan burned to ashes his commentaries on the sutras and declared, “In comparison to this awareness, all the most profound teachings are like a single hair in vast space. However deep the complicated knowledge of the world, compared to this enlightenment it is like one drop of water in the ocean.” Then he left the monastery.

Case 28. Ryutan’s Candle

Comment

Causal explanations are chains ad infinitum, they never stop, one has to decide where, thus they are relative and subjective not absolute.

*

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

Nietzsche

*********

Rationality and Abstractions

A monk asked, “How as it before Niutou met the Forth Ancestor?”

Dagui said, “Cold hair standing straight.”

The monk asked, “After seeing him then what?”

Dagui said, “Sweat streaming from the forehead.”

Comment

“Cold hair standing straight.” is pointing to the the unreality of abstractions. The last line points to the concreteness of truth.

*

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Nietzsche

*********

Timelessness

The monk asked, ” What is the place where the student is empowered?”

Cuiyan said, “A thousand days chopping-wood but burning it all in a single day.”

Comment

Sudden intuitive understanding of what-is is insight. Timelessness is moment and moment is timelessness. Cut the thousand days in an instant and one is realized.

*

Glance into the world just as though time were gone and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Nietzsche

*********

Morality: Practice of, Not Ideas

A monk said, “In the scriptures there is the passage, ‘When this deep mind pays honor to the ten thousand worlds, this is known as “repaying Buddha’s compassion”.’I don’t ask you about ‘ten thousand worlds’ but tell me, what is repaying Buddha’s compassion?”

Guizong said, “If you are thus that is repaying Buddha’s compassion.”

Comment

Good deeds do not make a good man, a good man makes good deeds.

*

Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881):

One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.

Nietzsche

*********

The Self

A monk asked, “The mountains, rivers and the great earth – from where did all of these things come forth?”

Tiantai said, “From where did this question come forth?”

Comment

From where does ALL creation come from, is man not part of it?

*

What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.

Nietzsche

*********

Words and Concepts

A monk asked, “Why did the Bodhidharma come from the west?”

Huguo said, “When one person says it, it’s a rumor. When a thousand says it, it’s a fact.”

Comment

Mass psychology and the fear of meaninglessness and chaos.

*

Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a “truth” of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.

Nietzsche

*********

Meaning-systems

A monk asked, “How can it be expressed without words?”

Dayu said, “The universe is three feet too long. The cosmos is six feet too short.”

The monk said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Dayu said, “All samsaric ground is excessive or lacking.”

Comment

Abstractions and generalizations are the cornerstones of theories, hypotheses, possibilities, probabilities, that is to say, these are not real. Reality is what-is, concrete,what else?

*

We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.

Nietzsche

*********

Suchness

Xingyan head a dove’s call and said, “What’s that sound?”

The monk said, “A dove’s call.”

Xingyan said, ” If you don’t want to give rise to limitless evil karma, then don’t slander the true Dharma of the Tathagatas.”

Comment

“Dove” is a label thus an illusion. The true Dharma is the appearances of life as experienced in suchness.

*

As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.

Nietzsche

*********

Liberation

A monk asked, “What is liberation?”

Shitou said, “Who has bound you?”

Another monk asked, “What is the Pure Land?”

Shitou said, “Who has polluted you?”

Another monk asked, “What is Nirvana?”

Shitou said, ” Who has given you birth and death?”

Comment

Mindfulness not answers is the Way to liberation. Words encapsulate the mind.

*

The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption — in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune.

Nietzsche

*********

Desire

Desire nothing, and you’re content with everything Pursue things, and you’re thwarted at every turn.

Ryokan

Comment

Self-evident. If there is no desire there is fulfillment.

*

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…

Nietzsche

*********

Suffering

A monk asked, “From old times there’s a saying, ‘Until a person has fallen down, the earth can’t help from arise’. What is ‘fallen down’?”

Caoshan said, “its allowing.”

The monk asked, “What is ‘arise’?”

Caoshan said, “Its arise.”

Comment

Allowing the arise of falling is to allow oneself to recognize the truth of the human condition as it actually is. Falling is arising.

*

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not – that one endures.”

“Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound”

Nietzsche

And a final comment: The above sayings and quotes clearly show that the dual notion of “Eastern thought” and “Western thought” is an exaggeration. The style of communicating universal views might be slightly different but branches of Western philosophy for instance phenomenology or sociology of knowledge and Zen has much in common. Human ways of structering or attacking the validity of thoughts are the same no matter culture. Fundamentally we all share the same mind.

ZenFrog (ZenHsin)

Visit ZenHsin Site

Haiku
A Collection of Haiku Poems

Krishnamurti
The iconoclastic writings of Krishnamurti

Mahayana
Mahayana the philosophical foundation of Zen

Scriptures and Sutras
Scriptures and Sutras Collection

Taoism
Taoism: the Chinese influence

Zen Philosophy
Zen Principles and Philosophy

Zen Poems
Collection of Zen Poems

Zen Teachings
Zen Teachings, Koans and Zazen

Glossary
Zen Glossary

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Image source

English: Young Bamboo with Clouds, Roots, and Brush, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 26 x 29.5 cm. Located at the Palace Museum, Beijing.
中文: 雲根叢篠圖 – 立軸 – 紙本墨筆 纵26厘米 横29.5厘米 中国北京故宫博物院
Date
Early 15th Century
Source
Zhongguo gu dai shu hua jian ding zu (中国古代书画鑑定组). 2000. Zhongguo hui hua quan ji (中国绘画全集). Zhongguo mei shu fen lei quan ji. Beijing: Wen wu chu ban she. Volume 10.
Author
Wang Fu (王紱)
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