I gave this brief encouragement talk on Friday, November 10th, during a Full Moon Zen sesshin. Our theme was “wandering” and the text we examined is Case 98 in the Blue Cliff Record:

While on pilgrimage, Tianping visited Xiyuan. He was always saying, “Don’t say you have understood Buddhism. There is no one who can have a dharma dialogue with me or examine me.”

One day Xiyuan saw him at a distance and called to him, “Come here, Congyi.”

Tianping raised his head.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping went on for two or three steps.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping turned and came closer.

Xiyuan said, “I have just said, ‘Wrong’ twice. Is it I who am wrong, or is it you?”

“It is I.”

“Wrong.” Tianping was silent.

“Stay here for the summer retreat, and I’ll examine this question of two wrongs
with you.” Tianping, however, departed.

Years later, when Tianping became an abbot, he addressed his assembly and said, “Once in my days of pilgrimage, I visited Xiyuan by chance, and he twice said, ‘Wrong.’ He advised me to stay with him for the summer retreat to examine this question of two wrongs with him. I don’t say I was wrong then, but when I left for the South, I realized for the first time that I had finished saying ‘Wrong.’

Each of us has wandered onto this Zen path somehow, and into this zendo.

We encounter one another as fellow wanderers in a land we once were too certain we knew well.

Now we wander together with not knowing mind.

Where are we going? We don’t know.

What must we do? Eat our rice gruel. Wash our bowls. Chop wood. Carry water. Ring the bell. Bow.

Take good care of one another.

And when the sun has set and the moon has risen, close our eyes, and sleep.

Nothing more is asked or required of us. Nothing more we must do to be worthy of our place in this strange familiar land.

Perhaps there’s a more fundamental way in which the seeker in our koan felt he was wrong. Perhaps the teacher in our koan sensed it. Perhaps that wrong is a sense of existential (even ontological) lack or separation.

Perhaps that sense of lack and separation fuels our twin fears: our fear of death and our fear of life.

Perhaps the teacher’s declaration “wrong” when the wanderer stepped this way, and the teacher’s declaration “wrong” when the wanderer stepped that way, were benevolent nudges—encouragements, invitations for the seeker to know and declare of and for himself, that his existence, that all existence, is not wrong.

Perhaps the teacher wanted to make himself available to the student over the summer to help that message sink in, and also just to enjoy the student’s company.

Perhaps the student declined the invitation because, down deep, the message he’d just received already was beginning to sink in, even if it would take him years to fully realize he was done saying wrong.

Is that sense of lack and separation we yearn to mend wrong?

Could we have the dew laden grass, the birdsong, the falling flower petals, winter frost without out it? Delight in being distinct from these things, and the joy of discovering ourselves one with them, without it?

Perhaps the old teacher’s two wrongs helped make right what never was wrong to begin with.