Yesterday Full Moon Zen and Providence Zen Center held a joint retreat at PZC, with about 30 people participating. The theme was Two Traditions, One Family. The late Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, who founded the Kwan Um school of Zen (and PZC as its primary center in North America), and the late Japanese Zen Master Taizan Maezumi, who founded the White Plum Asanga, our lineage, were good friends. Yesterday’s retreat was both a tribute to their friendship and an expression of the abiding friendship between our two Zen families. Yesterday we juxtaposed many of each Zen stream’s forms (chants, koans, etc.), highlighting mostly similarities, and also some differences, in these two expressions of the Dharma. For example, we chanted the Heart Sutra in Korean, Sino-Japanese, and in our respective English translations. Kwan Um and the WPA each include koan practice, so we picked a koan used by both families (Case 19 in The Gateless Gate) as the prompt for a short talk by each of the four teachers present, Zen Master Tan Gong; Kwan Haeng Sunim, JDPSN, Fran Jindō Ludwig, Sensei; and myself. Here’s the text of my talk. A recording of all four talks follows.

This is the koan that gave us Mu.  But don’t think you’ve found the source of Mu, at least if you think the source was hidden before you encountered this koan.

Here we see Joshu, who would become a great teacher, had his own questions as a young seeker.  This was long before another nameless seeker asked him if the temple dog has Buddha nature.

We ask these sorts of questions because we doubt.  Here we see young Joshu’s doubt.  Joshu doesn’t confess his doubt, but his question reveals it.  “What is Tao?” he asks.  “I’m lost.  I’m feeling uncertain,” he’s saying.

Nanchen zeroes in on Joshu’s doubt.  “If you really want to attain the Tao of no-doubt,” Nachen says—to realize it as you—you must stop seeking it as knowing (rather than not-knowing) and as right (rather than wrong).

We don’t find our way in the realm of ideas.  We won’t find our ultimate home in fixed principles of any kind, whether the dogma of a religion, of a philosophy, or of the political right or left.

We seek and need kinship, of course, but being part of a tribe bound by ideas will never fully satisfy.  Members of these tribes still lay awake at midnight with existential questions on their minds and hearts. 

If ordinary mind is Tao and Joshu’s ordinary mind doubts, then the Way Joshu seeks, the Tao of No Doubt, must contain doubt. 

Joshu’s question, our questions, do not resolve as we imagine they will, through syllogisms.  They resolve as we open to, deeply penetrate, accept, and settle into our experience. Just this. We must allow just this to penetrate us.  We discover ourselves as just this.

As we do, our old questions aren’t so much answered.  They just lose their force.

There are no silly questions we can bring to a Zen teacher along the Way.  Yet maybe we should question the nature of our questions a bit more; question the nature of the answers they seek.