I gave this talk today at our Rohatsu Zazenkai. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 32 in The Gateless Gate, A Non-Buddhist Questions the Buddha:

A non-Buddhist in all earnestness asked the World-Honored One, “I do not ask about words, I do not ask about no-words.” The World-Honored One just sat still. The non-Buddhist praised him, saying, “The World-Honored One in his great benevolence and great mercy has opened the clouds of my delusion and enabled me to enter the Way.” Then, bowing, he took his leave. Ananda asked Buddha, “What did the non-Buddhist realize that made him praise you so much?” The World-Honored One replied, “He is just like a fine horse that runs even at the shadow of a whip.”

Tomorrow is Rohatsu in Japan, the holiday when Zen Buddhists remember Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment. I suppose this is Buddhism’s Big Bang. Pow! as our friend José Ramirez likes to say. 

This koan is perfect for the occasion. Its form is so familiar. A seeker brings a question to a teacher. The teacher responds. The student finally breaks through. It’s her Big Bang. Pow!

Your meetings with Fran and me are just like that, right? 🙂

In most of our koans, the teacher is abbot of a Zen monastery in China living hundreds of years after the Buddha died. The seeker is a resident monk. They’ve each taken hundreds of monastic vows. They’ve identified as Buddhists in every way. In what they wear, how they eat, how they pass each day and year, each full of recurring ritual forms and practices.

In today’s koan, the teacher is Shakyamuni Buddha himself. I’ve read Koun Yamada’s translation of this koan because he refers to the seeker as a “non-Buddhist.” I find this a bit amusing, because I’m not sure we can say Buddhism even existed at the time, at least not as a tradition with stably established forms and practices. The Zen tradition as we eventually would come to know it certainly did not exist yet. Other translations of this koan refer to the visitor as an “outsider” or a “nonbeliever,” as if belief had anything to do with Zen. 

While the structure of this koan is familiar, much of its content is quite different. The Chinese, who developed koan practice using anecdotes from their own experience and unique cultural context, seemed to want a handful of koans featuring the historical Buddha, perhaps as one more way to assure themselves and others they were connected to him. They crafted a few koans from snippets of much earlier Buddhist texts.

We also get this interesting exchange between the Buddha and Ananda, his cousin and attendant, at the end of the koan. Ananda often is portrayed as the Buddha’s foil in the Pali Canon and in Chinese koans. If the Buddha is Laurel, Ananda is Hardy. We’ll return to their exchange in a moment.

Let’s look at the question this unnamed seeker brings to the Buddha: “I do not ask about words, I don’t ask about no-words.” This sentence doesn’t quite form a question. It seems inarticulate—like the speaker is on the edge of his own awareness and understanding and can barely find the words to express himself. An insight is emerging, but this seeker doesn’t yet know what he knows.

He’s asking about what the sutras call form and emptiness. Form is words. Emptiness is no-words.

This seeker is sensing this seeming binary is a trap.

Form is our starting point early in life; even throughout life for many, if not most, of us. First, we take things—beings, objects, concepts—as concrete, separate things with essences.

Later one may begin to sense this understanding of things is amiss. We start to question whether things are so solid and separate. We begin to penetrate the illusion of separateness. We open to Oneness. Emptiness. 

Eventually we may come to realize form is Emptiness and Emptiness is form. But as long as we’re relying on words and no-words, things and no-things, and even if we’re saying one is the other, we’re still holding onto ideas to some extent. We’re still partially in the conceptual realm. 

The Buddha’s visitor senses that “form is Emptiness, Emptiness is form” doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.

The Buddha knows exactly where this seeker is at and what he is asking. What is the Buddha’s response? 

Presence. Pure and simple.

This response affirms what the seeker intuits. The Buddha is saying, “Yes, this is it. What you see, feel, and know is what I see, feel, and know.”

With this encounter, the knowledge that was on the perimeter of the visitor’s awareness a moment ago is now in his bones, not as an idea. Pow!

What about the Buddha’s exchange with Ananda? What’s with the horse and whip. This was a common metaphor where and when the Buddha lived—and this was high praise of the visitor.

It’s a rather grim image. Horses were trained with whips in those days, as they often still are today. Particularly willful or slow learning horses were struck with a full crack of the whip. A horse that’s a bit more insightful, we might say for purposes of the Buddha’s analogy, just needs to feel the coiled whip held against its body. An even more insightful horse just needs to see the whip. The Buddha’s visitor didn’t need much nudging. Seeing the shadow of the whip was enough.

On Tuesday I was in Washington, D.C., for a dinner hosted by Saudi Sheikh Mohammed Alissa. Sheikh Alissa heads the Muslim World League, which includes clerics and religious scholars from all Muslim countries and promotes moderate forms of Islam.

Sheikh Alissa played a leading role in producing the 2019 Charter of Mecca, which was endorsed by 1,200 Muslim clerics and scholars. Here are the first three of its 30 principles:

1. All people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races, and nationalities, are equal under God.
2. We reject religious and ethnic claims of “preference.” [The idea that there is a chosen people.]
3. Differences among people in their beliefs, cultures and natures are part of God’s will and wisdom.

In his remarks Tuesday, Sheikh Alissa said, regardless or our religious or non-religious beliefs, we all come from and return to the same source. Speaking in his religious idiom, he asked whether God wants the destructive, belief-based conflict we see everywhere today. He answered his own question with an emphatic no. Sheikh Alissa discourages Muslims from drawing hard sectarian lines within Islam or hard lines between Muslims and non-Muslims. 

Of course, a history of drawing hard lines between and within religions, isn’t unique to Islam. We see this happening in some expressions of every major religion. Buddhism doesn’t get a free pass. Some Zen teachers before and during WWII fanned the flames of ideologically based hatred raging across the globe, doing so in explicitly religious terms. Many Buddhist monks in Burma (Myanmar) support militarism in defense of ethnic and religious purity.

What the Buddha saw, and what we seek and see, isn’t something exclusive and proprietary. It doesn’t depend upon having the “right” beliefs or the “right” practices or the “right” authorizations. It doesn’t depend upon anything because it’s always right here. We depend upon it. We are it.

“I and all sentient beings and the great Earth itself attain enlightenment simultaneously,” the Buddha purportedly said upon his enlightenment. Dependent co-arising. Interdependence. 

Now, our conscious recognition of this—the personal experience of enlightenment—is likely to depend upon our openness to that recognition, and our acceptance of it once it begins to dawn. Upon turning toward, not away from, our aching for this recognition, as the Buddha’s visitor did. Upon our diligent effort to break down our own defenses to that recognition. 

Seek, and you shall find. Right under the North Star. Right under the Bodhi tree. Right under your nose.