I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Thursday evening sit tonight. A recording follows the text. 

This is Case 19 in the Blue Cliff Record:

Whenever anything was asked, Master Chu Ti would just raise one finger.

I’m going to break something of a taboo in Zen by speaking about metaphysics—the branch of philosophy that considers the fundamental nature of reality. Shakyamuni Buddha himself is said to have avoided metaphysical speculation. In Zen, talk about metaphysics in practice environments like this is bound to draw a finger—a finger held to the lips to say, “Shhh,” or perhaps the middle finger.

But Chu Ti in our koan likely would just hold his index finger up a foot or so in front of his chest, like this, responding very genuinely to whatever he had been asked. There’s nothing admonishing or flippant about his response. He’s responding directly and straightforwardly.

From one perspective, Zen frowns on metaphysical speculation—or at least lots of loopity-loop chatter about the basic structure of reality. From another perspective, we’re talking about it all the time. We can’t help it. It’s unavoidable. We are talking about it plainly and boldly, saying this is it. Nothing mysterious; nothing hidden.

The koan literature is full of cases in which a student asks a teacher some version of the question, “What’s the nature of reality?” “What’s it all about?” In Buddhist lingo, that’s expressed with words like, “What is Buddha?” “What is mind?”

Notice that “Buddha” and “mind” in these questions are isolated as something separate. The question already has thing-ified them. The question itself is constructed on an assumption that a foundational feature of reality as the questioner imagines it can be isolated, objectified, essentialized. In this construction, words like “Buddha,” “Buddha nature,” “mind, ” or the “Way” are doing the same sort of work the word “God” is doing in many versions of theism.

You can imagine how disappointed—or how suddenly illuminated!—many Zen students throughout the ages have been when an earnest question like, “What is Buddha?” drew a response like, “dried shit stick” or “three pounds of flax.” 

Like Chu Ti, those teachers are offering a straightforward response from a Zen perspective. They’re not being flip. This is it, they’re saying. Just this. 

And yet, and yet. 

On the one hand, what they’re saying is simple and direct. Declarative. Decisive. 

On the other, there is subtlety, nuance, paradox.

In the language of metaphysics, we might ask if Zen is pantheistic. Pantheism is the view that God—or whatever word one uses for the ultimate—is the dried shit or flax.

The Zen perspective arguably is closer to pan-en-theism, or God-in-everything. 

A classic Zen metaphor for this perspective is the ocean and its waves. Our conscious awareness is usually trapped in, and only noticing and observing from, our experience of being the particular wave we are. But the wave emerges from and rests upon and is not separate from the ocean’s dark and quiet depths. The wave and the depths are all water. 

This is a slight shift in perspective that maintains a sort of vitalizing, paradoxical tension. We are the ocean—we are not separate or separable from it in this instant of being-time—and yet it can’t be reduced to us or perhaps even to the sum of its parts.

Kensho experiences have this quality of recognizing our waveness as reaching to the full depth and breadth of the ocean. I recognize myself as a feature of something boundless and uncontainable. We somehow exist in and as that boundlessness.

It’s like Kabayashi Issa’s little verse in our Sutra Book:

The world of dew

is indeed a world of dew

and yet . . . 

and yet . . . 

There’s a Shroedinger’s Cat aspect to Zen metaphors about the nature of this.

But let’s not get too entangled in ideas and words. Big cosmic concepts like this, and our wrestling with them, can be useful to the extent they nudge our activity in the world, our experience, in a better direction or help us make sense of our experience through the rearview mirror.

Zen practice is fundamentally about our experience—including our mental experience, the thoughts rambling about in our skull, but its ultimate concern is the quality of our activity, individually and collectively. Our manifest, lived experience.

In Zen, metaphysics has implications for ethics. If the perspective I’m talking about becomes your intuition about reality, and increasingly your experience of it, it gets increasingly, personally uncomfortable to act in ways that treat someone or something as if it can be separated, objectified, and essentialized as ultimately good or bad. Qualified or disqualified to exist. 

Noticing one’s impulse to make those distinctions—to tell stories like that—begins to weigh on one’s conscience.  As Bodhidharma said, “There is nothing worth begrudging.”Ethics is a realm in which our stories about the nature of reality matter. Zen’s Bodhisattva Precepts are understood and, ideally, actualized from the perspective I’m talking about.

Whenever anything was asked, Master Chu Ti would just raise one finger.

This finger is connected to my hand, to my arm, to my body, to the Great Buddha body itself. Your finger, too. 

It’s all as plain as the finger on your hand. The nose on your face. 

It is the nose on your face. 

The secret Zen adepts through the ages have been seeking is hidden in plain sight.