I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. A recording follows the text.
This is Case 55 in The Blue Cliff Record:
A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly
destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.
“This perishes,” said Dasui.
“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other.”
“It follows the other,” said Dasui.
Sleep. Morning dew. The chill in the air. Feeling happy. Feeling sad. This day. Tomorrow. This life. All life.
Impermanence is a core tenet of Buddhism. Why? Because it’s observably true. How can we deny the reality of change?
Another core tenet of Buddhism is that our default mode is to resist the reality of change. We cling to whatever evokes pleasurable feelings. We’re averse to whatever threatens to take away pleasurable feelings. We remain willfully ignorant to the reality of impermanence; to our inability to avoid change.
This koan probes the furthest reaches of Zen Buddhist notions of impermanence. The monk accepts that the morning dew, and even our whole universe, will vanish. But what about this?
We Zen types are always point to this. Just this. But what is this? Is this permanent?
No, the Dasui says. Even this perishes. It perishes with the tea and the teapot. With the moon and the stars.
As usual, the answer to the koan is in the question. The monk divides the world into this and that. Destroyed and not destroyed.
And, as usual, the question is about oneself. The monk has some insight into the Great Matter. He’s seen into emptiness—and has become identified with it.
If emptiness is not destroyed, might I live on?
Just as form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness truly is no other than form. When all the many universes are destroyed in the kalpa fire, their moons and stars with them, emptiness perishes with them. And you and me with them. This is no thing.
This koan is about as close as Zen gets to dogma on physics and metaphysics. As physics and metaphysics, this perspective undoubtedly is debatable. But we know the Buddha declined to engage in metaphysical speculation. I don’t think Dasui is engaging in metaphysical speculation either.
The monk is still looking for something permanent to hold onto. He’s searching for the ultimate and equating it with permanence. Dasui is channeling the ancients that preceded him, and foreshadowing the ancients that will follow him, like Dogen, who tells us that hitting the mark—finding what we’re seeking—is knowing we never have another nest than this fleeting moment in this fleeting life in this fleeting universe in which to settle.
Dasui is advising the monk, and advising us, that, whatever perspective you may have on physics or metaphysics, it’s best to live in accord with the observable reality of change, including the ways we ourselves, and our own perspectives, are susceptible to change. Orienting ourselves in this way invites and enables, in turn, a particular orientation toward our actions, or activity, another key Zen theme that Dogen emphasized in his teaching. It opens us to newness and the possibility of an appropriate response to what’s arising here and now, rather than to our prior, fixed and, quite possibly, misguided views on ourselves, others, and the situation in which we now find ourselves–views on which we may have a death grip and which we may layer over our immediate experience, strangling the life from it. I’ll return to and develop this theme in my talk during our upcoming Zazenkai.
I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit today. A recording follows the text.
I gave a Thursday evening talk earlier this month about Zen and what I called “the other mindfulness”: the work of Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, whose research has revealed the surprising power, and many health and other benefits, of simple awareness—of paying attention. You can find that talk on my blog if you didn’t hear it.
Langer describes her work as the study of mindfulness, but she chose that term without knowing about Vipassana meditation, which is more commonly called mindfulness meditation. She sees no connection between the two. In fact, she thinks mindfulness meditation can be mindless. She says mindfulness is what might happen for meditators after they meditate, and that you don’t need to meditate to experience it.
Langer’s disclaimers haven’t stopped people from making connections between mindfulness meditation and Langer’s research about the power of noticing. They’re all wishful thinkers from Langer’s perspective. But all the comparisons are made between her work and Vipassana meditation, which is very different than shikantaza, Zen’s approach to meditation.
I think there are interesting connections between Langer’s take on mindfulness and shikantaza. Those of you who heard my earlier talk will recall that I asked an AI tool, Claude, to help me explore possible connections. Here’s what it said, which I think is quite good:
1. Non-goal orientation: Both Langer’s mindfulness and shikantaza emphasize process over outcome. Langer critiques mindless pursuit of goals, while shikantaza explicitly avoids meditation as a means to an end.
2. Present-centered awareness: Both approaches value immediate experience rather than abstract analysis. Langer emphasizes noticing novelty in the present moment, which aligns with shikantaza’s open, non-discriminating awareness.
3. Rejection of rigid techniques: Langer’s approach doesn’t involve formal meditation techniques, and shikantaza is considered the most technique-free form of meditation.
4. Creative engagement: Langer emphasizes creative engagement with one’s environment, which has some resonance.
So, this morning I want to say just a bit more about what’s going on in Zen’s approach to meditation in my experience, and why I do think it supports “the other mindfulness” (Langer’s version), whatever may or may not be happening in other forms of meditation.
Here are some of the key functions of Zen meditation and how they help us cultivate the presence of mind and being—presence to experience, to life—that Langer studies:
Capacity to cope. When many of us begin to meditate, we fear we won’t be able to sit still for 25 minutes. That we won’t be able to tolerate the discomfort. That the sky really will fall if we don’t respond to that email now. Maybe we fear just being with our thoughts and feelings. One of the first things meditation does is simply increase our confidence that we can bear experiences we’d cast as unbearable. This reduces adventitious suffering: the extra suffering we tend to layer over suffering we can’t avoid, like an injury, or that we choose to endure, like a surgery to repair an injury. Meditation—all or most forms, I imagine—develops our capacity to cope, and this helps us become more at ease with life, with ourselves, and with others we find challenging.
Inclination toward noticing. This is Langer’s territory. It’s what she studies. Shikantaza truly is the most technique-free form of meditation. We just sit. There’s nothing more to it. So all that’s left is being. All that’s left is noticing, receptivity. What do we notice? We notice leaves rustling and sirens getting louder, then quieter, then gone; we notice our stomach growl; we notice our noticing come and go. We notice impermanence. Change. The river.
Nonseparation; identification with it all. The river’s water works on the stone that we are, or at least that we’ve imagined ourselves to be. It smooths it, softens it, makes it porous, dissolves it in time. The distinction between stone and water becomes less clear. We feel less separate; more part of it all. More attuned to context, because we experience ourselves as woven into the fabric of our context. Sometimes we forget ourselves—in a good way.
Comfort with no-thing. The more we sit and notice, the more we know and don’t know. We know our experience more intimately, but confidence in our capacity to contain it conceptually declines. Our best concepts and constructs remain useful, but we see their limits. We no longer hold them so tightly. We develop comfort with not knowing and not being able to contain or control everything.
These are some of the fruits I feel Zen meditation practice, and Zen practice more broadly, offers over time. They seem very related to and supportive of the qualities in which Langer sees such value, including genuine curiosity and the capacity to get out of our own frame to consider others’ experience. Ultimately, she’s all about creativity: our capacity to respond freely and appropriately to life in the moment; to be creatures that co-create creation. I think Zen’s all about that, too.
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:
All people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races, and nationalities, are equal under God.
We reject religious and ethnic claims of “preference.” [The idea that there is a chosen people.]
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.
I gave this talk at our Sunrise Sit today, the day before Thanksgiving. A recording follows the text.
This is Case 6 in the Blue Cliff Record:
Yunmen gave a teaching, saying, “I’m not asking you about before the fifteenth day of the month. Why not say a word about after the fifteenth day of the month?”
He answered himself, “Every day is a good day.”
The full moon is a metaphor for enlightenment in Zen. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the full moon appears mid-month, so the monks training with Yunmen would have heard him asking them what it’s like to be enlightened.
They seem confounded, so Yunmen answers his own question, “Every day is a good day.”
What does he mean? Is he taunting the monks by saying every day is a good day only after the full moon rises; only after one is enlightened? I don’t think so.
I expect there was a long silence before Yunmen answered himself. He would have known the monks were thinking to themselves, “I have no idea what it’s like after the full moon. Why are you asking me? I can only imagine my life right now, before the full moon.”
Living in close quarters with Yunmen, the monks also would have seen him getting sick, getting frustrated occasionally, sometimes forgetting things and making mistakes, after the full moon; after enlightenment.
I think Yunmen truly means every day is a good day, including the days before the full moon. These days when the monks think the moon is hidden and they lack enlightenment.
Yunmen’s question simultaneously meets the monks where they believe they’re at and contests their self-understanding. Yunmen is addressing seekers; people seeking enlightenment. They’re sure they don’t have it or haven’t yet found it. More than one of these seekers would have asked Yunmen, “What’s enlightenment like? I want to know. Tell me.”
Yunmen turns this question back at them. “You’re always telling me about your troubled lives before the full moon; before enlightenment,” he seems to be saying. “Tell me something about your life beyond the full moon, right here and now.”
But they’re dumbfounded.
Yunmen’s question both confirms the monks’ belief that there’s a time before enlightenment and a time after it and challenges that belief. Yunmen implies they can describe the enlightenment experience and invites them to do so.
If Yunmen thinks they can describe life beyond the full moon, then perhaps it’s not the idealized life they imagine.Perhaps it’s still a life with troubles.
If only someone had just groaned about their splitting headache or the lukewarm tea.
Yunmen’s question divides time into before and after, but, as I’ve said, his response doesn’t differentiate between the days before the full moon and the days after it. No before. No after.
Troubled or untroubled. Our awareness attuned to the light that shines within or not. Grateful or not.
I gave this talk on November 8, 2024, during our Full Moon Zen sesshin. A recording follows the text (which is lightly edited).
Our koan for this sesshin is Linji’s famous line, “If you meet the Buddha on a road, kill him.”
If I had to pick just one koan or phrase to sum up all Zen teachings and their spirit, this just might be it. It certainly would be among my top few.
This line isn’t a koan exactly. It doesn’t appear in any of our koan collections. We find it instead in The Record of Linji, a compilation of Linji’s talks. He said something more like, “If you meet the Buddha, slay the Buddha,” but the line sometimes is transformed and used informally as a koan.
Linji lived during the ninth century, the heyday of Zen in China. He’s credited with founding the Rinzai line of Zen. The Zen stream we’re in is mostly Soto-derived. Maezumi Roshi, who founded the White Plum Asanga (with Bernie Glassman), initially received transmission from his father, a prominent Soto teacher who did not practice with koans. But Maezumi also studied with and later received transmission from the lay Rinzai teacher Koryu Osaka, as well as Hakuun Yasatani, a Soto reformer who studied koans with his teacher, Harada Daiun Sogaku, who had taken up koan practice with Rinzai teachers. So our stream is unusual; we’re a bit of a mix. I think we can fairly claim Linji as our own.
You can imagine that Linji got some quizzical looks when he gave the talk that includes this line. For me, this line has resonances with some of the deepest, and, I think, most misunderstood wisdom in my birth tradition, Christianity. I’m talking about one of the most remote and, for some, most suspect corners of that tradition: its contemplative or mystical strain.
I’m conscious that we’re Zen practitioners, and that Zen is a non-theistic religious tradition, and that some of us have an uneasy relationship with theism, maybe even an aversion to it. But let me take a a very brief detour nonetheless, if you’ll permit me. I promise to return to Zen soon to make the connection I want to make.
In the Christian tradition, the notion of idolatry arises in the Old Testament, in Jewish scripture, in the book of Exodus. Many of us are familiar with this story. Moses has an encounter with God, who gives him the Ten Commandments on stone tablets to bring to the Israelites as God’s covenant with them. The first commandment has been translated several ways but boils down to something like this: “I am God. You shall have no other God before me. Don’t make graven images of me. Don’t worship anything in my place.”
When Moses returns to camp, he finds the Israelites partying and worshiping a golden calf. Moses has a fit. He smashes the tablets and the golden calf. Party over. Fortunately for the Israelites, they repent, and God replaces the stone tablets.
In Jewish tradition to this day, in this spirit, one doesn’t use the word God. When we see God in print, we might see an asterisk in the place of the “o” (G*d). Or we might hear the word Yahweh, but see it spelled without the vowels (YHWH). Yahweh translates to something like “I am” or “He that is.” Christian monks later translate Yahweh as Jehovah.
So, as we can see, there is this uneasiness with representation in Jewish tradition; with thingifying. There’s an emphasis on being. On ultimate reality as verb, not noun. As pure, vital, vibrating presence.
To my taste, the deepest thinking, the deepest feeling, the furthest and most insightfully seeing later Christian practitioners and teachers pick up this aversion to representation and push it even further. In the Middle Ages, for example, we get the great German mystic Meister Eckhart, who was very quotable. He was famous for saying things like, “Pray God that we may lose God for the sake of finding God.”
Alright, back to Zen, and to the soil out of which it grew. Soil that’s different in some ways and not so different in other ways.
There always were local gods in India, in China, and in Japan. There still are, even to this day, in Japan, from which we’ve received the Zen tradition. Very local deities. In Japan, today people have Shinto weddings and Zen funerals, with a bit of Christianity mixed in along the way for some. The religious culture there is very syncretistic. But long before Buddhism arrived, and long afterwards, people have perceived gods everywhere in Japan.
So, it’s fair to ask if Buddhism made a clean break from the theism that was pervasive in India when it arose and that was pervasive in the places Buddhism traveled over time. Not exactly. The strong monotheism that developed in the Western world in antiquity won’t contend with Buddhism for some time, but we don’t exactly see Buddhism dispatching with all hints of forms of theism before that encounter, in my view.
If we focus solely on what the historical Buddha seems to have taught, it’s probably fair to say there was a clean break from the forms of theism present in his time. He didn’t so much reject theism, as dodge it. He seemed to say, not unlike Meister Eckhart, “Don’t get so twisted up about ideas like god.”
But those who follow the founder of a tradition have a way of messing it up, as we see time and again. There are gods and proto gods in early Buddhism, and even Zen, I’m inclined to say. Look at this beautiful tapestry above us with its many Buddhas, and its Bodhisattvas who seem to have divine qualities. Think about our meal chants. We chant about mythical Buddhas before the historical Buddha, Buddhas yet to appear, and Bodhisattvas who are larger than life.
But I do think most of the old Zen teachers we remember, and most present ones too, are offering us something different. Most Zen teachers throughout space and time double down on the notion that there really is no need for a reified concept of the ultimate.
And in our koan, “If you meet the Buddha on a road, kill him,” we’re clearly being told to smash our idols. I mean really smash them. Smash them by not even positing the existence of something we could idolize. Zen doesn’t offer us a lot of fodder for that.
But if we look—and we humans don’t have to look too hard—we can find (or concoct) ideas in Zen to thingify and fixate on. Take the Absolute and the relative, for instance. Some theists drawn to Zen might even draw parallels to God and Jesus as the Absolute manifest in and as the relative.
But we shouldn’t read too much into or hold too tightly to these metaphors. I’d say to any theist interested or not interested in Zen, “Whatever God is to you, I sure hope God is not an idea.”
None of these metaphors, none of these ideas, none of these concepts that the Buddha didn’t want us to get twisted up about can resolve the mystery. A mystery the resolution of which is as plain as the nose on your face. Is the nose on your face.
The mystery doesn’t need resolving, thank you. The mystery is resolved here and now.
We mistake so much for the ultimate, including the idea of the ultimate. That tendency can be so subtle and insidious.
Teachings and teachers can become idols, for sure. Hopefully, any good teacher will recognize this and deflect it.
We can have our political saviors and our political devils. Some of us might want to kill those devils. But the devil is just another idol. It’s a kind of anti-God idol.
Relationships, I think, are a domain in which we often idolize. We often expect too much of those with whom we’re intimate. It’s a kind of category error. I think one reason we can get so, so incredibly frustrated with intimate partners is that we’re idolizing them, even as they drive us mad, and we criticize them. We want them to serve a godlike function for us. To ultimately ground us, to be our salvation, to be our paradise.
Even more subtly I can make myself an idol, good and/or bad, God and/or devil. That’s what our self-sense inevitably is, I suppose. Our self-sense, or ego or whatever you want to call it, is a facsimile of our being. It’s a partial representation of it. It’s a construct that’s useful, and with which we can become at ease if we don’t hold it too tightly. If we don’t inflate it or deflate it. If we’re humble.
(By the way, my favorite definition of humility is from a Carmelite monk who said it’s not thinking little of yourself but thinking of yourself very little.)
When we kill the Buddha, when we kill all idols, it’s only then that we’re truly able to realize ourselves as Buddha, and all others as Buddha. Killing the Buddha opens that possibility for us. It just comes storming in.
The deepest meaning of the holy truths cannot be contained or represented. It can’t be embodied in or as just one thing, because the deepest meaning of the holy truths is nothing less than everything. Just as it’s manifesting right now.
Another way to translate Linji’s expression “Kill the Buddha”—to translate all the teachings is—this is it. Full stop.
We’re grounded in everything, all at once, all the time. We must discover that ground. We must discover the self as that ground.
The bad news is there’s nothing discreet we can hold onto. The good news is there’s no risk of falling.
Just don’t try too hard to define everything; to contain it. Let it be. Let it be you. When we do our three bows, we’re honoring the three treasures. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Let’s honor the three treasures. Let’s honor ourselves; let’s honor everybody else; let’s honor everything. Let’s just not idolize things.
So, if you meet the Buddha on a road, extend a hand. Offer him a place to rest his weary frame. A meal, a cup of tea. Pour one for yourself, as well. Sit down and enjoy his company. Offer him the pleasure of your company.
I gave this talk on October 31, 2024. A recording follows the text (which is lightly edited).
A big theme for me this year has been vulnerability. That theme has been very present to me personally, and there a lot of people in my life, including many of you, for whom I sense it’s been a theme, as well.
As many of you know, I had a big surgery earlier in the year to correct a problem that caused a big medical emergency last fall; a close call. After that surgery, I learned that three good friends about my age all had terminal cancer. As of last Friday, they’ve all died. Vicky, I know, recently has lost people close to her. People here have family members and other loved ones who are struggling in one way or another.
We’ve seen wars. We’ve seen hurricanes and flooding. Somehow vulnerability just seems like a big theme this year.
So recently my mind was wandering, and I found myself thinking about koans in which vulnerability is a theme. The one I’m going to read and say a few words about tonight is the first one that came to mind. At sunrise sit last week I spoke about another one, but this one is the very first one I thought of.
It helps before one hears this koan to know a little bit about the characters in it, so let me tell you a little bit about them. I’m going to say more about each of them after I read the koan.
The first character is Te-shan. He is a famous Zen teacher; famous in China at the time, famous throughout history to this day. He’s, say, about 80 years old in this koan. He was the head of a major monastery in China. This is the early ninth century, which historians generally think of as the peak of ancient Chinese civilization. It’s the heyday of Zen in China.
The other two characters are two of his senior students. Hsüeh-feng, is maybe about half Te-shan’s age. He’s 40, let’s say. And his Dharma brother Yen-t’ou, the head monk, is maybe a little bit older. They’re both senior students in this monastery. They’re not yet transmitted teachers, but they’ve been in the monastery a long time and they have a lot of responsibilities, no doubt. So, you’ll hear their names, and I’ll say a little bit more about each of them after I read the koan.
This is Case 13 in The Gateless Gate. It’s called Te-shan: Bowls in Hand:
Te-shan one day descended to the dining hall bowls in hand. Hsüeh-feng asked him, “Where are you going with your bowls in hand, Old Teacher? The bell has not rung and the drum has not sounded. Te-shan turned and went back to his room.”
Actually, that’s just the first part of the koan, and it was all I was thinking about when I was thinking about this koan in relation to vulnerability. I’d forgotten about what comes next. When I read the whole thing, I realized I got even more than I bargained for on this theme. So here’s where the koan goes from there:
Hsüeh-feng brought up the matter with Yen-t’ou, his Dharma brother. Yen-t’ou said, “Te-shan, great as he is, does not yet know the last word.”
Hearing about this, Te-shan sent for Yen-t’ou and asked, “Do you not approve of this old monk?” Yen-t’ou whispered his meaning. Te-shan said nothing further.
Next day, when Te-shan took the high seat before his assembly, his presentation was very different from usual. Yen-t’ou came to the front of the hall, rubbing his hands and laughing loudly, saying, “How delightful! How delightful! Our old boss has got hold of the last word. From now on no one under heaven can outdo him.”
So let me say a bit more about each of these characters. Te-shan, as a young man, had been an expert on and renowned for his insight into the Diamond Sutra. He went around preaching about the Diamond Sutra as a young man. Impressing people; going to see teacher after teacher, trying to impress them with his knowledge of the sutras generally and this sutra in particular.
One day he came across a wise old woman who wasn’t so impressed and essentially told him, “So what? I don’t think the real Dharma—the real thing—is in these words on this page. I can’t even read.” Te-shan was shaken by this and, to his credit, he took her words and her insight to heart. He went deeper.
Te-shan matured and eventually became a teacher. He looked for some new way to teach the Dharma. We know Te-shan ultimately became famous for not teaching with words and not teaching with silence either, but instead, holding up his teacher stick as his teaching. He sometimes whacked his students with his stick, in good Punch-and-Judy form. Let’s hope it was more of a gentle tap!
I think it’s fair to say that Te-shan’s holding up his stick is an expression of the middle way. To borrow some words Jay introduced to us a couple weeks ago, his teaching was both apophatic and cataphatic. It’s at once the via positiva and the via negative. It’s neither extreme. Te-shan wants people to realize that this is it. It’s all right here; simply right here.
And it’s probably also fair to say that stick is a bit of a prop for Te-shan. When, we ought to ask, does his stick become a prop? Maybe in that phase of his life, the stick is being weaponized a bit as a symbol of strength. Is it still masking a bit of vulnerability? Is it more a shield than a weapon? Hold that thought for just a minute.
So what about Hsüeh-feng? Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but think, Hsüeh-feng’s reaction to his old teacher coming down to dinner at the wrong time, bowls in hand, is a little bit scolding or a little bit prideful. In fact, I can’t help but see his raising the matter with his Dhrama brother Yen-t’ou as maybe a little bit of tattling.
What is Hsüeh-feng clinging to? Maybe his role in the monastery. Maybe his status. Maybe his perfection of the forms. And, if so, might these things be masking vulnerability—the kind of things we sometimes cling to as a false projection of strength, that mask the deeper reality of our vulnerability.
What to say about his Dharma brother Yen-t’ou? I think Yen-t’ou comes across pretty well in this koan. Yen-t’ou is very important to Xuefang, actually. I think it’s fair to say Yen-t’ou becomes Hsüeh-feng’s main teacher.
There’s a story about Yen-t’ou from another koan that I’ll just mention briefly. The culmination of that koan relates back to Fran’s talk yesterday morning. Those of you who heard it will recognize a metaphor she used. In this other koan Hsüeh-feng is lamentiong to Yen-t’ou that, “My heart is not yet at peace. My mind is not yet at peace.” Yen-t’ou says, “Well, tell me about your experience. Tell me what you’ve experienced on this path.”
Hsüeh-feng tells Yen-t’ou about a realization of emptiness he had; a kensho moment. He tells him about another moment of insight he had. He’s reporting these profoundly moving experiences we associate with enlightenment, realization, insight, but he’s still saying they didn’t set his heart to rest. In fact, he says he went to their teacher at some point and asked whether he would ever experience what the ancestors experienced.
What did Te-shan do? He hit Hsüeh-feng with his stick and said, “It’s as if you’re a bucket whose bottom suddenly dropped out!” (That’s the metaphor Fran used in her talk yesterday.)
At this point in their exchange, Yen-t’ou says, “Don’t you know that what enters from the gate cannot be the treasure of the house? If you want to propagate the great teaching, it must flow point by point from within your own breast to cover heaven and earth. Only then will it be the action of someone with spiritual power, only when it comes from inside you.”
Pow! With this, Hsüeh-feng had a great realization, true realization, deep and lasting realization.
Here we see Hsüeh-feng had been clinging to kensho experiences. Flashes of insight as a source of strength or representation of his strength; of the spiritual power he’s seeking. I think Xeufeng is also looking for eternal knowledge and clinging to supposed certainties as he imagines he is finding them.
Now, here’s where our original koan really gets playful: What’s this bit about the last word, and what did Yen-t’ou whisper to Te-shan? After Hsüeh-feng tattles on Te-shan, you can imagine him flying into a tizzy when Yen-t’ou says, “Te-shan, great as he is, doesn’t yet know the last word.”
“What! There’s a last word! There’s a secret I don’t yet know?” Te-shan thought he knew it all already, a bit like the young Te-shan with his command of the Diamond Sutra.
So, when Te-shan came down and asked Yen-t’ou whether he still approved of his old teacher, what did Yen-t’ou whisper to Te-shan? I imagine he whispered, “Oh, my old friend, you are more than okay.” I imagine Yen-t’ou thinking to himself as he said this, “You are more than okay, even as your mind slips away; even as dementia takes over.”
Then I imagine Yen-t’ou whispering to Te-shan, “Hey, let’s have some fun with Hsüeh-feng. Tomorrow when you show up in the Dharma hall, stride right in like a peacock! Speak loudly, boldly! Let them know you really do know the last word after all!”
Whatever false strength Te-shan might have been projecting earlier in life with his impressive knowledge of the Diamond Sutra or by whacking students with his stick, it’s all been stripped away as we meet him here. He’s vulnerable. Fully exposed.
How does all this end? Well, Yen-t’ou, precocious spiritual powerhouse that he was, dies a couple of decades later without any Dharma heirs. There’s no line from Yen-t’ou. Hsüeh-feng, plodding as he seems to be in this koan, keeps at it. He takes it all to heart. He lets his heart break open. He becomes vulnerable. The vulnerable anchor of two of the five main houses of Zen that continue to this very day.
Turning Words 