Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series

Is there any connection in any possible way between the washing of the dishes and the blowing out of a candle and the twisting of the nose? We must say with Ummon: If there is none, how could they all come to the realisation of the truth of Zen? If there is, what inner relationship is there? What is this satori? What a new point of viewing things is this? So long as our observation is limited to those conditions which preceded the opening of a disciple’s eye we cannot perhaps fully comprehend where lies the ultimate issue. They are matters of everyday occurrence, and if Zen lies objectively among them, every one of us is a master before we are told of it. This is partly true inasmuch as there is nothing artificially constructed in Zen, but if the nose is to be really twisted or the candle blown out in order to take the scale off the eye, our attention must be directed inwardly to the working of our minds, and it will be there where we are to take hold of the hidden relation existing between the flying geese and the washed dishes and the blown out candle and any other happenings that weave out infinitely variegated patterns of human life.

Under Daiye (Tai-hui, 1089–1163),[5.15] the great Zen teacher of the Sung dynasty, there was a monk named Dōken (Tao-ch‘ien) who had spent many years in the study of Zen, but who had not yet delved into its secrets if there were any. He was discouraged when he was sent on an errand to a distant city. A trip requiring half a year to finish would surely be a hindrance rather than a help to his study. Sogen (Tsung-yüan), one of his fellow-monks, took pity on him and said, “I will accompany you on this trip and do all that I can for you. There is no reason why you cannot go on with your meditation even while travelling.” They started together. One evening Dōken despairingly implored his friend to assist him in the solution of the mystery of life. The friend said, “I am willing to help you in every way, but there are five things in which I cannot be of any help to you. These you must look after yourself.” Dōken expressed the desire to know what they were. “For instance,” said the friend, “when you are hungry or thirsty, my eating of food or drinking does not fill your stomach. You must drink and eat yourself. When you want to respond to the calls of nature, you must take care of them yourself, for I cannot be of any use to you. And then it will be nobody else but yourself that will carry this corpse of yours [i.e., the body] along this highway.” This remark at once opened the mind of the truth-seeking monk, who, so transported with his discovery, did not know how to express his joy.

Gen now told him that his work was done and that his further companionship would have no meaning after this.[5.16] So they parted company and Dōken was left alone to continue the trip. After the half-year Dōken came back to his own monastery. Daiye, his teacher, happened to meet him on his way down the mountain, and made the following remark, “This time he knows it all.” What was it, one may remark, that flashed through Dōken’s mind when his friend gave him a most matter-of-fact advice?

Kyōgen (Hsian-yen) was a disciple of Hyakujo. After the master’s death he went to Yisan (Wei-shan, 771–853) who was a senior disciple of Hyakujo. Yisan asked him,[5.17] “I am told that you have been under my late master Hyakujo, and also that you have remarkable intelligence; but the understanding of Zen through this medium necessarily ends in intellectual and analytical comprehension, which is not of much use. Yet you may have had an insight into the truth of Zen. Let me have your view as to the reason of birth and death, that is, as to your own being before your parents gave birth to you.”

Thus asked, Kyōgen did not know how to reply. He retired into his own room and assiduously made research among his notes which he had taken of the sermons given by his late master. He failed to come across a suitable passage he might present as his own view. He returned to Yisan and implored him to teach in the faith of Zen. But Yisan said, “I really have nothing to impart to you, and if I tried to do so, you may have occasion to make me an object of ridicule later on. Besides, whatever I can instruct you is my own and will never be yours.” Kyōgen was disappointed and considered his senior disciple unkind. Finally he came to the decision to burn up all his notes and memorandums which were of no help to his spiritual welfare, and, retiring altogether from the world, to spend the rest of his life in solitude and simplicity in accordance with the Buddhist rules. He reasoned, “What is the use of studying Buddhism, so difficult to comprehend and too subtle to receive instructions from another? I shall be a plain homeless monk, troubled with no desire to master things too deep for thought.” He left Yisan and built a hut near the tomb of Chu (Hui-chung), the National Master, at Nan-yang. One day he was weeding and sweeping the ground, and when a piece of rock brushed away struck a bamboo, the sound produced by the percussion unexpectedly elevated his mind to a state of satori. The question proposed by Yisan became transparent; his joy was boundless, he felt as if meeting again his lost parent.

There is something, we must admit, in Zen that defies explanation, and to which no master however ingenious can lead his disciples through intellectual analysis. Kyōgen or Tokusan had enough knowledge of the canonical teachings or of the master’s expository discourses; but when the real thing was demanded of them, they significantly failed to produce it either to their inner satisfaction or for the master’s approval. The satori is not a thing after all to be gained through the understanding. But once the key is within one’s grasp, everything seems to be laid bare before him; the entire world assumes then a different aspect. By those who know, this inner change is recognised. The Dōken before he started on his mission and the Dōken after the realisation were apparently the same person; but as soon as Daiye saw him, he knew what had taken place in him even when he uttered not a word. Baso twisted Hyakujo’s nose, and the latter turned into such a wild soul as to have the audacity to roll up the matting before his master’s discourse had hardly begun (see below). The experience they have gone through with within themselves is not a very elaborate, complicated, and intellectually demonstrable thing; for none of them ever try to expound it by a series of learned discourses, they do just this thing or that, or utter a single phrase unintelligible to outsiders, and the whole affair proves most satisfactory both to the master and to the disciple.

As to the opening of satori, all that Zen can do is to indicate the way and leave the rest all to one’s own experience; that is to say, following up the indication and arriving at the goal—this is to be done by oneself and without another’s help. With all that the master can do, he is helpless to make the disciple take hold of the thing, unless the latter is inwardly fully prepared for it. Just as we cannot make a horse drink against his will, the taking hold of the ultimate reality is to be done by oneself, just as the flower blooms out of its inner necessity, the looking into one’s own nature must be the outcome of one’s own inner overflowing. This is where Zen is so personal and subjective, in the sense of being inner and creative. In the Āgama or Nikāya literature we encounter so frequently with such phrases as “Atta-dīpā viharatha attā saraṇā anañña-saraṇā,” or “sayaṁ abhiññā,” or “Diṭṭha-dhammo patta-dhammo vidita-dhammo pariyogāḷha-dhammo aparappaccayo satthu sāsane”; they show that Enlightenment is the awakening, within oneself and not depending on others, of an inner sense in one’s consciousness, enabling one to create a world of eternal harmony and beauty—the home of Nirvana.

I said that Zen does not give us any intellectual assistance, nor does it waste time in arguing the point with us, but it merely suggests or indicates, not because it wants to be indefinite, but because that is really the only thing it can do for us. If it could, it would do anything to help us come to an understanding. In fact Zen is exhausting every possible means to do that, as we can see in all the great masters’ attitudes towards their disciples.f109 When they are actually knocking them down, their kindheartedness is never to be doubted. They are just waiting for the time when their pupils’ minds get all ripened for the final moment. When this is come, the opportunity of opening an eye to the truth of Zen lies everywhere. One can pick it up in the hearing of an inarticulate sound, or listening to an unintelligible remark, or in the observation of a flower blooming, or in the encountering of any trivial everyday incident such as stumbling, rolling up a screen, using a fan, etc. These are all sufficient conditions that will awaken one’s inner sense. Evidently a most insignificant happening, and yet its effect on the mind infinitely surpasses all that one could expect of it. A light touch of an ignited wire, and an explosion shaking the very foundations of the earth. In fact, all the causes of satori are in the mind.

That is why when the clock clicks, all that has been lying there bursts up like a volcanic eruption or flashes out like a bolt of lightning,f110 Zen calls this “returning to one’s own home”; for its followers will declare: “You have now found yourself; from the very beginning nothing has been kept away from you. It was yourself that closed the eye to the fact. In Zen there is nothing to explain, nothing to teach, that will add to your knowledge. Unless it grows out of yourself, no knowledge is really of value to you, a borrowed plumage never grows.”

Kozankoku (Huang San-ku),[5.18] a Confucian poet and statesman, came to Kwaido (Hui-t‘ang, 1024–1100) to be initiated into Zen. Said the Zen master, “There is a passage in the text you are so thoroughly familiar with, which fitly describes the teaching of Zen. Did not Confucius declare, ‘Do you think I am holding back something from you, O my disciples? Indeed I have held nothing back from you.’” Sankoku tried to answer, but Kwaido immediately made him keep silence by saying, “No, no!” The Confucian disciple felt troubled in mind, and did not know how to express himself. Some time later they were having a walk in the mountains. The wild laurel was in full bloom and the air was redolent. Asked the Zen master, “Do you smell it?” When the Confucian answered affirmatively, Kwaido said, “There, I have kept nothing back from you!” This suggestion from the teacher at once led to the opening of Kozankoku’s mind. Is it not evident now that satori is not a thing to be imposed upon another, but that it is self-growing from within? Though nothing is kept away from us, it is through a satori that we become cognisant of the fact, being convinced that we are all sufficient unto ourselves. All that therefore Zen contrives is to assert that there is such a thing as self-revelation, or the opening of satori.

As satori strikes at the primary fact of existence, its attainment marks a turning point in one’s life. The attainment, however, must be thorough-going and clear-cut in order to produce a satisfactory result. To deserve the name “satori” the mental revolution must be so complete as to make one really and sincerely feel that there took place a fiery baptism of the spirit. The intensity of this feeling is proportional to the amount of effort the opener of satori has put into the achievement. For there is a gradation in satori as to its intensity, as in all our mental activity. The possessor of a lukewarm satori may suffer no such spiritual revolution as Rinzai, or Bukko (Fo-kuang) whose case is quoted below. Zen is a matter of character and not of the intellect, which means that Zen grows out of the will as the first principle of life. A brilliant intellect may fail to unravel all the mysteries of Zen, but a strong soul will drink deep of the inexhaustible fountain. I do not know if the intellect is superficial and touches only the fringe of one’s personality, but the fact is that the will is the man himself, and Zen appeals to it. When one becomes penetratingly conscious of the working of this agency, there is the opening of satori and the understanding of Zen. As they say, the snake has now grown into the dragon; or more graphically, a common cur—a most miserable creature wagging its tail for food and sympathy, and kicked about by the street boys so mercilessly—has now turned into a golden-haired lion whose roar frightens to death all the feeble-minded.

Therefore, when Rinzai was meekly submitting to the “thirty blows” of Obaku, he was a pitiable sight; as soon as he attained satori, he was quite a different personage and his first exclamation was, “There is not much after all in the Buddhism of Obaku.”[5.19] And when he saw the reproachful Obaku again, he returned his favour by giving him a slap on the face. “What an arrogance, what an impudence!” Obaku exclaimed; but there was reason in Rinzai’s rudeness, and the old master could not but be pleased with this treatment from his former tearful Rinzai.

When Tokusan gained an insight into the truth of Zen, he immediately took up all his commentaries on the Diamond Sutra, once so valued and considered indispensable that he had to carry them wherever he went; he now set fire to them, reducing all the manuscripts into nothingness. He exclaimed: “However deep your knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair placed in the vastness of space; and however important your experience in things worldly, it is like a drop of water thrown into an unfathomable abyss.”[5.20]

On the day following the incident of the flying geese,[5.21] to which reference was made elsewhere, Baso appeared in the preaching hall and was about to speak before a congregation, when Hyakujo came forward and began to roll up the matting.f111 Baso without protesting came down from his seat and returned to his own room. He then called Hyakujo and asked him why he rolled up the matting before he uttered a word.

“It is not painful any more to-day, master.” How differently he behaves now! When his nose was pinched, he was quite an ignoramus in the secrets of Zen. He is now a golden-haired lion, he is master of himself, and acts so freely as if he owned the world, pushing away even his own master far into the background.