Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series

Ryutan Sōshin (Lung-t‘an Sui-hsin)[6.68] was a disciple of Tenno Dōgo (Tao-wu). He served the master as one of his personal attendants. He was with him for some time when one day he said to the master: “Since I came to you, I have not at all been instructed in the study of mind.” Replied the master, “Ever since you came to me, I have always been pointing to you how to study mind.” “In what way, sir?” “When you brought me a cup of tea, did I not accept it? When you served me with food, did I not partake of it? When you made bows to me, did I not return them? When did I ever neglect in giving you instructions?” Ryutan kept his head hanging for some time, when the master told him, “If you want to see, see directly into it; but when you try to think about it, it is altogether missed.”

Dōgo Yenchi (Tao-wu Yüan-chih) and Ungan Donjo (Yün-yen Tan-shêng) were standing by the master Yakusan (Yüeh-shan) as attendants, when Yakusan remarked,[6.69] “Where our intellect cannot reach, I verily tell you to avoid talking about it; when you do, horns will grow on you. O Yenchi, what will you say to this?” Yenchi thereupon rose from his place and left the room. Ungan asked the master, “How is it, sir, that Brother Chi does not answer you?” “My back aches to-day,” said Yakusan, “You better go to Yenchi himself, for he understands.” Ungan came to his brother monk and inquired thus, “O Brother Senior, why did you not answer our master now?” “You better go back to the master himself and ask,” was all that poor Ungan could get out of his senior brother.

There was another favourite movement often practised by Zen masters, which was to call out to the questioner or somebody else. One case of this has already been given somewhere else in another connection. The following are the typical and classical ones. Chu, the National Teacher, called out to his attendant monk three times, to which the latter responded regularly. Said the Teacher, “I thought I was not fair to you, but it was you that were not fair to me.”f132[6.70] This calling and responding took place also three times between Mayoku (Ma-ku) and Ryosui (Liang-sui), which at last made the latter exclaim: “O this stupid fellow!”[6.71]

This trick of calling out and responding was frequently practised as is seen in the following cases: A high government dignitary called upon Ungo Doyo (Yün-chü Tao-ying) and asked[6.72]: “I am told that the World-honoured One had a secret phrase and Mahākāśyapa did not keep it hidden; what was the secret phrase?” The master called out, “O honoured officer!” and the officer responded. “Do you understand?” demanded the master. “No, Reverend Sir!” was his natural answer. “If you do not understand, there is the secret phrase: if you understand, there is Mahākāśyapa in full revelation.”

Haikyu (P‘ai-hsiu)[6.73] was a local governor in Shinan (Hsin-an) before he was appointed a state-minister. He once visited a Buddhist monastery in his district. While going around in the premises of the monastery, he came across a fine fresco painting and asked the accompanying priests whose portrait this was. “He was one of the high priests,” they answered. The governor now turned towards them and questioned, “Here is his portrait, but where is the high priest himself?” They all did not know how to answer him. He then further asked if there were any Zen monks about here. They replied, “We have recently a new comer in this monastery, he does some menial work for us and looks very much like a Zen monk.” He was then brought in the presence of the governor who at once spoke to him, “I have one question in which I wish to be enlightened, but the gentlemen here grudge the answer. May I ask you to give me a word for them?” “I humbly wish you to ask,” politely requested the monk. The officer repeated the first question, whereupon the monk loudly and clearly called out, “O Haikyu!” Haikyu responded at once, “Here, sir!” “Where is the high priest now?” cross-questioned the monk. This opened the governor’s eye to the sense of the monk’s counter-question, in which he could now read the solution of his first query.

The case between Yisan (Wei-shan) and Kyōzan (Yang-shan) was more intellectual and to that extent more intelligible than this mere calling and responding. Kyōzan was the chief disciple of Yisan, and one of the peculiar features of this school was to demonstrate the truth of Zen concordantly both by the master and disciple. They once went out picking tea-leaves. The master said to Kyōzan,[6.74] “Picking tea-leaves all day, I hear only your voice and do not see your body; manifest your original body and let me see it.” Kyōzan shook the tea-plant. Said Yisan, “You have only got its function, you have not got the substance.” Kyōzan said, “Master, how with you then?” The master was quiet for a while whereupon the disciple said, “O master, you have got only the substance, you have not got the function.” “You will be spared of my twenty blows,” concluded the master. In Buddhist ontology three conceptions are distinguished, as was referred to previously; substance or body, appearance, and function or activity. “Body” or bhāva corresponds to the idea of mass or being, “appearance” (lakshaṇa) to that of form, and “function” (kṛitya) to that of force. Every reality is regarded by Buddhist philosophers as analysable into these three notions. Sometimes, however, the second conception, “appearance” is absorbed in that of “being,” or “body.” Without functioning no objects exist, but functioning cannot take place without something functioning. The two ideas, according to Buddhist philosophers, are thus inseparable for our understanding of the universe.

But Yisan and Kyōzan were not metaphysicians and would not argue on the subject. The one shook the tree and the other stood still. We cannot say that there is Zen in this standing and shaking as we may interpret them philosophically, but we may glean something of Zen in their remarks on “body” and “function” together with their direct method.

So far the direct method has not been of any violent character as to involve a bodily injury or nervous shock, but the masters had no qualms if they thought necessary to shake the pupils roughly. Rinzai for one was noted for the directness and incisiveness of his dealings; the point of his sword cut through the heart of the opponent. The monk Jō (Ting)[6.75] was one of his disciples, and when he asked the master what the fundamental principle of Buddhism was, Rinzai came down from his straw chair, and taking hold of the monk slapped him with the palm of his hand, and let him go. Jō stood still without knowing what to make of the whole procedure when a by-standing monk blamed him for not bowing to the master. While doing so, Jō all of a sudden awoke to the truth of Zen. Later, when he was passing over a bridge, he happened to meet a party of three Buddhist scholars, one of whom asked Jō, “The river of Zen is deep, and its bottom must be sounded. What does this mean?” Jō, disciple of Rinzai, at once seized the questioner and was at the point of throwing him over the bridge, when his two friends interceded and asked Jō’s merciful treatment of the offender. Jō released the scholar, saying, “If not for the intercession of his friends I would at once let him sound the bottom of the river himself.” With these people Zen was no joke, no mere play of ideas, it was on the contrary a most serious thing on which they would stake their lives.

Rinzai was a disciple of Ōbaku (Huang-po), but while under the master he did not get any special instruction on Zen; for whenever he asked him as to the fundamental truth of Buddhism, he was struck by Ōbaku. But it was these blows that opened Rinzai’s eye to the ultimate truth of Zen and made him exclaim, “After all there is not much in the Buddhism of Ōbaku!”[6.76] In China and in Korea what little of Zen is left mostly belongs to the school of Rinzai. In Japan alone the Soto branch is flourishing as much as the Rinzai. The rigour and vitality of Zen Buddhism that is still present in the Rinzai school of Japan comes from the three blows of Ōbaku so mercifully dealt out to his poor disciple. There is in fact more truth in a blow or a kick than in the verbosity of logical discourse. At any rate the Zen masters were in dead earnest whenever the demonstration of Zen was demanded. See the following instance.

When Tō-Impo (Têng Yin-fêng)[6.77] was pushing a cart, he happened to see his master Baso stretching his legs a little too far out in the roadway. He said, “Will you please draw your legs in?” Replied the master, “A thing once stretched out will never be contracted.” “If so,” said Tō, “a thing once pushed will never be retracted.” His cart went right over the master’s legs which were thus hurt. Later Baso went up to the Preaching Hall where he carried an axe and said to the monks gathered, “Let the one who wounded the old master’s legs awhile ago come out of the congregation.” Tō came forth and stretched his neck ready to receive the axe, but the master instead of chopping the disciple’s head off, quietly set the axe down.

Tō-Impo was ready to give up his life to re-assert the truth of his deed, through which the master got hurt. Mimicry or simulation was rampant everywhere, and therefore Baso wanted to ascertain the genuineness of Tō’s understanding of Zen. When the thing is at stake, the masters do not hesitate to sacrifice anything. In the case of Nansen, a kitten was done away with: Kyōzan broke a mirror into pieces; a woman follower of Zen burned up a whole house; and another woman threw her baby into a river. This latter was an extreme case, and perhaps the only one of the kind ever recorded in the history of Zen. As to minor cases such as mentioned above, they are plentiful and considered almost matters of course with Zen masters.

While I have not attempted to be very exhaustive in describing all the different methods of demonstration or rather realisation of the truth of Zen resorted to by the masters of various schools, the statements so far made in regard to them, may suffice to give us at least a glimpse into some of the peculiar features of Zen Buddhism. Whatever explanations may be given by critics or scholars to the philosophy of Zen, we must first of all acquire a new point of view of looking at things, which is altogether beyond our ordinary sphere of consciousness. Rather, this new viewpoint is gained when we reach the ultimate limits of our understanding, within which we think we are always bound and unable to break through. Most people stop at these limits and are easily persuaded that they cannot go any further. But there are some whose mental vision is able to penetrate this veil of contrasts and contradictions. They gain it abruptly. They beat the wall in utter despair, and lo, it unexpectedly gives way and there opens an entirely new world. Things hitherto regarded as prosaic and ordinary and even binding are now arranged in quite a novel scheme. The old world of the senses has vanished, and something entirely new has come to take its place. We seem to be in the same objective surroundings, but subjectively we are rejuvenated, we are born again.

Wu Tao-tzŭ or Godoshi was one of the greatest painters of China, and lived in the reign of the Emperor Hsüan-tsung, of the T‘ang dynasty. His last painting, according to legend, was a landscape commissioned by the Emperor for one of the walls of his palace. The artist concealed the complete work with a curtain till the Emperor’s arrival, then drawing it aside exposed his vast picture. The Emperor gazed with admiration on a marvellous scene: forests, and great mountains, and clouds in immense distances of sky, and men upon the hills, and birds in flight. “Look,” said the painter, “in the cave at the foot of this mountain dwells a spirit.” He clapped his hands; the door at the cave’s entrance flew open. “The interior is beautiful beyond words,” he continued, “permit me to show the way.” So saying he passed within; the gate closed after him; and before the astonished Emperor could speak or move, all had faded to white wall before his eyes, with not a trace of the artist’s brush remaining. Wu Tao-tzŭ was seen no more.

The artist has disappeared, and the whole scene has been wiped out; but from this nothingness there arises a new spiritual world, abiding in which the Zen masters perform all kinds of antics, assert all kinds of absurdities, and yet they are in perfect accord with the nature of things in which a world moves on stripped of all its falsehoods, conventions, simulations, and intellectual obliquities. Unless one gets into this world of realities, the truth of Zen will be eternally a sealed book. This is what I mean by acquiring a new point of view independent of logic and discursive understanding.

Emerson expresses the same view in his own characteristic manner: “Foremost among these activities (that is, mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration), are the somersaults, spells, and resurrections, wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again be quite the miserable pedants we were.”

Here is a good illustration of the difference between a “miserable pedant” and one who has “passed the bounds.” There was a monk called Gensoku (Hsüan-tsê)[6.78] who was one of the chief officials of the monastery under the Zen master Hōgen (Fa-yen), of the early tenth century. He never came to the master to make inquiries about Zen; so the master one day asked him why he did not come. The chief official answered: “When I was under Seiho (Ch‘ing-fêng) I got an idea as to the truth of Zen.” “What is your understanding then?” demanded the master. “When I asked my master, who was the Buddha, he said, Ping-ting T‘ung-tsŭ comes for fire.” “It is a fine answer,” said Hōgen, “but probably you misunderstand it. Let me see how you take the meaning of it.” “Well,” explained the official, “Ping-ting is the god of fire; when he himself comes for fire, it is like myself, who, being a Buddha from the very beginning, wants to know who the Buddha is. No questioning is then needed as I am already the Buddha himself.” “There!” exclaimed the master, “Just as I thought! You are completely off.” Soku, the chief official, got highly offended because his view was not countenanced and left the monastery. Hōgen said, “If he comes back he may be saved; if not, he is lost.” Soku after going some distance reflected that a master of five hundred monks as Hōgen was would not chide him without cause, and returned to the old master and expressed his desire to be instructed in Zen.

Hōgen said, “You ask me and I will answer.” “Who is the Buddha?”—the question came from the lips of the now penitent monk. “Ping-ting T‘ung-tzŭ comes for fire.” This made his eyes open to the truth of Zen quite different from what he formerly understood of it. He was now no more a second-hand “pedant” but a living creative soul. I need not repeat that Zen refuses to be explained but that it is to be lived. Without this, all talk is nothing but an idea, woefully inane and miserably unsatisfactory.

Below is another story illustrating the peculiarity of Zen understanding as distinguished from our ordinary intellectual understandings which are based on ideas and representations. The same phrase is repeated here as in the preceding case, and as far as its literal meaning goes, we have no reason to suppose its producing different effects on the mind of the recipient. But as I said elsewhere Zen is the opening of one’s own inner consciousness occasioned by some external incidental happening which may be of purely physical nature but may invoke some mental operation. This opening is therefore something, we as outsiders not belonging to the inner life of the individual concerned, have no means to judge beforehand, we know only when it is opened; but the masters seem to know when this opening is going to take place and how it is to be brought about from their own experience. Students of the psychology of Zen will here find an interesting problem to investigate.

Suigan Kashin (Ts‘ui-yen K‘ê-chên)[6.79] was a disciple of Zimyo (Tz‘u-ming), 986–1040, who was one of the greatest Sung masters and under whom the Rinzai school of Zen was divided into two branches, Woryu (Huang-lung) and Yogi (Yang-ch‘i).[6.80] Kashin was quite proud of being one of the disciples of the master, he was not yet really a master himself, but he thought he was. When he had a talk with another of Zimyo’s disciples, he was found out and laughed at. When they were having a walk together one day, they discussed Zen. His friend picked up a piece of a broken tile and putting it on a flat rock, said, “If you can say a word at this juncture, I will grant your really being Zimyo’s disciple.” Kashin wavered, looked this way and that, trying to make some answer. His friend was impatient, who broke out, “Hesitating and wavering, you have not yet penetrated through illusion, you have never yet even dreamt as to what the true insight of Zen is.” Kashin was thoroughly ashamed of himself. He at once returned to the master who severely reproached him, saying that he came before the termination of the summer session, which was against the regulations. Full of tears, he explained how he was taken to task by his fellow-monk and that it was the reason why he was here even against the monastery rules. The master abruptly asked him: “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” Replied Kashin,

The master’s eyes flashed with indignation, and he thundered, “Shame on you! To have such a view for an old seasoned man like you! How can you expect to be delivered from birth-and-death?” Kashin earnestly implored to be instructed. Said the master, “You ask me.” Thereupon he repeated the master’s first question, “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” The master roared,

If people ask me what Zen is like, I will say that it is like learning the art of burglary. The son of a burglar saw his father growing older and thought, “If he is unable to carry out his profession, who will be the bread-winner of this family, except myself? I must learn the trade.” He intimated the idea to his father, who approved of it. One night the father took the son to a big house, broke through the fence, entered the house, and opening one of the large chests, told the son to go in and pick out the clothings. As soon as he got into it, the lid was dropped and the lock securely applied. The father now came out to the courtyard, and loudly knocking at the door woke up the whole family, whereas he himself quietly slipped away from the former hole in the fence. The residents got excited and lighted candles, but found that the burglars had already gone. The son who remained all the time in the chest securely confined thought of his cruel father. He was greatly mortified, when a fine idea flashed upon him. He made a noise which sounded like the gnawing of a rat. The family told the maid to take a candle and examine the chest. When the lid was unlocked, out came the prisoner, who blew out the light, pushed away the maid, and fled. The people ran after him. Noticing a well by the road, he picked up a large stone and threw it into the water. The pursuers all gathered around the well trying to find the burglar drowning himself in the dark hole. In the meantime he was safely back in his father’s house. He blamed him very much for his narrow escape.