Today’s teisho will be on Case 31 in the
Mumonkan, the “Gate of No Barrier.” Case
31 is entitled “Joshu Investigates an Old Woman.”
CASE
A monk asked an old woman, “What is the way to Taisan?”
The old woman said, “Go straight ahead.” When
the monk had proceeded a few steps, she said, “A good
respectable monk, but he too goes that way.”
Afterward someone told Joshu about this. Joshu said, “Wait
a bit, I will go and investigate the old woman for you.”
The next day he went and asked the same question, and the
woman gave the same answer. On returning, Joshu said to his
disciples, “I have investigated the old woman of Taisan
for you.”
MUMON'S COMMENT
The old woman only knew how to sit still
in her tent and plan her campaign; she did not know when she
was shadowed by a spy. Though old Joshu showed himself clever
enough to take a camp and overwhelm a fortress, he displayed
no trace of being a great general. If we look at them, they
both have their faults. But tell me, what did Joshu see in
the old woman?
MUMON'S VERSE
The question was like the others,
The answer was the same.
Sand in the rice,
Thorns in the mud.
Three bells
Taisan—“Tai Shan” in Mandarin–
is one of the five sacred mountains of China. Should you go
there someday, you will see a number of temples, some Buddhist
and some Taoist, majestically seated among rocks, clouds,
and trees, and associated with the mountain god. But “mountain
god” is not quite the right phrase because the mountain
itself is the god. From very ancient times—beginning
3000 years ago and probably even earlier—people have
been climbing up Tai Shan. Later, it became the custom for
the emperors of China to make sacrifices there. The Chinese
understood very well that Tai Shan isn’t an ordinary
mountain; it’s the Mountain with a capital “M,”
the special place where the Earth meets the Sky. Isn’t
that where we’re all trying to go? Isn’t that
what Zen is all about, finally reaching this sacred place?
But why is getting there so hard?
In the story, a monk is on his way to the sacred
site, but somehow he’s gotten lost and so he stops to
ask an old woman for directions. In response, she tells him,
“Go straight ahead,” but when the monk has only
taken a few steps, she says aloud, so that he can plainly
hear, “A good, respectable monk, but he too goes that
way.” Stung by these words of criticism, the monk becomes
confused, filled with doubt about himself and more lost than
ever.
If you stop to consider the story, “Go straight ahead”
is rather strange advice. The old woman might have said go
East, North, South or West, or she might told the monk to
turn left once he reached the creek. But “Straight ahead”
could mean any direction, depending on where the monk is facing.
What, I wonder, were the old woman’s intentions? Why
was she trying to trip him up or undermine his confidence?"
Who is this old woman anyway? Perhaps you’ve noticed
already that women, old or young or in between, seldom appear
in the koans. The only other old woman I can recall appears
in the koan about Tokusan, a great Zen master in the T’ang
dynasty. Originally, Tokusan didn’t practice Zen but
spent his time combing through the technicalities of the Diamond
Sutra. One day, however, someone told him about Zen, the sect
which deemphasized sutra study because it taught that everything
can be learned simply by practicing zazen. For Tokusan this
was absolute blasphemy, and he set off to find the leaders
of the Zen cult in order to confront them face to face. But
on the way he met up unexpectedly with an old woman like the
one in our story about the monk. Stopping at an inn after
a long day’s journey, Tokusan asked this old woman for
directions, and her reply exposed his fundamental ignorance
about the nature of enlightenment:
Before Tokusan crossed the barrier from his native place,
his mind burned and his mouth uttered bitterness. . . .When
he reached the road to Reishu, he asked an old woman to let
him have lunch to “refresh the mind.”
“Your worship, what sort of literature do you carry
in your pack?” the old woman asked.
“Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra,” replied Tokusan.
The old woman said, “I hear it is said in that sutra,
‘The past mind cannot be held, the present mind cannot
be held, the future mind cannot be held.’ Now, I would
like to ask you, what mind are you going to have refreshed?”
At this question Tokusan was dumbfounded.
The old woman stuns Tokusan because she grasps the heart of
the Diamond Sutra’s teaching, which Tokusan
has only glimpsed in the abstract. Her reply cuts the ground
out from under him, and leaves deeply submerged in emptiness.
These old women aren’t what they appear, but neither
are the monks. In each of these koans we are told about a
“home leaver”—a monk– who’s
supposed to understand something about enlightenment, but
then the monk get stopped dead in his tracks by an old woman
who is not assumed to know much about anything.
As I say, women of any kind are quite rare in the koans. The
absence of women in the literature tells us something we might
not want to hear about the history of Zen, which taught that
Buddha nature is everywhere but still treated women as second
rate, erasing them from Zen history when they weren’t
excluded from practice altogether. What I admire about these
two stories is precisely that they try to correct this omission.
But the problem won’t be solved simply by setting out
to retrieve the stories of women in Zen. That work is essential,
I agree, but a more important question remains. How can people
who practice Zen be so blind when they operate in the world
of form—in the world of culture and convention? How
can people who sit wholeheartedly sometimes make such terrible
mistakes? From time to time in the world of Zen we hear about
teachers who have broken their vows by having sex with their
own students. But Zen teachers have done things much worse
than that in recent history—even encouraging young soldiers
to kill civilians during WWII.
The koan “Joshu Investigates” is not just about
the undervaluing of women, although that is a crucial element.
It’s also about how we encounter the world, and whether
it is ever possible to get beyond our assumptions and prejudice.
This is not just an ethical dilemma or a political problem.
It has to do with the possibility that “awakened mind”
itself is nothing more than a myth. How can people who sit
with diligence, who cultivate themselves wholeheartedly, still
fail to see things as they really are? How can a “good,
respectable monk” not know the way to Tai Shan?
A few years ago the Dalai Lama came here to Rutgers University
to deliver a public talk in the football stadium. Fifty thousand
people arrived to hear him speak, even though for many he
was just a name they had heard on Oprah’s show or read
about in People Magazine. When he arrived in the stadium,
he was wearing his usual robes—brilliant yellow and
deep maroon, with strings of beads wrapped around his arms
like the bodhisattvas you can see in classical Buddhist art.
He walked along a red carpet and sat on a resplendent throne
above an entourage of followers, dignitaries, and members
of the press. Close by were the monks and nuns from local
Tibetan communities, and also representatives from other Buddhist
groups. Even before he began to speak the spectacle itself
announced to one and all, “This is person you should
listen to.”
But what if you happened to sit across from an aging Asian
women on the bus going from College Avenue to Livingston–old
woman dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, or a set of sweats.
No robes, no beads, maybe gray hair on her head. Would you
somehow know if she’s deeply awake? Would you even give
her a second look?
The monk in the koan reacts in the same way when he comes
across the old woman. What could she possibly know except
perhaps the directions to the pilgrimage site? But the answer
she gives is tantalizing because she seems to understand something
more than that—not just the route to the physical place
but also to what that place represents. So this koan is not
just about a man who underestimates an old woman, but how
our assumptions prevent us from becoming fully aware. The
koan asks if it is even possible to encounter the world as
it really is, pushing aside all of these veils of ignorance.
Newcomers who join our introductory classes usually know very
little about Zen, and when I try to explain what it’s
all about, I ask them to think of Zen as a way of getting
into contact with reality—which, I suppose, might leave
them more confused than when they first arrived. Isn’t
the real rather obvious? Many people who are attracted to
Zen, or to meditation practice generally, feel they already
see the world as it is—a rather unappealing place, after
all, full of conflict and tension, and often disappointing,
even cruel. And so the motivation to get involved with Zen
sometimes comes from the desire to transcend—to reach
a more peaceful realm or a higher plane.
In a certain way this kind of discontent is perfectly justified.
From the time you are eight or nine, you spend the greater
part of your waking hours sitting at a desk while a teacher
talks, or watching TV or playing games on your computer or
ipad—day after day after day. Along with this relentless
routine there is often a high degree of stress, pressure to
get good grades or do well on tests, expectations about how
you should look or the career choices you should make. If
you think about it, we spend most of our lives closed in by
cubicles or tiny rooms, or traveling from one enclosure to
the next. Every once in a while we get to look out the window
at the trees and grass, if we have a window. Occasionally
they let us go on excursions to places like Hawaii or Cancun,
where the rooms are much the same but the scenery is different.
When I was travelling in southern Mexico twenty-five years
ago I was surprised that so many people didn’t wear
a watch. I was told that the locals there, especially people
who lived outside of the city, didn’t follow a structured
routine like the one we are familiar with up here. Sometimes
people stayed up all night just to enjoy each other’s
company, and they would eat whenever they wanted to. I also
recall someone telling me about a great Tibetan teacher who
died recently after spending his whole life outside in the
open air or sheltered in natural caves. Apparently he didn’t
like to be cooped up. Imagine how he’d feel in our society!
In one sense our way of life is completely real—just
try to escape it! But in another sense it’s completely
made up, completely unreal and arbitrary. We live, you might
say, in a collective dream, and Zen practice is supposed to
lead to waking up from that fantasy. Sooner or later, if you
practice Zen, the falseness of this contrived reality should
become more obvious. On the cushion you might notice that
your stress disappears and time itself seems to stand still
or stretch out in all directions, endless and unhurried. Or
you might feel a certain thrill simply by listening to the
sound of rain or the humming of the cicadas. At these moments
our regular routine can begin to seem unnatural. “Why
do I worry so much,” you might think. “I need
to let go, allowing things to unfold.” The truth is
that humans spend very little time in contact with the real
world, and that’s a great pity. A respected philosopher
who died about a year ago year is supposed to have said at
the end, “I wish I’d made more friends.”
My own father, just before he died, was filled with regret
for things he might have done but couldn’t make the
time.
But why don’t we make time for life and for friends?
Why can’t we get in closer contact with the world? You
might say that the “old woman” in the story is
life itself. This old woman could really be someone important
to know, someone from whom you could learn a lot, with whom
you could have marvelous experiences. But why don’t
we see her for what she is? Has it ever occurred to you that
the problem might be that we keep trying to climb the mountain?
Every year millions of people pack their bags, leave their
homes, and travel across China to ascend Tai Shan. But why
do they make this journey? What’s up there on the mountaintop?
In Zen we are taught that every place is a bodhimandala, a
place of awakening. So why should people make the pilgrimage?
Why climb up the mountain?
When beginners come to our center I say, “Just watch
your breath.” And typically people begin by thinking,
“What could be simpler? This is going to be easy.”
And yet, as you might remember, the first time you tried to
watch your breath, it was actually quite difficult because
this veil of thoughts, associations, fears and anxieties draws
itself over your awareness, and you’re unable to see
the breath for long stretches. And of course, all the time
that you’re struggling to encounter the breath, you
also had all these assumptions about what Zen practice should
be and what transcendent experience might involve. Perhaps
you might end up by thinking that the whole practice is a
waste of your time. People come into dokusan and say, “I
wish you would take me off the breath perception exercise.”
And I might say, “Why?” And they might answer,
“Well, I’m breathing. There’s nothing more
to it. Now let me start real Zen practice.”
I was like that myself. When I first came to the Seattle Zen
Center I thought that my teacher was going to welcome me into
the dokusan room at some point and reveal secret techniques
to me. I know you think I’m kidding, but I assure you
I’m not. I had read somewhere that Buddhism had two
traditions, the exoteric or open tradition and the esoteric
or hidden one. So I was waiting for Genki Roshi to reveal
the esoteric teachings to me. Of course I bowed, I recited
the sutras and so on, but I believed that one day I would
enter the dokusan room and the Roshi would say, “Ok,
here it is. You’ve proven your dedication. Now this,
clap your hands, and say ‘Om,’ and imagine a spinning
wheel”—something like that. Who knows what fantasies
I had, but the important thing was that I knew a great secret
was waiting for me in the dokusan room—a bit like the
great secret people go to see when they climb up Tai Shan.
I continued to watch my breath, but I thought of that activity
as a test and not something worthwhile in itself. I had spent
years reading about philosophy, mysticism, Christian mysticism,
Jewish mysticism, Sufi mysticism. I had read a wonderful book
by Alexandra David-Neél entitled “Magic And Mystery
In Tibet.” Magic! Mystery! That’s what I wanted
to find. David-Neél talks about certain people—known
as the lung-gom-pa–who enter trances and walk incredibly
fast over long distances in the high deserts of the treeless
Tibetan plateau. She claims that these monks can move almost
as fast as a horse. She once saw a lung-gom-pa coming over
the horizon like a train on its tracks– just breath,
breath, breath while his eyes were glazed and, as she recalls,
“He didn’t see me.” Then he moved off into
the distance. When I read this account I thought, “That’s
it!! I want to be that monk.” But instead of becoming
a lung-gom-pa, I was stuck with the breath, like a teenager
forced to ride a child’s bike. Because of my fantasies
about the esoteric tradition, I couldn’t be in the moment.
I couldn’t become one with the breath.
Stuck with breath meditation for years, I tried to be creative.
I wrote poems. I brought flowers and oddly shaped rocks into
the dokusan room. I was so afraid that I wasn’t going
to be special, that I wasn’t going to be awake. I thought
that if I could just go into dokusan and say something extraordinary
to the roshi, he would see that I’m a unique and special
person. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything to say
that would convince him of that. And unconsciously, I didn’t
believe it myself, not even for a moment. So I just kept trying
to avoid the breath, because when you really watch the breath
something “terrible” happens: you disappear, the
world disappears, and finally even your fantasies are gone.
Then you open your eyes and you’re right here—not
in Tibet, but in Seattle or New Jersey. And that can be hard
to handle.
The real is difficult to find, and difficult to accept once
you have found it. When people from Europe came to this continent
for the first time, they had never encountered what you might
call wild nature. Their ancestors may have encountered it
a thousand years earlier, but nature of that uncontrolled,
wild kind had been completely forgotten. Apparently the wildlife
in the New World was so abundant that flocks of birds would
obscure the sun as they flew overhead. Rivers were filled
with fish beyond number. Buffalo were so numerous that days
were required for a single herd to pass by. But when the first
Europeans arrived, they were terrified of the wilderness and
they thought of it as the devil’s domain. People associated
wild nature with evil and danger, and so clearing the trees
was like doing war with evil, conquering the devil’s
territory. A few centuries later, our society began to produce
people who saw nature a different way, people like Thoreau
and John Muir, who thought of it as a sacred text. Muir used
to go off into the wilderness with his gun, a little bit of
flour, some matches, and his blanket, living off the land
for months. He thought of the wilderness as “The Second
Bible.”
It took centuries for Europeans and their descendents to stop
looking at the natural world as evil and dangerous, and to
see it as holy and wonderful. A lot of destruction, a lot
of confusion, had to happen before these people could change
their way of thinking. Something similar is happening in other
ways as well. When I was growing up on a military base in
southern Virginia during the late sixties, white people and
black people absolutely never mingled. Our town had a black
grocery store and a white grocery store, and I went to a school
that was entirely white. Throughout the day I had no contact
with people of color, and at the time, the arrangement seemed
totally natural to me. It has taken our culture more than
two hundred years to see people of color in a different way—-really
to see them at all.
If we have cultural reasons for not dealing with reality,
we have psychological reasons as well. After the most recent
Thursday night meditation I came home and joined my wife,
Barbara, who had arrived a little earlier. She was watching
a program on TV about the “continuity” crews that
are involved in the production of movies. Their job is to
ensure that all the details are continuous throughout the
entire film, an enormous problem because the scenes aren’t
shot in their final sequence. The director might film Brad
Pitt in an elevator pushing the button to go up. But then
a week later he might film the scene where Pitt walks toward
the elevator and steps in. Continuity people have the difficult
job of making sure that Brad’s hair in the first shot
isn’t parted on the right, only to change to a left-hand
part a few seconds after that. The director might film the
fifth scene first and the tenth scene next and then the third
scene. And somebody has to be in charge of continuity, but
it’s tremendously confusing and of course they screw
up all the time. Yet the audience seldom notices, which I
find very interesting. If you watch a film repeatedly, you
might catch a slip up. In one scene, Brad Pitt might be waiting
for this woman to come down the escalator and as he waits,
he’s holding a bowl of shrimp and eating from the bowl.
In the next scene he’s holding a plate of shrimp, not
a bowl. In the next scene he’s holding a bowl of shrimp
again. Only very rarely, however, do people see the problem
the first time around because the mind prefers not to notice
such inconsistencies. We tend to suppress them as much as
we can.
This is partly why Zen practice can be such a challenge. What
we’re trying to do on the cushion, breath by breath,
is peel away these layers of culture, these layers of expectation,
common sense and fantasy. It can be done but not the way people
think—by consciously trying to notice what we don’t
want or don’t expect. In fact, consciously trying in
that way only makes the problem worse. What we expect is seldom
real.
People often think of enlightenment as an epiphany or revelation.
You’re sitting on the cushion. You’re watching
the breath and then, all of a sudden, BOOM. There’s
this flash and everything is suddenly revealed. When you get
up you feel completely transformed—born again, so to
speak. You might cry. You might laugh. And then you go in
to the dokusan room where the teacher says, “Yes, that’s
it! You’ve done it!” Ecstatic events of this kind
do take place occasionally, but for the most part insight
in Zen comes rather differently.
What usually happens is that you’re sitting
on the cushion and you’re watching the breath or focusing
on koan and you notice something, something odd, but then
you pass it by. You notice something just for a second and
then you go on looking for the answer you think you should
pursue—something important and transformative. But that
approach never works because the “answer” isn’t
ever what you think. Basically every koan gives you a command
like this: “Go find something but we’re not telling
you what it is, and it’s not what you think you should
be looking for.” You’re supposed to enter into
deep samadhi, deep emptiness, and then allow your unconscious
mind to do the processing. While you’re consciously
looking for the answer you might notice, say, that your hands
and your face have disappeared. And you might think, “Oh,
that’s odd, but now back to the koan.” After that,
when you go to dokusan, you might tell the teacher, “I’m
afraid I didn’t experience anything on the cushion today,
nothing.” And the teacher asks, “Nothing?”
“Nothing happened,” you say. “Nothing of
importance.”
But suppose the teacher asks, “Well, what happened that
wasn’t important?” And then you might remember,
“Well, my face and hands disappeared, and my mind became
completely blank. Just for a second.” To your surprise,
the teacher might say, “I accept that answer.”
So often when people come in to see me in dokusan, they walk
right past the “answer” to their koan. They notice
something but they don’t see it as important because
it looks inconsistent or anomalous. The mind has its own continuity
crew, and they edit out all the unexpected details. Sometimes
people will notice something on the cushion but not tell me
about for two or three days. They might say, “Well,
actually the other day this happened to me.” And often
that turns out to be the best response to the koan. But even
when students “pass” a koan, they might find success
hard to accept. Instead of having a “Eureka” moment,
they might feel disappointed! “That’s the answer?”
they might ask with annoyance. “But that’s nothing—it’s
trivial!” Please don’t trust the voice that tells
you, “That’s nothing.” Zen practice is a
little bit like entering a cave after being out in the sun.
At first you can’t see anything. Little by little you
begin to notice the details of the cave as your eyes adjust.
But while you are still groping in the cave you might miss
very important insights because you’re not psychologically
prepared to see them.
Even after you’ve encountered “the real,”
it takes time before you understand what’s happened.
The consequences of the event have to seep into your body,
heart, and mind. Often, after people “pass” the
Mu koan, for example, they may feel that nothing of importance
has occurred. Your mind goes blank for a while—so what?
You scream “Mu” loudly—so what? But you
have to stay for a long time in that liminal consciousness
we call “emptiness” before you begin to feel the
extraordinary energy that can arise when you clear away the
barriers built up over the years. When you become consciously
aware of that extraordinary energy, it can be astonishing.
From the Zen standpoint, the real is not something we can
ever fully grasp with our discriminating minds, or reach by
sheer strength of will, but we know that we have encountered
it when the barriers fall away and we feel more intensely
alive, more deeply connected—more at one with the world.
No permanent formulation can produce that condition automatically.
We have to encounter the real unconsciously, and only later
does the conscious mind get the news in the form of joy, freedom,
and expansiveness.
A monk asked an old woman, “What is the way to Taisan?”
The old woman said, “Go straight on.” When the
monk had proceeded a few steps, she said, “A good respectable
monk, but he too goes that way.”
Afterward someone told Joshu about this. Joshu said, “Wait
a bit, I will go an investigate the old woman for you.”
The next day he went and asked the same question, and the
woman gave the same answer. On returning, Joshu said to his
disciples, “I have investigated the old woman of Taisan
for you.”
The monk wants straightforward instructions: “Follow
the ridge of the mountains. Turn left at the stream. Go up
the ancient steps. And there you will encounter the shrine.”
But the real is not accessible to humans in that that way.
Have you ever wondered what happens to all those people who
go on a pilgrimage like the journey to Tai Shan? They travel
for hours, even for days. In olden times they used to walk,
like the monk in the koan. When they stopped for the night
at an inn, they must have felt dog tired, covered with the
dust of the road. Finally they got to the foot of the mountain,
and then—in the time before trams and buses—they
had to make the arduous climb to the top on foot. All day
long they would keep walking, up and up, until finally the
temple came into view. At last they would cross the threshold
into the courtyard, lighting incense and offering prayers.
Sometimes they would make full-body prostrations for many
hundreds of yards! Finally they would reach the altar with
its statue of the Buddha flanked by Manjushri and Samantabhadra.
Was this it—was this the revelation? They could have
seen an altar like that anywhere—in any temple in China.
If a pilgrimage changes anything, the moment of transformation
probably happens some time earlier, when a pilgrim gives his
seat to a stranger at the inn. Or when he remembers the kindness
of his parents as he climbs the steps. Or in the dead of night,
when it occurs to him that life is very short and he has to
show more kindness to others. At the end of the pilgrimage
a person might really feel transformed, but the turning point
does not have to take place when he reaches the top. Perhaps
something happens along the way, and only afterward does he
begin to understand. We walk backward into reality; we bump
into it almost by accident, and little by little, as this
keeps happening, it begins to change us, but change takes
a while. It has to seep into our bones.
In Zen practice you start with the breath. And one day, while
you’re sitting on the cushion, you notice that your
body is disappearing, or you feel like you’re turning
around on the cushion even though you’re not, or you
feel like you’re floating, or you feel like you’re
expanding. Your mind goes totally blank. Believe it or not,
that’s kensho—“opening.” That’s
your first Zen encounter with the real. You’re not actually
floating off the cushion. What has happened instead is that
your mind has entered non-dualistic awareness. Your attention
is no longer divided or screened off by thoughts but fused
with the moment, and in that state ordinary body sensations
can appear strange or supernatural. But what difference does
it make that such things take place? The form of the experience
is actually inconsequential. The change that matters is not
that you can disappear or float, but that you have opened
up to the world a little bit more than you’re accustomed
to, and in a way that involves your whole body and not just
the thinking mind.
Apparently Joshu’s student never made his way to the
top of the mountain. And later the news spreads that the old
woman was responsible. As the leader of the community, Joshu
sets off to avenge the insult to their temple. But what happens
when he and the old woman meet? The koan tells us, perhaps
misleadingly, that he asks the same question as the monk and
that he received the same answer. But how is that possible?
I wonder what happened when the two of them met. When I was
the attendant—the inji– for my teacher
at the Seattle Zen Center, my job was to see that he was taken
care of. And when a visiting roshi came for a stay at our
Zen center, I thought in my naiveté that the two might
spend their time exchanging esoteric teachings. They might
talk about past lives. One might recall that in a past he
was painter or a pirate. “I was an emperor,” the
other might say. But after the visiting master had left, I
asked my teacher, “Did you talk about reincarnation?”
Laughing, Genki said, “No, of course not. We had a cup
of tea together.” Maybe the old woman and Joshu had
tea; maybe they did zazen or listened to the rain. What happens
when your unconscious meets the unconscious of another? Normally
when we meet others we come with all kinds of unacknowledged
expectations, fears, projections, fantasies. Do you think
that Joshu was nervous about the impression he might make?
Did he try to live up to his great reputation?
Think about how refreshing it would be if Joshu didn’t
want to prove anything—had no agendas and no anxieties.
Wouldn’t you find it liberating to meet someone who
was open to you no matter what, with a loving kindness beyond
all praise and blame? No matter what you wanted to do he would
give you a thumbs up and say “Go straight ahead”
with the utmost confidence in your good intentions and ability.
And imagine if you could see yourself that same way, through
the eyes of unconditional love. Could anything be better in
the whole world? Isn’t this what people are really looking
for when they climb up Tai Shan?
On returning, Joshu says to his followers, “I have investigated
the old woman of Taisan for you.” He doesn’t tell
his monks what he found out.
Three bells
08.30.11
