Joshu Investigates an Old Woman

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