|
The
Koan “No”: observations on Wumen’s commentary
The
first koan in the Gateless Gate (Wumenkuan), the collection of koans
compiled by the 13th century Zen master Wumen, is the koan
with which he worked for many years himself.
It has come to be the first koan usually assigned to students
in the Zen Community of Boston and the Worcester Zen Community who have
made a strong commitment to the practice of zazen and have expressed
an interest in koan study. It contains within it the seeds of awareness
which are cultivated throughout Zen practice, and Wumen’s own commentary
on the koan is an illuminating set of instructions on how to practice
zazen, and specifically koan Zen, and how to find freedom from the constructions
of the mind.
The
word “no” is a translation of the Chinese word “wu,” which is more familiarly
known to Western Zen students in its Japanese form of “mu.” “Wu” can be translated in a number of ways,
including “not”, “non-“ and “no”, but for practice purposes “no” seems
easiest to work with. (The use
of “no” in American Zen is a fairly recent innovation.
For many years Western students in the Japanese lineages were
encouraged to work with the syllable “mu” and discouraged from attaching
any meaning to the word itself.)
The
following translation of the koan and of Wumen’s commentary is from
Robert Aitken. I have replaced
his use of Mu with the word No.
The
koan itself is simple and short:
“A
monk asked Chaochou, ‘Has the dog Buddha-nature or not?’ Chaochou
said, ‘No.’”
According
to the teachings of Zen, everyone and everything has the Buddha-nature,
or the nature of being inherently awake.
There are no exceptions to this.
All sentient beings have the capacity to realize their own nature,
and even non-sentient beings express it.
Why, then, does the monk ask this question?
And why does Chaochou answer him in the negative?
These
questions point to the koan quality of the interchange. There is something here that disturbs, that
provides a sense of not knowing, of being unsure. The ordinary cognitive mind struggles with understanding. Wumen’s commentary that follows this koan in
the Wumenkuan is a step by step guide to understanding not only the
koan, but also how to proceed in the actual moment-by-moment practice
of Zen.
“For
the practice of Zen, it is imperative that you pass through the barrier
set up by the ancestral teachers.” The
practice of Zen is not simply the practice of zazen, or sitting meditation.
The true practice, and the only way we can really “pass through
the barrier” is to learn to integrate what we experience while we practice
zazen into every moment of our lives. This is not casual or intellectual study, but
requires every fiber of our being.
In each moment, our practice of Zen is actualized and made available
to us. The barrier is something
we encounter when we imagine that the life we’re presently living is
somehow lacking – that this life is not a life of practice. Passing through means seeing through a construction of our own making.
The ancestral teachers are our ancestors in Zen, and they are
also the embodiments of the living, breathing truth of this moment,
who accompany us on our way through the barrier. They are rocks, stones, grass, birds, people,
cars, you and me.
“For
subtle realization, it is of the utmost importance that you cut off
the mind road.”
It
is easy to misunderstand the phrase “cut off the mind road.” Wumen is not asking us to stop having thoughts,
but to stop following them. To stop following thoughts resembles Dogen’s
advice: “to study the self is to forget the self.” When we forget the self we stop putting a false
construction we call the self at the center of our lives. Similarly, when we watch the pattern of thoughts
that arise moment after moment we can follow them to their origins,
which turn out to be nothing more than fantasies, constructions of the
mind. Seeing through these fantasies
and constructions, we discover a world beyond thought, in which rain
is only rain, not words or stories about rain.
We come back to our true life, our true self. The “subtle realization”
that Wumen mentions here is nothing more than this recognition of our
naked, unborn self, alive to this moment, alive to the world as it is,
not as we think or construct it to be.
This smell, this taste, this touch, sight, sound – with no description
in the way – this life, in this moment, and we along with it – perfect
and complete.
If
we are honest with ourselves, we can see how our usual life of the mind
can resemble the condition of ghosts, clinging to what is useless, attached
to objects everywhere. How can we avoid this attaching, this floating
like a ghost and clinging? First
of all we must recognize and even embrace this ghost-like nature in
ourselves – how our minds wander “west of river, south of the lake”
and how we cling to whatever presents itself to us as a temporary resting-place.
The bushes and grasses are our habitual thoughts, our empty entertainments,
anything that distracts us from this moment unobstructed by opinions
and constructions. Even our
relationships with those we love can take on the quality of uselessness
or distractions if we fall into taking people for granted, unable to
see them as they are, but as we want them to be.
We cling to what cannot serve us, to what is fundamentally unable
to nourish us. We are blind
to the life that surrounds us, the life that, as the Tibetans say, is
“kindly bent to ease us.”
“What
is the barrier of the ancestral teachers?
It is just this one word, No, the one barrier of our faith.”
This
one word No cuts through all of the many knots of thinking that make
up the working of our minds. Everything
that can be conceptualized is, at the least, somewhat removed from reality,
and at the most, complete delusion.
“People these days,” says Chaochou in another story, “see this
flower as though in a dream.” To
wake up, to recognize one’s own Buddha nature, and the awakened nature
of all things, even dogs, demands direct perception, direct seeing,
direct intimacy. Just No, just Mu, as a temporary skillful means, leads us to a moment,
and to a life, where we exist in the world without commentary, without
interpretation. This is the
skill of Chaochou, who kindly and directly points out the deluded monk’s
confusion, as he cuts through what may be, at root, the heartfelt question:
“Do even I have the Buddha nature?”
In asking, the monk reveals his folly, but also his tender heart,
brave enough to ask, ready to be cut through.
“When
you pass through this barrier, you will not only interview Chaochou
intimately, you will walk hand in hand with all the ancestral teachers
in the successive generations of our lineage, the hair of your eyebrows
entangled with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same
ears. Won’t that be joyous?”
Wumen
here describes one of the most tempting aspects of practice – the opportunity
to find true, intimate companionship, in the company of people living
and dead who have penetrated into this great matter.
On one level, he’s tempting us with a dualistic notion – that
there are “special” people, whereas in reality, once we have touched
the real nature of things, everything and everyone becomes our best
friend. What’s the difference between that cloud, the
sound of that bird, Mahakashyapa smiling?
And this is the very closest intimacy – seeing with their eyes,
hearing with their ears – closer than tangled eyebrows. As the Sufis say, we long for the Friend, and even this longing
is a trace of the Friend’s constant presence.
“Is
there anyone who would not want to pass this barrier?”
Wumen
is enticing us again here: Enticing us with a promise of entry into
a new world, a new way of being. This
way is unimaginable until we actually experience it, live in it, and
yet we tend to create expectations surrounding “passing through the
barrier,” waking up to reality. What
will it be like? Will we be happy all the time, peaceful, content,
serene? What will it feel like
to heal the separation that has become so familiar to us, that seems
so real --- the separation of our opinion of ourselves from our true
self. To live as a “true person of no rank” in Linchi’s
phrase, to blend in with and ride the flow and current of our lives,
is something everyone has tasted at some point – perhaps briefly and
therefore unremembered and certainly unintegrated – or maybe profoundly
and life-shatteringly, but then abandoned in the demands of consensual
reality. “Isn’t there anyone
who wants to?” Wumen asks. “Don’t you want to experience your wholeness,
your birthright?”
“So
then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your 360 bones
and joints and your 84,000 hair follicles, concentrate on this one word
No.”
Here
we have even clearer instructions, but how do we accomplish this? Wumen is talking here about complete concentration,
but not in the way we are used to. Working with No takes not only our mind but our entire body to accomplish
itself. He is pointing to something
beyond idle or even serious contemplation. We must merge completely with the question physically as well as
mentally. We must breathe, touch,
smell, see and taste No. There
can be no cracks in this seamless work of cultivating a great doubt,
a huge curiosity. What is No? Only No, only Mu. The body and mind become the bodymind and there is nothing but the
question.
“Day
and night, keep digging into it.”
Every
moment devoted to this practice – this is what Wumen asks of us. What kind of a life can we lead if we are truly
digging into our practice day and night?
This is the life of one fabric, perhaps not yet realized, but
enacted. We are instructed to do what we can’t yet experience.
Like St. Paul’s “pray without ceasing,” our devotion to practice
prepares the ground for a seamless life.
We are truly cultivating a field in which seeds of reality, through
hearing teachings and experiencing life as directly as we can, begin
to take root at the deepest place, eventually to blossom into wakefulness
-–into the opening of the mind’s eye. Nothing but No, at every moment, filling our
conscious and then our unconscious minds – every thought accompanied
by this one word, which functions as a stand-in for a reality that is
essentially nameless. Temporarily,
everything becomes No, every smell, sight, taste and sound, everything
we touch and think. There is
no time off – there is only this one thing, called, for the time being,
No.
“Don’t
consider it to be nothingness. Don’t
think in terms of ‘has’ or ‘has not.’”
In
fact, it is the nothingness that fills the universe. Mu or No reveals the essential nature of things, if we persist in
using No constantly, faithfully, at every turn of the mind. How are we to understand something that is
not the opposite of anything? The
mind is forever making this and that, good and bad, has and has not. No is a single response to this dualism. It is the sound of the single hand, the original
face. It is alone and has no
quality of singleness. It accompanies,
defines, and is one with everything.
Can we find a place where this one thing doesn’t exist? In No everything comes alive, a voidness full
of possibilities, and a fullness that is completely empty. The mind keeps trying to understand, and with
each attempt, we must relentlessly answer with this single word, which
means everything and has no meaning.
This wonderful companion, dear No, Muji, leads us away from the
suffering implicit in duality. “It
is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball.
You try to vomit it out, but you cannot.”
Obsessing
on some thought or series of thoughts, something that torments us and
sticks to us like glue or velcro, is a common experience for many of
us. Here Wumen is inviting us to substitute something
more helpful for these useless constructions. We must relate to No as we relate to something
that completely preoccupies us. As
strange as it may seem, we must become obsessed on purpose. This unusual instruction is a skillful means
that directs us towards freedom. Just
as the obsessive thought eventually unwinds itself, unsticks itself,
often in a moment of sudden clarity, so No opens up, and what was foggy
and muddy becomes lucid and apparent.
This opening is only possible because of our mind’s devotion
to this one thing. Working with No is a discipline that trains
our mind to be centered and one-pointed.
It can feel painful or annoying because we must actually feel
the stuckness, which is nothing more than the impossibility of understanding
what is real with the dualistic mind.
“Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating
mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past.”
All
of the mind’s constructions of reality have been acquired through a
lifetime of learning how the world seems to work.
These learnings are extremely useful in navigating the world
of consensual reality, and without them we would be fairly helpless
and would find it difficult to function.
But they tend to obscure the actual workings of reality, especially
if we trust them as real, rather than know them for what they truly
are. To know that these constructions
are representations of what is real but are not actually real is to
be emancipated, to be freed to lead a life of bare attention to what
is so. This freedom is the promise
of No, and it is what is realized in the moment of the mind’s awakening.
Here it is, with nothing extra – just this, just this.
No lights or heavenly choirs or even blissful states of mind
compare to this feeling of rejoining our original mind, the mind that
has always been present but has been obscured by our acquiring of seemingly
helpful delusions.
“Inside and outside become one, and you are
like a dumb person who has had a dream.
You know it for yourself alone.”
The
natural ripening of a person on this path may be so gradual as to be
unnoticed, or so sudden as to feel like an explosion.
Trusting this process of awakening, we begin to taste the experience
of oneness, which is frankly indescribable.
No matter how hard we try, we can’t communicate this feeling,
which is so unlike our previous life, our familiar construction of reality,
that we may liken it to dreaming. But
we have actually woken up to our true life, and we are struck dumb,
wordless, in an experience that can’t be described by the ordinary words
we have used all our lives. It
feels impossible to talk about this new, freshly felt life of realization,
which is so amazing in its simplicity and ordinariness.
The subtlety of this part of the path is misleading because it
is actually not at all subtle. The
profundity of the shift in consciousness, when outer and inner become
one, must simply be lived, not described -–but recognized, of course,
by others on the same path.
“Suddenly No breaks open. The heavens are astonished; the earth is shaken.”
In
another translation, Wumen describes this breaking open as the disintegration
of the ego-shell. How could
this cause such a powerful surge in personal energy, enough to shake
the heavens and the earth? This
shell of ego is of course a false construction, and as it drops away
or wears away, the true self emerges, vividly alive and strong.
This is the freedom of oneness, as Shakyamuni Buddha meant when
he said, “In heaven above and earth below, I alone am.”
This is not a oneness that is exclusive, because it can’t be
– it includes everything, without exception.
It draws on, joins with, truly is everything, and therefore is
inexhaustible. Sometimes the idea of breaking open can seem
frightening – after all, what are we to make of a phrase describing
the loss of an identity we have held dear for so long?
We have been fooled into identifying with a small, limited self,
and cannot imagine a sense of ourselves as bigger without more ego getting
formulated. We do not become
nothing in this disintegration process, this breaking open – we become
what we truly are.
“It
is as though you snatch away the great sword of General Kuan.”
This
path leads us to a life where we can truly meet each event, each person,
each thing intimately and directly.
This intimate directness has no hesitation in it.
We perceive clearly, and we move or stay still according to circumstances.
This is snatching the sword of Kuan, an historical warrior, and
also the word in Chinese for gate or barrier.
We do not storm this barrier violently or wildly, but with an
embracing heartfulness. The great warrior is calm and centered, full
of wisdom and compassion -- a bodhisattva.
“When
you meet the Buddha, you kill the Buddha.
When you meet Bodhidharma, you kill Bodhidharma.”
Some
of us pull away from this seemingly violent concept of killing, so it
is important to understand that what is being killed is constructions
and stories – false differentiation.
What is the difference between you and a Buddha?
We cause so much harm to ourselves by separating ourselves, by
making high and low! The Buddha
nature, the wisdom of Zen masters, is all here, now, present and available,
but concealed. In the process or moment of awakening, this
wisdom is clearly and undeniably revealed.
“At
the very cliff-edge of birth and death, you find the Great Freedom.”
In
the boundless freedom of awakening, there are no dualities. Life as opposed to death doesn’t exist. Each moment contains both and neither, and
thus they are transcended, and we attain independence from them. To be truly alive is to know this at the deepest
level.
“In
the six worlds and in the four modes of birth, you can enjoy a samadhi
of frolic and play.”
What
this life could be and what burdens us seem to promise something completely
different. How can we roam freely
in the midst of all conditions and states of being, the six worlds and
four modes of birth, which include difficulties as well as pleasures,
joy and delight as well as suffering? The six worlds in Buddhist mythology
include heaven and hell, the realms of hungry ghosts, animals, fighting
demons and human beings, and the four modes of birth are from the womb,
the egg, moisture and metamorphosis.
Wumen is telling us that we can now enjoy every circumstance,
remaining fully present and focused wherever we go and with whatever
we encounter. This is a life
that encompasses and embraces everything. A life of ease and freedom, of frolic and play,
is possible when everything is recognized as a part of everything else.
“So,
how should you work with it?”
Here
Wumen arouses, once again, our way-seeking mind with his question, offering
us the instructions that will lead us to freedom.
It is important to realize that, until we awake, we can’t know
what awakening is. And yet we
desire this state we do not know – we yearn for it.
Wumen knows this from his own experience. Here he is playing with our greed – beckoning us on into an unknown
land. So much of initial practice
is based on greed and desire, for enlightenment, happiness, power, serenity,
or any one of a countless number of conceptualizations that are all
we can imagine of the real thing. Wumen’s
use of our desire is truly compassionate, like in the Buddha’s story
of a father trying to get his children out of their burning house by
laying out all their favorite toys on the grass. We come to his instructions eagerly, not really knowing were they
will lead us. And we become
grateful for everything that keeps us on this path, even our wanting
mind. “Exhaust
all your life-energy on this one word No.”
The
mind naturally wanders, and is filled with imaginary constructions of
reality that bear some resemblance to the actual nature of reality but
are never the thing itself. Wumen
is giving us clear medicine for the ailment of being removed from the
real. Teach the mind, relentlessly, to focus on one
thing. He asks us to bring all
of our energy, everything with nothing left over, to one point. Not letting the attention lapse allows us to
make our mind a seamless fabric of this one thing. In a way, No is a substitute for something that is unnamable.
In this practice, we give it a temporary designation, and we
stay with this temporariness with all our might.
Never letting the other constructions take root, we devote ourselves
to this particular construction, simply returning to one thing, to No
or Mu, again and again, until this practice of returning becomes one
of abiding.
“If
you do not falter, then it’s done!
A single spark lights your Dharma candle.”
You
and the universe are not separate.
In penetrating No, or Mu, in realizing our part of the essential
wholeness of reality, we free ourselves and the light of clarity that
has been obscured and now is released.
There is just this one thing, penetrating everywhere.
“In heaven above and earth below, I alone am.”
This is not our personal our personal light or Dharma candle. It is the light that has always been present.
We come alive to the fullness of our being, and everything else
shines with its own light. Just this, just Mu, just No.
BACK
to Worcester Zen Community HOME
|