Part 1
https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/i9cr10/a_zen_joke_part_1/
Part 2
https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/i9m7td/a_zen_joke_part_2_bodhidharma_meets_his_adversary/
The man steadied his hand on his walking stick. He took his own time to choose his words and steady his emotions. And what he said next renewed Bodhidharma’s long dormant and cynical faith.
“Perhaps once I wanted to kill you. Yes, once I did. That desire consumed my days and haunted my dreams. I would still kill you right now, because of what you said, even knowing all that you have done, even having come to respect and admire you, if I did not have better control of my feelings. Then, after hating you for years, I wanted just to meet you. Eventually, I wanted to find and learn from you and be your last student. Because you spoke the truth.
The books we preserve are confusing and heavy to carry, and they wear out our eyesight reading them and our fingers and wrists copying and re-copying them long before we die. The rules are frustrating and contradictory, and eventually there come moments where it is the Dharma to break rather than keep them. Everything my order taught me, every doctrine we cherish, every Sutra and chant that is our way, is in the end but one more delusion to overcome, perhaps the greatest delusion of all.
But, if you are honest with yourself, Bodhidharma, it is the same with your way. You call it beyond words, but your kind have cherished texts and chants of their own, and you write new ones when you need them or when you feel moved. You may have burned your books, but if you did, you had already committed their every word to memory. You say that the Dharma cannot be taught, but you still take students, and take great care in teaching them.
You say that compassion and the desire for wisdom are delusions to be overcome, but deep inside your heart you cannot extinguish these things. You say that it is pointless to save others, that they must save themselves, that all we can do in saving them is harm them – but you still try to save them anyways.
You say that you should not have saved your first student, but you love him still, and when he left you missed him, and you spent every day hoping for his return, wondering how he had survived and in what way he taught students of his own, if he thought of you with love or hatred or complete indifference. You wondered if he remembered you clearly or came to think of you as a myth or a dream. You say that you teach the direct truth, brutal and honest, and yet nearly every word that you say is a lie, carefully calculated to lead the listener towards a greater truth.
You have such pride, and yet in the end you realized that you were nothing but an old, lonely hermit gone half-mad from living with no company, and in despair you sought to die despite not knowing whether you had reached full enlightenment, and whether you had truly done all you could to fulfill the vows that you took. You might wonder how I know these things, whether I am a god or a demon or a Buddha. I am none. I know these things because I am like you, and have lived a similar life, though the particular circumstances are nothing alike.
I will not be your student, Bodhidharma. You have things to teach me still, but I have things I could teach you, and I am too old and proud to be a Zen master’s pupil. It was not easy to find you and it was harder still to nurse you back to life. It has strained my efforts, taken the last decades of my life, cost me several dear friends, and stranded me and my surviving students in a dangerous and foreign land. I am ready to die, but they are not, and their fates concern me. So I have just one question for you, Bodhidharma, and if you deny me, then I will let you die, for good this time, or even kill you, if that is what you truly want.
I ask you to be my partner. I would study the wordless Dharma with you, not as a student, but as an equal and a brother. You and I would teach my students together. You would help us navigate through and survive in this strange country, where we are unwelcome foreigners and do not know the language or the lay of the land. You would learn our way, and I would learn yours. Now I am tired, and I feel despair myself, for I fear your stubbornness, and I fear my quest has been in vain, and that I have led myself and my students to a stupid and pointless death.”
Bodhidharma, for the first time in a very long time, did not need to ponder, did not need to deceive, did not need to struggle with himself or ask the Buddha for wisdom and assistance. “Yes”, he said. “Yes, I will do these things. I am sorry for what I wrote and said, and I am curious about your ways, and about your students, who follow you with such devotion and track men as easily the great cats of the jungle do. But I am tired of this country. Let us go back to your land. Let me meet your teachers and let me see your temples and read your texts. There we can teach many before we die, rather than a scattered few”.
The man sighed. “I fear that is not possible. We do not remember the way home, and even if we could retrace our steps, it is too dangerous. The south is consumed by war, and the people have taken up arms and are suspicious of strangers, even forest monks. I am not sure that my teachers even survive, and that our great temples have not been burned or abandoned. We are here, wherever here is. You must guide us to some new home. If we require a new temple and new students, I fear we will have to build it and find them ourselves”.
Bodhidharma thought for a minute.
“Actually, I have an idea. When I came to this land, few Chinese had even heard the Buddha’s name, and they followed a different, older way, a religion of elements and animals rather than scholarly learning. It frightened me at first, being very ancient and unlike the Dharma, and I thought at first that they were priests of Mara even more powerful and deluded than your order, but I studied with them for a while and came to believe they knew some truth that not even the Buddha had perceived, and that they were men also, strange as they seemed.
The teachers of this way are few now, and difficult to find – impossible for me, but perhaps not you. I think you and your students would like them, in fact. They are also forest monks, of a kind, though they few texts, and consider reading and writing and rules even more worthless than we Ch’an do.
They speak, when they speak, of something they call the Tao, which is beyond words, beyond practice, beyond wisdom and delusion, beyond even death. Shall we seek them out? We will probably never find them. You will have to learn the Chinese language, for these men rarely study foreign tongues or embark on long voyages. But I will teach you, and on the way, you can teach me other things. And if we die, we will die together, rather than alone or in despair”.
The man breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, I see now why I sought you out. I have long been searching for something beyond the Dharma, though I did not know its name and feared to admit that all the wisdom I of our country and the teachings we inherited were not sufficient for me or for my followers. But now I see. The circle feels like it is almost complete. You are not foolish. And I am ready. My students are strong and eager. We shall seek out these men of the Tao. We will find them or die trying. In the meantime, you must rest. Your body is still weak. We have tea and fruit. Rest, Bodhidharma. When you wake, then our new journey will begin.”
Bodhidharma at last accepted the man as a friend, and not a devil. If this was a delusion of Mara, or a dream, then he gave in to it, and finally ceased resisting. How could one resist delusion forever, when it was so beautiful? He finally understood that delusions are truly endless, that he would eventually be ensnared no matter how well he fought, that sometimes giving in is more courageous than resisting.
Perhaps he would wake again, perhaps he would not. But he was no longer afraid, and he did not feel alone anymore. His time of being a master had ended, and so had his time of being a student. He was, at last, a Buddhist monk, and when he died, he would die because it was his time, not because he was tired of living or proud of his life. He fell back into sleep, back into the endless, beautiful, terrifying dream.
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Deep respect to anyone who has read this entire thing through. Again, no disrespect is meant to any Buddhist scholars, monks, or teachers. This is not an attempt at writing a modern koan, sutra, or history. It is just a short fictional story that originated with an idea I had for a joke. Don't give up struggling with those koans - they still contain wisdom. I'm learn more from the ancients every day, and am working through the Gateless Gate right now. Not even sure I still understand Mu.
Gassho!
Submitted August 15, 2020 at 11:00PM by mousekeeping https://ift.tt/3g1ByZY
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