Zhaozhou's Dog
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does even a dog have Buddha-nature?"
Zhaozhou said, "No."
WUMEN SAYS,
To study Zen you must pass through the barrier of the masters; for ineffable enlightenment you need to interrupt your mental circuit. If you do not pass through the barrier of the masters, and do not interrupt your mental circuit, then your consciousness will be attached to objects everywhere.
But tell me, what is the barrier of the masters? This one word No is the unique lock on the door to the source; so it is called the "Barrier of No Locking the Door of Zen."
Those who can pass through the barrier not only see Zhaozhou in person, they will then be able to team up with the Zen masters of all time, and be on a par with them, see with the same eye and hear with the same ear. Would that not be joyous?
Isn't there anyone who wants to pass through the barrier? Arouse a mass of doubt with your whole body, inquiring into this word No, bringing it to mind day and night. Do not understand it as nothingness, do not understand it as the nonexistence of something.
It will be like having swallowed a hot iron pill, which you cannot spit out no matter how hard you try. Washing away your previous misconceptions and misperceptions, eventually it becomes thoroughly familiar. In a natural manner, inside and outside become one; like someone without the power of speech who has had a dream, you can only know it for yourself.
When you suddenly break through, startling the heavens and shaking the earth, it is as though you have obtained a great warrior's sword: meeting Buddhas you kill the Buddhas; meeting Zen masters, you kill the masters. On the shore of life and death, you attain great independence; in the midst of all sorts of conditions and states of being, you remain perfectly focused even while roaming freely about.
But how do you bring it to mind? Using all of your day-to-day energy, bring up this word No. If you do not allow any gap, you will be like a torch of truth that lights up the moment fire is set to it.
WUMEN'S VERSE
A dog's Buddha-nature
Presents the true directive in full:
As soon as you get into yes and no,
You lose your body and forfeit your life.
ZEN MASTER WUZU'S VERSE
Zhaozhou shows a sword
Whose cold frosty light blazes;
If you go on asking how and what,
It cuts you up into pieces.
ZEN MASTER SUSHAN RU'S VERSE
"A dog has no Buddha-nature"
Kind compassion, deep as the sea. Those who pursue words and chase sayings
Bury the hearty mind.
TIANTONG RUJING SAID
When thoughts are flying around your mind in confusion what do you do? "A dog's Buddha-nature? No." This word No is an iron broom: Where you sweep there is a lot of flying around, and where there is a lot of flying around, you sweep. The more you sweep, the more there is. At the point where it is impossible to sweep, you throw your whole life into sweeping.
Keep your spine straight day and night, and do not let your courage flag. All of a sudden you sweep away the totality of space, and all differentiations are clearly penetrated, so the source and its meanings become evident.
TRANSLATOR'S COMMENTS
Zhaozhou (pronounced Jow-joe) was born in 778 and lived to be one hundred and twenty years old, finally pass- ing away in 897. An exceptionally high-minded master, Zhaozhou was first awakened in the Zen way at the age of eighteen, but he did not open a teaching center until he was eighty years old.
In this koan, the dog represents the state of the unenlightened person, while the Buddha-nature refers both to the essence of enlightenment and the possibility of realizing enlightenment. In this context, enlightenment means full awakening of higher faculties of mind, ordinarily lying dormant beneath subjective preoccupations with thoughts and things.
At the most elementary level, the Zen master's statement that a dog has no Buddha-nature simply draws a distinction between the animal nature and the enlightened nature in humankind. The animal nature is not fully conscious, it reacts to things by instinct and habit, without understand ing why. The enlightened nature is the essence of consciousness itself: it sees and understands most directly.
The consciousness of a nonhuman animal is traditionally said to resemble that of the dream consciousness of a human. By a similar analogy, the relationship of ordinary human consciousness to enlightened consciousness is also said to be as that between dreaming and awakening.
The central Zen question is this: What is it that dreams and awakens? The final answer is a realization that can only be found by the individual, in direct experience. The temporary answer is that whatever you may think or imagine this is, that idea or image is a product of mind, not the essence of mind. The significance of this distinction between image and essence is that without direct experiential grounding in the essential nature of consciousness, it is im possible to evaluate the reality of anything that consciousness perceives or conceives.
A concept about consciousness is itself a product of consciousness, not the experience of consciousness in itself. The question in the story at hand can in one sense be paraphrased, "Is it possible to be fully awake while habitual and random thoughts still ramble through the mind? Here the Zen master says No. As we shall see later on, this is not simple negation, for what the Zen master says in effect this: In order to see for yourself whether or not it is possible to wake up right in the middle of confusion, first of all stop idle thought and speculation. The No is for the questioner not for the question itself.
Wumen's prose commentary is an attempt to describe a process of using No as an intensive concentration device for clearing the mind and achieving what Buddhists call "stop- ping" or "cessation." In the full experience of cessation, not only are random thoughts stopped, the whole world view, one's personal idea of reality, is suspended. This is done as an expedient, to free the mind from the limitations of fixed ideas and compulsive habits of thought.
The kind of No practice Wumen is talking about was brought to the forefront of popular Zen by the extraordinary master Dahui (pronounced Dah-hway), generations before Wumen himself. Dahui emphasized this practice in response to the growing complexity of society, because it can help people to cut through mental complications with relative facility.
At the entry level, this exercise is done as follows: Watch what your mind does, and each time you notice "dog" thinking rambling on, bring No to mind.
Sound simple? Just try it.
But don't try too hard until you have read the rest of this book and learned all about the place of this exercise in the total design of comprehensive Zen Buddhist teaching.
This warning is traditional, because like any tool, it is possible to misuse No. You can slip and cut off your head without even knowing it.
A basic form of abuse of No is to interpret and practice it in a negative way, using it to make the mind blank and shut out reality instead of using it properly to make the mind clear and open to reality.
This advice is repeated several times in the commentaries of Wumen and the other Zen masters, to which I will now couple of return in order to set No into the overall context of Zen practice.
In Wumen's prose commentary, he says, "Do not under stand it as nothingness, do not understand it as the absence of something." In practical terms, other Zen masters describe these misunderstandings as the belief that it is necessary to erase all objects from awareness in order to realize the essence of mind and the objective emptiness of subiee tive projections. In simple terms, neither the practice nor the realization of No is a blackout, ness in which no objects are apparent.
Some systems of Buddhist meditation include concentration with no mental object, but this expedient is properly a means of transcending the feeling that our subjective experience of perception corresponds to its objective reality. Thus objectless meditation is only a temporary expedient, and if overused may result in what is known as "intoxication by the wine of absorption," a pathological condition of illusory liberation caused by mental anesthesia.
Wumen's verse comment also repeats this warning by saying that we lose our liveliness if we get into If we get involved in ideas of "yes and no," then "no" be comes negative, the opposite of "yes."
The "true directive" by which Wumen refers to No means absolute reality, the ultimate truth, which Buddhists say is beyond thought and ideation: Zhaozhou's No means that ultimate reality is not like anything we can imagine, yet that does not mean there is no ultimate reality. If we only follow thoughts coming and going, that is "getting involved in yes and no," frittering away time and energy going back and forth. According to traditional Buddhist yoga, in order to witness absolute reality it is necessary to detach from our conceptual description of reality: that nonattached relationship is neither clinging nor denying, not getting involved in nor yes and no.
The use of No as an instrument is also emphasized in the verse of Zen master Wuzu (pronounced Woo-dzoo), who likens No to a sword with which to cut through mental tangles and errant thoughts. Just as Wumen warns agains getting involved in "yes and no," Wuzu advises people no to think about No conceptually, for that would only lead to fragmentation of mind, not concentration.
The verse of Zen master Sushan (pronounced Soo- shahn) points up the essentially positive intent of the No exercise. At the same time, he reiterates the warning against its misapplication, especially through misunderstanding based on superficial literal interpretation.
In the first two lines, Sushan equates No with profound compassion, in the sense of release from doggishness. The second two lines warn that a literal negative interpretation of No does not liberate the mind, but rather inhibits its free functioning. By contrast, therefore, No also properly means release of the "hearty mind."
One particularly sticky form of doggishness, or the doggedness of self-deception, is that of compulsive rationalization. This is in reality one form of superficial literalism, even if it deals primarily with concepts rather than written words per se.
Some people today, for example, understand the question about a dog's Buddha-nature as a metaphysical question about animals. Since Buddhists have always recognized that all living beings are conscious, this question would not arise in a literal sense, it is a purely symbolic representation of a human problem. It is misleading to treat this question as a metaphysical or moral problem, is simply an immediate alert system within a very direct Zen technique whereby human beings can clear their own mental vision. The commentary of Zen master Tiantong (pronounced Tyen-toong) illustrates this practical function in a manner somewhat similar to that of Wumen.
Some translators do not grant any semantic value to the reply No, but render it as if the master in the story had answered with an inarticulate utterance, which they generally say is Mu, a Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese wu. This reflects a practice of using this meaningless syllable a kind of mantra or concentration spell thoughts and detach it from the world of objects.
The original saying was in fact articulate and meaningful, and its original use in meditation was not as a spell. The mental and verbal repetition of Mu seems to have been invented in Japan around the year 1900 by monk who used it to popularize Zen, which he saw to be on the verge of extinction and in need of emergency measures. Relics of that movement later produced attempts at popularizing "instant" or "jet-age" Zen by throwing people into trances, or driving them to distraction, in highly pressured intensive sessions lasting several days to a week or more at a time.
The general drawbacks of this technique are those of all incantational practices, deriving from the dangers inherent in its effect on unprepared minds. The specific flaw of the Mu repetition practice is that it tends to produce a counterfeit experience of emptiness, one that is only an altered state and does not cut through the root of the ego. As the Buddhist giant Nagarjuna wrote, "Emptiness wrongly seen destroys the weak-minded, like a mishandled snake or a misperformed spell."
I have written at length about the first story because of the importance given to it by Wumen and later Zen tradition. In particular, I have reported the traditional warnings of the masters concerning misapplication of this koan because classical lore is full of these caveats, and because such abuse still happens. Today some people still deceive themselves and others by malpractice of this koan, believing themselves to be Zen masters, and trying to teach others to do likewise.
End of Case 1.
From the book Unlocking The Zen Koan by Thomas Cleary
Submitted October 08, 2019 at 06:09PM by atomicmustardseed https://ift.tt/2pVFPKm
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