The Zennist

Hau-t'ou/watô

Not very many scholars or Zen masters really understand koans (Ch., kung-an). They might as well get into another profession. Their analysis of koans is always wrong because they don't understand the heart of the koan which is the hua-t'ou or watô in Japanese. I feel sorry for the beginner and especially the student who has been hanging around a Zen center for twenty years or more.

The answer to any koan becomes crystal clear when the ernest seeker understands the hua-t'ou. Literally, it means word's source. The source is the pure Mind before it gets stirred up or begins to vibrate in the form of a thought. When one can turn to the light of Mind he or she understands what hau-t'ou really means. This is Zen mastery.

In one of the oldest koan collections entitled The Blue Cliff Records (The Hekigan Roku), it has this to say about the hau-t'ou which is translated as "Pre-Voice".

The real substance of the universe, the ‘First Principle’, that which is behind or beyond the Voice or expression of ultimate truth, this ‘Pre-Voice’ [Hua T’ou] is transmitted only from heart to heart, and no matter how great or holy or advanced in Enlightenment a man may be he cannot transmit it by means of words and phrases. This Pre-Voice is not far away, it is indeed quite close to us, but unless one has had intimate, immediate contact with it—has had audience of it as one who has an audience with the Emperor—this very near-at-hand Truth will be as far off and separated from us as by thousands of miles. (tr., Shaw)

If anyone is truly transmitted to carry on the dark secret of Zen by way of koans they have had an audience with pure Mind. By seeing pure Mind they have not only seen the source of words, i.e., the hou-t'ou, but they have also seen the source of mental images as well as the source of the movement of their fleshy bodies! These masters see the very light of Mind before it appears or becomes a word in one's mind. When they lift up their leg, they know it is the pure Mind that is doing this. When they say "Mu", they recognize what is actually producing it. Ordinary people don't. They are attached to the effect called the hua-wei. If I say the Buddha-nature is "Mu" and you mentalize Mu all day, you are doing effect koans. You're not getting any place. If you come up with a clever answer it is still an effect or hua-wei. Now you are really lost.

Dharma of thatness

If you meet a Buddha, cut him down; if you meet a Patriarch, cut him down; if you meet an arhat, cut him down; if you meet your parents, cut them down and if you meet your relatives, cut them down.

— Rinzai (Ch., Lin-chi)

Rinzai is a Zen shock jock. He wants to get the attention of his students on a critical matter. How should they see the Dharma of thatness? First of all, it is immaterial. Size has nothing to do with it. It is clear, independent, and radiant. The senses can't even detect it. The more one thinks about it the more illusive it becomes. Every attempt at trying to conceive the Dharma of thatness amounts to an external reflection, or the same, an external consideration. This is the way of the world. It only knows things externally by means of sensory consciousness. When the worldly mind thinks of a Buddha it sees a person or it has a mental image of the Buddha; not to mention many assumptions. Rinzai is telling his students that when they pursue the Dharma of thatness this way, they should cut it down. Rinzai illustrates this by saying, "If you meet a Buddha, cut him down." In truth, the Buddha is the pure Mind—it is transcendent. It is not something you cannot cut! The same goes for the Dharma of thatness. If you think you see the Buddha or a Patriarch—you are deluding yourself. You need to cut away all external reflections. Only by this practice can a seeker see the Dharma of thatness.

To perfectly discern

The true nature of Prajna-paramita as realized by the Bodhisattva—this is the perfect discernment of the principle from which all existence issues forth. When this liberation is realized the Bodhisattva can aptly give expression to it and skillfully illustrate it.

— Avatamsaka Sutra

To perfectly discern that which animates this temporal body of ours is true Prajna-paramita. Prajna-paramita is not about playing metaphysical games or about defending certain views as being 'Buddhist' contrary to those which are believed to be heretical. It is not about being a naturalist either. Zen is not about watching Canada geese fly over your head or picking wildflowers, as if this were some sublime experience. Zen, or the same, the Bodhisattva realization goes far deeper than looking at worldly phenomena. It goes beyond this temporal body together with its DNA. It goes to our original face before we were even born. This, by the way, is not something you can possibly understand unless you've personally witnessed being immersed in the animative light of universe which is prior to everything. And don't believe this is farfetched or wild speculation. Just lift your hand up and ask yourself, "Do I first apperceive the animative light which lifts this hand or do I just sense the hand?" If at this very moment you could turn to this animative light and immerse yourself in its power, you would be astonished in two ways. First, you would be astonished at your utter stupidity for not seeing the obvious and secondly, you would be astonished to learn that this is all the Buddha ever pointed at. The rest is error.

Kung-an/koan

Kung-an (Jp., koan) is made up of two Chinese characters. The first character, "kung" means a judge. The second character "an" is the image of a bench behind which the judge sits. Together, we get the idea of a court, a trial, judgment and punishment. In the practice of Zen, the seeker must face the kung-an to see if he is making progress.

By using the kung-an method, the seeker is really submitting to being inwardly judged by the pure Mind and whether or not he is just guessing, passing from one opinion to another. Implicitly, the seeker claims to know the heart of Zen which is pure Mind. Well, if he does know the heart of Zen, the kung-an will be the judge. If deserved, it will hand out the punishment called san-shih pang meaning "thirty blows". But the Zen punishment is far worse than a mere thirty blows. One stays in samsara to suffer endlessly who fails to answer the kung-an.

For many who study Zen today, the kung-an method is believed to be a comment on Zen philosophy as if Zen were just about letting things happen. But all the kung-ans center on the nature of pure Mind as if to say, "Manifest the pure Mind right here and now and you will see the answer and become free of samsara!"

To reach the pure Mind, which is the Buddha's Mind, the seeker must acquaint himself with the hua-t'ou of the kung-an which means "before-word" referring to the fact that pure Mind is before all words and ideas. When the seeker at last reaches the hua-t'ou, the kung-an's judgment is acquittal. There will be no thirty blows from the punishment rod. The Zen master (the magistrate) will be overjoyed that he does not have to punish another foolish seeker of the Buddha's enlightenment.

Universal root

Rather, in Zen practice, what you are looking for is to realize yourself as a self that does not distinguish between subject and object. You must go from your self which you accept unconditionally right now to the self that is based on the universal root.

— Joshu Sasaki Roshi

There is something profound in the the above words of the Roshi who still, I assume, is abbot of the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California. His words certainly don't seem to chime with the current rhetoric that is being pumped out of a typical American Dharma center. But then who would ever expect an old Zennist like Sasaki to be typical?

Zen, and for that matter Buddhism, is not about self denial or self negation. Nor is it about the individual self to which one is attached that eventually craps out. Put that out of your pretty little heads. Zen is a matter of seeing the real self which is outside of the category of subject and object.

As Sasaki notes, the real self is based on the universal root. There are, of course, many names for this root from Suchness to Buddha-nature. Essentially, universal root refers to the pure Mind which underlies our mental life as its very living substance—but as a pure animative substance. This is analogous to the element water and the waves it generates. The goal of Zen, therefore, is to dip into the water. Yes, a Zen baptism! At all costs, one tries to avoid the habit of wave grabbing!

Poetic love

Ryokan was a Soto Zen monk who was known for his poetry. Ryokan was born around 1758 in Echigo province on the west coast of Japan which is today, Niigata Prefecture.

He called himself Daigu, the "Great Fool". He trained under Kokusen at Entsu-ji for about twelve years. He studied, in addition to Zen, Chinese poetry and other arts such as calligraphy. He received Shiho from his teacher in 1790 who died the following year.

After the death of Kokusen Ryokan decided to return to his village. He found an empty hermitage and named it Gogo-an meaning "one day of rice hermitage". He stayed at Gogo-an till his death. He loved to play with the children in the villages and pick flowers. He loved to drink saké with the farmers. He slept when he wanted to, and go up when he wanted to. He was a loafer. Yet he was pure in heart and unselfish.

Later on around sixty-nine and in ill health, he met the love of his life. She was the nun Teishin. When they met each other it was love at first sight. Ryokan was forty years older than she! In fact, Teishin was twenty-nine when she met Ryokan. She was with he beloved Ryokan when he died on January 6, 1831. His last poem reads:

Life is like a dewdrop,
Empty and fleeting;
My years are gone
And now, quivering and frail,
I must fade away.

Ryokan's beloved Tieshin published a collection of her lover's poems entitled Hasu no tsuyu (Dewdrops on a lotus leaf). Teishin died in 1872.

Interpret nothing

Zen never wished itself to become mired in exegesis. Interpretations interpret nothing of spiritual value. What the strange antics of old Zen masters meant, including their paradoxical words, can only fathomed when the seeker mystically sees the pure Mind, the power of which animates body, speech, and thoughts.

This is evident when a monk visited the Zen master Chao-chou (Jp., Joshu) one day. The monk, who no doubt had not seen pure Mind, related a dialogue to Chao-chou which was between the Zen master Hsüeh-feng and his disciple. It went like this:

Disciple: Master, tell me something about the 'cold spring of the ancient brook'?

Master: However hard to look into it, you can't see its bottom.

Disciple: So what happens to the drinker?

Master: He does not drink it with his mouth.

After the monk had finished relating the dialogue he wanted to know about the taste of the 'cold spring of the ancient brook'. Chao-chou said that it was poison and the drinker dies!

For Chao-chou, the monk appeared to be overly concerned with exegesis. He had no inkling that the dialogue was really a metaphor for the attainment of pure Mind which if you drink it, requires no mouth.

A skillful teacher, Chao-chou threw the exegete monk back upon himself, making a joke of it. It was as if he were saying, "If you seek the pure Mind by trying to find the right explanation you're drinking poison!"

The key to opening the huge gate to such Zen paradoxes demands that the sincere seeker awaken to pure Mind which if he or she really connects with it, straightaway gives the right answer. It is then no longer about understanding that Mind animates our body, speech, and thoughts—we sense the power of Mind actually doing it. And because we are now yoked with this pure Mind, we no longer worry about the person of flesh, except to show compassion to others and liberate them from their ignorance of pure Mind which is undying and eternal.

Tso-ch'an: zazen

Is zazen really about sitting meditation? One can hardly imagine that one must sit in order to do dhyana which is the meaning of zen. (Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character ch'an which is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word dhyana which generally means contemplation.)

Za, the first character in zazen, is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character 'tso'. Tso means to sit down, to rest, to place, and to reign. The character depicts two men sitting on the earth face to face to talk. In light of 'zen', which it modifies, which means meditation or contemplation, 'za' or 'tso' refers to the stabilization of oneself so that one will not be affected by external perturbations. This allows the practice of zen which, according to the Sixth Ancestor Hui-neng, means "to see the original nature and not become confused."

The danger of zazen or tso-ch'an is that it will be misunderstood to mean sit down meditation in which the main emphasis of Zen practice shifts to just sitting; trying to remain unaffected by external perturbations. It is 'za' sans the 'zen' or 'tso' minus the 'ch'an'.

Without the zen component of zazen, which means to see our original nature, the practice of Zen is just the formality of sitting (za/tso) without moving. One learns to become like an insentient block of wood or stone, in other words.

The most unessential part of Zen is really the actual sitting which can lead to such excesses as Silent Illumination Zen which Dogen attempted to popularize in Japan. Its most significant error was to equate silence with calming meditation and insight meditation. It emphasized long hours of sitting. Monks were instructed to sit like dead trees.

Those who practice authentic Zen aim for their original nature—not a posture. This nature is an animative power which governs the body, otherwise known as Mind or Suchness (Skt., tathata). To come into communion with this power is quite a profound event. The body is suffused with a spiritual light. One understands that the habit of clinging to the corporeal body has made one spiritually dead. To see our original nature is like an awakening—an awakening from the dead—being no longer dead trees!

Katagiri Zen and Descartes

Soto Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri wrote:

When you are sitting in zazen, don't think. Don't use your frontal lobe. Your frontal lobe is sitting with your already, so don't use it to think.

In the Second Meditation Descartes finds one proposition immune to his doubt. The demon of deceptions "can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think I am something." This argument is condensed in the Discourse as the now famous "I think, therefore I am" (Fr., je pense, donc je suis).

Unlike Descartes, Dainin Katagiri takes a different course, "I don't think, therefore I am naught." Of course, it takes a lot of work on the part of the person doing zazen to keep being naught. And then there is the nagging sense that this is so much nonsense. It is like a small pumpkin in a tub of water. A person pushes it down then thinks, "The pumpkin is naught." But he knows that the pumpkin is still there; and so is he!

Since when did the suppression of thinking, in which there is required a suppressing agent, lead to naught, or the same, emptiness? To be sure, the agent is still there looking out for thought as if to strangle it should it appear.

The Sixth Ancestor Hui-neng was critical of this approach. He said:

Deluded people attached to the characters of dharmas hold that calmness, in which one realizes that all dharmas are the same, means simply to sit unperturbed and to remove erroneous thoughts without allowing others to arise in the mind; that to them is calmness in which one realizes that all dharmas are the same. If this were the case, this Law would [render us] equivalent to insentient beings and would be a cause of hindrance to the Way. (14)

The suppression of thinking is not the aim of Zen. The aim is to see the pure Mind shorn of appearance which is an incorporeal seeing in a positive sense. This Mind is the self-nature which gives rise to ordinary thoughts. The Sixth Ancestor calls it True Thusness because it is the substance of thought phenomena like water is the substance of waves.

Dainin Katagiri's zazen never arrives at Hui-neng's True Thusness which is positive. This exercise of zazen is negative. Nor does it ever reach naturalness. One has to make effort. But for one who has seen the pure Mind nothing further needs to be done. Pure Mind is everywhere. So what is the need to suppress or establish it?

Emperor Zen

In the late eighties, when the American Zen master Daido Loori went to Japan to receive an important congratulatory ceremony performed at Eiheiji and Sojiji, he was acknowledging that American Zen (at least his brand of it) was now authoritatively and firmly grafted onto the ancient Japanese form of Zen Buddhism. For various reasons, we can assume that Loori believed that Japanese Zen has the final word; that its institution of Zen—particularly Soto—is the bearer of the flame of authentic enlightenment. Nothing, of course, can introduce an iota of doubt into his assumptions about Japanese Soto Zen—not even its present lackluster impact on the modern Japanese mind which sees it as something a bit antiquarian—in this sense, being good only to sacralize funerals!

Yet, all was not well with the Loori’s happy American Zen Lilliputians in the land of Japanese giants. Daido Loori’s entourage was surprised to observe that the so-called core teaching of Soto zazen (i.e., sitting meditation) had declined in Japan. They noticed, too, that some of the small Soto Zen temples in Japan provided no inspiration or program by which one might learn to practice zazen. Nor could an intensive meditation retreat, or "sesshin", be found. Moreover, they discovered there is little mention made of zazen in official Japanese Soto institutional literature. Many Soto abbots, they concluded, had abandoned zazen altogether. Nevertheless, they were sufficiently encouraged to realize that they were now part of an emerging Soto renaissance. Daido Loori’s lineage would, from now on, restore Soto Zen; teaching the Western multitudes the importance of doing an hour or less of zazen every day offering, in addition, week-long sesshins every month!

But somebody in Loori’s entourage had forgotten to look at the history of Japanese Soto Zen. As one scholar recently demonstrated, healing, rainmaking, protection from fire—not to mention funeral services—constituted the core of Soto Zen; all contributing to its popularity with the superstitious masses. By implication, the success of Soto Zen was neither due to zazen (which, according to this scholar, was practiced at fewer than one percent of all temples in the 18th-century) nor was it due to the teachings of Dogen Zenji, whose works were never a big time hit in Soto. In fact, one might get no challenge from a distinguished body of Soto scholars if they claimed that much of Soto’s history was not concerned with saving the hearts of its practitioners through zazen, but was more concerned with saving the Emperor from untold demonic forces.