Zen is more than words and gestures

Words and gestures are not the secret of Zen anymore than the forefinger is the moon above or smoke is fire.  For Zen master Dahui, Zennists who take up koans suffer from a disease of the intellect (the Chinese literati 士大夫 suffered from this in spades).  For such people as these, they believed that the koan is self-contained, that is, the answer lies within the words (their ingenuity will solve the koan they believed!).  Also, maybe there are different interpretations and not just one (not on your life).

The source, or maybe I should say the secret of Zen, is not dependent on the koan.  In fact, it could not care less about koans.  It’s better to first penetrate beyond birth and death realizing Zen’s secret so as to attain liberation, than waste your time trying to solve koans.  In the fifty-fourth case of the Blue Cliff Record titled, Extending Both Hands, 

Unmon asked a monk, "Where have you come from?" The monk said, "From Saizen." Unmon said, "What words does Saizen say lately?" The monk stretched out his arms. Unmon slapped him. The monk said, "I have something to say about it." Unmon then stretched out his own arms. The monk remained silent. Then Unmon hit him. 

This seems to be all words and gestures as you can easily recognize.  Are you awakened—do you know Zen’s deep secret now?  I doubt it.  What do these words and gestures allude to?  Is the answer more words, more gestures?  That’s right, you nailed it, they all allude to the secret of Zen that no Zen master or even the old Buddha himself ever revealed and never will.

But now let’s imagine that I waved my staff over your heads and you all had the eyes of the Buddha.  Looking at the koans you would grin like the Cheshire Cat.  There it is!  The secret of Zen.  How skillful the old master played.  Why that old fart knew exactly what he was doing.  But these poor monks and nuns will never intuit the secret in a lifetime I bet.

Old Unmon sat there on his chair. The radiant Mind extended around him in all directions.  Did anyone pick this up when they first saw him?  I mean you could cut it with a knife it was so thick and blissful.  And still the monks and nuns didn’t notice it.  They only visited to play with words and gestures.  No wonder Zen eventually declined in China!

Comments

[n. yeti]

Zennist:

I've alluded to this before that koan practice seems -- to my mind at least -- at the very best peripheral to what Zen offers as spiritual practice in our present age.

I don't mean to downgrade people's practice of koans or dissuade those who are inspired by them, but just to point out that at the age in which koans were flourishing was also fairly early in the steep decline toward the present nadir of the Dharma Ending Age (soon to get much worse).

The koan (gong'an) arose in other words as expedient means. In today's world, unlike in the golden age of the gong'an, anyone with access to the Internet has an unbelievable wealth of spiritual treasures in the form of scriptures and teachings and discourses throughout the ages. Just looking at the milieu of the time, undertaking a gong'an with a teacher would have been perhaps the best opportunity to break the vise-grip of false thinking, because there were so few other options.

Now, in today's polluted age, I think it is not only increasingly difficult in general, but there are fewer and fewer realized masters who can help to guide the student along with the use of this particular expediency. All of this is very controversial I suppose to those who insist on the traditional model of student-teacher practice.

As I mentioned recently, I am inclined to believe as the Buddhadharma continues to disappear, the fewer and fewer numbers of spiritually attuned people will need to retreat from the world as best as they can and study on their own, to the extent of their abilities. Try to be the best you can be morally, study the scriptures diligently and with whatever faith can be mustered, and search every moment of every day for what the Buddha realized.

It has been said that when the treasures of Buddhism become unavailable to this world, bodhisattvas and solitary realizers will arise to continue to inspire the path of awakening until the birth of Maitreya and a new cycle of wisdom becomes available to the terrestrial world.