There is a charming Chinese legend of the infinite saving power of this truly marvelous Bodhisattva, told of some very simple people dwelling in a village on a remote upper stream of the Yellow River. They had never heard of religion and were interested only in archery and swift horses. One early morning, however, an astonishingly beautiful young woman appeared in their village street, bearing a basket lined with fresh green leaves of the willow and filled with the golden-scaled fish of the stream. Her wares, which she cried, were immediately sold, and when they were gone, she disappeared. Next morning she returned; and so it went for a number of days. The young men of the village, of course, had taken note and, having begun to watch for her, one morning stopped her and pleaded with her to marry.
“O honorable gentlemen,” she answered, “certainly I wish to marry. But I am only one woman: I cannot marry you all. So if any one of you can recite by heart the Sūtra of the Compassionate Kuan-yin, he is the one I shall choose.”
They had never even heard of such a thing, but that night put themselves to work; and next morning when the young woman appeared, there were thirty presenting their claim. “O honorable gentlemen, I am only one woman,” she replied again. “If any one of you can explain the Sūtra, he is the one I shall wed.” The following morning there were ten. “If any one of you can in three days realize the meaning of the Sūtra,” she promised, “he is the one I shall marry surely.” And when she arrived the third morning thereafter, there was but one there standing to greet her. His name was Mero. And when she saw him, the very beautiful young woman smiled.
“I perceive,” she said, “that you have indeed realized the meaning of the blessed Sūtra of the Compassionate Kuan-yin, and do gladly accept you as my husband. My house you will find this evening at the river bend, and my parents there to receive you.”
Mero searched that evening as instructed, and at the river bend, among the rocks by the shore, discovered a little house. An old man and woman at the gate were beckoning, and when he approached, announcing his name, “We have been waiting for you a long time,” the old man said, and the woman led him to their daughter’s room.
She left him there, but the room was empty. From the open window he saw a stretch of sand as far as to the river, and in the sand, the prints of a woman’s feet, which he followed, to find at the water’s edge two golden sandals. He looked about in the gathering twilight and saw no house now among the rocks. There was only a cluster of reeds by the river, rustling dryly in an evening breeze. And then suddenly he knew: the fishermaid had been no other than the Bodhisattva herself. And he comprehended fully how great is the benevolence of the boundlessly compassionate Kuan-yin.7
That is a fable of the way of “outside help,” tariki, the way of the kitten—which is not, however, the way of Zen.
I have already mentioned the legend of the Buddha elevating a lotus and but one member of his audience grasping the meaning. Suppose now that I were to lift a lotus and ask you for its meaning! Or suppose, rather, not a lotus—for associated with the lotus are a lot of well-known allegorical references: suppose I lifted a buttercup and asked for the meaning of a buttercup! Or a dead stick, with the question: “What is the meaning of a dead stick?” Or still again: Suppose you asked me the meaning of Buddhism or of the Buddha, and I lifted up a dead stick!
The Buddha is known as the one “Thus Come,” Tathāgata. He has no more “meaning” than a flower, than a tree; no more than the universe; no more than either you or I. And whenever anything is experienced that way, simply in and for and as itself, without reference to any concepts, relevancies, or practical relationships, such a moment of sheer aesthetic arrest throws the viewer back for an instant upon his own existence without meaning; for he too simply is—“thus come”—a vehicle of consciousness, like a spark flung out from a fire.
Fig. 7.4 — Bodhidharma
When Buddhism, in the first century A.D., was carried from India to China, an imperial welcome was accorded the monks, monasteries were established, and the formidable labor was undertaken of translating the Indian scripture. Notwithstanding the really enormous difficulty of turning Sanskrit into Chinese, the work went forward famously and had continued for a good five hundred years when there came to China from India, about the year 520 A.D., a curiously grim old Buddhist saint and sage known as Bodhidharma, who immediately proceeded to the royal palace. According to the legend of this visit, the Emperor asked this somewhat cussed guest how much merit he had gained through his building of monasteries, support of monks and nuns, patronizing of translators, etc., and Bodhidharma answered, “None!”
“Why so?” inquired the Emperor.
“Those are inferior deeds,” came the answer. “Their objects are mere shadows. The only true work of merit is Wisdom, pure, perfect and mysterious, which is not to be won through material acts.”
“What, then,” the Emperor asked, “is the Noble Truth in its highest sense?”
“It is empty,” Bodhidharma answered. “There is nothing noble about it.”
His Majesty was becoming annoyed. “And who is this monk before me?”
To which the monk’s reply was, “I do not know.” And he left the court.
Bodhidharma retreated to a monastery and settled down there, facing a wall, where, as we are told, he remained in absolute silence for nine years—to make the point that Buddhism proper is not a function of pious works, translating texts, or performing rituals and the like. And there came to him, as he sat there, a Confucian scholar, Hui K’o by name, who respectfully addressed him, “Master!” But the Master, gazing ever at his wall, gave no sign of even having heard. Hui K’o remained standing—for days. Snow fell; and Bodhidharma, in perfect silence, remained exactly as he was. So finally, to indicate the seriousness of his purpose, the visitor drew his sword and, cutting off his own left arm, presented this to the teacher; at which signal the monk turned.
“I seek instruction,” said Hui K’o, “in the doctrine of the Buddha.”
“That cannot be found through another,” came the response.
“I then beg you to pacify my soul.”
“Produce it, and I shall do so.”
“I have sought it for years,” said Hui K’o, “but when I look for it, cannot find it.”
“So there! It is at peace. Leave it alone,” said the monk, returning his face to the wall. And Hui K’o, thus abruptly awakened to his own transcendence of all daylight knowledge and concerns, became the first Ch’an master of China.
The next crucial teacher in this Chinese Ch’an line of great names, Hui-neng (A.D. 638–713), was an illiterate woodchopper, we are told. His mother was a widow, whom he supported by delivering firewood. And he was standing one day at the door of a private home, waiting for an order, when he overheard someone inside intoning the verses of a Mahāyāna scripture called the “Diamond Cutter,” or Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra . “Wake the mind,” is what he heard, “not fixing it anywhere.” And, immediately illumined, he was overcome.
Desiring to improve his understanding, Hui-neng then made his way to a monastery, the Monastery of the Yellow Plum, where the old abbot, Hung-jen, who was the leading Ch’an master of the period, sized up the illiterate youth and assigned him to the kitchen. Eight months later, realizing that the time had arrived for him to fix upon a successor, Hung-jen announced that that one of his monks who could summarize best in a single stanza the essence of Buddhist teaching would be given the abbot’s robe and begging bowl symbolic of the highest office. There were some five hundred monks to compete, and among them one, extraordinarily gifted, whom all expected to win: his name Shen-hsiu. And indeed, they were his four lines that were selected and formally inscribed on the wall by the door of the refectory:
The body is the Bodhi-tree,
The mind, a mirror bright,
Take care to wipe them always clean,
Lest dust on them alight.
The idea here being that the essence of the Buddhist way is diligent pur
ification.
The illiterate kitchen boy, however, having learned of the competition, asked a friend that night to read to him the poem inscribed there on the wall; and when he had heard, begged to have the following set beside it:
The body is no Bodhi-tree,
The mind no mirror bright,
Since nothing at the root exists,
On what should what dust alight?
The abbot, next morning, hearing the excited talk of his monks, came down, stood a while before the anonymous poem, took his slipper and angrily erased it. But he had correctly guessed the author and, sending that night for the kitchen boy, presented him with the robe and bowl. “Here, my son,” he said; “here are the insignia of this office. Now depart! Run away! Disappear!”
Shen-hsiu’s doctrine became the founding tenet of the Northern Ch’an School of China, based on the idea of “gradual teaching” (chien-chiao) and the cultivation of learning. Hui-neng, on the other hand, became the founder of a Southern School of “abrupt teaching” (tun-chiao), based on the realization that Buddha-knowledge is achieved intuitively, by sudden insight. For this, however, the disciplines of a monastery are not only unnecessary but even possibly a hindrance, and such a doctrine, as the old abbot recognized, would discredit and finally undermine the entire monastic system. Hence his warning to disappear.
“Look within!” Hui-neng is reported to have taught. “The secret is inside you.”8
But how, if not through a study of the doctrine, may one come to any knowledge of that secret?
Fig. 7.5 — The Open Circle
In the Zen monasteries of Japan the preferred method is meditation, guided and inspired by a curious succession of intentionally absurd meditation topics known as koan. These are drawn, for the most part, from the sayings of the old Chinese masters; as, for instance: “Show me the face you had before your father and mother were born!” or “What is the sound of the clapping of one hand?” Such conundrums cannot be reasoned upon. They first focus, then baffle, thought. In the monasteries the candidates for illumination are ordered by their masters to go meditate on these enigmas and return with answers. Time and time again they fail and are sent back to meditate further—until one moment, suddenly, the intellect lets go and an appropriate retort breaks spontaneously forth. It has been said (I am told) that the ultimate koan is the universe itself, and that when this one has been answered the others come of themselves. “A koan,” D. T. Suzuki has declared, “is not a logical proposition but the expression of a certain mental state.”9 It is that mental state of transrational insight that the apparently absurd, but actually carefully programed sequences of brain-busters are meant to provoke. And that they work and have worked for centuries is the answer to any question a captious critic might ask as to their sense or worth.
So let me offer now a modern Western parable of the Buddhist “wisdom of the yonder shore”—that shore beyond reason, from which “words turn back, not having attained”—of which I first learned some thirty-odd years ago, from the lips of my very great and good friend Heinrich Zimmer. As we have said, Buddhism is a vehicle or ferry to the yonder shore. So let us imagine ourselves standing on this shore; let us say, on Manhattan Island. We are sick of it, fed up. We are gazing westward, over the Hudson River, and there, behold! we see Jersey. We have heard a good deal about Jersey, the Garden State; and what a change that would surely be from the filthy pavements of New York! There are no bridges yet: one has to cross by ferry. And so we have begun to sit on the docks, gazing longingly over at Jersey, meditating upon it; ignorant of its true nature, yet thinking of it ever with increasing zeal. And then one day we notice a boat putting out from the Jersey shore. It comes across the waters, our way, and it docks right here at our feet. There is a ferryman aboard, and he calls, “Anyone for Jersey?” “Here!” we shout. And the boatman offers a hand.
“Are you completely sure?” he says, however, as we step down into his craft. And he warns “There is no return ticket to Manhattan. When you put out from this shore you will be leaving New York forever: all your friends, your career, your family, your name, prestige, everything and all. Are you still quite sure?”
We are perhaps a bit intimidated, but we nod and declare that we are sure, quite sure: we have had Fun City to the teeth.
My friends, that is the way of becoming a monk or nun; the way of monastic Buddhism; the way of the earliest followers of the Buddha, and, today, of the Buddhists of Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand. We are here entering what is known as the “little ferryboat,” or “lesser vehicle,” Hinayāna, so called because only those ready to renounce the world as monks or nuns can ride in this craft to the yonder shore. The members of the lay community, unwilling as yet to take the fateful step, will have to wait (that’s all!) for a later incarnation, when they will have learned a little more about the vain conceits of their luxuries. This ferry is small, its benches are hard, and the name inscribed on its side is Theravāda, “the doctrine of the ancient saints.”
We embark, the ferryman hands us an oar, and the craft moves out from the dock. Ship ahoy! We are on the way, but on a rather longer voyage than we knew. In fact, it may endure for a number of lives. Nevertheless, already we are enjoying it, and already we feel superior. We are the holy ones, the voyagers, the people of the crossing, neither here nor there. We actually know, of course, no more about the Garden State than the fools (as we now call them) back on shore in the rat-maze of New York; but we are heading in the right direction, and the rules of our life are entirely different from those of the folks back home. In terms of the ladder of the kuṇḍalinī ascent, we are at cakra five, Viśuddha, “purgation,” the center of ascetic disciplines. And we are finding it, at first, very interesting and absorbing. But then gradually, in a surprising way, it begins to become frustrating—even hopeless. For the aim of it all is to get rid entirely of ego-consciousness, whereas the more we strive, the more we are building up ego, thinking of nothing, really, but ourselves: “How am I doing?” “Have I made any progress today? this hour? this week? this month? this year? this decade?” There are some who become so attached to all this self-examination that the last thing they really want to achieve is disembarkment. And yet, in some chance moment of self-forgetfulness, the miracle might indeed take place and our boat, in the spirit of the ancient saints, put to beach—in Jersey, the Garden State, nirvāṇa. And we step ashore. We have left the boat and all its dos and don’ts behind.
But now let us realize where we are. We have arrived at the ri hokkai, the shore of the knowledge of unity, non-duality, no separateness; and, turning to see what the Manhattan shore might look like from this absolute point of view... Astonishment! There is no “other” shore. There is no separating stream; no ferryboat, no ferryman; no Buddhism, no Buddha. The former, unilluminated notion that between bondage and freedom, life in sorrow and the rapture of nirvāṇa, a distinction is to be recognized and a voyage undertaken from one to the other, was illusory, mistaken. This world that you and I are here experiencing in pain through time, on the plane of consciousness of the ji hokkai, is, on the plane of ri hokkai, nirvanic bliss; and all that is required is that we should alter the focus of our seeing and experiencing.
But is that not exactly what the Buddha taught and promised, some twenty-five centuries ago? Extinguish egoism, with its desires and fears, and nirvāṇa is immediately ours! We are already there, if we but knew. This whole broad earth is the ferryboat, already floating at dock in infinite space; and everybody is on it, just as he is, already at home. That is the fact that may suddenly hit one, as “sudden illumination.” Hence the name, Mahāyāna—“big ferryboat,” “greater vehicle”—of the Buddhism of this non-dual thinking, which is the Buddhism best known as of Tibet, medieval China, Korea, and Japan.
And so what we have now discovered is that the world of many separate things, the ji hokkai, is not different from the ri hokkai. There is between the two no division. The Mahāyāna Japanese term for this stage of realization is j
i-ri-mu-ge, “things and unity: no division.” Though moving in the world of the multiple, we realize also, “This is the One.” We are experiencing as an actuality the unity of all—and not simply all of us human beings, but the light-bulbs up there on the ceiling as well, and the walls of the great old lecture hall, and the city outside, Manhattan, and yes! the gardens of Jersey too. We include equally the past—our numerous disparate pasts—and the future, which is already here, like an oak in the acorn. To walk about in knowledge and experience of all this is to live as in a wondrous dream.
Nor is this, finally, all; for there is still one more degree of realization possible of discovery, namely that termed in Japanese ji-ji-mu-ge: “thing and thing: no division”: no separation between things. The analogy suggested is of a net of gems: the universe as a great spread-out net with at every joint a gem, and each gem not only reflecting all the others but itself reflected in all. An alternate image is of a wreath of flowers. In a wreath, no flower is the “cause” of any other, yet together, all are the wreath.10 Normally we think of causes and effects. I give this book a push and it moves. It moved because I pushed it. The cause preceded the effect. What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.
Myths to Live By Page 16
