| | In the spirt of one hand clapping 'a lone voice shouting'.
From The Essential Record of Zen Master Hakuin A translation of the Sokko-roku Kaien-fusetsu by NORMAN WADDELL
"If you are not there for even an instant then you are just like a dead person."
Buddha means "one who is awakened."1 Once you have awakened, your own mind itself is Buddha. By seeking outside yourself for a buddha invested with form, you set yourself forward as a foolish, misguided man. It is like a person who wants to catch a fish. He must start by looking in the water, because fish live in water and are not found apart from it. If a person wants to find buddha, he must look into his own mind, because it is there, and nowhere else, that buddha exists. Question: "In that case, what can I do to become awakened to my own mind?' What is that which asks such a question? Is it your mind? Is it your original nature? Is it some kind of spirit or demon? Is it inside you? Outside you? Is it somewhere intermediate? Is it blue, yellow, red, or white? It is something you must investigate and clarify for yourself. You must investigate it whether you are standing or sitting, speaking or silent, when you are eating your rice or drinking your tea. You must keep at it with total, single-minded devotion. And never, whatever you do, look in sutra, or in commentaries for an answer, or seek it in the words you hear a teacher speak. When all the effort you can muster has been exhausted and you have reached a total impasse, and you are like the cat at the rat hole, like the mother hen warming her egg, it will suddenly come and you will break free. The phoenix will get through the golden net. The crane will fly clear of the cage. But even if no breakthrough occurs until your dying day and you spend twenty or thirty years in vain without ever seeing into your true nature, I want your solemn pledge that you will never turn for spiritual support to those tales that you hear the down-and-out old men and washed-out old women peddling everywhere today. If you do, they will stick to your hide, they will cling to your bones, you will never be free of them. And as for your chances with the patriarehs' difficult-to-pass koans, the less said about them the better, because they will be totally beyond your grasp….
… If you want to attain mastery in the Buddha Way you must, to begin with, empty your mind of birth and death. Both samsara and nirvana exist because the mind gives rise to them. The same for the heavens and hells; not one of them exists unless the mind produces them. Hence there is one and one thing only for you to do: make your minds completely empty. Falling right into step, students set out to empty their minds, make them utter blanks. The trouble is, though they try everything they know, emptying this way emptying that way, working away at it for months, even years, they find it is like trying to sweep mist away by flailing ay it with a pole, or trying to stem the flow of a river by blocking it with outstretched arms. The only result is greater confusion, Suppose, for example, that a wealthy man mistakenly hires a master thief of the greatest skill and cunning to guard his house. After watching his granaries, treasures, and the rest of his fortune dwindle by the day, he orders the thief to seize several suspicious servants and to interrogate them around the clock until they confess, Family members are worried sick. Relations between husband and wife are severely strained. Yet their fortune goes on mysteriously shrinking. And it all happen because of the mistake the man had made in the beginning, in employing and placing his complete trust in a thief. The lesson to be learned from this is that the very attempts to banish birth and death from your mind are, in themselves, a sure sign that birth and death is in full progress….
…. In recent times, monks are given the Mu koan to work on.8 With diligence and concentration, one man among them—or half a man—may be passed by his master.9 But in achieving this first small breakthrough, the student forgets about his teacher. He gets the idea that he has enlightened himself and goes around crowing about it to anyone who will listen—sure signs that he is still confined within samsara. Then he proceeds to hatch ideas of his own on various matters pertaining to Zen. With cultivation, these grow find prosper. But the gardens of the patriarehs are still beyond his farthest horizons. If you want in reach the ground where true pence and comfort is found, the more you realize, the harder you will strive. The further you reach, the further you will press forward. When you finally do see the ultimate truth of the patriarehal teachers, there will be no mistake about it—it will be as if it is right there in the palm of your hand. Why is this? You don’t trim your nails at the fool of a lamp.10…..
….. In the fourth chapter of a collection of Zen records titled Ch'an-yu nei-chi is a Dharma talk the Ming priest Yung-chian gave to his assembly during the December practice session: Ch'ien-feng said that the Dharma-body has three kinds of sickness and two kinds of light; he also says that there is an opening through which to pass beyond these obstructions. Now, even if I have to lose my eyebrows for doing it, I'm going to explain the true meaning of Ch'ien-feng's words to you.2 As a rule, mountains, streams, the great earth, light and darkness, form and emptiness, and all the other myriad phenomena obstruct your vision and are, as such, impediments to the Dharma-body. That is the first of the sicknesses Ch'ien-feng refers to. When you go on to realize the emptiness of all things and begin dimly to discern the true principle of the Dharma-body, but are unable to leave your attachment to the Dharma behind—that is the second sickness, When you are able to bore through and attain the Dharma-body, but you realize upon investigating it anew that there is no way to grasp hold of it, no way to postulate it or to indicate it to others, attachment to the Dharma still remains. That is the third sickness. The first sickness is a kind of light that doesn’t penetrate freely. The second and third sicknesses are likewise a kind of light; it doesn’t penetrate with unobstructed freedom either. When a student has bored his way through the opening mentioned, he is beyond these obstructions and is able to see clearly the three sicknesses and two lights, with no need for even the slightest bit of further effort.
Zen Master Hakuin: Complete nonsense! Discriminatory drivel of the first water. When I read that, my hands involuntarily closed the book. Doubting my own eyes, I shut them and sat there, utterly appalled. How could anyone. believe such feeble remarks are capable of clarifying the ultimate principle of Zen?.....
…. Long ago, when Zen master Nan-yueh sat in front of Ma-tsu's hermitage and began polishing a tile, he did so because of his desire to make Ma- tsu's grasp his true meaning. When teachers of the past left phrases behind them, difficult-to-penetrate koans that would strip students' minds of their chronic inclination to attach to things, they did it because they wanted to kick over that comfortable old nesting place in the Alaya consciousness. Hence a master of the past said, "I made the mistake of burrowing into an old jackal hole for over thirty years myself; it's no mystery to me why so many students do the same." (Nan-yuch, seeing his student Ma-tsu practicing zazen, took a tile and began polishing it. When Ma-tsu asked him what he was doing, he replied that he was making a mirror. Ma-tsu told him that is was impossible to make a mirror from a tile, Nan-yuch first replied, "And how do you expect to become a buddha by doing zazen?" Then he spoke the words Hakuin quotes here. ‘The great teacher Nan-yueh said, "Suppose an ox is pulling a cart, and the cart doesn’t move. Should you hit the cart? Or should you hit the ox? "’) There's no doubt about it, the practice of Zen is a formidable under taking….
In his later years, the Zen master Fa-yen enjoyed strolling the south corridor of his temple on Mount Wu-tsu. One day he saw a visiting monk pass by reading a book. He took it from him and, glancing through it, came to a passage that caught his attention; "Most Zen students today are able to reach a state of serenity in which their minds and bodies are no longer troubled by afflicting passions, and their attachment to past and future is cut away so that each instant contains all time. There they stop and abide contently like censers lying unless and forgotten in an ancient cemetery, cold and lifeless with nothing to break the silence but the sobbing of the dead spirits. Assuming this to be the ultimate Zen has to offer them, they are unaware that what they consider an unsurpassed realm is in fact obstructing their true self so that true knowing and seeing cannot appear and the radiant light of extraordinary spiritual power (jinzu) cannot shine free."15 Fa-yen closed the book and, raising his arms in a gesture of self-reproach for his ignorance, exclaimed, "Extraordinary! Here is a true teacher! How well he expresses the essence of the Zen school!"
.....When Ta-hui went to study under Zen master Yuan-wu for the first rime, he had already decided on a course of action. "By the end of the ninety-day summer retreat," he declared to himself, "if Yuan-wu has affirmed my understanding like all the other teachers I've been to, I'm going to write a treatise debunking Zen." Ta-hui, did you really think Yuan-wu wouldn't be able to see through the fundamental matter you secretly treasured? If you had persisted in clinging to it like that, revering it and cherishing it for the rest of your life, how could the great "Reviler of Heaven" ever have emerged? Fortunately, however, a poisonous breeze blowing from the south snuffed Ta-hui's life out at its roots, cutting away past and future.16 When it happened, his teacher Yuan-wu said, "What you've accomplished is not easy. But you've merely finished killing your self. Your not capable of coming back to life and raising doubts about the words and phrases of the ancients. Your ailment is a serious one. You know the saying, 'Release your hold on the edge of the precipice. Die, and then be reborn'? You must believe in those words." Later, upon hearing Yuan-wu say, "What happens when the tree falls and the wisteria withers? The same thing happens." Ta-hui suddenly achieved great enlightenment. When Yuan-wu tested him with several koans, he passed them easily.17 |