Koans are invitations to the mysterious unfolding of life. While much has been written about how we cannot understand them intellectually,
koans operate on many levels. It is true that the most profound fruit of koan practice can only
be tasted in meditative practice and in dokusan with a Zen teacher who has
trained with koans. But we can also reflect on koans and harvest some pointers for the Way.
Take Case 26, “Fayen’s Two Monks Roll Up the Blinds,” from Wumen’s Gateless
Gate. The central figure, Fayen Wenyi, was a Zen Master who lived and taught in
China during the ninth and tenth centuries. For the bulk of his teaching years,
he resided at Qingliang Monastery. According to this case, “The great Fayen
Wenyi took the high seat before the midday meal to preach to his assembly.
Raising his hand he pointed to the bamboo blinds. Two monks went and rolled
them up in the same manner. Fayen said, ‘One gains; one loses.’” I like to
imagine that as they rolled up the blinds, Fayen saw through the open window a
pale moon floating just above the pines.
Fayen saw that there was no difference in the way the monks rolled the blinds,
yet he created concepts such as gain and loss out of thin air. Fayen hammered
nails into the sky. Still, each monk may have wondered, “which monk am I? Am I
the one who gains or the one who loses?” This could have caused quite a crisis
for them!
How often do we play such mind-games? As a teacher of high school English,
particularly when I was new to the role, how often did I walk away from a
lesson and think, “I am quite a good teacher! I really got them involved in the
lesson today,” only to walk away from the very next class thinking, “I am such
a terrible teacher! My students were obviously bored by the questions I asked!”
Which was true?
Each of these senses of self depended on my being a teacher of students. No
students, no teacher. And each story I told about myself depended upon my
students’ reactions, not on some intrinsic essence in myself. Still, we often
trick ourselves into believing in separate, fixed selves when, from the
perspective of emptiness, there is no self at all. In an absolute sense,
neither monk gains or loses. They are just rolling up blinds. Just this.
When we see that senses of self are only senses of self,
they appear as light shows without any real substance, like rainbows made of
falling drops of water and angling sunlight. The colors glisten in our eyes,
but the rainbow has no essence of its own, like a mirage.
This is Fayen’s invitation: can you too see through gain and
loss, winner and loser? Can you see through the rainbow of your self?
In Zen practice, we are invited to see deeply into the great matter of
emptiness and form. From the perspective of form, we say that separate things
exist. The moon is outside while I am inside. Form, or differentiation, is how
we categorize things in the world.
Emptiness, or nonduality, is ironicallly difficult for us to see because we
invest great faith in our categorizations of reality. From the perspective of
emptiness, things do not exist as separate fixed entities. The moon only glows
because of the light of the sun. The moon is stardust. Each being depends on
the whole universe to exist and is in fact made of the rest of the universe.
Nothing exists separately or independently. The notion of separate existences
is an illusion.
This is the insight expressed midway through the Heart Sutra when
Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra, “No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.”
Often the perspective of emptiness is expressed as a negation. As Thich Nhat
Hanh explains, there can be no vision without the eye, but there also can be no
vision without the object seen and the light refracting off of the object.
Vision is not a separate “thing.” In this moment, your vision is made of my
words! We cannot explain vision by looking at the eye alone. Thus we can say, “no
eye.” There is no separate eye that sees without all the rest of the components
of vision, just as there is no self that exists without all of the non-self
elements that constitute that self – the air we breathe, the food we eat, the
languages we speak, even our ancestors who developed our languages, all of
which depend upon the entire universe to exist. So in a very real sense, the
“self” is composed of the universe. Dogen famously expressed this insight with
his poetic image of the “moon in a dewdrop.” The self is not an isolated being
existing inside our little heads. The self is a boundless, dependent arising
illuminated by the universe.
To be empty also means that there are no fixed essences anywhere, for
everything changes. As Hume, a sneaky Buddhist, illustrates, if perceptions
change from moment to moment, there can be no self. What Hume means is that
every aspect of the supposed “self” changes from one moment to the next.
Sometimes the variation can be quite subtle, so we may not notice the change
and therefore think of ourselves as the same person as we were before. But we
are not the same person. Hume offers a metaphor from the Ship of Theseus.
Imagine a ship traveling across a great ocean, but imagine that the ship stops
multiple times along the way to gather food for the next leg of the journey.
Each time the ship stops, parts of the ship are replaced. At the first port,
the mast and sails are replaced with a similar mast and sails. At the second
port, the deck is removed and replaced with new boards. At the third port, many
of the boards composing the hull are also removed and replaced, and so forth.
By the end of the journey, every board of the ship has been replaced, but for
the crew, the ship feels like the same ship. After all, it still has the same
name! Our minds and bodies are like the ship of Theseus. The constituent parts
– emotions, thoughts, sensory experiences, the cells of our bodies, and even
our genes -- change over the course of our lives. Were we to place the baby
form of ourselves next to our adult selves in the same moment, we would not
call the two people the same. So Buddhists say that there is “no self.” There
is a person who is becoming, but there is no fixed identity as we often
imagine.
When a person practices and touches into the emptiness of forms, it can feel
scary. One friend told me that while working with his first koan on retreat in
a monastic setting, he began to touch into the groundlessness of our being and
became frightened. Rather than pause to acknowledge these feelings, his teacher
pushed him, and he felt a hollowness that was so traumatizing that he abandoned
Zen. This hollowness was not what we mean by emptiness. But we need to be
careful not to push too hard or too fast into recognizing the groundlessness of
our being. We can be patient. The lack of intrinsic essence naturally reveals
itself to us with time and attention.
Another risk is that when we form ideas about emptiness as a “thing” to be
seen, that conception inevitably excludes other aspects of our lives. At the
extreme level, one may try to live as a hermit, never using language in the
misguided belief that emptiness cannot include any thinking. We can get
terribly lost in false ideas of emptiness, where we can be of no benefit and
where practice becomes cold, lacking compassion. Rather than caring for those
who suffer, we may judge those who suffer as deluded.
While getting lost in emptiness usually is not this dramatic, this kind of
attachment to notions of emptiness can become an obstacle. This is why Wumen
cautions us in his verse following the case: “When they are rolled up the great
sky is bright and clear,/but the great sky still does not match our Way./Why
don’t you throw away that sky completely?/Then not a breath of wind will come
through.” When the blinds that divide inside from outside, or self and other,
are rolled up and put away, the moonlight shines in the dewdrop, and the
vastness of our true nature becomes apparent. And, when we finally gain some
insight into emptiness, we must then throw away our ideas about emptiness. This
is because our understanding of emptiness is not the true, living emptiness,
and it will become a hell-cave for us if we are attached to it. We must turn
toward forms again to see that emptiness is a dependent arising that does not
exist separately from forms. Emptiness is exactly form.
Forms are provisional designations empty of intrinsic essence, but they are not
lies. They are “relative truths.” If water is emptiness, forms are the shape of
water. To be lost in emptiness means denying the shape water takes as though
there were no waves on the ocean. And on a personal level, this often means
trying to deny our very human hearts. To be lost in emptiness can mean
pretending that grief does not, or should not, arise after we have lost a loved
one because “there is no such thing as a separate loved one,” “there is no such
thing as grief,” and “to grieve must mean I am deluded and believe in a fixed
self where there was none.” Spiritual bypasses deny our human hearts and cause
us to repress our feelings, leading to more suffering. Spiritual bypasses can
also be shaming. We can blame ourselves for having feelings that we cannot
control. We try to cut off these “delusions” with Manjushri’s sword, but this
is like cutting an open wound. Our hearts keep hurting even when we give them
no home. And ultimately, what we run from controls us. Being attached to false
notions of emptiness actually hinders our freedom. “I am empty, so I do not
feel sadness.” These conceptions of our “selves” are the opposite of freedom.
Freedom is the ability to see what we actually are in any given moment. Though
a dependent arising, the moon still shines.
Some years ago, I was divorced, my child was hospitalized multiple times with a
life-threatening illness, my mother was hospitalized with Alzheimer’s, my best
friend from high school was killed, and one of my high school students
committed suicide. A few years later, my mother and father died. Each event
fell hard upon the last. My heart filled with dark sadness that sometimes
nearly suffocated me. I could find no solid ground on which to stand as so many
aspects of my life were stripped away. I felt like a failure in Zen as well,
for I could not “Zen my way through” the grief.
Fortunately, my teachers never encouraged me to engage in spiritual bypass.
Rather, they simply bore compassionate witness and encouraged me to do the
same. They assured me that these painful feelings were not due to a flaw in my
practice. Nor was there any fixed self inside of me to take the blame as the
“first cause.” Rather, these feelings were the natural result of infinite
changing causes and conditions. This was the middle way. My practice, modeled
after my teachers’, became bearing witness to what was becoming. And the world
rose up to meet me in the form of funerals, hospitals, a lonely apartment, and
tears. These were the forms of emptiness. In time, impermanence revealed itself
not only as a thief but as a relief. The pain of loss transformed into a new life
of shape-shifting joys and sorrows. And I have seen that even pain is without a
fixed essence. It waxes and wanes. But the sadness had to be compassionately
witnessed to share its wisdom with me.
On the societal level, spiritual bypass is also harmful. It leads to neglect. I
had a white student who said that race is nothing but a social construct, so we
should just practice not seeing race – a possibility based in privilege. One
might call it a spiritual bypass of societal problems. According to the NAACP,
African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. We
can explain countless statistical inequalities like this by arguing that black
people are “by nature” worse than white people – a false designation of
intrinsic essence – or we can acknowledge that the plight of black people is a
dependent arising resulting from a long history of racist policies that have
led to unfavorable outcomes for Blacks in America – a dependent arising. Though
sometimes painful, bearing witness illuminates how we mutually condition one
another’s experiences and inspires us to take action to address injustices and
alleviate suffering.
What the seeming polarities of emptiness and form ultimately reveal is a middle
way, an embodied realization that though we exist, we do not exist as separate,
fixed entities. Moment after moment, we co-create one another.
Believing in a delusion of separateness, Siddhartha’s father tried to sequester
Siddhartha behind palace walls where he could not see sickness, old age, and
death. He tried to protect Siddhartha from suffering in his kingdom of
privilege. But it is impossible to separate ourselves from the world. When
Siddhartha lost his innocence and discovered what lay beyond the palace walls,
he could no longer hide behind them, for the suffering beings in the world
resided in his heart. He instead turned toward suffering in the world and vowed
to gain enlightenment for all beings.
On the night of his enlightenment, Buddha faced Mara, who manifested as our
human temptations and fears. Buddha’s practice embodied the open-ended
question, “what is this?” Rather than believe in the content of his fears, and
rather than deny Mara’s existence, Buddha practiced the middle way and simply
said, “I see you, Mara.” In bearing witness, Buddha allowed the forms of
emptiness to reveal their "suchness," and Mara's arrows, neither
emptiness nor form, transformed into flower petals. As the morning star arose
in the sky, Buddha said, “Together with all beings, I have attained the
way.”
Great realization was not the end of Buddha’s journey. In saying he had
attained the way together with all beings, Buddha acknowledged that
all beings are already saved. All beings are already such, as waves are
already water. There are no separate selves anywhere in the universe to
save.
Still, Buddha returned to his sangha to enlighten them. This is because even
though his sangha mates were Buddhas, they did not realize this. Buddha's
compassion caused him to "throw away the sky," to throw away
attachment to any particular mind-state he might have attained beneath the
bodhi tree, so that he could "return to the marketplace" to liberate
all beings from suffering.
Buddha was free from attachment to mind-states because "suchness"
does not depend on any state of mind. Suchness is all inclusive. Buddha
discovered the freedom that does not depend on causes and conditions.
Like the two monks in the koan, Buddha lost and gained. He saw through his
sense of having a fixed, separate self, and he gained his freedom, allowing him
to return to society to save all beings. Like Buddha, we are called to
attain liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. This is why, in
the Mahayana tradition, our practice is to roll up the blinds, behold the empty
sky, and throw it away.
The Mahayana tradition is a practice, not just a philosophy. While this essay outlines some of what we may realize, reading is no substitute for practice. To walk the walk, to actually awaken, we need to train with a teacher and sangha. Then these koans really come alive, stone statues dance, and we realize the Buddha Way.