Koans as Pointers: Two Monks Roll Up the Blinds

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.