Download this Document

The Darkened Mirror
The First Rank of Tung-shan

The Phenomenon within the Universal
When the third watch begins, before the moon rises, don't think it strange to meet and not recognise the other, yet still somehow recall the elegance of ancient days.

This gatha, the first of ten in Tung-shan's Five Ranks, touches the mystery of who you are and your deep connection to all that is. This is beyond imagining, beyond words. It can't be expressed in words but here are Tung-shan's profound metaphors which touch the heart and mind with wonder, and make a light for our feet.

Tung-shan entitles this first gatha 'The Phenomenon within the Universal'. You are the phenomenon in the vigil of deep practice at midnight -- the third watch in old Chinese horology.1 Inside and outside are utterly dark, indistinguishable. In Wu-men's words 'inside and outside (have) become one and you are like a mute person who has had a dream. You know it for yourself alone.'2 When you come to dokusan you have nothing to say; silence feels like the only possible presentation.

You are like a great dark ravine, a mysterious valley. You're pregnant, but you can't give birth. Everything waits, in dark pause, aching to be breathed out, to come into life. You feel edgeless: it's like looking into a mirror that shines back darkness only.3 Like walking out on a long jetty at night, and without being able to see hand in front of face, hear the sound of water lapping in the darkness.

Everything feels utterly open and alive, but if you're questioned you don't know, and you don't know, and still you don't know. It's important to settle in there, into that not knowing which isn't the blankness of ignorance, but rather of a profound mystery that cannot find its tongue.

There's an old story which bears on this, the story of how Hogen (Fa-yen) had his awakening when he met his teacher Jizo (Ti-tsang).4 Hogen was very young at the time, probably about eighteen, and was on pilgrimage with two companions after the three of them had survived a shipwreck.

Jizo said, "Where are you going?"

Hogen said, "I am wandering at random."

The teacher asked, "What do you think of wandering?" (Stirring the waters of eternity.)

Hogen said, "I don't know." (This stupor, this stupidity is utterly fruitful.)

Jizo said, "Not knowing is most intimate." (Your not knowing is the vastness of your own deep nature giving birth to the spattering galaxies, to the dark shapes of the trees in the courtyard, to your own beating heart.)

Hogen had an awakening. When we are ripe, words like Jizo's, or anything at all, can shake us awake, tip us over the edge. Till then, all we can do is to continue. There are no fancy intellectual means available. No tricks. Tung-shan called this 'Treading the darkling path', paying tribute to the gathering obscurity as we open our eyes at deeper and deeper levels. For him 'Treading the darkling path' was persevering in practice. It doesn't make any sense to return to Mu -- you just do, and then gently return again. This is beyond reason and the Way gathers in darkness. Mostly you don't notice this gathering; in fact, most of the time you feel a bit desperate and wonder why you're doing such an unreasonable, impossible practice.

An ancient tradition associates the first gatha with the I Ching's hexagram Sun -- the gentle, the penetrating,5 and suggests a way to practice -- like the gentle wind that blows unceasingly and gets in everywhere. Breathing Mu, christening each thing that arises -- aching knee, the taste of the fruit salad, the sound of the truck unloading -- as Mu. Like this, each thing calls us home and gets blessed at the same time. You ask, 'What is Mu?', get lost, and then after finding your way home, you get lost all over again. It's like the wind that blows persistently in one direction -- it penetrates, it produces results inconspicuously; we're subtly, inconspicuously changed -- deepened beyond reckoning. We come up to the gate a thousand times, and finally without contrivance or manipulation; we go through under the cover of night.

Treading the darkling path is chastening. We're disabused of cherished notions and opinions about ourselves and the world. We allow ourselves to be simplified, cut and shaped by the stream of the Way in what seems to be a necessary simplification -- a stilling, a darkening. In this there is a letting go as we open into our uncertainties and doubts. Doubts about whether we deserve the Way when there is so much suffering in the world, or if we're enlightened from the beginning, why we have to sweat and struggle like this, are threaded through by vertigo, fear of falling, or fear of going mad. Sometimes there are experiences that seem like an opening -- there is the vastness of Mu -- but it's also pallid, gruel-like and contaminated by fears. ('How will they recognise me when I turn up for work on Monday?')

It doesn't pay to get too interested in the spectres of failure, fears of success and competitiveness at this stage of the work. Good not to be too led about by our ideas about the great sea-change we're undergoing, either. Later, such preoccupations can be looked at in the light of the moon, and their root systems uncovered in the cultivation that continues after enlightenment. Whatever can be readily let go of is allowed to go. Wu-men advises 'Make your whole body a mass of doubt and with your 360 bones and your 84,000 hair follicles, just concentrate on this one word Mu. Day and night keep digging into it.'6

'Making your whole body a mass of doubt', as Yamada Roshi suggests, is becoming one with Mu. In this hermetic fire our uncertainties, our profound doubts are equally fuel for the Way, are equally Mu, as we build the vessel with each return to 'What is Mu?', or to breathing Mu. This is the vigil. It requires patience, and a measure of faith to endure there. I'm reminded of John Tarrant's lovely description of faith:
 
 

Don't think it strange to meet and not recognise the other.
 

The moon rises and reflects in the water in its own good time. You realise when your time is ripe. In the deep mean time, in the profound middle time, we meet the other, yet don't recognise her. What is the other? Who is the other? You look out and see water drops flashing on the tree, you suck an orange, burn your tongue with black scalding coffee, bitter as penitence. You are always meeting her -- as your face in the mirror, as the long ringing bell that opens you up, shaking, like an aeroplane opening up the sky. In the darkened mirror the other appears and disappears and brushed by her wings we experience such frank unreasoning joy. Intimations shake us. We find that we laugh and cry for no reason.
 

*****
 
  Such a deep experience, that is both a complete turning about of the life and a deep conversion, has no inside, no outside -- the shimmering vastness and darkness can't be described, or adequately conveyed. You feel this in Te-shan's grateful, but enigmatic response to Lung-tan's "What truth did you discern?" The truth he's discerned has knocked him flat, stolen his tongue.
 
Next morning, after Lung-tan got up before his assembly and predicted a lofty career for Te-shan, Te-shan took his notes on the Diamond Sutra before the Dharma Hall and burned them, saying, "Even though you have exhausted the abstruse doctrines, it is like placing a hair in vast space. Even though you have learned all the secrets of the world, it is like letting a single drop of water fall into an enormous valley."10
 
In the blaze of his vastness, in the potent fire of genuine realisation, all his old theories and pompous opinions about the Dharma go up in smoke. In his fierce cleaning out of the old so that he can open the vast open spaces of the new, there is something god-like. Yet, correspondingly, he's not fully human, the vastness hasn't run its full course into low, tender humanity.
 
Suddenly, momentarily, we're not there and it's like the night sky, and we're awed, transfixed, cross-eyed in love with the mystery. Our eyes, wide, dark, are filled with the vastness, but, as yet, we haven't come back into the light and shadow, the tenderness and pain of our life. We're not ready to touch or be touched by others. We've been knocked flat by its glance, but we're not back on our feet walking it, talking it.
 
An old Rabbi was talking with his assembly. He asked his people, "How do you know when the night is ended and the day has begun?" After a while someone ventured, "Is it that moment when the individual trees begin to step out of the forest?" The old Rabbi shook his head, "No, it is not that moment." Another spoke up, "Is it that moment when you can tell a cloud from the morning mist?" "No," said the Rabbi, "it is not that moment." They all fell deeply silent and finally someone said, "Please tell us, Rabbi, how we can tell the moment when the night has ended and the day has begun?" And the Rabbi said, "It is the moment when you look into the face of a stranger and recognise your own."12
 
Recognising your own face in the face of a stranger -- experiencing the other as yourself, as utterly you. The young woman reaches out to touch her Teacher's beard and the shock of its wiriness jolts her out of exile. She finds the whole world walks through her heart and feels sudden overwhelming love for her husband and children.
 
This is the rising of the sun; this is coming back to life after the obligatory death; this is the vast darkness now alive and glinting with the wetness of your eyes and the loveliness of your limbs, with your unique and idiosyncratic ways, with the unrepeatable angle of your ironies, your smile, your walking, your struggling out of bed, your confused stumbling to the bathroom, the conversation with your friends, your children, animals -- each of your precious and unrepeatable moments, each of your gestures -- that's it.
 
The ancient way has stepped in and taken up lodgings; it finds its unsteady, croaking voice with, "Good morning. How's it going?"
 

Yet still recall the elegance of ancient days.
 

After an experience of the empty world, after you've been brushed a moment by its dark wings, it's like getting out of bed with sleep in your eyes and still being held in the embrace of your dream, wandering lost in its mysterious valley. A phrase like Kerouac's "Dark and light are mysterious. Why do they sojourn here?" moves you unaccountably. A poem like Mary Jaksch's:
 

I have been swallowed by a great whale.
In her vast belly birds are silent
and stars sing at random.

prompts your heart, touching what is ancient, inexpressible.
 
There are dangers in cultivating 'the elegance of ancient days'. We can be transfixed by our opening experiences and hang around there, as Kinzan puts it, 'like a person guarding a stump, waiting for a rabbit'.13 Or we are blinded by the brilliance and depth of the insights of others and lamentably waste our time trying to have their experiences. Seduced in these ways, and generally setting up the kind of luminous denial that can pose for deep sitting, we can subtly build a dam against the fury and the wonder of our lives. We miss our children's growing up; the joy and pain of our close friendships outside the sangha.
 
The light squirms and seethes within the darkness; an ancient image invokes uncomprehending joy and tears. Before we experience, images and metaphors inspire our love for the Way, touch off the rapture and the curiosity that has us making long journeys to find a teacher, has us sitting solitary retreats, and helping to found a Zen group so we have someone to sit with. After we experience genuinely, such images brush our open depths. As Yamada Roshi, commenting on Tung-shan's First Rank, has it:
 

No matter how deeply we realise, we yearn for greater depth; this beauty that lies deep within us also allures us, pulls at us, encourages us to dive into the unfathomable vastness that is in each of us. This beauty which we remember, which we take back through the heart, is also our incompleteness calling for deeper and deeper connection, for fuller and more fuller life.
 
Heraclitus, describing soul, says that she is so vast that you could journey many days without reaching the end of her. For days, let's read years or decades. The undertaking of coming to know who you are and your deep connection to all that is, is vast. The path of zazen and the teachings arising from it, for instance Tung-shan's Five Ranks, open us into the ever-deepening darkness and, in the same breath, provide a lamp for our feet.
 
The dark mirror of the First Rank yearns towards the clear bright mirror of the second. At each stage of the Way it is 'Not enough - not enough yet. Never enough' -- and that is the deepest encouragement of all.
 
 
Notes
 

1. Robert Aitken, The Five Modes of Tung-shan, translation with commentary, unpublished manuscript, Diamond Sangha, Honolulu, 1987, p.1.

2. Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier, translation with commentary, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1990, Case 1, p.7.

3. Hakuin Zenji writes that 'the light of the Great Mirror Wisdom (which for him characterises Tung-shan's First Rank) is black like lacquer'. See Isshû Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Zen Koan, Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, San Diego, New York, London, p.66.

4. Shoyoroku, Book of Equanimity, Case 20, translated by Robert Aitken Roshi and Yamada Koun Roshi, unpublished manuscript, Diamond Sangha.

5. I Ching, translated by Richard Wilhelm, Hexagram 57.

6. Robert Aitken, Gateless Barrier, p.7.

7. John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark, Harper and Row.8. Te-shan was a ninth century Master living in the north of China, who in his twenties and thirties was renowned as an expert on the Diamond Sutra. He heard about the Zen sect in the south of China that taught that you could awaken to your original nature in this lifetime, for him a view completely at odds with the teachings of the Diamond Sutra. So he made a long and arduous journey to the south of China to stamp out this heresy. There he met an old woman who asked him a profound question on the Diamond Sutra, in effect inviting him to touch and convey his own Buddha Nature right there in her tea house. Te-shan was unable to answer, but asked her where he could find a Zen teacher in he local area. She directed him to Lung'tan, and our story takes up there. The encounter between Te-shan and the old woman in the tea house is told, delightfully and in full, in Wu-men's commentary to Case 28 of the Gateless Barrier, op. cit., p. 179.

9. Op. cit., p.177.

10. Op. cit., p.179

11. I'm indebted to Susan Murphy for this lovely re-telling of the traditional Hassidic tale in her article on Hekigan Roku Case 3, published in Bright Water, 1998, Vol. l.

12. Blue Cliff Record translated by Thomas and J.C. Cleary, Shambala, Boston and London, 1992 vol.2, p.460.

13. Yamada Koun Roshi, Preliminary Notes on Hensho Goi and Kokun Goi, Diamond Sangha, unpublished manuscript.
 

Paris -- Perth 1998

More By This Teacher

Buy the Book

Back to Index

 

© Copyright Efini Design 98, 99, 2000 and 2001. All Rights Reserved.