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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.
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:
....When we have
faith we follow the practice we have chosen, simply and with love; and
how we feel about it, and whether our understanding has deepened yet --
these considerations are none of our business.7
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.
Te-shan made his bows and lifted the blinds
to withdraw but was met by darkness. Turning back he
said, "It is dark outside."
Lung-tan lit a taper and handed it to
Te-shan. Te-shan was about to take it when Lung-tan blew it out.
At this, Te-shan had sudden realisation
and made bows. Lung-tan said, "What truth did you discern?"
Te-shan said, "From now on I will not
doubt the words of an old priest who is renowned everywhere
under the sun."9
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:
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.
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