​Case 9 Daitsû Chishõ Buddha                  
 

A monk asked Kõyõ Seijõ, "Daitsû Chishõ Buddha sat in zazen for ten kalpas and could not attain Buddhahood. He did not become a Buddha. How could this be?"

Seijõ said, "Your question is quite self-explanatory."
The monk asked, "He meditated so long; why could he not attain Buddhahood?"
Seijõ said, "Because he did not become a Buddha."
 
Mumon's Comment

I allow the barbarian's realization, but I do not allow his understanding.
When an ignorant man realizes it, he is a sage.
When a sage understands it, he is ignorant.
 
Mumon's Verse 頌曰
    Better emancipate your mind than your body;
    When the mind is emancipated, the body is free,
    When both body and mind are emancipated,
    Even gods and spirits ignore worldly power.


          This koan is only subtly different from case 8.  Again it is about samadhi though it has a different flavor from other koans. I have written in previous commentaries we must go back again and again to samadhi.  As the experience of samadhi permeates our being it does it's work.  All sense of self importance slowly dissolves.  We may dream about becoming enlightened.  We might think that to be a Buddha is the most exalted thing.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to always be happy, to have had amazing transcendent experiences and maybe even accumulate some of those special powers which Buddha's are reputed to have?  In the end we are all human beings just trying to do our best in a world we can never fully understand.  Dogen put it this way:

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. 

What is missing?  Completion is missing, practice is a never ending road.
          
          My local Buddhist scholar and translator told me that in the years after the Buddha's death, many philosophic schools arose trying to determine what in our experience as humans is real and what is illusion resulting from thought and what is permanent and what is impermanent.  Shakaymuni's teaching on impermanence and non-atman was not unquestioningly accepted, even by those who were following in his path.  Eventually the Mahayana school arose and the Prajanaparamita Sutras were written repackaging the Buddha's teachings in new language.  This is the language of Emptiness (Sunyata in Sanskrit).  The Heart Sutra very explicitly takes what previous philosophers had catagorized as real or perminent and applied this word "emptiness" to them.  Emptiness in the Buddhist context is a difficult word to grasp, it can have multiple meanings.  Things are empty because they are imperminent.  They are also empty because they are artificially discriminated from the larger One. All catagories are also empty because they are atrificial products of our thought.  All of this intellectual understanding of emptiness is fine but as Zen practitioners emptiness is to be experienced.   We are now back to samadhi.
          The catch in this koan is the idea of being a Buddha.  We think of this as something very special.  It is the result of years of meditation.  Chiso has put in those many years of meditation and more. We even call Chiso a Buddha but in this koan he is not a Buddha and why?  Is being a Buddha just another attachment to an empty concept?  We sit in meditation so that we can clear our mind of all delusive thinking.  Do Buddha's exist when we are in samadhi?  Do we exist?  We must clarify these questions through the experience of emptiness/samadhi.
         Sometimes I run into an individual or a whole Sangha who believe that the greatest insight we can have in Zen is that there is nothing to acheive.  This idea seems to go with the "practice enlightenment" idea of the Soto school, though I think this is a grevious missinterpretation.  We should understand that there is actually much acheived throught practice but if we are filled with the desire to acheive something through practice then this is just another barrier, and if there is no thought of acheivement then this can also be a barrier.  This is the edge one must walk in practice.  We should not stop desiring to go deeper in our practice yet in deep samadhi there is no thought of acheivement. In Samadhi there is no thought of being a Buddha or not being a Buddha.  It is through samadhi that we can understand that being a Buddha is just another idea and also simultaniously that from the beginning we have never been seperated from the Buddha, and thus are already Buddhas
           

Case 8 Keichû the Wheelmaker               
 
Gettan Oshõ said, "Keichû, the first wheelmaker, made a cart whose wheels had a hundred spokes.
Now, suppose you took a cart and removed both the wheels and the axle. What would you have?"
 
Mumon's Comment
If anyone can directly master this topic, his eye will be like a shooting star, his spirit like a flash of lightning.
 
Mumon's Verse 
     When the spiritual wheels turn,
     Even the master fails to follow them.
     They travel in all directions, above and below,
     North, south, east, and west.
  

          After my last blog where I tried expressed some transcendent insight to comfort us, now we are back to nuts and bolts Zen.  At one sesshin I was having all sorts of great experiences and insights. My mind was on fire.  I kept going into sanzen and telling the Roshi all this great stuff that was happening to me.  Finally he shut me down.  He did not want to hear all my wonderful thoughts.  He was interested in something else.
           The Mumonkan unlike the many other koan collections is usually "studied" in order.  The 48 cases that Mumon assembled are a course of study for the training of clear eyed monks.  Here we are at case 8, not exactly beginners but still it is easy to catch our minds.  Maybe we have had some great insights and experiences but can we let them go.  Again and again we need to go to the root.  We need to go to that place described in the Heart Sutra, "no eyes, no ears, no body, no mind," no spokes, no wheel, no axel.
           After Harada shut me down I had a very simple insight that is not transcendent in any way, yet it was a very important insight.  The insight was that Harada was not interested in my insight but rather the depth of my meditation.  When I was to meet Harada in sanzen I was to meet him in whatever samadhi I could muster.  Insight is just a natural result of zen samadhi, but if one gets caught up in insight then that insight becomes a barrier to further deepening samadhi. 
          Most Koans are alike in their essence.  They start by telling you something that catches the mind in thought.  The story or question might seem absurd or just interesting,  We might think we can think through the koan but then we find that never satisfies the teacher.  So we go back to sitting but then when our meditation reaches sufficient depth we discover that in some way the koan is really about meditation and that the koan is not about thinking at all but rather about not thinking.  So why do we do koans, why don't we just sit like the Soto School and teach not-thinking?  Koans in conjunction with regularly meeting a teacher push us in a way that is not found through regular practice.  Once we understand that koans can not be thought out then we will realize that we must push our meditation to return to that place where zen insight is natural, samadhi.  As we work through the koans our teacher gives us we must do this again and again. Years ago after I passed a few koans with Sezaki Roshi he told me that I must build a "structure".  I now realize that this practice of doing one koan after another is how this structure is usually built.
          Koans do have meaning, and that meaning will reveal itself when our meditation is sufficiently deep.  In this case the cart without wheels or axles is a metaphor for samadhi, nothing else.





















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           Tuesday evening when I realized that Donald Trump was going to be the next President of the United States I got this deep sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I got little sleep that night.  I had been watching this election very closely for several months and have come to believe that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man and now he will be the president of the most powerful country on earth.  Though I hope not I suspect that he is incapable of dealing rationally with events and that things things might well spin out of control.  A friend described his election as an explosion with a slow shock wave which we have not felt yet but we need to get ready for..  He also said that it will be an incredible opportunity for practice.
           My thoughts go back to the past when Zen practice took place under the circumstance of war and political upheaval.  I think of ancient China and Japan just 70 years ago and Vietnam 40 years ago.  I think of those teachers like Shunru Suzuki and Thich Nhat Hanh who brought Zen to the West from war torn countries.  I think of the Buddha who saw his own home land destroyed by war.  I think of Tibet.
           Remember that the Buddha's first truth is that life is suffering.  Here in America we live in such easy times that it is difficult to buy into this truth  There has been little need to practice with any urgency.  Many of us practice as dilettantes.  Zen is just one of the multitude of activities we engage in.  There is nothing wrong with this.  It makes sense in our current world but to really progress on this path takes a deep commitment and full time effort even if much of this effort is off the cushion.  There is a saying that is often written on the han ( wooden board hit to signal time in a Zen Monastery).  It goes something like this.  The question of life and death is of great importance.  Life is short.  Don't waste any time.  Some people think that just sitting is enough of a bull work against the travails of life.  But as much as sitting is important resolving the question of life and death is of equal importance in that bull work.  I know that recently in these blogs I have been emphasizing sitting because the wisdom of Zen (prajna) is not to be found by figuring anything out but rather appears through the grace of the clear quiet mind.  And that takes a lot of sitting.  Sometimes a little bit of that wisdom is helpful.  We cannot just keep our head down, try to forget about the world and just practice.  We need to stand up and look directly at the word and still not get emotionally caught up in events because our deep wisdom tells us that everything is ok.
          So here is a little attempt at conveying some of that deeper wisdom.  That deeper wisdom is the wisdom of non-duality.  What I mean by non-duality is that we humans are just a small part of a greater whole and a greater intelligence that includes all of life and all of what appears to be non-living on this planet as well as everything else in the Universe.  We give such importance to ourselves as individuals and yet there really are no individuals.  We give such importance to our time hear on Earth and yet we live during just a pinprick of time.  But what we can know is our Oneness with the Universe.  And we can have a deep abiding faith in that greater intelligence of which we are a part.
​          In a deeper sense we are not just a part of the Whole we are the Whole.  Our actions are the actions of the Whole, our thoughts are the thoughts of the Whole and our consciousness is the consciousness of the Whole.  The outcome of the many thousands of hours we Zen practitioners sit in meditation is to come to identify our True Self as this One Whole Unbounded Universe.  When we come to understand this then we come to realize that our concerns as individual humans have very little importance.  This allows us to observe and function with our  heart and yet remain unattached.