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Mumonkan case 35

12/28/2017

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Case 35 Seijõ's Soul Separated                

Goso said to his monks, "Seijõ's soul separated from her being. Which was the real Seijõ?"
 
Mumon's Comment

When you realize what the real is, you will see that we pass from one husk to another like travelers stopping for a night's lodging.
But if you do not realize it yet, I earnestly advise you not to rush about wildly.
When earth, water, fire, and air suddenly separate, you will be like a crab struggling in boiling water with its seven or eight arms and legs.
When that happens, don't say I didn't warn you!
 
Mumon's Verse 
     The moon above the clouds is ever the same;
     Valleys and mountains are separate from each other.
     All are blessed, all are blessed;
     Are they one or are they two?



          This case uses an ancient Chinese folk tale about Seijo.   The story is, she falls in love with a young man who their parents don't approve.  They run off together and get married.  In time she decides to make amends to her parents and they go back. Unknown to this Seijo when she left her parents some how she divided in two and another version of her stayed with her parents and never married.  When the married version of Seijo approaches her parents door simultaneously the other version of Seijo comes to the door and the two versions merge and become one again.
          I think in Chinese culture  this is a tale of the importance of filial devotion, how a person can never be truly happy if they go against the will of their parents.  But this is not the importance of the tale to a Zen practitioner.  For the Zen practitioner this koan allows us to clarify such issues as the soul, duality and non-duality, zen action, and even reincarnation.  
          I immediately think of the line out  of Hakuin Zenji's Song of Zazen, "Not two not three, straight ahead runs the Way."  The Way is the way of Zen practice.  Hakuin tells us not to be divided in our practice.  Practice with single mindedness.  When you sit zazen just sit zazen, when you clean the toilet just clean the toilet.  Do not let the mind wander imagining we are someplace else or doing something else.  This approach in fact is the essence of meditation mindfulness and concentration, even if one is not sitting.  Maybe this tale is telling us we should bring our emotions and intellect into harmony before we act.  We can call this Zen activity but to function this way is not easy and may only be the outcome of many years of Zen practice, but even so this is what we try to practice.  We can see the story from this perspective but this is only one perspective.
          There is also the perspective of the larger "not two", the perspective of cosmic non-duality.  Our practice, all our sitting, the practice of a active meditation we can think of it all from the perspective of the small self, finding happiness or enlightenment.  Or we can try to drop the small self and think of our practice as an end in itself and just accept without judgement what it gives and how it changes one.  But even if we take this second approach which we might call the practice enlightenment approach our practice is still the preparation for a deep change in our psyche and a whole new perspective.  I can tell you this is the perspective of no-self or non-duality but my passing some intellectualization of the experience will do little  to actually allow to you enter the perspective.  Even so I try.
          Maybe you are a diligent practitioner and have even had some deep experiences this does not mean you have fully clarified the perspective of non-duality.  Nor does it mean that you have the full flexibility of mind to penetrate this koan  What is Mumon talking about when he says?

When you realize what the real is, you will see that we pass from one husk to another like travelers stopping for a night's lodging.

Maybe he is talking about reincarnation but is this reincarnation as we normally think of it?  I don't think so.  We need flexibility of mind to understand this statement.  We also need to step out of the individual idea of the self.  This cannot be done with our normal way of thinking.  We need poetic liberation.  We need to stop seeing words as fixed concepts but rather as metaphor for a deeper reality.  And this deeper reality must be experienced again and again.  One of the classic yogic skills is psychic transference,  Zen teachers often say "Become One with ...." a tree or a bird or the sound of the running river or even another person.   What does this mean?  Or are we talking about moment to moment rebirth.  Again do you understand this?  Don't be caught in our normal way of seeing things.  Break free.
         Lastly  Mumon adds a warning.:  

When earth, water, fire, and air suddenly separate, you will be like a crab struggling in boiling water with its seven or eight arms and legs.
When that happens, don't say I didn't warn you!


Do not try to think out this koan with our normal dualistic thought, it will not work.  We must become intimate with this deeper reality and then it will all make sense.


 
























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December 14th, 2017

12/14/2017

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Case 34 Nansen's "Reason Is Not the Way"                  

Nansen said, "Mind is not the Buddha, reason is not the Way."
 
Mumon's Comment

Nansen, growing old, had no shame.
Just opening his stinking mouth, he let slip the family secrets.
Yet there are very few who are grateful for his kindness.
 
Mumon's Verse 
 The sky clears, the sun shines bright,
 The rain comes, the earth gets wet. 
 He opens his heart and expounds the whole secret,
 But I fear he is little appreciated.


           This case is not very different from the previous case and there is nothing more I want to say so I will write about something else, growing old.  I am 63 and I no longer am working a regular job.  I devote my time to my Zen practice and a bit more time to teaching Zen.  I write this blog.  I play guitar.  Walk the dog. and hang out with my wife.  I cook a bit.  Socialize a bit.  And I contemplate life. Growing old is about giving up things.  Friends and parents die.  The body grows weak and frail.  I am not quite there but many of my friends and family are. Activities are given up.  Ambitions are given up.  But growing old is also an opportunity for wisdom.  This giving up things is something like Zen practice.  And then of course there is just more experience.  Maybe we can see life as it is and not some fantasy of what we would like it to be.
          I find myself contemplating life quite a bit.  It is such a great unknown.   At one time I studied physics and from that perspective we are hardly real just a vast collection of subatomic particles which themselves are just little more then energetic blips in space-time.  And then there is the vast space between the particles. And it is all interacting according the mysteries of quantum cause and effect.  Understanding this, when I look out through my eyes at the world, everything has a sort of phantom existence.
          And then when I look at human society I see delusion and folly.  I have been alive long enough to know that the hopes of youth for some sort of better world, that progress follows a straight line is just not going to happen the way we might want.  There is tragedy all along the way and it may all collapse.
            I find myself talking to friends about death and I contemplate my own death, and think about just disappearing. 
          As a Buddhist and through my experience in meditation I hold to no idea that I have a soul or personal essence that will continue to live after my death.  For me meditation has confirmed this understanding,  and that first experience of confirmation deeply changed me,  yet the ego, the idea of an individual self, does not give up so easily.  It is simply growing older that does the work.  In its own way it  puts me more and more in touch with my own emptiness. 
           Emptiness,  that Buddhist concept we so love to contemplate.  The other day a friend told me that the Sanskrit word sunyata from which emptiness is translated has its root in the ancient Sanskrit word for the number zero sunya.  Interestingly, many a zen teacher also uses the word zero in their teaching repertoire, most notably my own teacher Sasaki Roshi.  In Zen we are asked to experience emptiness in our meditation.  It is not to be understood in words though there are some classic definitions.  To experience emptiness in meditation is to experience what we call the Great Death which is just another term for letting go of all thought and emotion and even the awareness of an individual self.  Meditation that is this deep really is like a temporary death though the physical body is not dead.  It is not something we should be scared of though for many students it is scary.  Even if we experience emptiness/ death in meditation again and again there is always some attachments that remain, there is always a bit of ego we can still get stuck on.  I think the final teacher is old age, approaching death, not death itself because by then it is too late. 
          One might think that a deep realization of our personal emptiness is depressing but it is exactly the opposite because with the realization of emptiness comes the realization of Oneness.  I will leave further discussion of this for later.  Enjoy the Holidays. 




























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December 07th, 2017

12/7/2017

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Case 33 Baso's "No Mind, No Buddha"                         
 

A monk asked Baso, "What is the Buddha?"
Baso answered, "No mind, no Buddha."
 
Mumon's Comment
If you understand this, you have finished studying Zen.
 
Mumon's Verse
        Present a sword if you meet a swordsman;
        Don't offer a poem unless you meet a poet.
        When talking, tell one-third of it;
        Don't divulge the whole at once.

          Yesterday at a the quarterly weekend sesshin here at the Moonwater Dojo  a participant heading into the Zendo says to me, "Back to polishing the mind."  This idea of polishing the mind has gotten a bad reputation since Hui Neng wrote his poem.

There is not a Bodhi Tree
Nor is there a mirror bright
Originally there is not a single thing
Where can dust alight

Which seems to put down an other poem about polishing the mind. Students of Zen read this and then think Zen isn't about polishing any mirror and yet the idea of zazen as polishing the mind still persists.  This idea of polishing the mind is not incorrect as a metaphor for zazen, only that it comes from the non-enlightened perspective.  We certainly experience the clearing of the debree of our thought as we diligently practice zazen.  If we clean the mirror of the mind so that all thought stops for a time then the mirror becomes so clear that it disappears.  No Mind No Buddha!  This is the Absolute truth.
          We all want to fix the truth in concepts, something we can grab hold of and carry with us.  But the truth of Zen is not like that.  It is with out concept.  It is actually to experience the world without any intermediary concepts.  We try to explain this in words but only confuse.We use words like Buddha and Mind and discover that our students have developed concepts around these words which they mistakenly think is some deep Buddhist truth.  Stop words, let it all go. 

 


























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    Hi I am Ed Shozen Haber an authorized teacher of Zen in the lineage of Shodo Harada Roshi of the One Drop Sangha.  By the way I look a bit older now.

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