BOOKS: Me and you
and a dog named Mu!
Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism: Reflections for Every Day
By William Wray
Published by Arcturus, 2006
If a tree falls in the woods to make a book on Zen koans and no one reads the book, does it make a sound? My review for The Nation, published this month.
A book that should have been a desk calendar, “Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism” leaves me coldly unenlightened. Frankly, I think Zen may be a scam. Not Buddhism, just Zen. And especially Zen koans.
I’ve been reading about koans for nearly 40 years and come at them from various angles, from the deepest depths of earnestness and the greatest expanses of open-mindedness. Alan Watts and DT Suzuki are like old friends. Meditation, I found, certainly works. The moments of clarity it produces are miraculous. But Zen koans still seem like someone’s idea of a joke.
Perhaps they are. The first time I visited Wat Pho I was passing a boy of about 12 when suddenly there was a great splash of water on the ground next to him. We both looked around and saw a very ancient monk who’d just hurled a water balloon at the lad. All three of us laughed. I’m still giggling.
There is much to be said for the shock of a well-turned phrase that comes out of the blue and makes you gulp air for a moment, flabbergasted – or laugh out loud. Or the insanity of a new invention that makes people say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Surprise is a revelation in itself, regardless of the objective behind it.
It’s understood that koans are not riddles. You can’t turn them over and over like a Rubik’s Cube, wrestling with the component bits, and expect life’s truth to eventually snap into place. “They are expressions of awakening,” offers one definition that I’ve seen, just as mystifying as the koans themselves.
They are exercises for the mind, says another, “patterns, like blueprints” that enable you “to hold entire universes of thought in mind all at once”, and in no way do they have to interrupt your everyday consciousness.
They are, to be somewhat more understandable, tripwires on the path of consciousness. Long before you get back up again and dust yourself off, you’re supposed to have seen a bright light. But do they work? Plenty of Zen practitioners say they do, and here’s a book with one fresh koan for every day of the year, so you can have a try and see if 2008 will be your Nirvana Year.
William Wray – the philosophy lecturer, not the Mad magazine cartoonist – has sampled all the sounds of one hand clapping and trees falling in forests and selected 365 anecdotes, tales and verses, each of which promises insight by doing a strange dance with logic. The pages have floral prints on them; I’m not sure why, other than possibly making the book a prettier Christmas gift.
There are many selections I hadn’t come across before, and several classics, too. A troubled monk asks Joshu, the Chinese Zen master from Joshu (!), whether a passing dog has Buddha-nature. Joshu shouts, “Mu!” I still don’t get it (even substituting the Thai ma for “mu”) and, at risk of sounding like an unsalvageable savage, I still can’t get my head around the Sixth Patriarch’s famous question, “What is your original face before you were born?”
“How can we escape the cold and heat?” a monk asks Tozan in a tale very topical today. “When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through.”
Ahhh.
Apart from these eminently revisitable sayings, there is lots of mundane stuff, like this Buddhist basic: “For people, life is a succession of graspings and attachments and then, because of it, they assume the illusion of pain and suffering.”
What I do like about the book is the haiku, whose pages seem like little oases in the dry sands of pointless prose. “The sea darkens; the voices of the wild ducks are faintly white.” “A brushwood gate, and for a lock – this snail.” And my all-time favourite: “Eaten by a cat! Perhaps the cricket’s widow is bewailing that.”
Surely this is at least better than another book being touted on the Zen airwaves, “Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality”, in which Brad Warner expresses his feelings about reincarnation – he wants to come back “as a pair of Lucy Liu’s panties”.
Technically, for his part, Wray doesn’t get off to a terrific start in his introduction, in the distinction he makes between the Soto and Rinzai schools of Zen. The former, he says, “concentrates on sitting meditation (za-zen) whereas Rinzai makes use of za-zen in conjunction with meditation problems (koans)”. This is a common misunderstanding: Soto very much embraces koans as well; it just doesn’t think they’re crucial.
But let’s not get into the divisiveness that split Zen apart in the first place. Its twin schools show no sign of descending into a Shi’ite-Sunni rivalry, but you have to wonder how followers of the spirit end up on opposite sides of a fence that the Buddha never even noticed. It’s just as mystifying to see Buddhist monks on a hunger strike in front of the Thai Parliament, trying to have their religion consecrated as the national faith. Thank God there is politics to explain some things.
Sounds as if this is a book not to read but to leave lying around, so that people think you are deeply spiritual. Which puts it less in the Zen category and more toward the New Age end of things. But hark! What is that I hear? Can it be the sound of one hand slamming a book shut?
Modern haiku:
The book has no weight.
And yet — a doorstop!
Please hold your applause until all the trees have fallen.
A comment by “Zennie” has been stopped by Spaminator, but there’s nothing wrong with it and I’m trying to get it posted. The spambot keeps bouncing me. Stand by.
You write: “I still don’t get it … and … I still can’t get my head around the Sixth Patriarch’s famous question, ‘What is your original face before you were born?’.”
Well, if “you” don’t get it, then “obviously” Zen is a joke. Sheesh!
As a Zen practitioner (and a student of koans, gasp), I’m actually not all that taken by this book. Koans, haiku and the other bite-sized chunks aren’t supposed to be taken for light contemplation once a day with your cornflakes.
There’s really only one “angle” to “come at” koans from: that’s from within a steady meditation practice supported by a teacher who preferably has been through the lineage (”quality control”) system him- or herself. You also write that “in no way do they have to interrupt your everyday consciousness”.
Terribly sorry, but that’s utter twaddle. Working with a koan should be, they say, like swallowing a red-hot iron ball, and the Way should be studied as intensely as if their hair were on fire. When working on mu, I was strongly advised to take some leave and attend a sesshin (retreat) because the level of intensity required at times rather precludes going to work etc.
My countryman Alan Watts was a great popularizer of Buddhism, but no Buddhist and certainly no Zen teacher. D.T. Suzuki, too, did much to raise the profile of the Zen sects, but modern Zen Buddhists often sigh frustratedly with his descriptions of attainable mystic-sounding enlightenment experiences (the same may be said for Kapleau, too). It’s “Shunryu” Suzuki, not D.T., who took that ole marrow of Zen with him to the US. He left behind a sangha and a practice - as did a few others, like Taizan Maezumi, whose successors probably represent the most successful koan-practicing lineage in the West currently.
One “can” pass “mu” - many hundreds in the West have already done so. You haven’t… hmmm. So, how’s them grapes?
One slight correction: the Soto school, while not rejecting koans as such, certainly wouldn’t approve of them being used during zazen. They are often used during teisho (talks on the dharma), but saying that the Soto sect “concentrates on sitting meditation” - and specifically the method of shikantaza - is essentially correct. (There are some teachers & lineages who have blended the Soto & Rinzai approaches: in Japan, the Sanbo Kyodan school and in the West the White Plum lineage of Maezumi… but ‘regular’ Soto Zen meditation certainly doesn’t involve koan study.)
I’m grateful to Bangkok writer S Tsow for emailing to explain a couple of things:
“Mu” doesn’t have anything to do with dogs. It probably means “no” in Japanese. I’m more familiar with the Chinese version of the story, where the word is “wu”, also meaning “no”. Joshu is apparently the Japanese rendering of the Chinese name Chao Chou. This monk’s name was Ho Tsung-shen, and he was the abbot of a monastery at Chaochou district in Hebei province. Lots of Chan (Zen) masters were called by the name of the place they lived in.
Interestingly enough, in this story Chao Chou says a dog doesn’t have the Buddha nature. On another occasion he was asked the same question, and he said a dog does have the Buddha nature. I suppose the difference depends on whether you’re thinking of the Buddha nature as being actual or potential. That is, a dog has not actualized its Buddha nature, but it does have it potentially.
As for the business about your original face before you were born, obviously it was the face of your fetus, and before you were a fetus you didn’t have any face at all. I guess the Chan masters didn’t study biology.