The Zen Experience Part 21

By the time of Huang-po the issue of "gradual" versus "sudden"

enlightenment was decisively resolved in favor of the latter. He therefore turned instead to two major remaining questions: 1) how enlightenment fits into the mental world, and 2) how this intuitive insight can be transmitted. Before he was through he had advanced these issues significantly and had laid the philosophical basis for the next phase of Ch'an in China--to be dominated by the school of his pupil Lin- chi.

Huang-po struggled with a fundamental dilemma of Ch'an: how the wordless wisdom of intuition can be pa.s.sed from generation to generation. Enlightenment necessarily has to be intuitive, and that means traditional teaching methods are useless. There are no conceptual formulations or "concepts." It is by definition wordless. It has to be realized intuitively by the novice, by himself. The masters had isolated a type of knowledge that words could not transmit. It was this transmission of wordless insight, of Mind, that obsessed Huang-po.

His teachings are well summarized by his biographer Pei Hsiu, who declared: "Holding in esteem only the intuitive method of the Highest Vehicle, which cannot be communicated in words, he taught nothing but the doctrine of the One Mind; holding that there is nothing else to teach, in that both mind and substance are void. . . . To those who have realized the nature of Reality, there is nothing old or new, and conceptions of shallowness and depth are meaningless. Those who speak of it do not attempt to explain it, establish no sects, and open no doors or windows. That which is before you is it. Begin to reason about it and you will at once fall into error."5

He seems to have been preoccupied with the issue of transmission even during the early days of studying under Huai-hai. His very first question to the older master reportedly was "How did the early Ch'an masters guide their followers?" Huai-hai answered this very un-Ch'an question with silence, an implied rebuke. When Huang-po pressed the point, Huai-hai called him a disappointing disciple and said he had best beware or he (Huang-po) would be the man who lost Ch'an.6

In a later episode, however, Huai-hai designates Huang-po as a successor in Dharma, via a famous transmission exchange in which Huang- po finally demonstrates wordless communication.

_One day Huai-hai asked Huang-po, "Where have you been?"

The answer was that he had been at the foot of the Ta-hsiung

Mountain picking mushrooms. Huai-hai continued, "Have you seen any tigers?" Huang-po immediately roared like a tiger. Huai-hai picked up an ax as if to chop the tiger. Huang-po suddenly slapped Huai-hai's face. Huai-hai laughed heartily, and then returned to his temple and said to the a.s.sembly, "At the foot of the Ta-hsiung Mountain there is a tiger. You people should watch out. I have already been bitten today_."7

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_This enigmatic utterance by Huai-hai has been taken by many to signify that Huang-po was being acknowledged as a worthy being, perhaps even a successor. The scholar Chang Chung-yuan has observed that the genius of this response was its freedom from the trap of logical a.s.sertion or negation.8 The act signified freedom from the alternatives of words or silence. Could it be that with this incident we have finally captured a wordless transmission?

Huang-po also had a number of exchanges in later years with Nan-ch'uan (738-824), another of his seniors who had studied at the feet of old Ma-tsu. As the story is reported in _The Transmission of the Lamp_:

_Some time later Huang-po was with Nan-ch'uan. All the monks in Nan- ch'uan's monastery were going out to harvest cabbage. Nan-ch'uan asked Huang-po, "Where are you going?" Huang-po answered, "I am going to pick cabbage." Nan-ch'uan went on, "What do you use to pick cabbage?" Huang- po lifted his sickle. Nan-ch'uan remarked, "You take the objective position as a guest, but you do not know how to preside as a host in the subjective position." Huang-po thereupon knocked on the ground three times with his sickle.9

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When Blofeld translates this puzzling episode from _On the Transmission of Mind_, he comments that he has been unable to find a modern Zen master who could explain its meaning.10 However, Nan-ch'uan's final remark questions the degree of Huang-po's enlightenment, and some a.s.sume the latter knocked on the ground to signify defeat.11

As did other masters, Huang-po also employed silence as a teaching device, using it to teach wordless insight by example. One particularly pointed story involves none other than his biographer, the official Pei Hsiu. In Pei Hsiu's introduction to his transcript of Huang-po's teachings he says that they first met in 843 when he invited the master to lecture at Lung-hsing Temple in Chung-ling, the district which he governed. Six years later, in 849, the governor was in charge of Wan- ling, and he again invited the master to come and teach, this time at the local K'ai-yan temple.12

When Huang-po arrived in Wan-ling, for what was to be the second teaching session with Pei Hsiu, the story says that the governor made the mistake of presenting the master with a written exposition of the teachings of Ch'an. Huang-po greeted this with silence, his "exposition" of Ch'an.

_The Prime Minister invited the Master to the city and presented his own written interpretation of Ch'an to him. The Master took it and put it on the table. He did not read it. After a short silence, he asked the Prime Minister, "Do you understand?" The minister answered, "I do not understand." The Master said, "It would be better if you could understand immediately through inner experience. If it is expressed in words, it won't be our teaching._"13_

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_The Transmission of the Lamp_ reports that after this episode at Wan- ling, the spirit of Huang-po's school became widespread south of the Yangtze River.14

This exchange brings out the essence of Huang-po's concerns. His most insistent conviction was that Ch'an cannot be taught, that it must be somehow gained intuitively. He was contemptuous of conceptual thought, believing it to be the greatest hindrance to achieving intuitive insight. The problem is the mistaken belief that Zen can somehow be taught and understood if only one grasps the concepts. But concepts only serve to obstruct intuition; Zen intuition can work only outside concepts. As Huang-po phrased it:

_Since Zen was first transmitted, it has never taught that men should seek for learning or form concepts. "Studying the Way" is just a figure of speech. It is a method of arousing people's interest in the early stages of their development. In fact, the Way is not something which can be studied. Study leads to the retention of concepts and so the Way is entirely misunderstood.15

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The use of the rational mind in the study of Ch'an is only meaningful at the beginning. But once the fish of intuitive insight has been snared in the net of the rational mind's ken, the net must be discarded. Elsewhere he likens the extended use of a.n.a.lytical thought to the shoveling of dung.16 Concepts, it turns out, are only one of the mind's many constructs. The mind also provides our perception of concrete objects, thereby "creating" them to suit its needs.

_Hills are hills. Water is water. Monks are monks. Laymen are laymen.

But these mountains, these rivers, the whole world itself, together with the sun, moon, and stars--not one of them exists outside your minds! . . . Phenomena do not arise independently, but rely upon (the mental) environment (we create).17

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Since reality is created by the mind, we will never know what is "real"

and what is illusion. Examples of this are commonplace. The electron is both a wave and a particle, depending upon our point of view. Which is "reality"? Furthermore, concepts limit. By treating the world using rational constructs, we force it into a limited cage. But when we deal with it directly, it is much more complex and authentic. To continue the example, the electron may be something much more complex than either a wave or a particle, since it behaves at times like either or both. It may in fact be something for which our rationality-bound mind has no "concept."

The illusory world we think we see around us, deceptively brought to us by our untrustworthy senses, leads us to conceptual thought and to logical categories as a means to attempt its "understanding." The resulting intellectual turmoil is just the opposite of the tranquility that is Ch'an. But avoidance of conceptual thought leads to a serene, direct, and meaningful understanding of the world around us, without unsettling mental involvement.

_Ordinary people all indulge in conceptual thought based on environmental phenomena, hence they feel desire and hatred. To eliminate environmental phenomena, just put an end to your conceptual thinking. When this ceases, environmental phenomena are void; and when these are void, thought ceases. But if you try to eliminate environment without first putting a stop to conceptual thought, you will not succeed, but merely increase its power to disturb you.18

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What is worse, reliance on misleading perception blocks out our experience of our own pure mind.

_People in the world cannot identify their own mind. They believe that what they see, or hear, or feel, or know, is mind. They are blocked by the visual, the auditory, the tactile, and the mental, so they cannot see the brilliant spirit of their original mind.19

_When he was asked why Zen students should not form concepts as other people do, he replied, "Concepts are related to the senses, and when feeling takes place, wisdom is shut out."20 Huang-po is so adamant against the deceiving world of the senses he even comes down hard on the pleasures of the gourmet.

_Thus, there is sensual eating and wise eating. When the body suffers the pangs of hunger and accordingly you provide it with food, but without greed, that is called wise eating. On the other hand, if you gluttonously delight in purity and flavour, you are permitting the distinctions which arise from wrong thinking. Merely seeking to gratify the organ of taste without realizing when you have taken enough is called sensual eating.21

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The point here seems to be that the use of the senses for pleasure is an abuse and distracts one from the illusion of the world, which itself obscures our mind from us. The ideal man he describes in terms of one who can remain pa.s.sive even when confronted by a manifestation of good or of evil. He commends the person who has the character to remain aloof, even when in the Buddhist heaven or the Buddhist h.e.l.l:

_If he should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being.22

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Truth is elusive. It is impossible to find it by looking for it. And the world of the senses and the conceptual thought it engenders are actually impediments to discovering real truth. He provides an a.n.a.logy in the story of a man who searches abroad for something that he had all along.