The Zen Experience Part 22

_Suppose a warrior, forgetting that he was already wearing his pearl on his forehead, were to seek for it elsewhere, he could

travel the whole world without finding it. But if someone who knew what was wrong were to point it out to him, the warrior would immediately realize that the pearl had been there all the time.23

_He concludes that the warrior's finding his pearl had nothing to do with his searching for it, just as the final realization of intuitive wisdom has nothing to do with the graduated practice of the traditional Buddhists.

_So, if you students of the Way are mistaken about your own real Mind .

. . you will indulge in various achievements and practices and expect to attain realization by such graduated practices. But, even after aeons of diligent searching, you will not be able to attain to the Way.

These methods cannot be compared to the sudden elimination of conceptual thought, the certain knowledge that there is nothing at all which has absolute existence, nothing on which to lay hold, nothing on which to rely, nothing in which to abide, nothing subjective or objective. It is by preventing the rise of conceptual thought that you will realize Bodhi (enlightenment); and, when you do, you will just be realizing the Buddha who has always existed in your own Mind!24

_

The traditional practices neither help nor hinder finding the way, since they are unrelated to the final flash of sudden enlightenment-- which is in your mind from the beginning, ready to be released.

What then did he teach, if there is nothing to be taught? The answer seems to be to stop seeking, for only then does wisdom come.

Furthermore, to study a doctrine of nonattachment puts you in the compromising position of becoming attached to nonattachment itself.

_If you students of the Way wish to become Buddhas, you need study no doctrines whatever, but learn only how to avoid seeking for and attaching yourselves to anything. . . . Relinquishment of everything is the Dharma, and he who understands this is a Buddha, but the relinquishment of ALL delusions leaves no Dharma on which to lay hold.25

_

But just how does Huang-po manage to practice what he preaches?

_. . . [M]ost students of Zen cling to all sorts of sounds and forms.

Why do they not copy me by letting each thought go as though it were nothing, or as though it were a piece of rotten wood, a stone, or the cold ashes of a dead fire? Or else, by just making whatever slight response is suited to each occasion?26

_

His final admonitions were organized by Pei Hsiu and summarized in the following list, reported as Huang-po's answer to the question of what guidance he had to offer those who found his teaching difficult.

_

I have NOTHING to offer. . . . All you need to remember are the following:

First, learn how to be entirely unreceptive to sensations arising from external forms, thereby purging your bodies of receptivity to externals.

Second, learn not to pay attention to any distinctions between this and that arising from your sensations, thereby purging your bodies of useless discernments between one phenomenon and another.

Third, take great care to avoid discriminating in terms of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, thereby purging your bodies of vain discriminations.

Fourth, avoid pondering things in your mind, thereby purging your bodies of discriminatory cognition.27

_

Huang-po struggled mightily with the problem of transmission. Since the doctrine was pa.s.sed "mind-to-mind," he was obliged to find a transmission that somehow circ.u.mvented the need for words, something to bring a novice up against his own original nature. His contribution here was not revolutionary: He mainly advocated the techniques perfected by Ma-tsu, including roars and shouts, beatings, calling out a disciple's name unexpectedly, or just remaining silent at a critical moment to underscore the inability of words to a.s.sist. He also used the technique of continually contradicting a pupil, until the pupil finally realized that all his talking had been just so many obscuring concepts.

But just what was this mind that was being transmitted? His answer was that nothing was transmitted, since the whole point was just to jar loose the intuition of the person being "taught."

_Once Huang-po was asked, "If you say that mind can be transmitted, then how can you say it is nothing?" He answered, "To achieve nothing is to have the mind transmitted to you." The questioner pressed, "If there is nothing and no mind, then how can it be transmitted?" Huang-po answered, "You have heard the expression 'transmission of the mind' and so you think there must be something transmitted. You are wrong. Thus Bodhidharma said that when the nature of the mind is realized, it is not possible to express it verbally. Clearly, then, nothing is obtained in the transmission of the mind, or if anything is obtained, it is certainly not knowledge_."28

He finally concludes that the subject cannot really even be discussed, since there are no terms for the process that transpires. Just as _sunyata_--that "emptiness" or Void whose existence means that conceptual thought is empty and rational constructs inadequate--is not something that can be transmitted as a concept, so too is the Dharma or teaching, as well as Mind, that essence we share with a larger reality.

Even statements that concepts are pointless must fall back on language and consequently are actually themselves merely make-do approximations, as are all descriptions of the process of transmission. He finally gives up on words entirely, declaring that none of the terms he has used has any meaning.

_A transmission of Void cannot be made through words. A transmission in concrete terms cannot be the Dharma. . . In fact, however, Mind is not Mind and transmission is not really transmission.29

_

He was working on the very real problem of the transmission of understanding that operates in a part of the mind where speech and logic cannot enter. As John Wu has pointed out, in a sense Huang-po had come back full circle to the insights of Chuang Tzu: good and evil are meaningless; intuitive knowledge is more profound than speech-bound logic; there is an underlying unity (for Chuang Tzu it was the Tao or Way; for Huang-po, the Universal Mind) that represents the ineffable absolute.30

In effect, Huang-po laid it all out, cleared the way, and defined Ch'an once and for all. The Perennial Philosophy was never more strongly stated. The experimental age of Ch'an thus drew to a close, its job finished. With his death at the midpoint of the ninth century, there was little more to be invented.31 It was time now for Ch'an to formalize its dialectic, as well as to meet society and make its mark in the world. The first was taken care of by Huang-po's star pupil, Lin-chi, and the second was precipitated by the forces of destiny.

The death of Huang-po coincided with a critical instant in Chinese history whose consequences for future generations were enormous. Once before Chinese politics had affected Ch'an, producing a situation in which Southern Ch'an would steal the march on Northern Ch'an. And now another traumatic episode in Chinese affairs would effectively destroy all Buddhist sects except Southern Ch'an, leaving the way clear for this pursuit of intuitive wisdom--once relegated to wandering teachers of _dhyana_--to become the only vital Buddhist sect left in China.

As noted previously, resentment toward Buddhism had always smoldered in Chinese society. Periodically the conservative Chinese tried to drive this foreign belief system from their soil, or failing that, at least to bring it under control. The usual complaints revolved around the monasteries' holdings of tax-free lands, their removal of able-bodied men and women from society into nonproductive monastic life, and the monastic vows of celibacy so ant.i.thetical to the Chinese ideals of the family.

The Ch'an monasteries, deliberately or not, worked hard to defuse many of these complaints. Indeed, some would say that Ch'an managed to change Buddhism into something the Chinese could partially stomach.

Ch'anists were just the opposite of parasitical on society, since they practiced Po-chang Huai-hai's injunction of a day without work being a day without food. Also, the unthinking piety of traditional Buddhists was reviled by Ch'anists. Furthermore, Ch'an dispensed with much of the rigmarole and paraphernalia favored by the Buddhist sects that stuck to its Indian origins more closely.

The resentment felt toward Buddhists was summarized in a doc.u.ment issued in 819 by a scholar-bureaucrat named Han Yu.32 His recital of Buddhism's failings came down particularly hard on the fact that the Buddha had not been Chinese. Han Yu advocated a complete suppression of this pernicious establishment: "Restore its people to human living!

Burn its books! And convert its buildings to human dwellings!"33 As resentment toward the worldly influence of Buddhism grew during the ninth century, there came to power an emperor who decided to act.

The Emperor Wu-tsang (r. 841-46) is now thought to have gone mad as a prelude to his persecution of the Buddhists. But his edicts were effective nonetheless. The state had begun tightening its grip on Buddhism when he came into power in 841, but in August 845 he issued the edict that ultimately had the effect of destroying traditional Buddhism and urbanized Northern Ch'an in China. Over a period of two years he destroyed 4,600 big temples and monasteries and over 40,000 smaller temples and retreats. He freed 150,000 male and female slaves or temple attendants and evicted some 265,000 monks and nuns, forcing them back into secular life. (This was out of a total Chinese population estimated to be around 27 million.) And not incidentally, the state reclaimed several million acres of property that had belonged to the monasteries. The effect of this was to obliterate virtually all the great Buddhist establishments, including the Buddhist strongholds in the capitals of Chang-an and Loyang, which were reduced to only two temples and thirty monks in each of the two cities.34

The irony of the Great Persecution was that it actually seemed to invigorate Southern Ch'an. For one thing, these rural Ch'an teachers had long been iconoclasts and outcasts themselves, as they disowned ostentatious temples and even the scriptures. Almost as much a philosophy as a religion, Southern Ch'an had long known how to do without imperial favor and largess. And when a further edict came down demanding that all Buddhist paraphernalia, including statues and paintings, be burned, the outcast Ch'an monasteries had the least to lose, since they had even done a bit of burning themselves--if we are to believe the story of Tan-hsia (738-824), a famous Ch'an monk who once burned a Buddhist statue for warmth. Southern Ch'an teachers just melted for a time back into secular life, from which they had never been far in any case.35

The result of all this was that after 846 the only sect of Buddhism with any strength at all was rural Ch'an. Chinese Buddhism literally became synonymous with Southern Ch'an--a far cry from the almost fugitive existence of the sect in earlier years. And when Buddhism became fashionable again during the Sung, Southern Ch'an became a house religion, as Northern had once been. The result was that Ch'an gradually lost its iconoclastic character. But out of this last phase of Ch'an developed one of the most powerful tools ever for enlightenment, the famous Zen koan, whose creation preserved something out of the dynamism of Ch'an's early centuries.