Chapter Fourteen
TA-HUI:
MASTER OF THE KOAN
To confront the koan--the most discussed, least understood teaching concept of the East--is to address the very essence of Zen itself. In simple terms the koan is merely a brief story--all the encounters between two monks related here could be koans. During the Sung Dynasty (960-1279) these stories were organized into collections, commented upon, and structured into a system of study--which involved meditating on a koan and arriving at an intuitive "answer" acceptable to a Zen master. Faced with the threatening intellectualism of the Sung scholars, Ch'anists created the koan out of the experience of the older masters, much the way a liferaft might be constructed from the timbers of a storm-torn ship. But before we examine this raft, it would be well to look again at the ship.
It will be recalled that Ch'an grew out of both Buddhism and Taoism, extracting from them the belief that a fundamental unifying quality transcends all the diversity of the world, including things that appear to be opposite. However, Ch'an taught that this cannot be understood using intellectualism, which rationally makes distinctions and relates to the world by reducing it to concepts and systems. One reason is that all rationality and concepts are merely part of a larger, encompassing Reality; and trying to reach this Reality intellectually is like trying to describe the outside of a building while trapped inside.
There is, however, a kind of thought--not beholden to concepts, systems, discriminations, or rationality--that can reach this new understanding. It is intuition, which operates in a mode entirely different from rationality. It is holistic, not linear; it is unself-conscious and noncritical; and it doesn't bother with any of the rational systems of analysis we have invented for ourselves. But since we can't call on it at our pleasure, the next best thing we can do is clear the way for it to operate--by shutting off the rational part of the mind. Then intuition starts hesitantly coming out of the shadows. Now, if we carefully wait for the right moment and then suddenly create a disturbance that momentarily short-circuits the rational mind--the way shock suppresses our sense of pain in the first moments of a serious accident--we may get a glimpse of the intuitive mind in full flower. In that instant we intuitively understand the oneness of the world, the Void, the greater Reality that words and rationality have never allowed us to experience.
The Zen teachers have a very efficient technique for making all this happen. They first discredit rationality for a novice by making him feel foolish for using it. Each time the novice submits a rational solution to a koan, he receives a humiliating rebuff. After a while the strain begins to tell. In the same way that a military boot camp destroys the ego and self-identity of a recruit, the Zen master slowly erodes the novice's confidence in his own logical powers.
At this point his intuitive mind begins overcoming its previous repression. Distinctions slowly start to seem absurd, because every time he makes one he is ridiculed. Little by little he dissolves his sense of object and subject, knower and known. The fruit now is almost ready to fall from the tree. (Although enlightenment cannot be made to happen, it can be made possible.) Enter at this point the unexpected blow, the shout, the click of bamboo, the broken leg. If the student is caught unawares, rationality may be momentarily short-circuited and suddenly he glimpses--Reality.
The irony is that what he glimpses is no different from what he saw before, only now he understands it intuitively and realizes how simplistic and confining are rational categories and distinctions. Mountains are once again mountains; rivers are once again rivers. But with one vital difference: Now he is not attached to them. He travels through the world just as always, but now he is at one with it: no distinctions, no critical judgments, no tension. After all that preparatory mental anguish there is no apparent external change. But internally he is enlightened: He thinks differently, he understands differently, and ultimately he lives differently.
Ch'an began by working out the question of what this enlightenment really is. Prior to Ma-tsu the search was more for the nature of enlightenment than for its transmission. This was the doctrinal phase of Ch'an. As time went by, however, the concern shifted more and more from defining enlightenment--which the Ch'an masters believed had been done sufficiently--to struggling with the process. After Ma-tsu, Ch'an turned its attention to "auxiliary means" for helping along transmission: paradoxical words and actions, shouts, beatings, and eventually the koan.1
The koan, then, is the final step in the "auxiliary means." A succinct analysis of the koan technique is provided by Ruth F. Sasaki in _Zen Dust_: "Briefly, [koans] consisted of questions the early masters had asked individual students, together with the answers given by the students; questions put to the masters by students in personal talks or in the course of the masters' lectures, together with the masters' answers; statements of formulas in which the masters had pointed to the profound Principle; anecdotes from the daily life of the masters in which their attitudes or actions illustrated the functioning of the Principle; and occasionally a phrase from a sutra in which the Principle or some aspect of it was crystallized in words. By presenting a student with one or another of these koans and observing his reaction to it, the degree or depth of his realization could be judged. The koans were the criteria of attainment."2
Called _kung-an _in Chinese (meaning a "case" or a problem), the koan was a response to two major challenges that beset Ch'an in the Sung era: First, the large number of students that appeared at Ch'an monasteries as a result of the demise of other sects meant that some new means was needed to preserve personalized attention (some masters reportedly had one thousand or even two thousand followers at a monastery); and second, there was a noticeable decline in the spontaneity of both novices and masters. The masters had lost much of the creative fire of Ch'an's Golden Age, and the novices were caught up in the intellectual, literary world of the Sung, to the point that intellectualism actually threatened the vitality of the sect.
The koan, then, was the answer to this dilemma. It systematized instruction such that large numbers of students could be treated to the finest antirational tradition of the Ch'an sect, and it rescued the dynamism of the earlier centuries. Although mention of kung-an occurs in the Ch'an literature before the end of the T'ang era (618-907), the reference was to a master's use of a particularly effectual question on more than one student. This was still an instance of a master using his own questions or paradoxes. The koan in its true form--that is, the use of a classic incident from the literature, posed as a conundrum--is said to have been created when a descendant of Lin-chi, in the third generation, interviewed a novice about some of Lin-chi's sayings.3 This systematic use of the existing literature was found effective, and soon a new teaching technique was in the making.
Examples of classic koans already have been seen throughout this book, since many of the exchanges of the early masters were later isolated for use as kung-an. But there are many, many others, Perhaps the best- known koan of all time is the exchange between Chao-chou (778-897) and a monk:
_A monk asked Chao-chou. "Does a dog have Buddha nature [i.e., is a dog capable of being enlightened]?" Chao-chou answered, _"Mu _[a word whose strict meaning is "nothingness"]._"4
Quick, what does it mean? Speak! Speak! If you were a Ch'an novice, a master would be glaring at you demanding an immediate, intuitive answer. (A favored resolution of this, incidentally, is simply "Mu," but bellowed with all the force of the universe's inherent Oneness behind it. And if you try to fake it, the master will know.) Or take another koan, drawn completely at random.
_When the monks assembled before the noon meal to hear his lecture, the Master Fa-yen [885-958] pointed at the bamboo blinds. Two monks simultaneously went and rolled them up. Fa-yen said, "One gain, one loss._"5
Don't think! Respond instantly! Don't say a word unless it's right, Don't make a move that isn't intuitive. And above all, don't analyze.
_
Yun-men [862/4-949] asked a monk, "Where have you come here from?" The monk said, "From Hsi-ch'an." Yun-men said, "What words are being offered at Hsi-ch'an these days?" The monk stretched out his hands. Yun-men struck him. The monk said, "I haven't finished talking." Yun- men then extended his own hands. The monk was silent, so Yun-men struck him._6
You weren't there. You're not the monk. But now you've got to do something to show the master you grasp what went on in that exchange. What was spontaneous to the older masters you must grasp in a secondhand, systematized situation. And if you can't answer the koan right (it should be stressed, incidentally, there is not necessarily a fixed answer), you had best go and meditate, try to grasp it nonintellectually, and return tomorrow to try again.
Off you go to meditate on "Mu" or "One gain, one loss," and the mental tension starts building. Even though you know you aren't supposed to, you analyze it intellectually from every angle. But that just heightens your exasperation. Then suddenly one day something dawns on you. Elated, you go to the master. You yell at him, or bark like a dog, or kick his staff, or stand on your hands, or recite a poem, or declare, "The cypress tree in the courtyard," or perhaps you just remain silent. He will know (intuitively) if you have broken through the bonds of reason, if you have transcended the intellect.
There's nothing quite like the koan in the literature of the world: historical episodes that have to be relived intuitively and responded to. As Ruth F. Sasaki notes, "Collections of 'old cases,' as the koans were sometimes called, as well as attempts to put the koans into a fixed form and to systematize them to some extent, were already being made by the middle of the tenth century. We also find a few masters giving their own alternate answers to some of the old koans and occasionally appending verses to them. In many cases these alternate answers and verses ultimately became attached to the original koans and were handled as koans supplementary to them."7 Ironically, koans became so useful, indeed essential, in the perpetuation of Ch'an that they soon were revered as texts. Collections of the better koans appeared, and next came accretions of supporting commentaries--when the whole point was supposed to be circumventing reliance on words! But commentaries always seemed to develop spontaneously out of Ch'an.
Today two major collections of koans are generally used by students of Zen. These are the Mumonkan (to use the more familiar Japanese name) and the Hekiganroku (again the Japanese name) or _Blue Cliff Record_.8 Masters may work a student through both these collections as he travels the road to enlightenment, with a new koan being assigned after each previous one has been successfully resolved.
The _Blue Cliff Record _was the first of the two collections. It began as a grouping of one hundred kung-an by a master named Hsueh-tou Ch'ung-hsien (980-1052) of the school of Yun-men. This master also attached a small poem to each koan, intended to direct the student toward its meaning. The book enjoyed sizable circulation throughout the latter part of the eleventh century, and sometime thereafter a Lin-chi master named Yuan-wu K'o-ch'in (1063-1135) decided to embellish it by adding an introduction to each koan and a long-winded commentary on both the koan and the poem supplied by the previous collector. (In the case of the poem we now have commentary on commentary--the ultimate achievement of the theologian's art! However, masters today often omit Yuan-wu's commentaries, giving their own interpretation instead.9) The commentator, Yuan-wu, was the teacher of Ta-hui, the dynamic master of the Lin-chi lineage whom we will meet here.
The Mumonkan, a shorter work, was assembled in 1228 by the Ch'an monk Wu-men Hui-k'ai (1183-1260) and consists of forty-eight koans, together with an explanatory comment and a verse. Some of the koans in the Mumonkan also appear in the _Blue Cliff Record_. The Mumonkan is usually preferred in the Japanese summer, since its koans are briefer and less fatiguing.10
The koan was an invention of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), an era of consolidation in the Chinese empire after the demise of the T'ang and passage of a war-torn interlude known as the Five Dynasties (907-60). Although Sung Ch'an seemed to be booming, Buddhism in general continued the decline that began with the Great Persecution of 845. For example, the number of registered monks dropped from around 400,000 in 1021 to approximately half that number a scant half-century later.11 But the monks who did come probably had higher education than previously, for the Sung educational system was the world's best at the time. Colleges were established nationwide, not just in the sophisticated metropolitan areas, and scholarship flourished. Whether this was good for Ch'an is not a simple question. The hardy rural monks who had passed beyond the Buddhist scriptures made Ch'an what it was. Could the powers of the antirational be preserved in an atmosphere where the greatest respect was reserved for those who spent years memorizing the Chinese classics? The answer to this was to rest with the koan.
The Ch'an master Ta-hui (1089-1163), who perfected the koan technique, was rumored to be a reincarnation of Lin-chi. Born in Anhwei province, located about halfway between the older capitals of the north and the Ch'an centers in the south, he was said to be both pious and precocious, becoming a devoted monk at age seventeen while assiduously reading and absorbing the teachings of the five houses.12 At age nineteen, he began his obligatory travels, roaming from master to master. One of his first teachers reportedly interviewed him on the koans in the collection now known as the _Blue Cliff Record_, but he did so by not speaking a word and thereby forcing Ta-hui to work them out for himself. Ta-hui also experimented with the Ts'ao-tung teachings, but early on began to question the straitlaced, quietistic approach of that house. He finally was directed to the Szechuan teacher Yuan-wu K'o-ch'in of the Lin-chi school, beginning the association that would move him to the forefront of the struggle to save Ch'an via the koan.
Ta-hui experienced his first enlightenment under Yuan-wu, in the master's temple in the Northern Sung capital of Pien-liang. As the story is reported:
_One day when Yuan-wu had taken the high seat in the lecture hall, he said: "A monk asked Yun-men: 'From whence come all the buddhas?' Yun- men answered: 'The East Mountain walks over the water.' But if I were asked, I would not answer that way. 'From whence come all the buddhas?' A fragrant breeze comes of itself from the south, and in the palace pavilion a refreshing coolness stirs." At these words [Ta-hui] suddenly attained enlightenment.13
_
After this he grew in experience and wisdom, eventually taking over many temple duties from Yuan-wu. He soon became a part of the Ch'an establishment in the north and in 1126 was even presented with an official robe and title from a minister.
Then suddenly, in the midst of this tranquillity, outside forces intervened to change dramatically the course of Chinese history. For many years previous, China had been threatened by nomadic peoples from the north and west, peoples whom the Chinese haughtily identified as "barbarians." The Sung emperors, cloistered gentlemen in the worst sense of the term, had maintained peace in their slowly shrinking domain by buying off belligerent neighbors and occasionally even ceding border territories. They thought their troubles finally might be easing somewhat when their hostile neighbors were overwhelmed by a new warring tribe from Manchuria. But after a series of humiliating incidents, the Chinese found themselves with merely a new enemy, this time more powerful than any before. China was at last on the verge of being overwhelmed, something it had forestalled for many centuries. Even the invention of gunpowder, which the Chinese now used to fire rocket- propelled arrows, could not save them. Before long the barbarians marched on the capital, and after some years of Chinese attempts at appeasement, the invaders carried off the emperor and his entire court to Manchuria. The year was 1127, which marked the end of the Chinese dynasty now known as the Northern Sung (960-1127).
After this disheartening setback a son of the former emperor moved south and set up a new capital in the coastal city of Hangchow, whose charms the Chinese were fond of comparing
favorably with heaven (in the refrain, "Heaven above; Hangchow below"). This new regime, known as the Southern Sung (1127-1279), witnessed yet another transformation of Ch'an. Among other things, Southern Ch'an came to resemble eighth-century Northern Ch'an, in its close association with the court and the intelligentsia.
When political discord forced the Northern Sung government to flee south, the master Yuan-wu was assigned a monastery in the southern province of Kiangsi by the emperor, and Ta-hui accompanied him there, again as head monk. After four years, Ta-hui again decided to migrate-- this time alone--to Szechuan and there to build a secluded hermitage. After another move he was summoned in 1137 by the prime minister, himself also a former pupil of Yuan-wu, to come and establish a temple near the new southern capital of Hangchow. Before long he had collected almost two thousand disciples and was becoming known as the reincarnation of Lin-chi, possibly because he was giving new life to the Lin-chi sect. But then his politics got him in trouble and he was banished for almost fifteen years to various remote outposts, during which time he began to write extensively.14 Finally, in 1158, he was ordered back to Hangchow to take over his old temple. Since by then old age was encroaching, he was permitted to retire at this temple and live off imperial patronage. It is said that his pupils swelled to seventeen hundred when he returned and that when he died in 1163 he left ninety- four enlightened heirs.15
Ta-hui is regarded today as the great champion of the koan method, and he was celebrated during his life for a running disagreement he had with the Ts'ao-tung (later Soto) school. In a sense, this dispute drew the distinctions that still divide Zen into two camps. The issue seems to have boiled down to the matter of what one does with one's mind while meditating. The Ts'ao-tung masters advocated what they called Silent Illumination (_mo-chao_) Ch'an, which Ta-hui preferred to call Silent Illumination Heterodox (_mo-chao-hsieh_) Ch'an. The Ts'ao-tung master Cheng-chueh, with whom he argued, believed that enlightenment could be achieved through sitting motionless and slowly bringing tranquillity and empty nonattachment to the mind. The koans were recognized to be useful in preserving the original spirit of Ch'an, but their brain-fatiguing convolutions were not permitted to disturb the mental repose of meditation. Ta-hui, in contrast, believed that this silent meditation lacked the dynamism so essential to the sudden experience of enlightenment. His own approach to enlightenment came to be called Introspecting-the-Koan (_k'an-hua_) Ch'an, in which meditation focused on a koan.16
Another of Ta-hui's objections to the Silent Illumination school seems to have been its natural drift toward quietism, toward the divorcing of men from the world of affairs. This he believed led nowhere and was merely renouncing humanity rather than illuminating it.
_These days there's a breed of shaven-headed outsiders [i.e., rival masters] whose own eyes are not clear, who just teach people to stop and rest and play dead. . . . They teach people to "keep the mind still," to "forget feelings" according to circumstances, to practice "silent illumination." . . . To say that when one has put things to rest to the point that he is unawares and unknowing, like earth, wood, tile, or stone, this is not unknowing silence--this is a view of wrongly taking too literally words that were (only) expedient means to free bonds.17
_He seemed to be counseling never to forget that meditation is only a means, not an end. Instead Ta-hui advocated meditating deeper and ever deeper into a koan, focusing on the words until they "lose their flavor." Then finally the bottom falls out of the bucket and enlightenment hits you. This "Introspecting the Koan" form of Ch'an (called Kanna Zen by the Japanese) became the standard for the Rinzai sect, whose students were encouraged to meditate on a koan until it gradually infiltrated the mind. As one commentator has explained, "The essential is to immerse oneself patiently and wholeheartedly in the koan, with unwavering attention. One must not be looking for an answer but looking at the koan. The 'answer,' if it comes, will come of its own accord."18 As described by Ta-hui:
_Just steadily go on with your koan every moment of your life. . . . Whether walking or sitting, let your attention be fixed upon it without interruption. When you begin to find it entirely devoid of flavor, the final moment is approaching: do not let it slip out of your grasp. When all of a sudden something flashes out in your mind, its light will illumine the entire universe, and you will see the spiritual land of the Enlightened Ones. . . .19
_
The important thing is to concentrate totally on a koan. This concentration need not necessarily be confined to meditation, as Ta-hui illustrates using one of the more celebrated one-word statements of Yun-men.
_A monk asked Yun-Men, "What is Buddha?" Yun-Men said, "A dry piece of shit." Just bring up this saying. . . .Don't ask to draw realization from the words or try in your confusion to assess and explain. . . . Just take your confused unhappy mind and shift it onto "A dry piece of shit." Once you hold it there, then the mind . . . will naturally no longer operate. When you become aware that it's not operating, don't be afraid of falling into emptiness. . . . In the conduct of your daily activities, just always let go and make yourself vast and expansive. Whether you're in quiet or noisy places, constantly arouse yourself with the saying "A dry piece of shit." As the days and months come and go, of itself your potential will be purified and ripen. Above all you must not arouse any external doubts besides: when your doubts about "A dry piece of shit" are smashed, then at once doubts numerous as the sands of the Ganges are all smashed.20
_
Although Ta-hui was a strong advocate of the koan, he was staunchly against its being used in a literary sense. Whenever a student starts analyzing koans intellectually, comparing one against another, trying to understand rationally how they affect his nonrational intelligence, he misses the whole point. The only way it can work is if it is fresh. Only then does it elicit a response from our spontaneous intelligence, our intuitive mind.
But the Sung trend toward intellectualism was almost irresistible. The prestige of the Chinese "gentleman"--who could quote the ancient poets, compose verse himself, and analyze enlightenment--was the great nemesis of Ch'an.
_Gentlemen of affairs who study the path often understand rationally without getting to the reality. Without discussion and thought they are at a loss, with no place to put their hands and feet--they won't believe that where there is no place to put one's hands and feet is really a good situation. They just want to get there in their minds by thinking and in their mouths to understand by talking--they scarcely realize they've already gone wrong.21
_
Equally bad was the Ch'an student who memorized koans rather than trying to understand them intuitively.
_A gentleman reads widely in many books basically in order to augment his innate knowledge. Instead, you have taken to memorizing the words of the ancients, accumulating them in
your breast, making this your task, depending on them for something to take hold of in conversation. You are far from knowing the intent of the sages in expounding the teachings. This is what is called counting the treasure of others all day long without having half a cent of your own.22
_Ta-hui rightly recognized in such scholarship an impending destruction of Ch'an's innate vigor. At one point, in desperation, he even destroyed the original printing blocks for the best-known koan collection of the time, the _Blue Cliff Record _compiled by his master, Yuan-wu.23 But the trend continued nonetheless.
Ch'an was not over yet, however. It turns out that the sect did not continue to fly apart and diversify as might be suspected, but rather it actually consolidated. Although the Kuei-yang and Fa-yen houses fizzled comparatively quickly, the Yun-men lasted considerably longer, with an identifiable line of transmission lasting virtually throughout the Sung Dynasty. The Ts'ao-tung house languished for a while, but with Silent Illumination Ch'an it came back strongly during the Sung Dynasty. Lin-chi split into two factions in the early eleventh century, when two pupils of the master Ch'u-yuan (986-1036) decided to go their own way, One of these masters, known as Huang-lung Hui-nan (1002-1069), started a school which subsequently was transmitted to Japan by the Japanese master Eisai, where it became known as Oryo Zen. However, this school did not last long in China or Japan, becoming moribund after a few generations. The other disciple of Ch'u-yuan was a master named Yang-ch'i Fang-hui (992-1049), whose school (known in Japanese as Yogi Zen) eventually became the only school of Chinese Ch'an, absorbing all other sects when the faith went into its final decline after the Sung. Ta-hui was part of this school, and it was the branch of the Lin-chi sect that eventually took hold in Japan.
In closing our journey through Chinese Ch'an we must note that the faith continued on strongly through the Sung largely because the government began selling ordinations for its own profit. Ch'an also continued to flourish during the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty (1279- 1309), with many priests from Japan coming to China for study. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), it merged with another school of Buddhism, the Pure Land Salvationist sect, and changed drastically. Although Ming-style Chinese Ch'an still persists today, mainly outside China, its practice bears scant resemblance to the original teachings. For the practice of the classical Ch'an described here we must now turn to Japan.