Zen Masters Of China. Richard Bryan McDaniel
it is with the koan that the true value of the story is revealed. Everyone has surely heard of the Sound of One Hand. The full koan reads, “You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?” A number of collections of koans have been made; among the most popular are The Mumonkan, The Hekiganroku, and The Book of Serenity. Many koans are indeed simply mondo that have been stripped down to the essential. Comments are added to the koan to help the student gain an entry into it. Each koan therefore is a miniature drama. To “work” with the koan—that is, to plumb its meaning—one must inhabit the koan. We must understand the conflict, twist, or incongruity described and dwell with the contradiction, and so allow the higher mind to awaken.
The above explanation gives the direction in which to go when reading this book. We do not read a book like this for information or knowledge but to awaken a higher part of the mind, a part that in most of us is asleep. A certain amount of information is given in the book, but this simply provides a framework within which to contain the essential part of the book: the stories, mondo, and koans. Koan practice is more properly called koan appreciation. We appreciate what is being said in the same way that we appreciate music, poetry, or drama. To do so is to dwell in the situation described in much the same way we dwell in a drama. By doing so we will not only gain a richer understanding of the stories or mondo, we will also gain a richer appreciation of life itself.
Rick McDaniel is well qualified to write a book such as this. He has been a long time member of the Montreal Zen Center and has attended many intensive retreats at the Center. He has worked on koan for much of his time with the center and draws on this experience in the writing of this book.
Preface
It was the stories of Zen that brought me to the practice of Zen—not the theory or teachings of Buddhism, not the philosophy or dogma, but the stories.
Once one takes up the practice, one encounters these stories again, in teishos (the talks given by the teacher during Zen retreats called sesshin) and dokusan (personal meetings with the teacher). But now they are teaching aids, upaya, “skillful means” by which the teacher seeks to help the student attain the experience called “awakening,” deepen it, and integrate it into his or her life. That is, after all, the purpose of the stories, the reason they have been preserved.
Still, when one first encounters them—when they are still not so much even stories as anecdotes—they have a freshness that is entrancing. In all the scriptures of this multicultured planet, nowhere else does one find tales like these—beguiling, often humorous, frequently irreverent.
The lore of religion begins in myth, passes through legend, and only slowly comes to verifiable historical narrative. One sees this pattern in the dominant religious traditions of the West. First there are the tales of the Bible, followed by the legends of Christian saints and Jewish folklore. And only in the later centuries do we have what might be considered objectively accurate information.
The stories of Zen likewise begin with the anecdotes of sixth century China, pass through the legends of the Tang and Song dynasties as well as of Japan, and continue in the records of the Zen teachers of more recent centuries, including those pioneers who brought the tradition to the world outside of Asia.
The spread of the teaching has been steadily eastward. It has been said that Zen (Chan in Chinese) is the product of the encounter between Indian Buddhism and Chinese culture, especially Daoism and Confucianism. From China, various schools of Buddhism, including Chan, spread to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan (where it was called Zen). While over time the Chan school declined in China, it continued to flourish in Japan, where it had its fullest flowering. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, Zen took its longest stride east, across the Pacific Ocean to the shores of North America.
In this, the first of three projected volumes, I retell some of the most significant Zen stories to come from China. The second and third volumes will recount the Zen tales of Japan, the United States, and Canada.
For some people, the stories in this collection form a kind of Zen canon. Even today certain teachers accept them as historically accurate. Scholarship, however, has not only called into question the historicity of individuals such as Bodhidharma but even details about the lives of historically verifiable individuals such as the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng. The story of the Buddha’s flower sermon and the transmission of the dharma (the teaching) to Mahakasyapa does not appear in any Indian source; it is a Chinese invention first recorded in the eleventh century.
The stories, however, were not originally collected as historical records. They were collected because they had the potential to help Zen practitioners attain “awakening” or “enlightenment,” the same experience that Siddhartha Gautama had had and because of which he came to be called the Buddha—the “Awakened One.” Insofar as they accomplished that end, it did not matter whether they described actual events or not—in much the same way that the significance of the parables of Jesus were not dependent upon whether the stories he told were based on events that had actually taken place or not. To be too concerned with the historical accuracy of the events described would probably result in one failing to understand the purpose of the stories.
Compared with the writings of other religious traditions, including the sutras of Indian Buddhism, Chinese Zen stories are refreshingly unique. One does not find in them exhortations to morality or discussions of points of doctrine. When first encountering them, one may fail to see any religious, philosophical, or moral content at all. For example, the story is told of a new student who came to work with the ninth-century master, Zhaozhou Congshen. He presented himself, saying, “I have just entered the monastery, and I beg you to accept me as a disciple and teach me.”
Zhaozhou asked him, “Have you had anything to eat yet?”
“Yes, I have. Thank you.”
“Then you had better wash your bowl,” Zhaozhou told him. And we are informed that upon hearing those words, the new monk attained awakening.
Whether one understands how this conversation brought about the result it claims to have done or not, one certainly recognizes that the method being described is exceptional in both global religious and philosophical traditions.
D. T. Suzuki was the Japanese Zen scholar primarily responsible for introducing Zen to the non-Asian world. He posited that the character of Zen was the result of the way Indian Buddhism adapted itself to the Chinese mentality in order to be relevant in that land. To demonstrate what he meant, he compared stories used by Indian and Chinese Buddhism to convey certain basic doctrines:
Buddhism . . . is a religion of freedom and emancipation, and the ultimate aim of its discipline is to release the spirit from its possible bondages so that it can act freely in accordance to its own principles. This is what is meant by non-attachment. . . . The idea is negative inasmuch as it is concerned with untying the knots of the intellect and passion, but the feeling implied is positive, and the final object is attained only when the spirit is restored to its original activity. The spirit knows its own way, and what we can do is to rid it of all the obstacles our ignorance has piled before it. “Throw them down” is therefore the recurring note in the Buddhist teaching.
The Indian Buddhist way of impressing the idea is this: a Brahman named Black-nails came to the Buddha and offered him two huge flowering trees that he carried each in one of his hands through his magical power. The Buddha called out, and when the Brahman responded the Buddha said, “Throw them down!” The Brahman let down the flowering tree in his left hand before the Buddha. The latter called out again to let them go, whereupon Black-nails dropped the other flowering tree in the right hand. The Buddha still kept up his command. Said the Brahman: “I have nothing now to let go. What do you want me to do?” “I never told you to abandon your flowering plants,” said the Buddha. “What I want you to do is to abandon your six objects of sense, your six organs of sense [sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and mind], and your six consciousnesses. When these are all at once abandoned and there remains nothing further to be abandoned, it is then that you are released from the bondage of birth-and-death.”