Wumenguan Case 2: Baizhang's Fox - Sunday May 18, 2014

In this Dharma talk, given during the weekly half-day practice session, Eshu introduces us to the second case of the Wumanguan, or Mumankan, "The Gateless Gate" - the first collection of Koans in the Rinzai Zen tradition.

Note: This practice may include strong language.

Transcript

For those of you who have heard me speak about this case before,

You'll know that it's definitely one of my favorites.

I think it's one of the most important cases in the Mumonkan,

In the Gateless Barrier,

But it's also one of my favorites because it lays out the capacity of this amazing teacher,

His function.

We call the school that we come from,

That we're trained in,

The Rinzai School of Zen.

Rinzai comes from the Chinese Linji.

The Linji school takes its name from a particular teacher,

Linji Yixuan,

Who lived in China.

Linji is the grandson,

Dharma grandson,

Of this Baizhang.

And so while the name of the school comes from Linji,

The foundation of the spirit of the school of Zen that we practice comes from,

Starts with,

In many ways,

Or was revitalized or a particular dynamic came from this individual Baizhang.

And even again,

From this disciple who shows up in this koan,

Huangbo,

Who was Linji's teacher.

So going backwards,

The story is that Huangbo was a terrifying individual.

The legends say that he was nearly seven feet tall and he was assiduous in practice.

One of his practices was prostrations,

Doing thousands and thousands of prostrations to the point where he developed a callus in the center of his forehead from doing so many prostrations.

But he was famous for shouting and hitting and just being an all-around rough and rugged character.

Big.

Kind of a bully in some ways maybe.

Terrifying.

Baizhang was also renowned as an individual in the Zen school.

Not just in the Rinzai Zen school,

But in all of the Zen school.

He was the person who is accredited with first laying out a Zen Buddhist monastic code.

Up until that time,

The Zen school had existed as a sort of subsidiary of other Buddhist schools.

And so they were sort of a sect,

Operating largely under the regulations of other Buddhist traditions,

Founding Buddhist traditions.

And different temples,

Different teachers had gone off from this and started communities.

But the story is that Baizhang was the first person to really lay out in explicit detail a code of conduct,

A way of living in communities as Zen practitioners.

Because of the ceremony that's coming up,

I was actually reviewing what's called now the Baizhang monastic code,

But the truth is that there is no copy in existence of the original code that Baizhang produced.

But all of the monastic codes that came afterwards for the Zen school all draw references from this text that I imagine existed at some point.

And the similarities between them all point to there being a single text.

But this text that I was looking at,

This old Baizhang monastic code,

Contains details about every aspect of monastic life.

When a new student approaching the temple,

A new monk entering the practice place,

The installation of abbots,

The responsibilities of the abbot,

The responsibilities of everybody in the monastic environment.

So Baizhang was credited with this,

Being very clear,

Establishing very clear and strict boundaries for the practice of Zen.

We see some of the aspects of this,

Even in this case,

Things like the evening talk,

Taking the high seat,

Sounding the board after the noon meal to signal that there's going to be a funeral for a priest.

It's easy for us to sort of glaze over these things as just the way that things are done,

But it's important to really recognize that Baizhang was the individual who actually started laying the order for these things out,

So that when the clapper is sounded,

The monks know something's going on.

When a funeral is announced,

They know that there's somebody or not somebody who is sick or died,

All because of the monastic code that Baizhang established.

Baizhang was also really famous for work.

One of his edicts or sayings was,

A day without work is a day without food.

We have to remember that one of the reasons that the Zen school did well in China,

Better than many other schools of Buddhism,

Was that it included,

It took on this sort of work ethic that was quite different than the schools of Buddhism that had existed in India previously.

The schools of Buddhism that existed primarily on mendicants,

Begging,

Were not really well received in China,

That had a very Confucian-ordered ethic,

So the begging was not really high on the list of things to respect,

Where in India it was.

The Zen temples were the first ones to really start to develop the gardens,

To produce food for themselves,

And so in these early cases,

There's many interactions that take place in the garden,

In the fields,

Working outside of the meditation hall.

And it's said that as Baizhang got older,

He kept working,

Even though he would go out into the field and be more of a nuisance probably to the working monks,

Than he was a help,

He was out there working,

And he got very old and frail,

And the monks were concerned because they thought that he'd kill himself working,

And so they hid his tools,

So he stopped eating.

So they said,

Master,

You need to eat something,

And this is where he said,

Well,

A day without work is a day without food.

So Baizhang was not stingy with his energy,

He wasn't stingy with his life,

Or his body,

Or his mind in teaching,

And that's what I think is so wonderful about this case,

Particularly when we take it as I've read it today,

A little bit out of the order that it is traditionally read.

One of the pieces of advice that I often give when we're looking at koans is to put ourselves in the place of the individuals,

Of the people in the koan.

We have to recognize that these cases,

When we pick them up,

They're set in old China,

And they're full of old Chinese men in the monasteries.

We have to understand them as koans,

We have to understand them as a public case,

Or a public demonstration of the fundamental principle or activity of this cosmos.

There's a sort of fundamental dynamic that's being unfolded and revealed inside each of the cases,

And it's easy for us to get caught up in the specifics of the case,

And we have to apply ourselves,

Body,

Heart,

And mind,

To sort of unfolding what's taking place in the koan.

And so I've found the best way,

For me at least,

To do this is to immerse myself,

To completely immerse myself in the activity of the koan,

To be filled with the confusion,

To be filled with the wonder,

To be filled with the revelation or the exposition that takes place within the koan.

And there are very few that are so craftily constructed as this case.

So one day,

Baizhang had the head monk strike the signal board and inform the assembly that after the noon meal there would be a funeral service for a priest.

The monks talked about this in wonder.

All of us are well.

There is no one in the morgue.

What does the teacher mean?

So if you can imagine being in a Zen center,

Being in a monastic temple,

Everything's sort of business as usual.

And then the abbot comes,

You hear like the sounding of the board,

Which usually marks an announcement.

So everyone says,

Well,

What's going on?

And the head monk says,

After lunch there's going to be a funeral for a priest.

In those days,

There were at least a hundred,

Probably more than a hundred monks,

Priests,

In this monastic training facility.

So I'm sure there's voices all over,

What happened,

Who's died?

Nobody knows.

The monks responsible for the sick room say there's nobody there.

I don't know who died.

So after the meal,

Everyone gets dressed up in kesas,

Because the one thing you wouldn't do is go to the abbot and say,

What's going on?

Well,

Maybe Huangbo might,

Or he might say,

Hmm,

I think maybe Baizhang's up to something.

I'll just keep my mouth shut and follow along.

So all of the priests,

All of the monks put on their kesas,

Dress formally for a funeral.

Baizhang,

At the front of the line,

Leads them around to the other side of the mountain,

Where he reaches into a hole with his stick and pulls out the body of a fox.

Very strange.

But again,

In the Zen tradition,

It doesn't burst out into sort of like,

What's going on?

What's with you?

Have you lost your mind,

Old man?

In fact,

If anything,

This kind of behavior would provoke a silence,

Because something is going on.

Maybe Huangbo starts smiling,

Hmm,

Definitely something going on.

So Huangbo,

With this dead fox dangling off the end of his staff,

Brings it to the funeral pyre,

They light it on fire,

They do the traditional chants,

Which are extensive.

This is the thing that I think is often skipped,

Is the funeral service for a priest is an ordination,

It's a very long process,

With a lot of chanting,

A lot of solemnity,

A lot of incense,

A lot of prostrations,

More chanting,

And so this is a fox that's going up in smoke.

But everybody goes along,

Okay,

Complete confusion,

Questioning,

What's going on?

At some point,

The teacher is going to say something about this,

At some point,

There's going to be a door in to the circumstance,

To the activity that we're engaged in.

This is a really challenging model,

I think.

This is part of the reason why Bai Zhang is so endearing to me,

Is because he leads with activity first.

This has always been a great challenge for me in teaching Zen in the West,

Is that I think if a teacher today were to behave this way,

Were to start this way,

Oh,

A priest has died and we need to have a funeral,

Well,

First of all,

Everyone would be talking,

What's going on?

Hey,

Has the abbot lost his mind?

And then,

Even if they sort of got through that,

Well,

Nobody really knows what's going on,

But let's just trust and let's see what happens.

The abbot walking around the back of the mountain,

Pulling a dead animal out of a cave with a staff,

I think people would start leaving the monastery at this point.

The guy's lost his marbles.

But maybe these people have practiced with Bai Zhang for a while,

Or maybe Huang Po has been sitting in the background going,

Wait for it,

Wait for it,

Be careful,

Tread carefully,

There's something going on.

So finally,

In the evening,

Everything sort of returns to normal at the monastery.

The evening session begins and Bai Zhang takes the high seat to give a teaching.

And he tells a story.

When Bai Zhang gave a series of talks,

A certain old man was always there listening together with the monks.

When they left,

He would leave too.

One day,

However,

He remained behind.

Bai Zhang asked him,

Who are you standing here before me?

Now,

There's a number of things that are very strange about the way that he explains this.

Particularly if you spend some time looking at the Bai Zhang monastic code for how a series of talks would operate.

Even here,

Even today,

The way that we do Zen talks is based on the Bai Zhang monastic code.

It's been functioning in essentially the same way for more than a thousand years.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So as you know,

When I come in to give a talk,

There's a gong,

I come in and sit down.

And at the end of the talk,

I get up and I leave,

And everybody's still here.

This isn't what happens here.

One day,

However,

The old man remains behind.

So Bai Zhang asks him,

Who are you standing here before me?

Now this question,

In the Zen school,

This is a question that comes up in many cases and in many stories and many interactions between teachers and students and adepts and masters and masters.

Who are you standing here before me?

This is also one of the fundamental koans that we can engage with in our own practice.

Not asking another,

Who are you?

But a question about our nature,

Beyond subject and object,

Beyond self and other.

Who are you?

What is it?

Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?

What is Buddha?

All of these questions are pointing to the same thing.

And in the Zen school,

This is a very difficult question to respond to.

And it's an easy question to miss,

Especially in a circumstance like this.

First meeting,

Face-to-face,

Who are you?

Seems a very natural question to ask.

A very natural response would be,

You know,

I'm Eshu,

I come from Suk.

And this would be,

In this circumstance,

Entirely the wrong way to respond.

Yeah,

Maybe not the wrong way.

There's no wrong way to respond,

I suppose,

To this question.

Have we hit 30 minutes?

Yeah?

Okay,

So we shouldn't really be.

.

.

Oh,

Wait a minute,

No,

No,

We're all soft now,

That's right.

Okay,

My apologies.

I start talking about Baizhang and I get so mean.

Who are you?

Standing here before me,

The old man replied,

I am not a human being.

What does he mean by this?

I am not a human being.

It's just said that there's an old man that hung around afterwards,

But his first response is,

I am not a human being.

Well,

He hasn't completely fallen off.

He responds.

In the far distant past,

In the time of Kasyapa Buddha,

I was head priest on this mountain.

So the old man is bringing up the idea,

This sort of cosmological idea of rebirth.

Part into this cosmological idea of rebirth is the idea that positive activity,

Positive,

In this case,

A positive response might somehow improve the kind of birth that you are going to have.

Making a mistake is going to be causally,

It's going to result in a negative birth.

The fox in Chinese mythology,

Most Asian mythology is a kind of a devil.

It's kind of a trickster.

Even in our own culture,

The character of the fox is one of sort of deception,

Cleverness,

Trickiness.

So by responding this way,

I am not a human being in the far distant past.

I wouldn't worry about ringing it,

Because everyone can move freely.

Maybe at an hour,

Ring it,

Okay?

This case is so loaded.

In the far distant past,

In the time of Kasyapa Buddha,

I was head priest on this mountain.

Now this is in the time of Kasyapa Buddha.

Again,

Cosmologically speaking,

In Buddhist talk,

Kasyapa Buddha is the Buddha that existed in the world cycle before Shakyamuni Buddha,

Our world cycle.

So what this old man is talking about is a world cycle that existed in the last kalpa.

And as you know,

A kalpa is the amount of time it takes,

If you had a ball the size of Ring Road at UVic,

And you filled it with poppy seeds,

And it's as deep as it is wide,

Like the diameter,

It's like as deep as the diameter,

Right,

Or the radius,

And you fill it with poppy seeds,

And you take out one poppy seed every three years,

And then the amount of time it would take to empty that ball is like a small kalpa,

And a world cycle is like three of those.

So that's how far back this monk was,

The head monk,

In the time of Kasyapa Buddha.

So again,

We have this timelessness.

Whenever we get into references like this,

The whole point of it is not to sort of get involved in the calculation of how long ago that was,

But in fact,

Quite the opposite.

It's like a slap,

Saying like,

Inconceivable.

That's the point of these kind of calculations.

I think our minds in the West,

We like to sort of try to figure it out,

But the point of these kinds of calculations is that all that takes place in the many years before,

The many breaths,

The many days before this activity of this moment,

They become incalculable.

Because we can't touch them,

We can't manipulate them,

We can't alter them,

It's this inconceivable past that has already taken place,

Yesterday,

A millennia ago,

A kalpa ago.

I am not a human being.

In the far distant past,

In the time of Kasyapa Buddha,

I was head priest on this mountain.

So,

He was a person who had a responsibility.

The head priest,

The teaching priest,

Like the shikha,

Responsible for interacting,

Guiding the practice of other people,

This is a serious business,

Accepting the responsibility for the guidance and teaching of other people.

One day,

A monk asked me,

Does an awakened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?

This is a great question.

The first case in the gateless barrier is the kuan mu,

No.

As we investigate this case,

Our investigation is pointed at the origin,

Shunyata,

Emptiness,

Mu.

Our practice in this kuan mu is to allow everything to melt away,

To dissolve,

To burn off,

To drop away,

Until we arrive at the very source,

Completely empty,

Inside and outside fuse and become one.

There is no more subject,

And no more object.

From this place,

This emptiness,

There is no good and bad,

There is no good and bad.

Good and bad are subjective.

They require a separation,

They require a duality,

They require an opinion,

A preference,

A self to be born.

But also,

All things in this cosmos arise out of this mu,

This emptiness.

This is one of the places where in Zen,

It's the most dangerous place in practice.

This is what Bajine is pointing to in this case.

Joshi Roshi always used to give this very simple sort of description.

He used to say,

In the absolute,

There is no subject,

There is no object.

Just like I've said,

There is no inside and there is no outside.

There is no good and there is no bad.

This is the dharma body,

The dharmakaya.

This is what we talk about when we talk about the sila or the precepts in our tradition.

In the dharmakaya,

There is nobody to be killed and no one to kill,

Nothing to crave,

No one to desire it,

Etc.

The distance has been sealed.

There are no words,

There is no way to describe it,

Because there is nothing separate to describe.

But he would say,

There is no bathrooms and there is no restaurants,

So we can't stay there.

Immediately,

Subject and object are born.

Space arises,

Distance.

We are able to see what we are looking at.

When we see what we are looking at,

We are able to be seen.

This is this fundamental activity,

Plus and minus,

Birth and death.

The experience of mu,

The experience of this dissolution,

This unification,

Is a very powerful experience.

It is not something that I can explain in words.

It alters your perception of the cosmos.

You can have an idea about it.

You can think,

Oh,

That sounds really cool.

But even with an idea of it,

Even if you really think about it a lot and think how wonderful it must be,

The reality is,

When we look at our lives,

We don't live our lives based on that experience.

For the most part,

We look at the world as subject and object,

This and that,

Good and bad,

Right and wrong,

All of those kinds of things.

We don't have the underpinning,

The underlying experience,

Kensho,

Realization of this fundamental oneness,

This fundamental emptiness,

That is at the root of Joshu's mu,

Which is the foundation of Zen practice.

All of our efforts,

Particularly at the beginning,

Are aimed at the realization of this one mu.

But we can't stay there.