Entangling Vines Page 2
The approved form of entanglement with koans involves thorough, sustained absorption in one koan at a time, in the hope that it will eventually resolve in a deeply liberating realization. Before the process runs its course, however, engaging a koan in this fashion often feels tedious or even torturous—every bit as constricting and exasperating as the title metaphor implies—and the bonds grow still tighter if one thrashes around mentally in the effort to get loose. So whoever originally applied the phrase “entangling vines” to koans undoubtedly deserves a prize for Truth in Advertising (Medieval Chinese Division). It wasn’t a private effort, though; institutionally, for centuries Chan and Zen have stressed the hardship of working with koans, promoting images of the process even more painful to contemplate than getting snarled in a web of creepers. The most cringe-inducing of these liken koan study to nightmares at the dining table—gnawing on an iron bun, eating the putrid mash left after the fermentation of alcohol, lapping up the shit and piss of bygone sages, swallowing a red-hot iron ball that can’t be disgorged.
Despite such repulsive warnings, generations of Zen practitioners—male and female, lay and monastic, dauntless or terrified—have undertaken koan work and survived to verify its joys and lasting benefits as well as its intermittent miseries. Most descriptions of the process attribute the difficulty of koans to their deliberate thwarting of rationality. By this account, koans function as efficient traps for logical thought because the masters of old designed them expressly for that purpose. While it’s true that logic rarely produces significant insight into a koan, the notion that koans are explicitly intended to impede logic doesn’t hold up.
Centuries ago, the annals of Chan tell us, a monk questioned his distinguished master about the sayings of his predecessors, asking, “Did the buddhas and ancestral teachers have the intention of tricking people or not?” The master’s reply holds for Buddhist texts of all kinds but fits koans particularly well:
Tell me, do rivers and lakes have any intention of obstructing people? Although rivers and lakes have no intention of obstructing people, still people can’t cross them, so they become barriers from a human standpoint. Although ancestral teachers and buddhas had no intention of tricking people, right now people can’t go beyond them, so ancestral teachers and buddhas trick people after all.
Rather than presuming that koans were created to confound us, we would do well to take them at face value, as good-faith attempts to present the Dharma, the wisdom of the Buddha, in a straightforward, perhaps striking, manner. Many events in everyday life surprise and confuse us, after all, though no one intends them to; we simply don’t understand them or even know how to understand them. From this perspective, it seems utterly unremarkable that a koan—a few words cherished for illuminating reality in a profound way—would go over our heads on first encounter (and maybe for quite a while afterward). Koans often perplex the monastics and laypeople who appear in them, and evidence abounds that they’ve perplexed innumerable monks, nuns, and laypeople who’ve pondered them as well. You’re baffled by them? Big deal. Join the crowd.
Beyond the qualities that have made koans a challenge in any age lie obstacles of a more mundane sort. Readers of this book can’t help being hampered by the fact that an enormous gulf of time, language, history, and worldview separates us from the original parties to its content—both the people who speak and act in its koans and those who later transcribed, edited, compiled, and published them. While the latter surely had posterity in mind as they went about their tasks, they had to speak to their culture in its own terms. Even if they could have imagined readers like you and me, they couldn’t possibly have tailored their texts to suit modern minds.
Judging it infeasible to bridge this culture gap, some Asian teachers whose own training centered on traditional koans have chosen to set them aside when instructing Westerners, instead improvising koans free of exotic references. Other masters, determined to transmit the legacy of koan study intact, have strived to help non-Asian practitioners cross the cultural gulf. This effort has sometimes led them to minimize cultural differences and assert dubiously universal human qualities and “archetypes,” and it has inevitably necessitated more or less detailed exposition of distinctively Asian elements that crop up in the koan stories.
Entangling Vines presents a lesser problem in this regard than earlier and better-known koan casebooks such as the Gateless Barrier and Blue Cliff Record, for it dispenses with all the embellishments that complicate and enrich those collections. Even so, most readers would be lost without the exemplary assistance that Thomas Kirchner provides in this translation, elucidating as he does every contextual feature that would obscure the basic sense of its koans. Luckily for us, he works from both sides of the cultural divide, coupling scholarly expertise and long years as a Zen priest in Japan with a keen awareness of Westerners’ needs deriving from his American upbringing. Besides rendering the text into English with great care, he has supplied the Chinese graphs for convenient comparison, generously annotated terms and allusions that would escape most of us otherwise, and furnished biographical information on every identifiable figure who appears herein.
Thus equipped, in most instances even a newcomer to Zen can readily discern the literal meaning of these koans and get a sense of their players, but engagement with a koan only starts there. What ensues will depend on a number of factors: your background in Zen practice and in koan training particularly, the character of the specific koan under consideration, your teacher’s guidance, and so on. In general, however, the process involves finding one’s way into the koan, imaginatively inhabiting the situation that it describes and exploring the metaphors and images it uses. Out of this reconnoitering comes an awareness of which point or points in the koan require clarification. Then the hard work begins. To promote full absorption in the koan and penetration of each point, many masters advocate the use of a huatou (, J., watō), a word or brief phrase that stands in for the full koan and that, with enough determination and practice, you can learn to carry in the midst of daily life and even in sleep, as well as during periods of formal, seated practice (zazen).
From this, it should be apparent that we’re talking about complete immersion in the koan, an absorption that crosses supposed boundaries between the physical, emotional, psychological, and mental aspects of our lives. Although reason doesn’t play a prominent role in this process, it can’t be excluded; as engagement with the koan deepens, a type of inquiry develops that doesn’t privilege one faculty over another. It often comes as a surprise to Westerners that inquiry of this nature is bodily as much as anything else and that, accordingly, expressions such as “working on a koan” don’t boil down to euphemisms for thinking hard. Rather, they signify total commitment to the koan without trying to wring meaning from it. Its resolution can’t be forced. One can only trust the process and carry on, however long it may take. Such is the degree of entanglement that koan study calls for.
At no small risk of oversimplification, perhaps we can say that koan work amounts, in the long run, to passing through a koan as a set of words and reanimating the realization from which those words sprang. The experience of resolving a koan has the quality of seeing with your own eyes what its originator must have seen in order to formulate them that way. One has the feeling not of matching wits with some faraway sage but of an intimate, immediate meeting of minds, a variation on the “mind-to-mind transmission” that Chan and Zen have noisily proclaimed and celebrated. A well-known Chinese master of the thirteenth century went so far as to declare that a breakthrough on his preferred koan would enable you to meet its author personally and “walk hand in hand with the generations of ancestral masters, truly knitting your eyebrows with theirs, seeing with the same eyes and hearing with the same ears.”
How this could occur no one can tell. I suppose neuroscientists may hope to document it with their imaging devices, but such an event is rare enough even in serene temple circumstances that the chances of its taking place un
der laboratory conditions become hopelessly small. To say, as I just did, that resolving a koan entails “reanimating” a prior realization actually attributes too much agency to the practitioner and too little to the koan. I might just as well say that the ancient realization encapsulated in the koan enlivens us practitioners. A phrase favored by the illustrious master Hakuin Ekaku conveys the mutuality of the process: “Mind illuminates old teachings; old teachings illuminate mind.”
The preceding overview of koan work derives all but entirely from the lineage of Chan and Zen known in Japan as the Rinzai sect. The other major strain of Japanese Zen, the Sōtō sect, for centuries institutionally disavowed and criticized koan practice, but that’s started to change in recent years. Research demonstrating a long and proud heritage of koan work in their own school has prompted some Sōtō leaders in the United States and elsewhere to begin experimenting with ways to revive it. Entangling Vines may prove helpful in this endeavor, for it contains follow-up koans, often referred to as “checking questions,” omitted by earlier koan collections. Masters use these secondary koans to test students’ realization and prod them to further insights.
The Sōtō sect historically has denigrated koan practice chiefly on the grounds that it can become delusory in its own right, hooking people on a quest for buddha nature—a quest to grasp the ungraspable and gain what nobody lacks. This criticism, trenchant as it is, doesn’t diminish in any regard the benefit countless Chan and Zen practitioners past and present have received from koan work, but it does point up a third form of entanglement with koans perhaps more dangerous than the pair described above. Frequently koans cling for a while after resolving, as practitioners’ understandable elation and feeling of accomplishment morph into smugness and obsession with “passing koans.” If this tendency isn’t soon scotched, it can easily toughen into private arrogance and condescension and, even more lamentably, sometimes results in exaggerated public attention to kenshō (realization experiences) and koan study per se. Old Chan worthies called this getting bound with a golden chain, since attachment to liberation has brought merely a glorified sort of enslavement.
Consider yourself warned. Entangling Vines is a magnificent book, subject to serious and consequential misuse. If you feel drawn to investigation of koans, get yourself a reliable guide—a Zen master of good reputation who’s done protracted, close training in a lineage with a history of koan work—and throw yourself into it headlong. The old vines still hold.
Nelson Foster
NELSON FOSTER is a Dharma heir of Diamond Sangha founder Robert Aitken and succeeded him at its Honolulu temple. He now teaches mainly at Ring of Bone Zendo in the Sierra Nevada foothills, making periodic visits to the East Rock Sangha in New England.
Introduction
THE KOAN COLLECTION Shūmon kattōshū has found an able translator in Thomas Kirchner, a ten-year veteran of Zen monastic life and presently the caretaker of Rinsen-ji, the subtemple that serves as the Founder’s Hall of Tenryū-ji in Kyoto. In translating this work, one of the most important texts for Japanese Rinzai koan studies, Kirchner worked closely with Rev. Hirata Seikō (1924–2008), the former Chief Abbot of the Tenryū-ji branch of Rinzai Zen and former master of Tenryū-ji monastery.
Born in the state of Maryland in 1949, Kirchner left the United States in 1969 for a junior-year-abroad program at the International Division of Waseda University in Tokyo. There he studied Japanese culture and religion, and practiced the martial art of kyūdō (Japanese archery). His first encounter with a Zen master was with ninety-five-year-old Katō Kōzan Rōshi (1876–1971), the priest of a small temple in the mountains west of Tokyo and one of the greatest Zen teachers of that generation. Through this connection he later met Kōzan Rōshi’s successor, Tsukada Kōun Rōshi (1898–1985), priest of the temple Shōan-ji in Nagano Prefecture, where Kirchner moved in early 1971 to begin formal Zen practice.
Kirchner’s encounter with these two exceptional teachers determined the course of his subsequent training. In the Spring 1996 issue of the journal Zen Bunka, Kirchner briefly described his stay under Kōun Rōshi. I find it a particularly evocative picture of his early contact with Zen, so I reproduce it here in full:
On the weekends I used to attend the meditation retreats at Katō Kōzan’s temple Toku’un-in, located deep in a valley where two rivers joined. It was on one of these visits that I first met Tsukada Kōun Rōshi.
Every autumn, as the Japanese maples started to redden, Kōun Rōshi and several of his students would visit Toku’un-in to pay their respects to Kōzan Rōshi. On these occasions meditation would be cancelled, and everyone would gather around a large table for an informal dinner in honor of the visitors. Kōun Rōshi, seventy-two years old at the time, had none of the mysterious air that I once associated with Zen masters. He was a plain man, looking rather like an old farmer, with a gaze that was open, yet penetrating and perceptive.
Those at the table asked me if there was anything I wished to ask Kōun Rōshi. As it was, a question had been on my mind for some time. I had come to Japan on a student visa for my junior-year-abroad program with Waseda, and had remained after the program to begin Zen practice. To support myself I was working as an English teacher, an activity that my visa status did not, strictly speaking, allow. Full honesty with oneself is central to Zen practice, I felt, and yet in order to practice Zen I was having to lie. I asked Kōun Rōshi what I should do in such a situation. He immediately replied, with a good-natured laugh, “In a situation like that, you should be completely honest about telling the lie.”
My plan had been to live at Toku’un-in from January 1971, but when I arrived at the temple soon after the New Year’s holiday it became obvious that Kōzan Rōshi’s failing health would make that impossible. The people there recommended that I stay instead with Kōun Rōshi at Shōan-ji, saying they would notify him of my coming. The next morning I went to the nearby town of Itsukaichi and boarded a local train for Nagano Prefecture, high in the mountains of central Japan. At about seven o’clock in the evening, after several transfers and a few extended stops at snow-covered rural stations, each one colder than the last, I finally arrived at Nakagomi, the town nearest Shōan-ji. A twenty-minute bus ride took me to the foot of the long stone path leading up to the temple through a grove of giant cryptomeria trees. The moonlight, reflected by the snow, cast a pale glow over the winter landscape.
Reaching the temple, I noticed lights on in the room next to the entrance hall, and called out in greeting. Kōun Rōshi had not, it turned out, received word of my coming, but if he and his wife were surprised to see a shaven-headed foreigner standing in their entranceway they did not show it. My request to stay was accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow. Thus began my half-year stay under this unusual master.
Every day Kōun Rōshi would rise with us at four-thirty in the morning for an hour of zazen in the piercing cold of the meditation hall. After seating himself he would lean forward and strike his own shoulders several times with his short warning-stick (keisaku), as if to spur himself on to greater efforts. Zazen was followed by private sanzen instruction, then about thirty or forty minutes of sutra chanting in the main hall. At the end of the formal sutra service Kōun Rōshi would take a few sticks of lighted incense out on the porch, raise them toward the morning sky in his wrinkled hand, and read a few short sutras.
Kōun Rōshi read the sutras with an unusual rhythm. Katō Kōzan Rōshi once called him a tanuki (a racoon-like animal with a trickster reputation), and, sure enough, whenever anyone tried to follow his rhythm Kōun Rōshi would subtly change it.
But, tanuki though he may have been, Kōun Rōshi had no deceit. There was a deep integrity about him; at that time I was full of unrealistic ideals about Zen, enlightenment, and Zen masters, yet nothing that Kōun Rōshi said or did during the entire time I was there betrayed those ideals, or seemed in any way dishonest or false.
Unusually for a Zen master, he was something of a philosopher, a man who enjoyed discussing
ideas and who had a gift for explaining complex problems in simple terms. No matter how abstract or theoretical a question I would ask, he always had a concrete reply that somehow cut through to the core of the issue. Never in these discussions did I sense any impatience—he would explain until I was satisfied, however long that took. The master also put great value on samu , manual labor. The best jobs for Zen monks were weed-pulling and emptying the toilets, he said, and even at his age he would help with those chores.
Later, after I left Nagano and began formal monastic life, I would sometimes return to Shōan-ji during the off-season. No matter what my doubts and questions were at the time, merely being with Kōun Rōshi for a few days was enough to dispel them.
The rōshi remained in good health until the end of his life. According to his wife, one evening he said “I’ll rest now,” and went to bed. That night he died in his sleep. He was eighty-eight years old.
Desiring to experience formal monastic life, in June 1971 Kirchner entered Shōfuku-ji monastery in Kobe as a lay monk and trained there for three years under Yamada Mumon Rōshi (1900–1988). In 1974 he was ordained and given the name Shaku Yūhō , and soon afterward entered Kenchō-ji monastery in Kamakura as an unsui (a formal Zen training monk). He remained at Kenchō-ji under Minato Sodō Rōshi (1912–2006) until 1978, when he left monastic life for several years to complete his college studies. After receiving a B.A. in Buddhist studies from Ōtani University in 1981, he resumed his training under Sodō Rōshi, who had in the meantime moved to Kennin-ji monastery in Kyoto.