I understand the Book of Mu is selling briskly. Well, briskly for a book on a spiritual practice that is both mysterious and arcane to the majority of people, even Zen people, even Zen people who do koans…
I feel this was a very important project. That dog and that question have saved many people over the many years. And, I’m so honored to have had a hand in presenting what it means to the Western reader, as well as the Western practitioner.
And little things keep popping up that I wish we’d noticed in time to include in the book. My dear friend Josh Bartok just sent me this from T’aego Bou, the great Korean Zen master and a direct lineage ancestor of our Boundless Way collective. I swear I read the book. But, then, a fair amount of time ago, and I missed it when Melissa & I were in the gathering stages for the book.
But, good news. Here it is:
This word No is not the No of existence and one existence. It is not the No of true nothingness. Ultimately, what is it?
When you arrive here, you must abandon all with your whole body, not doing anything, not doing not-doing-anything. Go straight to the empty and free and vast, with no pondering what to think. The previous thought is already extinct, the following thought does not arise, the present thought is itself empty. You do not hold to emptiness, and you forget you are not holding on. You do not reify this forgetting: you escape from not reifying and the escape too is not kept. When you reach such a time, there is just a spiritual light that’s clearly aware and totally still, appearing as a lofty presence.
Do not wrongly give birth to interpretations: just bring up the koan twenty-four hours a day, whatever you are doing. Do not be oblivious of it for a moment: diligently come to grips with it and study it in fine detail. If you keep studying like this, pulling it back and forth, when you reach the proper time, look back most carefully and see what Zhaozhou’s No means. When you are unable to turn back, like a rat going into a hollow horn, then views are cut off.
When those sharp faculties get here, they empty through and smash the lacquer bucket of ignorance; they capture and defeat Zhaozhou. They have no more doubts about the sayings of the world’s enlightened people.
Even if you are awakened like this, do not speak of it in front of people without wisdom. You must go see a legitimate teacher of the school.
T’aego Bou from A Buddha from Korea (translated by J.C. Cleary)
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