Zen and the Beauty of Ancient Days: Dongshan’s First Rank

At our Saturday morning zazenkai on October 13th, 2024, my dear friend and co-conspirator at Empty Moon Zen, Roshi Edward Sanshin Oberholtzer gave the Dharma talk. He explored the first verse of Dongshan’s famous Five Ranks. I asked if I could share it at my Monkey Mind blog, and he graciously consented…

It often takes a child to ask a question that opens either a can of worms or a fresh insight into the nature of things. Where do babies come from? Where do you go when you die? Why is that man poor? Why is that woman blind? Why does ice float? Why are there no green mammals?

One of my favorite childish questions is really both simple and deeply profound. Why is the night sky black? I sit out on my back patio and gaze up at that night sky pondering just that question. Better yet, I lie out on the grass and, instead of looking up, find myself clinging to the surface of the earth’s  sphere, looking down, down into the immeasurable depths that open out beneath me in the dark. And so that childish question: why clearly among all those stars is there all that black space, all that emptiness? If the universe were endless and continuously populated with star after star, then, you would think, between any two stars, no matter how close they might appear to be, there would be yet another star, and with each one of them and their neighbors putting out light the entire night sky would be ablaze with starlight, a vast glowing sheet. Clouds of dust would, over time be heated by the stars behind them and glow with the light of the stars they have obscurred. But, of course, it’s dark, an inky blackness strewn, granted, with stars, those myriad pinpricks of light, but holding onto its vast empty, darkness. An indication, perhaps, that the universe has not been around forever, that stars have yet to have expanded off into eternity. Or, perhaps, that distant stars have passed beyond the limits of our vision as space itself and not the stars embedded within it has expanded faster than light can catch up with it. But let me leave the comfort of my back porch rocking chair, leave that wonderous sight of a black inky sky strewn with pinpricks of light, each a star, each with worlds swirling around it, each, possibly circled by the distant homes of creatures, if not like ourselves, then dazzeling in themselves.

And let us consider that great and vast emptiness emerging together  with the particularity of all those stars, of all of those rocky, icy, or gaseous worlds,. emptiness emerging together with form, but an emptiness,nonetheless, a vast and dark ever expanding emptiness………

Dongshan, one of our ancesters on the Way lays this out in his first of his Five Ranks, themselves a culmination of the koan path, revered in both the Linji line and Dongshan’s and our own line, the Caodong. The Five Ranks provides a structure to examine both the results of our koan path and an examination of the interpenetration of the particular and the absolute, of form and emptiness. Let’s begin at the beginning – the first of those ranks is

Sho Chu Hen (J: the particular within the essential)

Now, one way I might be tempted to speak of the essential emerging from the particular is by considering that we cannot speak, for example, of the temperture of a single molecule of oxygen. Instead, temperture emerges as the property of a vast collection of molecules. Rigidity is not a property of a single iron atom but of an array of iron atoms bound together as a bar of metal. An army is not a single soldier, no matter what recuiting videos tell us. Instead it emerges from a collection of soldiers. a single lark is only a single lark, a multitude becomes an excaultation of larks. There are single starlings that show up in daylight hours on my back patio, the same back patio from which I gaze at starlit nights. Those singular starlings fly off , leaving the bird feeders I have so diligently maintained and join in masses of birds, in flocks, in swarms of birds, undulating clouds that move en mass from tree line to tree line.. A single grain of sand becomes a beach. Perhaps there is no more mysterious emergent qualty than that our sense of self emerges from the myriad skandas, heaps, properties that make up our lives. All of these singular things join and become something greater. Our currency proclaims of us that E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. And this all makes sense, the absolute stepping forth from the particular. But these examples ignore William Blake’s observation of a universe in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. And  Blake’s poetry reminds us that the absolute is not just a collection of individual things, it is each of those individual things. It’s not just in the collective masses of forms, but in each form itself that the absolute emerges. So yes, perhaps that recuruiting advertisement is right – each soldier is an army of one, each grain of sand holds within it a beach, and, as much as that fiction of an ego emerges from all those constituent parts, the absolute emerging from all those particulars is no fiction.

Dongshan provides a gatha, a set of verses that allow us to dance with the ground bass of his simple setting out of the first rank and so the particular within the essential find their living, breathing articulation in:

When the third watch begins, before the moon rises,

don’t think it strange to meet and not be conscious of meeting,

yet still somehow recall the beauty of ancient days.

Each atom, each lark, each starling,, all of those stars in the night sky, late at night, when the third watch begins, before the moon rises. We have seen the moon rise before. Linji tells his monks to not give him a word about before the 15th of the month, the time of the full moon, the standin for enlightenment. No, he says,  tell me of after the 15th. Where do you go when you step from that 100foot pole? Everyday is a good day.

There is a sense of both completness, of each of the five ranks as being whole and complete, and of there being a progression, and so we find ourselves at midnight, before the full moon of enlightenment peaks over the horizon, darkness broken only by an occassional bolt of lightning on the horizon, like the branching streams in Shitou Xiqian’s Sandokai, meeting, yet not quite meeting, still remembering the past. As Dongshan has it:

don’t think it strange to meet and not be conscious of meeting,

yet still somehow recall the beauty of ancient days.

And, speaking of immponderible questions, don’t you think it strange to meet and not be conscious of meeting? Yet another question posed by a clear eyed child.

But as I say this, the sun is high in the sky, a sky blue and laced with clouds of a blinding whiteness. Yet, behind that blueness, the result of the sun’s rays scattered through the atmosphere, the sky beyond is deepest black, and the stars and galaxies move off away from us as the very space within which they are embedded expands. And the absolute emerges from particularity just as that oak tree stands out in that corn field.