History, Koans, and Bumping Into It

Same spot in the path as a few days ago, today with clear skies and fresh snow.

I’m a Soto Zen history buff because I find so much in that field that invigorates practice.

For starters, the research that I most enjoy is like a thick mystery novel. I get a vicarious thrill as the historians, like detectives following the who-done-it? clues, try to connect the dots and make fresh sense of the past. What I enjoy most of all is how the history underscores the teaching the tradition – especially when that is done in spite of itself.

Here’s what I mean by that: the stories told about our tradition (just like our “selves”) continue to show themselves as shifting, unreliable, and empty of anything except that which we impute. They’re not nothing, mind you, just wonderfully empty.

Or as Tony Hoagland puts it in “History of Desire,”

…This is how history catches up
by holding still until you
bump into yourself….

Last night, for example, I got an email from a Zen student asking about Bodiford’s book, Soto Zen in Medieval Japan, of which I am very fond. I haven’t looked at it in years, so I pulled it off the shelf.

The book fell open to this dialogue (p. 56) from Record of the Final Words of the Founder of Eiheiji between Ejo, Dogen’s main successor, and Gikai, Ejo’s main successor:

Gikai: I have attained an insight based on our former teacher’s saying Shinjin datsuraku [body mind cast off].

Ejo: Good. Good. What do you understand?

Gikai: I understand datsuraku shinjin [cast off body mind].

Ejo: What is the meaning?

Gikai: I had thought only [the] barbarian beard was red, but here is another red-bearded barbarian.”

Ejo: Among the many permitted shinjin [body mind], there is this kind of shinjin [body mind].

A number of things are remarkable here. The modern Soto Zen story has Dogen and his first generation successor, Ejo, as pure shikantaza monks who did not study koans, and were even somehow against koans. But, whoops, there’s a whole lot of data that doesn’t line up with that story, like the above passage (and like 90% of the Shobogenzo).

Gikai presents himself as having insight, doing introspection during zazen with the phrase shinjin datsuraku (body mind cast off). And the whole dialogue is very much like Dogen’s encounter with Ju-ching (click here).

Ejo checks his understanding in a manner very reminiscent of modern koan work and asks for a verse (a jakugo – follow this link to Victor Sogen Hori’s incredible work, Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice, and, btw, for those of you interested in the language and stories of Zen, there is probably no better source).

Gikai then quotes the final phrase of the Wild Fox koan (damn, I can’t get away from that horrible wild fox!) and, of course, turns it first this way and then that way. Body mind cast off, cast off body mind; barbarian’s beard was red, red-bearded barbarian. “You are not it but in truth it is you.”

So what?

I once asked Katagiri Roshi, “Is shikantaza shamata (calming) or vipassana (insight)?”

Roshi said, “Shikantaza is calming and insight in dynamism.”

So what?

To practice zazen as something that is separate from insight (and koans are Zen style insight practice) is hardly wholehearted (’cause it is just a part of Buddha’s zazen) and hardly Buddhist at all, in the sense that BUDH (literally, “awake”) – ism is an oximoron without insight.

So what?

I bumped into this falling maple leaf of calming/insight shikantaza with Great Patience Katagiri almost 30 years ago and I still haven’t used it up.

Maybe you’ve found it for yourself but if you haven’t and are intensely interested, hold still long enough (and quietly contemplate birth and death) and you’ll bump into it too.