Mudballs and Buddhas

In response to recent posts distinguishing silent illumination and shikantaza, a couple practitioners wondered, “So what?”

This is an important question. Simply put, imho, because the Buddha dharma is infinitely subtle (and incomparably profound too, as the verse before the dharma talk says).

When the Buddha held up a flower and Mahakasyapa smiled, the Buddha recognized that he had realized the eye of the subtle dharma. Dogen wrote the nearly 100 chapters of the Shobogenzo to roll around that jewel.

And I can report that after 30-odd years of practice, that this sure is in line with my experience – subtle and ungraspable … and yet is not nothing. Therefore, careful understanding and practice it is necessary to discover and play with the real McCoy.

That said, there are other reasons that we moderns, like the ancients, quibble about practice details and our understanding. Like J.P. Morgan said, “A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

That’s a bit cynical (although I’d self-servingly rather regard it as having worked through my idealism) but it does point to how we’re all complex and a thick (rather than thin and one dimensional) explanation for what we do and say embraces more of the complexity of our human personalities.

Take the silent illumination/koan debate Song Dynasty China that has continued through Japan to today. Hongzhi and Dahui (and many others that they represent) were certainly, imv, deeply, authentically concerned with the freedom of their students and so taught silent illumination and koan introspection, respectively.

At the same time, they worked to establish the authenticity of their lineages, sometimes stretching and gluing together stories that legitimized them to their political and economic supporters in order to perpetuate their lineages. Once again, see How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute Over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in the Song-Dynasty China by Morten Schlutter for more on this.

Dahui criticized the enlightenment of Soto teachers. Dogen asserts (see Jisho Zammai online here) that Dahui himself never had a verified enlightenment and suggests the Dahui’s venomous attacks on the Soto line are due to his emotional trauma that resulted from a couple Soto teachers refusing to give him transmission.

Awareness of the economic and political motivations of the great teachers is one important dimension to fully appreciating what they had to say. It puts them in a human context.

Enlightened people can be self-centered. Selfishness and selfishlessness (a Katagiri term) are entangled for all of us, moment by moment, more or less. Denying the tangle leads to fragile idealism that will crack and crumble. Acknowledging it is healthy in that it promotes openness and intimacy.

You might find me cynical, but in my view, that’s as good as it gets. A Zen teacher is a teacher to the extent that s/he embraces his/her humanness.

And as Dogen said, “The bigger the mud ball, the bigger the Buddha.”