Using One Unobstructed Boat: How to Transcend Sounds and Colors Without Even Trying

Here are a couple bald eagles about a week back on a cold and windy day. This pair has hung around all winter, staying quite close to their nest and seeming to hunt together. They pay no heed whatsoever to this old baldy and dog Bodhi.

Speaking of baldies, I met an old friend today for coffee. He’s a retired Episcopalian minister and did a decade in a Catholic monastery when he was just out of high school. We both always arrive exactly on time, remnants of our monastic training, albeit in different traditions. We get together several times a year and always have a good time yacking it up.  A server at one restaurant once came over and asked if we could keep it down a bit, something I think we’re both nonmonastically and unspiritually proud of.

This morning my friend asked how koan training was going. “Still getting your mind zapped by the unanswerable?” he asked.

There is, of course, a bit of a mind zap when first encountering a koan, but koans, I explained to him, aren’t unanswerable and trippy. Instead, koans are the most practical little devils I’ve run across.

For example, “A monk once asked Fayan, ‘How can I transcend two words, sound and color?'”

Well, maybe in this case it’s more of a mind stoppage than a mind zappage. “Huh? I don’t get it,” you might say, “how can ‘I’ who is completely sound and color, transcend what I am?”

My friend is not alone in his impression that koans are unanswerable. Steven Heine concludes his nice piece, “What Is on the Other Side? Delusion and Realization in Dogen’s ‘Genjokoan’” that appears in his new book, Dogen: Textual and Historical Studies (see the previous post here for more) by quoting Dogen’s comments to the sound and color koan, “…Now I ask the great assembly, what things do you call sounds and colors?  Where are sounds and colors now?”

Heine sees this as a “rhetorical question.”

Quite the contrary and quite barking up an eagleless tree, imv. I see Dogen here as inviting a strong and clear dharma presentation.

Fayan responded to the monk, saying, “…if you understand the point of this monk’s question, it is not difficult to transcend sound and color.”

If it were meant rhetorically, in the sense of being unanswerable, transcending would not be not difficult, no?

A koan like this, though, is particularly impenetrable if the deep structures of consciousness still cling to the old stories about birth and death, delusion and enlightenment, buddhas and ordinary people.

Our practice on and off the cushion, is to be a bullshit burning furnace (Daido’s phrase), digging into the marrow of this one great life, leaping through sounds and colors.

Here’s another part of Dogen’s commentary on this koan, all of which occurs, btw, in Dogen’s Extensive Record (the Kindle edition is now a shockingly low $11.92 so shop now!) number 52:

When we realize the way, we do not realize with something else, we realize only with sounds and colors.  When we are deluded, we are not deluded with something else, we are deluded only with sounds and colors.  A deluded person and an enlightened person at the same time use one boat, and each is not obstructed.

Ain’t that sweet?