Some years ago, when I was younger and cleverer than I am now, I would have known exactly what to write when invited to contribute an article on Chan.
As it is, I thought to write of counselling and psychotherapy, for there is no doubt that the Buddha dispensed a powerful medicine, strong enough to quench the fever in this world and the next; to examine the nature of what arises, moment by moment, to understand becoming and passing away, what better remedy? But I have written about that before, and to write about it again is to cling to insights from the past.
Removing the safe limits of the past reveals the problem of the present. What is there to say about the now of Chan? Chan is great faith and great resolution, but it is also great questioning - great doubt, great spirit of enquiry. So in writing of Chan I must write of questions and not answers, uncertainty not certainty. Chan presents its great doubt in the form of the koan, the riddle that nags away at the mind, that laughs, teases, disquiets, infuriates, liberates. Unlike other forms of meditation, the koan is a test, but one that gives no clue to what happens if you live and die without solutions. Would that be failure? If so, who is it who fails and who is it who judges it as failure? And who is it who cares whether the world falls apart or stays in one place?
Master Puyan Duan-an of Dasheng Mountain, said:
You should not sit preserving empty stillness without contemplating a koan. You should not sit mindful of the koan without doubting it.
I shall illustrate my own doubt by writing of a journey, or rather of several journeys, that John Crook and I made; first on a frail, wind-buffeted plane across the January Aegean to the Greek island of Santorini, split once by a mighty volcano and still full of a magic strange as the black dust that shadows the rocks around the bay; and then inland from Athens through the purple hills to Delphi, the sanctuary of Apollo; and, in another incarnation, through the night-time, snow-capped mountains and next day across the plains of Arcadi towards Mani and a distant sea; and later still to the plains of Sparta and a ruined city rising steeply on a hillside, each step of our climb through its empty streets and silent churches an initiation into the mysteries of presence.
Maybe it is a journey that John and I each took in our own minds, and I remember best only those parts of it we shared. No matter. For in each moment the koan arose, at times demanding an urgent answer, at others settling into a peaceful murmur, yet always with a kind of troubled joy that mirrored the enchantment of those journeys into the magic whisper that is Greece.
D. T. Suzuki, that wise, gentle, nail-hard teacher says that the koan is a pointer that functions in two directions, firstly to push the intellect and let it see there is a realm into which as such it can never enter, and secondly to effect the maturity of Zen consciousness which eventually breaks out into a state of satori.
... in the first direction there takes place what has been called 'searching and contriving'. Instead of the intellect, which taken by itself forms only a part of our being, the entire personality, mind and body, is thrown out into the solution of the koan.
So the 'searching and contriving' come first. There is no point in abandoning the intellect all at once, since it also is part of the mind, awaiting transformation. My own koan, 'Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?' has provided me with intellectual answers in plenty, some trivial, some maddening, some supplying what feel like genuine insights into the bodhisattva mind, but all of them ultimately intrusive and leading back to the beginning.
Early in our journeyings, the mystic presence of Greece took hold of my koan and fashioned it into 'Why did John and I come from the West?', a question which aroused a train of cause and effect running back into beginingless time. If certain ancestors, millennia ago, had not escaped the clutches of sabre-toothed tigers there would have been no coming or going for either of us. So the koan aroused gratitude for those long dead ancestors, whose struggle for survival enabled us one day to walk the dusty roads of Greece. In that sense, everyone who ever lived has indeed been our parent.
Yet at other times the koan dissolved into a simple sense of nowness. There was nothing but this now that embraced the koan, the blue dome of the sky, the green leaves in the wind, John, myself, so that I wanted to sing with a quiet joy. Once, on a hill above Athens, we looked down on the smudge of the polluted city, and yet saw the pristine whiteness of the Parthenon, elevated above the grime, sparkling in the sunlight; and past and present fell away to be replaced by two men standing silent in the pure January day.
Greece breathes a very special kind of energy into John. Speaking the language, steeped in its thoughts and its history, Greece is his second home and he initiates one gently into his vision. In the Agora he walks where Socrates walked, and speaks snatches of the dialogues as if they are his own. And Socrates, the old Greek Chan master, rises from the stones, links arms, and in a whisper speaks of the fabled road to Eleusis and of the mysteries enacted there that linger in the blood.
Once we spent the night in a cottage borrowed from friends, perched above a winter village deserted as itself and with a garden looking across the Mani to a moonlit sea, and prised away at my koan and at a mind that grasped it too tightly.
"You must," said John, "become Bodhidharma in order to answer that koan. You must get inside his mind."
"Or at least inside the mind of the monk who first asked the question?"
"That too."
"How?"
"Yours is a very hard koan, a very advanced koan".
"My fault. I chose it years ago."
"Why not something simpler?" asked John.
"Shifu told me I must keep asking "Why, why?", and keep that "why?" always in place."
"Yes. But I think you could also keep asking "what?" I'm sure you would find that helpful."
What a clever trick the koan is! John and I sat late at our supper, mulling over a question to which frail scholarship can give no answer. How full of contradictions and paradoxes Chan is, always tempting, prodding, nudging the mind: 'Look . tell me what you see... show me what you see... , now don't tell me, don't show me, Just see... now tell me what you see...' And so it goes on, until the questions suddenly stop.
Master Gaofeng Yuanmiao told his pupil Qiong:
(Meditate continuously) twenty-four hours a day and do not let there be any interruption. Arise long before dawn, gather your koan and put it in front of you. never depart from the koan. Carry on like this all through the day and through the night. All those who fuse themselves into one whole (with the koan) will surely develop illumination.
On another occasion, walking through the ruins at ancient Olympus, where the games were a sacred ritual for nearly 1,000 years and the victors crowned with laurels from the Hill of Cronus, John spoke to me of the 'spirit of place', that indefinable sense of oneness with woods and fields and stones and with the people who across the centuries lived in that spot and loved what they saw. We know indeed there are no boundaries between us and the world. The materials of which we are made are no different from those in the earth around us. The thoughts in our heads belong half to others. The air in our lungs is taken from and given back to the world at every breath. Our genes are those of our forebears, our beliefs are handed down to us, our lives are dependent upon others. And yet we act and think as if we are separate, like dewdrops strung on the web of existence.
Chan reminds us of our wholeness, our unity, our non-separation. The dewdrops, the web itself are one, not through loss of individuality but through an absence of opposition between unity and individuality. In the Prajnaparamita the Buddha says of the Bodhisattva:
He does not seize on annihilationist views; for all dharmas are absolutely unproduced and therefore no dharma is ever annihilated. He does not seize on eternalist views; because dharmas are not produced, and there is neither eternity nor annihilation.
The mind grasps haltingly after such a truth, accepts its logic but cannot live it. Yet in those moments where one senses the spirit of place, whether at Olympus with its ghosts or in a walk to the postbox in the next street, the truth arises from within ourselves, and we are content.
Chan does not seek to take us to exalted states. It urges us to see where we are and what we are now. Time is the strangest of all concepts, stretching from the past to the future, yet never with a present we can grasp. Chan asks us to forget this crazy business of time, and think only of now, the eternal now. It tells us to refrain from stirring the mind with bittersweet thoughts of the past, with endless plans for the future, with a muddled chain of contriving and wishing that obscures what it is to be ourselves. It bids us look at this strangest yet simplest of all things, this being alive. It urges us to examine what it is to wake each morning and become aware of returning thoughts and sounds and colours. 'Look around you', says Chan, 'see for yourself; only you can experience it; you won't find the answer in other men's science; but take care - if you blink you'll miss it'.
Our journeyings in Greece took us to Delphi. The sanctuary of Apollo rises in a natural sweep of the hills facing the early morning sun, and surprises the traveller on the road below. There for centuries the oracle solved the puzzles of men, and once named Socrates as the wisest in all Athens because he alone knew that he did not know. Delphi, friendly in its stillness, and even in its ruins able to answer questions.
"Why did I come from the West?"
"Look within."
"How should I look?"
"First see who asks the question".
Our Greek friends watched in amusement as the two strange Englishmen picked their entranced path through those marvellous stones, listening to still voices, feeling the spirit of place, awakening the old gods to speak again of Chan.
On another occasion, at the foot of a steep hill miles from a town, John stopped the car to pick up an elderly countrywoman bent by the weight of heavy baskets, translating for me in great delight her stream of thanks: 'Ah the kind gentlemen, there she was at the foot of the hill, wondering how she was going to climb up to her home, the baskets so heavy and she not so young, and surely the Virgin, the good mother of God was taking care of her that day, and would bless the gentlemen for their kindness'. How many journeys up that steep hill with her baskets and no car in sight, and yet one day the English gentlemen came by! Her blessings and those of the Mother of God fell on willing ears, and in that moment our reason for coming from the West stood clear and uncomplicated.
Elsewhere, there was a different kind of magic. Since I heard their names at school, the plains of Arcadi and the plains of Sparta have stirred in my mind an equal excitement. When we drove out of the hills and saw Arcadi before us it was no disappointment. I had long learnt not to expect the lush green woodlands and fields that we wrongly dub Arcadian. Arcadi is a dry, sunburnt place, studded with scrub and small olive trees, but to the Greeks, accustomed to the hard life of the mountains, it looked a demi-Paradise, and I saw it as they saw it, and the excitement of my boyhood was not disappointed. In Chan, once illumination is reached, mountains and rivers are once more mountains and rivers. On seeing Arcadi I was unsure whether this was the first or the last stage of seeing, but the experience brought together two parts of one whole, the plains and whatever 'I' it was who looked out over them.
In the Pratyutpannasamadhi Sutra the Buddha said:
This triple world exists only because of the mind. According to one's own thoughts one sees oneself in one's own mind... All things have no reality in themselves, they take their rise owing to thought and laws of origination. When that which is thought vanishes, the thinking one himself vanishes... all the Bodhisattvas by means of this Samadhi attained great enlightenment.
So Arcadi was seen in direct contemplation, without the thinking that gives it a separate existence. And so it was with Sparta. We came upon it after a bone-chilling night in a small unheated guesthouse, the freezing air pouring down on us from the mountains. But in the morning there was a quiet mist rolling away in the sun, and we breakfasted in a white-tabled cafe with an antique stove, in the company of three workmen who glanced sideways at us with curiosity and powerful Spartan faces. And afterwards, a climb through the ruins of Mystras, ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire. Out of season, we had the city to ourselves. Again the spirit of place, and eye-catching murals on crumbling church walls.
John felt it most, standing transfixed before a painting, medieval yet abruptly modern in style, of Christ in the manger with a blue-mantled virgin reclining full length beside him, her face turned away... In the same church my eye was caught by a frosted glass door to a storeroom, incongruous and functional, and the memory of a dream which seemed to foretell that moment of seeing rose abruptly from the unconscious and kept me in turn transfixed.
Higher up in the city, we passed the houses of nobles, and climbed to the second floor of the largest. From the upper chamber we stepped out onto a balcony supported beneath by decorative arches, and looked over Sparta below. The mist had faded by then, and the plains were filled with a golden light.
How often the family who built and took pride in that house, stone upon stone, must have stood in that same spot and watched morning and night-time. Chan teaches that life and death are the same. In the Prajnaparamita Subhuti says, 'That form which is like a dream, or an echo, a mock show, a mirage, a reflection in the water, an apparition, that form is neither bound nor freed'. Again the spirit of place, and the long dead, still living ghosts who shared the balcony with us.
Higher still there was a monastery, lovingly restored, with quiet nuns in the shadows of a small courtyard, and a living church where we sat on old high-backed seats and meditated in the dusty stillness. The Chan doctrine of no mind. No thinker only thoughts, no meditator only meditation. Another trick, sly and helpful. 'Don't you see? Where are you looking? Who is it that looks? Who is it behind the looker? The wooden man sings and the stone woman dances. Don't you hear them? Very well, who is it who does not see, does not hear? Who is it? And why does he not see and hear?' Why why why? Why did Bodhidharma come? Three years in the journeying, and then nine years sitting before his wall. And then, before he died, the homesickness for India. And after death, the solitary walker sighted on a high mountain pass, one sandal in his hand, treading the long road back to India. And when the news reached China, the opening up of Bodhidharma's tomb, empty but for a sandal. Oh I could weep.
And in that quiet church Christ on the cross, mother blessing, another hint, another divinity, another Buddha.
Without the shedding of blood, there can be no remission of sins. Without the loss of that tough sculpted ego we are stuck forever where we are, no ears that listen, no eyes that see.
Master Liaoyo of Broken Cliff said:
If you want to transcend the ordinary and enter sage-hood, and forever shed sensory afflictions, you must strip off your skin and change your bones... After annihilation you are re-born; it is like flames flaring up in the cold ashes, like a dead tree blooming again. How could this be easy to conceive of?
Now back to the beginning, and that strange journey to the isle of Santorini. Coming in to land, our fragile plane was caught by the wind, and thrown sideways in abrupt uncertainty. Later, a taxi drove us up the hill and left us before an old man watching from a high white wall. In answer to John's request for a room he replied with grave dignity, 'Well then come with me.'
And what a room, built like all of Santorini into the cliff, with a window out to sea. And afterwards a walk bent double in the wind-racked night along the cliff and down the hill past quiet magical houses and narrow winding paths. Next morning, in the crystal light, the volcano in the bay that blew Santorini apart in a skyburst rage those centuries ago. And then we saw more ruins, a city uncovered from volcanic dust, with twisting streets and a vase of flowers where the architect reclaiming it from the vulcan god fell cruelly to his death. Then a small path from the ruins to a quiet restaurant, deserted out of season, where we ate with the clear Aegean at our feet, and men beside us mending their nets in the clarity of the moment and the blessing of Homer's wine-dark sea.
Chan offers us Chan masters to help us on our journeys. In one of his commentaries to the Hekiganroku, Katsuki Sekida writes that:
Children enjoy their positive Samadhi instinctively, and so do horses and cows, standing peacefully in the evening sun. But there is a special quality about the positive samadhi of a mature master, founded as it is on his laboriously achieved absolute samadhi. It has something of the severity and intensity of the high mountains. However, this is not to say that the master may not sometimes have a pleasant chat with you.
The Hekiganroku, the Mumonkan and other collections of koans are full of the master's pleasant chats to his pupils. When Suriyo approached Baso and asked him why Bodhidharma came from the West, Baso struck him down. At other times the pleasant chat takes the form of a mondo. The student asks a question, the master answers, but never in the region of concrete thinking or abstraction, and usually the exchange ends with the master's enigmatic statement. Joshu asked Nansen:
"What is the Way?"
Nansen replied, "Your everyday mind is the Way".
"Do we need any special conducting or not?"
"No, when we turn towards it we turn away from it."
"But if we do not need special conducting, how do we find the Way?"
"The Way transcends both knowledge and no-knowledge. Knowledge is illusion, no-knowledge is indifference. When you really arrive at the point where not a shadow of doubt is possible, it is like vastness of space, empty and infinitely expanding. You have no need either to affirm or negate."
Attaining enlightenment when her bamboo pail broke in the moonlight, the nun Chiyono's pleasant chat became a poem:
This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together
Hoping the weak bamboo
Would never break
Suddenly the bottom fell out:
No more water:
No more moon in the water:
Emptiness in my hand!
On one of our journeys, John and I drove to a cottage in the Mani, the southern tip of Greece, reached through winter-empty towns where we peered through silent windows. And in the Mani there was Chiyono's moon, secure in the vastness of the silver sea, emptiness in the hand. In the Mani there are many ruined towers, where families once kept themselves secure in a brutal lawless land. Now old women shake the olives from the trees, and catch them in large squares of cloth under the branches. The Mani is a country of earth tremors, of wild empty spaces, of few houses and no young people. Clear as Chiyono's moon is the memory of how the earth and sea and sky meet together there, and of rocky headlands and narrow open roads. On one such road we came again upon the spirit of place, a small convent, isolated but safe under the brow of a hill, where a nun with a damaged wrist asked shyly if we were doctors of medicine, because the sisters were too poor to call the doctor from the town. But deepest of all is the memory of John securing the cottage gate behind us for the final time, and quoting as he closed the latch the last ox-herding picture:
His garden gate is closed.
However hard you look
You will not find him there.
He is down in the market place,
teaching wine-bibbers and fishmongers
The ways of the Buddha.
And of course memories of John himself, magical speaker, each word clear and compassionate as a scalpel, seabirds flying above the headland in a darkening sky. Greece and the Maenllwyd. Winter nights and dark mornings. Clap your morning boards John, in the mud and the soft rain of a new Welsh day. And in between the claps, what dreams to trouble and inspire!
'Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?' The answer is given. The Cyprus tree in the garden; sitting long and growing tired; nothing better to do; inevitable. What else? Yet once, in a different time and place, John looking through the window to where a real tree bent before the wind, said only "No idea".
Ah yes, that too.
