Ksānti is radical openness. It translates into English as tolerance, forbearance, patience or endurance, which as a performative practice in everyday life, necessarily entails an honest acknowledgement of the way which we sometimes want to hold onto a false sense of certainty about things. In the face of uncertainty and the ultimate incomprehensibility of everything, ksānti is without a fixed personal position and has nothing to defend. Therefore, it is at the same time intuitively tolerant of, but nevertheless the antithesis of, anger, hatred, aversion and ill-will, which are all self-serving. We could understand the perfection of ksānti as the sort of forbearance that the earth possesses, as it endures all of our abuses. It was exemplified by Master Kyōrin Chōon in the Blue Cliff Record (case 17), when a monk asked him, “What is the meaning of the Zen Founder’s coming from India?” (The question asks about the purpose and value of the practice of Zen, which the Indian monk Bodhidharma, transmitted to China). Kyōrin replied, “Sitting for a long time becomes tiring.” He didn’t mean that sitting for a long time in zazen doesn’t work, or that Bodhidharma somehow failed in his mission, or even that Kyōrin himself sat only for the purpose of getting tired! All these interpretations would be linear. They would be based on the premise we do A in order to achieve B. Sitting in zazen, by contrast, like Ksānti Pāramitā, is not practised in order to achieve something else. In the perfection of patience, we don’t practise patience in order to get some reward for being patient; and in the practice of zazen, we don’t sit for hours on a cushion in order to achieve some higher state of consciousness. We just do them, and the doing of them is its own reward. When we “just do” anything, we endure it unconditionally, allowing whatever we do to be just as it is; and to do something unconditionally, we must do it wholeheartedly. Doing a thing wholeheartedly, we lose ourselves in the doing of it, because we are not concerned about what it is that we’re doing, or why we are doing it. When we do something for a particular purpose it is very difficult to be whole heartedly involved, because we are worrying about what we are doing, whether we are doing it in the right way and whether it will achieve our desired purpose. Our lives run more harmoniously and smoothly for us when we simply and patiently do things for their own sake, rather than as transactions to achieve something else. Just doing something for its own sake is the kind of perfection of endurance that Master Tozan Ryokai was pointing out, in case 43 of the Blue Cliff Record, where a monk asked him, “When cold and heat visit us, how should we avoid them?" Tozan answered, "Why not go where there is neither cold nor heat?" The monk asked, "Where is there neither cold nor heat?" Tozan said, "When it is cold, kill yourself with cold. When it is hot, kill yourself with heat." We can understand Tozan to have meant that we should simply throw ourselves into each situation, as we find it, and then the resistance that we may hold about a particular situation will dissipate. However, ksānti pāramitā is of much broader application than the mere endurance of cold and heat and, as the writer Barry Magid points out, so too is Tozan’s meaning in case 43. In both the kōan and ksānti paramita, Magid sees as an active surrender to the nature of reality at work: “We are talking about cold and heat as examples of what we are afraid we can’t handle and of all the likes and dislikes that practice is meant to confront.” This koan is asking about dualism and its avoidance. Tozan torments us with the promise of a place beyond it. Is there such a place? The koan is about surrender, saying yes, to reality, not transcendental fantasy.” There is nothing passive about Tozan’s teaching or ksānti paramita as the active acceptance of reality. Rather, what’s important here is a radical openness to whatever arises, which enables us to move beyond the dualisms of right and wrong, opposition and harmony. In that openness, all polarities, are transcended, because no particular understandings, personal perspectives or presumptions are presupposed. If ksānti paramita were passive it would degenerate in a mindless indifference in the face of circumstances, which Magid would call a passive submission, rather than an engaged surrender. To see Zen practice passively is to treat it as a lifeless collection of data that we can accumulate, or an inert and showy badge of merit that we wear, rather than to own it as the nature of our lives in each in moment. Master Tenkei Denson referred to the stasis of passivity as the “stagnant water of transcendence”. The writer, Dr Herbert Guenther, pointed out an inherent problem with the practice of ksānti paramita as too ready an acceptance of a life difficulty, in the belief that, by accepting it, we attain to some kind of spiritual realisation amounting to a final resolution. He said, “acceptance, though giving us a point of view from which to look out into reality, at the same time has a fossilising effect [upon us].” I remember that Maezumi Roshi used to say, “Don’t be satisfied!” and I would say that, if anything, it’s maybe better to postpone the stage at which “acceptance” sets in. Ksānti paramita is not a quality that is perfected once and for all, and then put in a box as something that’s been “ticked off.” It is an endless spirit of engagement with everyday life, howsoever it may be. The understanding of Ksānti paramita as wholehearted, unconditional and continual surrender is captured by the saying, “Four hundred years in the human realm is one day and night in Maitreya’s heaven.” Dōgen Zenji discussed this saying in a short talk contained in his Eihei Kōroku. He related how the ancient Indian monk Vasubandhu once descended from the inner palace of Maitreya (the Buddha yet to come) and was asked by his brother, Asanga, about this saying. With reference to it, Asanga related that Maitreya lead 500 billion heavenly beings to completely realise ksānti paramita. Asanga didn’t understand. He enquired of Vasubandhu what teaching Maitreya had given to the 500 billion heavenly beings. When Vasubandhu said that Maitreya expounded the teaching of “just this,” Asanga immediately got the point. Discussing this story, Dōgen asked his listeners how the everyday phenomena would be the sublime teaching of “just this.” No teaching devices, or religious trappings, will ever reach it, he said. Nevertheless, flowers open and close and dust, having settled, and be swept away anew. His final comment captures the teaching of “just this” in radical openness of ksānti paramita: “The oceans of the three thousand lands completely become autumn. The bright moon illuminates and chills the coral.” Sources The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Literature by Har Dayal The Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record, translated by Thomas Cleary Nothing is Hidden, The Psychology of Zen Koans, by Barry Magid (ch. 19) Philospohy and Psychology in the Abhidharma by Herbert V Guenter (p240) Dōgen’s Extensive Record, A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku, by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okamura (Bk 2.180)
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![]() Koan: A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature or not?” Jōshū answered, “Mu!” Joshu’s Mu is the first of 48 cases or kōan appearing in the Gateless Gate kōan collection (the Mumonkan) complied by Mumon Ekai (1183-1260), in 1228. It’s also the first case in the 200 introductory kōan studied by students working with teachers in Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s White Plum lineage; and it appears in the Rinzai Zen Shumon Kattoshu (Vines and Entanglements) and in the Sōtõ Zen Shoyoroku (Book of Equanimity). In the White Plum curriculum this kōan is studied three times. So, it’s a first and fundamental case for study, to which we keep coming back. Mumo considered this kōan the barrier of the ancestors, perhaps because we entrap ourselves by its seeming obscurity. We overthink its meaning and look for its resolution in the wrong place. Since Mu cannot be thought out and explained away, its resolution demands a leap beyond personal, dualistic perspective, even as we begin by grasping at shadows in a search for some grammatical means to articulate its unconditioned significance. The resolution of this kōan comes from a profound change in our appreciation of our own being in relation to the teaching of Buddha Nature. Mumon Ekai said of this kōan: “To realize Zen, one has to pass through the barrier of the ancestors. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, or if your path of discursive reasoning is not blocked off, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like an entangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a ancestors? It’s just this, “Mu!” This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it, you will see Jōshū face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of ancestors. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” The kōan’s significance arises from the question Joshu was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature, or not?” The monk asks the question because, in the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, the Buddha teaches that all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, which is nevertheless indistinguishable from conditioned existence and the monk wanted to understand what Buddha Nature was. The question was not an idle speculation. Seeing a dog in the temple courtyard perhaps, the monk intently wondered something along these lines: “If, as the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra says, all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, then I must have it; and that dog in the courtyard must have it. So, what is it? Why can’t I find it? Do I really have it, or not? Does that dog have it?” The teaching that all beings have the Buddha Nature had considerable traction in the development of Buddhism in east Asia and many of the principal sects of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, were fundamentally shaped by it. The thrust of the teaching is that Buddha Nature or Enlightenment is not something we acquire from practice, it is our original nature. We have always been fully endowed with Buddha Nature from the beginning of everything. It is one thing, however, to read and understand the words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, and perhaps also to have a certain amount of faith that the Buddha Nature teaching must be true; and quite another to experience the teaching as true for oneself, as one’s own life. The central concern of Buddhism is not merely that we believe the teachings but that we test them out, practice them and find them to be true for ourselves. It’s imaginable then, that during the heyday of Buddhism in China countless Buddhists devotedly learned, copied out, studied and chanted the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra with the intention to see directly for themselves that all beings have the Buddha Nature, and that many of these people, try as they might, could not get a handle on what Buddha Nature was. Chapter 27 the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra suggested an approach to understanding Buddha Nature offered a clue to the realisation of Buddha Nature: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. There must have been many earnest Buddhist practitioners who studied this verse and prayed ardently that their time would come, and Buddha Nature would be made manifest before them. It’s exceptional however that persistent and ardent desire alone delivers to us what we want. More commonly we need help and guidance in our endeavours and we need the right tool to break down the obstacles to obtaining what we want. The monk who asked Joshu whether a dog had Buddha Nature or not might have watched the dog intently, as it carried on in real time conditions and circumstances, and wondered when the time would come for it Buddha Nature to be manifest before him As Zen became established in China, it offered the person-to-person transmission of a direct, intimate understanding of the meaning of the Buddha’s teachings, without reliance on the words of sutra study. To many renowned exegetes of the sutras, the Zen teachers making such claims would have seemed like fraudsters, however, there were many monks and nuns who turned to Zen from a desperate need for the personal experience of Buddha Nature they lacked from the study of the mere words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra. The monk questioning Joshu would have been like this. However, when the monk put his question to Master Joshu, he received the answer “Mu!” We may wonder how that helped him. The point however of the kōan is that is if we penetrate the meaning of Mu we ourselves will be helped, immeasurably. There are two recorded versions of the dialogue about the dog and Buddha Nature in the record of Master Joshu, although it’s only the first one, in which he answered “Mu!” (“No!”), which was incorporated by later teachers into the classical kōan collections. The full record of Master Joshu reads like this: A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Mu! [no]” The monk replied, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature. Why would a dog not have it?” Joshu said, “Because it has karmic consciousness.” A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Yu! [yes]” The monk replied, “If it has, why then is it still stuffed into a bag of skin?” Joshu said, ”Because though it knows, it deliberately transgresses.” It does not particularly matter whether it was the same monk or two different monks who asked these two questions. What’s interesting is that on the first occasion Joshu answered in the negative; and on the second, in the affirmative. His first answer denied that the conditioned existence of a dog could be anything apart from its dog nature. If the monk thought its Buddha Nature would be something other than its karmic consciousness, or dog nature, he didn’t understand what Buddha Nature was. Joshu invited the monk to see the dog as a dog, rather than try to make it conform to some invocation of an idealised Buddha Nature. In the second case, Joshu affirmed that even in its conditioned existence as a dog, the dog was nevertheless nothing other than Buddha Nature; because, in the dog’s case, Buddha Nature was nothing other than the bag of skin making up the dog’s conditioned existence, as a dog. In both answers, the issue at stake was not the affirmative or the negative answer, it was the monks’ misidentifications of the Buddha Nature as other than conditioned existence. It’s unimportant whether Joshu said, “No!” rather than “Yes!” or “Yes!” rather “No!” in as much as neither answer denied the phenomenal nature of the dog as a dog; and both answers threw the monk the bare bone of the dog’s facticity, as an invitation to see what the Buddha Nature of a dog therefore amounted to. Joshu’s intention was, of course, that the monk should see for himself what his own Buddha Nature amounted to. This is also precisely the point encapsulated in the verse: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. The kōan of the nonsensical answer “Mu!” throws us up against the boundaries of real time, conditions and circumstances in order to that we might appreciate what we amounts to. For the purposes of kōan study, we could say that the words of the sūtra “We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances” match up with the advice of Master Mumon Ekai, “Just concentrate your whole energy into Mu!, and do not allow any discontinuation.” Master Mumon Ekai also said that to pass through the barrier of the kōan Mu, realise Buddha Nature and see Joshu face to face, it’s necessary to study, “…through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night.” If we are willing to muster the determination to do as Master Mumon Ekai advises then the real time, conditions and circumstances of our lives become transparent and Mu appears. It is not nothingness, and nor is it merely the real time, conditions and circumstances as we ordinarily think of them. From study of Mu the realisation of Buddha Nature dawns, and a treasure store of abundance, which is the birth right of us all is found to be spread out, all around. In the meantime, Master Mumon Ekai advised that the question “What is Mu?” should be pursued unremittingly, as if, “…you had taken into your mouth, “a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.” Imagine the visceral discomfort conjured up by this image! Mumon Ekai urges the abandonment of all swallowing and spitting out, which is to say all preconceived ideas and beliefs about Mu, or Buddha Nature. The resolution of the kōan is not to be found in evasive and mediated interpretations of its meaning. All our usual stratagems and explanations for containing doubt must all be thrown out, and the dark significance of Mu itself must be fearlessly embraced. Master Dōgen expressed the same perspective when he said that where the sutra says, Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, it includes wanting to forget. So saying, Dōgen was hinting at a heuristically embodied understanding of the nature of existence, in which knowledge harvested from books and scholarly research is laid to one side. In the study of Mu, “wanting to forget” is to put aside everything we think we know about Buddha Nature, or the kōan itself, together with everything we think might be a potential answer to the kōan. We need to throw ourselves into an investigation of Mu with an expansive and open-minded doubt. The sūtra’s admonition that We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances csan be considered together with Joshu’s two answers to the same question, both of refer to the real time, conditions and circumstances of a dog being a dog. Master Dōgen said that that the wanting to know exhibited in both questions is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, which in terms of the koan is equivalent to saying that the question, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature of not?” is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, and indeed that everything in the kōan is not different from, real time, conditions and circumstances. The monk, Joshu, the dog, Buddha Nature, the question, the answer Mu, or any other answer, are none other than real time, conditions and circumstances. Such an understanding follows because the expression, real time, conditions and circumstances, refers to the conditioned nature of all existence: i.e., as insubstantial, contingent and impermanent. There is no stepping outside of this law, which is all we find when we look for the cause, essence or ground of phenomenal existence. One of the Buddha’s most accomplished contemporary followers, the venerable Saripūtra, is recorded to have said that whomsoever understands the teaching of real time, conditions and circumstances realises the essence of Buddhism, and whomsoever understands the essence of the Buddhism realises this teaching. It’s therefore perfectly consistent that Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. and so too Joshu’s utterance Mu and its helpfulness as a barrier koan. There is however something rather important, and perhaps startling, that we need to register about the identification of “wanting to know” with “real time, conditions and circumstances. Look again at these lines: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances are identical. Buddha Nature and Mu are identical. Mu and the dog are identical. If, we understand Buddhism to mean that the practice of the Way will lead us away from dukkha (suffering) and samudaya (its cause) to a new and different place, nibbana (release from suffering) via marga (the eightfold path), then we overlook the identify of Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances, and Dogen cautioned that the effect would actually be to perpetuate our suffering and bring about its continued cultivation! Suffering and its cause arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. Release from suffering and a path to the release from suffering also arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. It isn’t possible to escape real time conditions and circumstances by means of real time conditions and circumstances. We always remain in the feedback loop of real time conditions and circumstances. We need to remember this, as we grapple after the resolution of the kōan, and begin to chase the shadows of all sorts of metaphysical ideas about what Mu might be. What then is the solution? How do we penetrate the barrier of Mu and see the Buddha Nature? Dogen said the words, we should just reflect, in the line, We should just reflect real time, causes and circumstances make it clear that the real time, conditions and circumstances of everyday life, with all its highs and lows, can nevertheless provide us with a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature. Why was he able to say that? Real time, conditions and circumstances offer a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature if we work with our lives in an embodied and enacted way, rather than by imagining Buddha Nature as an intellectual construct. To just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances is to allow the whole of our sensory apparatus to engage with the whole of life as-it-is, effortlessly and transparently. Engaging with life in this way then, as the sutra says, the time has come, and Buddha Nature is manifest before us. To put it differently, and in terms of the kōan, we penetrate the barrier of Mu when we embody it, rather than merely think about it. A mirror might be a good analogy for an embodied and enactive understanding of Mu (in the sense that Dōgen suggests to be the meaning of just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances). However, an important difference between a human being and a mirror is that a mirror isn’t busy. A mirror mindlessly and passively reflects. Human beings, by contrast, are always busy, hurrying from one thing to the next. So, in a way, we’re like distorted mirrors. We don’t reflect the arising, duration and departure of things all that clearly, because we’re relentlessly impelled either to hang on to, or move on from, real time, conditions and circumstances. Remembering the last thing and anticipating the next, we’re seldom passive; and we’re not so good at remaining more than fleetingly attentive to the present moment. In this way, we tend to overlook much of what’s presented to our senses and we don’t often take the trouble to examine what real time, conditions and circumstances say about the nature of momentary experience, as it arises. Instead, we dwell on what is already in the past, or our expectations about the future. In this way, we miss the subtle revelation behind the words, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which Master Tōzan Ryōkai (807–869) described, in these lines from his Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, Like facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other. You are not it, but in truth it is you. This is the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances direct us, and the intimate experience of the kōan of Joshu’s Mu. Wanting to know Mu, Mumon Ekai urges us to earnestly raise the doubt, “What is Mu?” during housework, walking to the bus and other day to day real time, conditions and circumstances. Doing so, we just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which is to say we unselfconsciously move beyond the dualistic subject - object paradigm that infects and distorts our understanding of the distinction between delusion and enlightenment. To just reflect, or to be lost in the question, “What is Mu?” is a transparent interaction with real time, conditions and circumstances. To put it differently, to lose ourselves in the doubt about the nature of Mu, is a transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances. In the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances, is the moment of When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. Dōgen Zenji said that, When the time is come means this time. To raise the doubt about Mu is the catalyst that enables to us ascertain the significance of reflecting real time, conditions and circumstances as the Buddha Nature of our own lives. When the time has come, in the present moment, the reality of The Buddha Nature is immediately manifest before us, appears, like a clear reflection in the mirror. When the barrier of Mu is pierced, it is seen in its entirety, and there is no doubt what Mu is. Dōgen said: “There has never been any time which was not time having come nor any Buddha Nature which was not the Buddha Nature manifesting before us.” There is therefore nothing in real time, conditions and circumstances from which we should feel any need for retreat or disengagement, or indeed any aspect of real time, conditions and circumstances from which retreat or disengagement is actually possible. Nothing impedes us from appreciating that in the present moment of real time, conditions and circumstances the lived-experience of Buddha Nature is manifesting. There was nothing to impede the monk’s sight when he questioned Joshu about the Buddha Nature of a dog and there is nothing impeding us from penetrating the barrier of Mu. If the kōan blocks us, and generally it does, it’s because we hide from ourselves in an inattentive reluctance to reflect real time conditions and circumstances, as they are. Note There are a few published translations of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra available in book format and online. For consistency and ease of reading I have adapted the verses I have used to align with the terminology in other translated materials I have used. I have referred to the Nishijima and Cross translation of Eihei Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo (and in particular the Busshō fascicle). The quotation from the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi is from the translation by Taigen Dan Leighton, published in Cultivating the Empty Field. The edition of the Mumonkan I referred to is The Gateless Barrier, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, by Zenkei Shiayama Roshi. The two dialogues about the Buddha Nature of a dog can be found in The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, by James Green. The Calligraphic kanji, Mu, is by Brigitte D'Ortschy (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported) |