Prajñā Pāramitā sublimates all other pāramitā, including giving, patience, precepts, vigour and meditation. It’s the light in their lamps, as it were, which transforms them into pāramitās. Robert Aikten Rōshi called prajñā the raison d’être of the Buddha Way. We’ve seen already that he said that dhyāna is the form and method of zazen; and that samādhi is its condition. To that, we could add that prajñā illuminates dhyana, that it’s the output. Knowing a little bit about Zen, and hearing that prajñā is its raison d’être, I expect that there will be many people who think that prajñā must therefore be emptiness. It’s common for people to describe something as “very Zen,” when ideas of oneness and emptiness are suggested. So, we will need to unpick this idea to have a clearer understanding of prajñā and Zen. According to Har Dayal, the words, wisdom, insight, intuition, gnosis, transcendental idealism, knowledge, spiritual enlightenment have all been used by translators to convey the meaning of prajñā. The word, “wisdom” is used most often; and it’s perhaps the most accessible equivalent; although “insight” and “intuition” might also convey some of the flavour of prajña. In their approaches to this most important of ideas, the two dominant Indian sects in the early development of the Mahayana took differing views in their appreciation of prajñā. The Yogācārins explained prajñā positively, as knowledge and vision of things as they really are (tāthatā). The Mādhyamikas, on the other hand, discussed it negatively, denying any positive statement made about it. However, both sects revered the Prajñā Pāramitā, which became so important that it appeared in Buddhist iconography as the mother of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Prajñā was originally said to be of three kinds: (1) learning through study; (2) reflecting on what is learned; and (3) embodied learning (that which is cultivated and expressed as practice-realisation). Dōgen Zenji hinted at the third, in his Genjō Kōan, when he said that realization is confirmed by the ten thousand phenomena. To covey that idea more immediately, we might say that the bodied learning of prajñā is awakened by the song of the blackbird outside the window, during zazen. This is how the Bodhisattva Kanzeon (“the one who perceives the cries of the world”) awakens to prajñā and responds to all beings from compassion. In the Heart Sutra, she is Kanjizai (“the one who sees through the fetters of a separate self”) declaring, “form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form.” The full title of the Heart Sūtra is, of course, the Mahaprajñāpāramitāhridayasūtra (Great Perfection of Wisdom Heart-mind Scripture) and the Heart Sutra is a condensed exposition of prajñā paramita. Without expressly naming it, in the Ikka-no-myoju fascicle of his Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen alluded to prajñā as the one bright pearl of Master Gensa, who taught, “The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.” Asked by a monk how to understand this, he replied, “What use is understanding?” Later, Gensa himself asked the same question: “The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl. How do you understand this?” A monk (the same one, perhaps) answered by mimicking Gensa’s words, and replied, “What use is understanding?” Gensa dismissed him, retorting that the monk struggled, “… in a demon’s cave on a black mountain”. The point here was that if a monk settled on an understanding which depended merely on his hearing and repeating the words of his teacher, he hadn’t digested Gensa’s meaning and come to his own understanding. Simply repeating the words of another, or relying on book knowledge, won’t cut through to the intuition of embodied learning. We’re stuck “… in a demon’s cave on a black mountain”. However, this is not to deny a value to received wisdom. We simply need to reflect on it, and be clear about our own understanding of its meaning. The fourteenth ancestor, Nāgājuna [c. 150 – c. 250 CE (disputed)], confirmed the importance of having a good understanding of the received teaching in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Ch24.v8-9): The Buddha’s Dharma rests on two truths: Conventional truth (samvrittisatya: dualistic relationships) and absolute truth (paramārthasatya; no dharmas arise) Those who do not know the distinction between these two truths Do not understand reality in accordance with the profound teachings of the Buddha. Although, however, we need to understand what the teachings are, we should be wary of literalism, which tends towards a one-sided position. A literal reading of the two truths doctrine would leave us choosing between two extreme options: either “everything exists” or “nothing exists.” Whereas, these ideas are meant provisionally. Existence and non-existence necessitate each other, having meaning only when set against one another. Prajñā lies in the gap between them. Therefore, in a crucial verse Nāgājuna continued (Ch. 24 verse 18): Dependent origination we declare to the emptiness. Emptiness is a dependent concept Just that is the middle way. It’s an easy mistake to understand non-existence, emptiness or śūnyatā as “nothingness” or an absolute “void” beyond and quite other than the conventional world of form. As Nāgājuna explained, however, the conventional world of form is itself emptiness. The phenomenal world is non-existent or empty because it is impermanent, interdependent and without any fixed essence, not because it’s a mirage covering some other paranormal realm. The impermanence, interdependence and absence of any fixed essence are the basis upon which it can be said that existence is really non-existence, or that beings are really no-beings. The practice of the prajñā pāramitā is to see this for ourselves; and to live from it, as the middle way between the extremes of existence and non-existence. Because the conventional truth of existence and the absolute truth of non-existence are themselves co-dependent, everything is described as, “thus” (or suchness; tathatā), neither one thing nor the other. To say this another way: prajñā is the ultimate truth that there can be no ultimate truth other than impermanence, interdependence and absence of any fixed essence. No ultimate truth could be taught without reliance on a conventional truth. Master Shuzan made this point and invited his audience to see the suchness of things when he held up his teaching stick, and said: “You monks. If you call this a teaching stick, you omit its reality. If you do not call it a teaching stick, you go against the facticity. Tell me what you call it?” The same point also emerges in case 8 of the Mumonokan, where Master Gettan said to a monk: "Keichū made a cart whose wheels had a hundred spokes. Take both front and rear parts away and remove the axle then what will it be?" Dividing something away from something else to find out what we’re left with is a Buddhist method of analytical insight to disclose the interdependence and lack of any fixed essence of the composite things making up our world. By over reliance on words and labels to manage the world around us we blind ourselves to the dynamic interrelationships that underlie the distinctions we make, and we miss the impermanence and provisional nature of everything that exists. In effect, we fail to see the suchness of the world as it is, and do not recognise that each fragment of the world is inextricably linked to and dependent upon the whole, in the manner of Indra’s net, which I talked about in connection with dhyāna pāramitā. Our fixation on words and labels for things leads us to expect that discrete entities exist at a fundamental level, always working in predictable and isolatable ways. In this way, we find ourselves lost in what the Buddha termed dukkha (dis-ease; suffering). There can be a problem with a reductive approach to analysing things into emptiness, however, if it leads into nihilism, or a passivity in which nothing exists, there is nothing to be done and nothing matters. It is not so easy to acknowledge that, if nothing is true, then everything is true; or that, if nothing matters, everything matters. If we deductively analyse into emptiness Master Shuzan’s teaching stick, Keichu’s cart and everything else, how are we to behave in the world? To put it another way, if we truly understand everything to be emptiness, why would we nevertheless look both ways before crossing the road? It’s obvious that however composite and impermanent existent things may be, they do exist to the same extent that we exist. Nothing exists in the way our fixation on words and labels might suggest it does. Nevertheless, we undeniably live discrete lives in a world where actions have consequences. Recognising this paradox, the cyberneticist Gregory Bateson (1904-80) sought for a holistic and pragmatic way to explain how things work that is closer to reality than the mistaken belief in a fixed and finite reality. He suggested that in the patterns of relationship that make up the world, differing things stand out to us, and work in recognisable ways, if they are, “differences that make a difference.” In other words, Shuzan’s teaching stick was not only different from other things in the room (a bell, for example), it stood out as a teaching stick because it made a difference as a device that Shuzan used for teaching. The same would be true of Keichu’s cart. If take the working of a cart holistically, we can see differences in the functions of the cart’s various parts (axles, spokes and wheels, for instance), and at the same time we recognise their overall performance in the functioning cart. Wheels don’t make a cart and nor do spokes or an axle. What makes a cart would be the difference between the wheels, spokes and the axle in a relationship that itself makes a difference, i.e., in their utility as a cart. The difference that makes the difference creates the idea behind the label ‘teaching stick” or “cart.” The meaning of the word “teaching stick” and “cart” and the utility of things themselves derive for the ecological context in which differences have come together as a teaching stick or a cart. Bateson’s position was that meaning derives from context, rather than the ideas, words and labels placed on things. The difference that makes a difference acknowledges that an assemblage is contingent, without denying its contextual significance. Whereas, the reductive analysis of a thing to emptiness from its component parts all too easily lends itself to an ontological misunderstanding the emptiness itself is somehow more real than the assemblage we’ve taken apart. The point that Masters Shuzan and Gettan were asking their students to understand was that reality (as impermanence, interdependence and no-self) and facticity (a stick, a cart or self) are not-two. Everything is suchness, neither at the extreme of existence or non-existence. This is prajñā. When we study the world around us, it turns out that everything is like this. We don’t live in a simple world of static and discrete things. We live in a complex, shifting and open-ended patterning and interplay of phenomenal differences, which we are only able to appreciate when we’re open-minded and receptive enough to put aside our convenience-driven fixation on names and labels, for instance during zazen. At such moments, we’re able to see how patterns repeat in different contexts, and how they affect and inform the way we live in the world and understand ourselves. We can glimpse this if we think about the human body. How does the body we have here and now relate to the body we had seven years ago? Or, how will it relate to the body of seven years’ time? What do the cells of the body have in common with the cells of the “same” body in the past and the future? Clearly, all these cells work in some kind of pattern, which repeats through time. But we make an error when we take the repeating pattern to be an unchanging self. In reality, there is only the ecology of differing cells arising, enduring for a time and passing. Inter-acting together, these differing cells make the difference which we call a self, or “me.” Isn’t this what the Heart Sūtra is also telling us? Prajñā, or the middle way between extremes, is to see through both fixed and reductive ways of looking at things, whether a teaching stick, a cart or a self, not in order to rest in an empty void, but rather to be able to move freely and flexibly within the shifting patterns and changeability of the world around us. In this connection, Aitken Rōshi reminded his own students to clarify and keep in mind the understanding that, in zazen, samādhi, the content of dhyāna, is not the same as the realisation of prajñā, the light of dhyāna. Prajñā, or wisdom, is the understanding from which we act after they we see clearly into suchness, in samādhi. In other words, the difference between dhyāna and samādhi that makes a difference, is prajñā. There is interdependency between posture, breath, stillness and insight, as in everything else, and a one-sided view of this relationship will blind us to its other aspects. The point is explored by case 46 of the Hekiganroku, in which Kyōsho asked a monk, "What is the sound outside?" The monk replied, fairly and accurately, "The sound of rain dripping." Kyōsho then said that, asked this question, ordinary people immediately separate themselves from the sound outside and give an analytical opinion of what they hear. In truth, they have to do this (as indeed the monk had just done), in order to communicate anything in words about the sound outside. The structures of conceptual thinking and language are dualistic and because of that they infer reality to discrete, severable and delimited ideas. Our ability to objectify in language is very useful, even vital, in its own context. I couldn’t talk or write without otherwise. However, it’s deceptive to mistake the intrinsically dualistic structure of thought and language for the content of dynamic experience. So, when the monk next asked how Kyōsho himself heard the sound outside, he replied, "I am on the brink of falling into delusion about myself." If, seeing the way in which we can be deceived by thought and language, we lean into a samādhi-based, absolute understanding that everything is empty or "one,” and that nothing ultimately exists, we’d would fall into another kind of confusion about the nature of self and other. After all, if nothing exists and it’s raining outside, what would it be that stayed indoors to keep dry, or took an umbrella to go out on a walk? We live in a world of differences, not oneness. The monk next asked, "What do you mean, ‘on the brink of falling into delusion about yourself’?" Kyōsho replied, "To attain the world of emptiness may not be so difficult, but to express the bare substance is hard." Kyōsho wanted the monk to understand that it’s relatively easy to sit passively in oneness and pretend that nothing matters; the performative practice of prajñā parāmita, by contrast, is hard to master. Whatever we think we’ve accomplished, we have to go beyond what’s passed and find prajñā afresh, in each new moment. Seeing the differences that arise at each moment we make a difference. This is a meaning of the mantrā at the conclusion of the Heart Sūtra: Gate [Learning through study] Gate [Reflecting on what’s learned] Para Gate [True Passing, embodied learning] Para Sam Gate [Playing Freely] Sources The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature by Har Dayal The Practice of Perfection by Robert Aitken Rōshi Shōbōgenzō (Genjō Kōan and Ikka-no-Myoju), Eihei Dōgen Zenji Nāgājuna’s Middle Way, Mark Sideris and Shōryū Katsura The Gateless Barrier, Zenkei Shibayama The Blue Cliff Record, translated by Taizan Maezumi Prajñāpāramitā Devi colorized.jpg; attribution: the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee (led by Professor Masahiro Shimoda of the University of Tokyo), CC BY-SA 4.0
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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) |