Let me make this a bit scholarly by quoting someone who actually knows what he’s talking about before devolving into my homey self-example. The writer here is Koun Yamada. He is writing in the Author’s Preface to the First Edition of the Gateless Gate: the classic book of Zen Koans. The man says:
The entrance into Zen [right away an interruption from me: Forget about the first four words. This is no more or less than getting to know yourself, a point I’ll undoubtedly make more times than necessary] is the grasping of one’s essential nature. It is absolutely impossible, however, to come to a clear understanding of our essential nature by any intellectual or philosophical method. It is accomplished only by the experience of self-realization through zazen. [Another interruption from me: Zazen is sitting meditation, and I don’t buy it as the only way to knowing who or what you really are, but it comes with the quotation. Let the man continue:] And the koans [Me again: Koans are short–often very short–stories designed to confound our usual processes of understanding] used in Zen can be seen through only when looked at from the essential point of view. Therefore to the person whose enlightened eye has not been opened, Zen koans seem impractical, illogical, and against common sense. Once this eye has opened, however, all koans express natural matters and relate the most obvious of realities.
OK, so koans are apparently absurd little stories which, when we try to figure them out, exhaust our practical, logical, commonsensical faculties, thus bringing into play our impractical, illogical and–here I’m being cute, but maybe not–nonsensical connections with life. Most remarkably we never solve them so much as transmute them into openings for entering into that deeper understanding of ourselves and all of reality. You might call them an entrance into (OMYGOD!) Zen!
Let the scene shift…
The last week in May was spent at the Dharma Drum Retreat Center in Pine Bush, New York. The event was a seven day Koan Retreat, the third I’ve attended along with five Western Zen Retreats of five days each and one other done mostly in Chinese with English translations. DDRC has become an grounding place and a launching pad for me. Without any formal acknowledgment or contract, the retreat leaders, John Crook and Simon Child, dharma heirs of The Venerable Master Sheng Yen (1930-2009), have become my teachers. Without conspiring they regularly double-team me, good-cop/bad-cop me into new levels of growth. What’s particularly remarkable is that there is never forewarning of who will be which cop!
This retreat like the others was a great success: learning to deal better with both physical and spiritual pain, opening more to reality and being a bit less vulnerable to the persuasions of ego. The method was koan based, using these ancient conundrums as a portal to self understanding beyond cognition, to lead us into worlds of sensation and perception without the brain’s compulsion to organize and interpret and value-judge.
After a day to settle in and leave the rest of the world behind we were given a handout with 7 full koans and perhaps 7 hua-tous, the punchlines to other koans. Our task was to select the one we’d prefer to work on for the remaining days. The belief: we are drawn to our choice by the karma we bring to it. A social worker might substitute the word “unconscious” for karma, but this particular social worker no longer sees a difference between the two.
I chose “How can you step off the top of a 100 foot pole?” I chose it for several reasons:
2. It was short and thus suited my limited ability to memorize.
4. Something told me it was the one to go with.
The retreat actually went as the one a year ago had also gone. The day of settling in. Then one day of befuddlement followed by a day of thinking I had the thing licked. An interview with our teacher and this year’s bad-cop, John Crook, who allowed me to rage successful for a few minutes then, by posing a simple follow-up question to my self-satisfied ravings, propelled me into “Great Doubt.” Great Doubt is another traditional Zen concept. It describes a period of utter agony which I expressed as thoughts of Why am I here? Who am I fooling? What’s the point of all this self-torture anyway? Notice that here the focus has shifted from the literal content of the koan to it’s impact on all of my life certainties. The portal was open. Did I dare walk through it?
My immediate and thoroughly logical conclusion: go back to the dorm; pack; hitch hike back to town; catch the train back to NYC!
One view from the center of the circle of Great Doubt
But something else said stay. A few hours later, during a period of solitary walk-in-the-woods meditation I found myself in an unknown part of the retreat grounds in a light rain, not so much distracting myself from the interior gloom by focusing on the exterior beauty but simply melting into it. That’s when it hit, my revelation of the moment, one which would carry me through the ups and downs of the week’s remaining rollercoaster ride and (hooray) life since then:
Just about twenty-four hours ago, maybe it was forty-eight, I wrote an entry for this space using a method I learned from Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing down the bones. Simply, one begins by placing the pen or pencil in the upper left hand corner of a blank page and writes and writes and does nothing but write. No reading what has been written. No correcting spelling or grammatical or punctuation or any other possible errors. No crossing out. Just keep writing until the pre-determined time period has ended or the hand hurts too much or you run out of paper or ink. Being bored or running out of things to write are not legitimate reasons to quit. Rather they become topics of the writing. Something like…
Welcome! 