When our lives are not free of fixed positions we drown in a sea of poison. Following after another's words and mimicking others' actions is the practice of monkeys and parrots. Zen practitioners should be able to show some fresh provisions of their own. Be that as it may, you should understand that even in the cave of demons on the black mountain the one bright pearl's radiance is not diminished.
In Shobogenzo (Treasury of True Dharma Eye) Master Dogen used
this koan as the starting point for a whole fascicle, "Ikkyamyoju," devoted to
the "one bright pearl." In his 300 Koan Shobogenzo, Dogen included another koan
centering on this image of completeness and perfection - "Nan-ch'uan's
Storehouse of the Mani Pearl." Clearly, the koan "one bright pearl" was an
important and evocative image by which Dogen could illustrate an important
Dharma point.
Most literally, ju in ikkyamyoju means a Buddhist rosary
bead. It can also be translated as pearl, the great cosmic gem, or jewel. Myo
means brilliant or bright. The phrase, as translated in the Shobogenzo, is "one
bright pearl."
In Chinese legends, a pearl was frequently associated with
a ferocious dragon, the protector of the precious gem. In statues and paintings,
the jewel is tucked under the dragon's chin or clasped in his claws. With the
advent of Buddhism, this gem gradually became synonymous with the teachings of
the Dharma.
According to Dogen, Hsuan-sha (Jap., Gensha) was the
originator of the phrase "one bright pearl." Hsuan-sha lived in China in the
ninth century, during the Golden Age of Zen. He was a student of Hsueh-feng
(Jap., Seppo) and was one of the most accomplished descendents in Hsueh-feng's
lineage. Unlike many of those involved in Zen during that time, Hsuan-sha did
not come from the elite class, was not a scholar, and was not familiar with the
sutras. He was a fisherman who enjoyed the solitary time he spent in his boat on
the lakes and rivers.
When Hsuan-sha decided to study the Dharma, he
found Hsueh-feng and wholeheartedly dedicated himself to his practice. At one
point though, he decided to visit other masters to perfect his understanding. He
packed his traveling bag, but just as he was setting out on his journey, he
stubbed his toe on a rock. The wound was extremely painful and it began to
bleed. Quite unexpectedly, at that very moment he had a realization experience.
He said, "This body does not exist, so where is the pain coming from?" He turned
around and went back to the monastery. Hsueh-feng asked him, "Did you go on a
pilgrimage to cut your foot and have a difficult time?" Hsuan-sha was serious.
He said, "Please don't jest with me." Hsueh-feng asked, "Why don't you continue
your journey?" Hsuan-sha answered, "Bodhidharma didn't come to China and the
second ancestor didn't go to India." Hsueh-feng detected some understanding in
this answer. Thereafter, Hsuan-sha stayed with Hsueh-feng and never studied with
anyone else. He lived a very simple life, so much so that Hsueh-feng used to
call him "the ascetic."
When I read about Hsuan-sha, he reminds me of my
first teacher, Soen Nakagawa Roshi, who also liked living a simple and rigorous
life. As a monk he was unusually dedicated to practice. Sometimes he sat for
days. I was fascinated by the fact that he never left the zendo. Once, during a
sesshin, I got up several times in the middle of the night. Waking up, I
wondered, "Is he still sitting?" My room was not far from the zendo so I would
creep down the hall and check. There he was, always sitting like a rock. He
never did kinhin, rarely took meals. He just sat twenty-four hours at a time.
Sometimes he would disappear for months, simply to sit. He regularly did
hermitage retreats, a hundred days long being his favorite length.
He
disliked seeing things wasted, especially food. While staying in New York City,
he actually walked along the streets and picked up discarded banana peels and
apple cores, took them home, washed them, put them over his morning gruel and
ate them. Nothing was garbage to him. One of the cooks at the monastery where I
was studying told me that Soen would walk into the kitchen when they were
working and check the scrap bucket where all the wilted leaves of lettuce and
the ends of carrots and other vegetables normally got thrown away. Soen would
start pulling things out, saying, "This is not garbage, this is not garbage."
Then he would take the whole collected batch, wash it, chop it up and it would
end up in the soup.
Soen was like this from the beginning of his
practice. The other monks who were training at Ryutaku-ji with him would
complain to their teacher and abbot, Gempo Roshi. But Gempo Roshi must have had
some sense that Soen was a special monk and allowed him to do his hundred-day
solo retreats and a lot of other things that monks in Japan normally wouldn't
get away with. Soen had a very fresh way of looking at the Dharma that made him
an exciting and effective teacher.
Hsuan-sha was like that too. Dogen
says of him: "Hsuan-sha always wore simple cloth robes full of patches. Beneath
he wore paper or mugwort [leaves of weeds] underwear. When he began teaching, he
always made the statement, 'The entire world of the ten directions is one bright
pearl.' "
The monk in this koan decided to ask Hsuan-sha about this
statement so he could understand it more clearly. He said, "The entire world of
the ten directions is one bright pearl. How can I understand the meaning of
this?" Hsuan-sha answered, "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright
pearl. Why is it necessary to understand the meaning of this?"
Do you see
the subtlety going on in this dialogue? If, indeed, the entire universe is just
one thing, then the notion of meaning or understanding becomes a contradiction.
There is no way to understand. When we talk of meaning or understanding we are
of necessity talking about separation. We have to step back from what we are
trying to understand to look at it, analyze it and describe it. In the intimacy
of the "one bright pearl" there is no way to do that. Appreciating this,
Hsuan-sha asked, "Why is it necessary to understand the meaning of
this?"
The following day Hsuan-sha decided to test the monk and asked
him, "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. How do you
understand the meaning of this?" The monk answered just as Hsuan-sha had the day
before: "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. Why is it
necessary to understand the meaning of this?" This time Hsuan-sha continued,
"Now I know that you are living inside a cave of demons on the black mountain."
Here, the cave represents darkness and demons stand for deluded beings.
Hsuan-sha's statement means that this monk is ignorant but, even in that deluded
state, he is living within the reality of the one bright pearl. There is no
place this pearl doesn't reach. There is nothing outside of it.
A similar
dialogue took place between Master Nan-ch'uan and Luzu. Luzu said to Nan-ch'uan,
"Nobody recognizes the mani pearl, but there is one in the storehouse of the
Tathagata." Nan-ch'uan replied, "Myself and yourself, coming and going are
nothing but that." Me and you, our comings, our goings, are nothing other than
that storehouse. Luzu said, "What about those who do not come and go?" In other
words, what about those who are not separated, who are not coming and going?
Nan-ch'uan said, "They are in the storehouse too." Luzu said, "Then what is the
pearl?" Nan-ch'uan called out, "Luzu!" Luzu said, "Yes, Master." Nan-ch'uan
said, "Go away. You don't understand what I mean." At that moment, Luzu had an
insight. What this koan points to is what Hsuan-sha tried to get the monk to
see.
Dogen said: One bright pearl expresses reality. It contains the
inexhaustible past existing throughout time and arriving in the present.
Presently there is a body and mind. They are one bright pearl. The stalk of
grass, a tree, the mountains and rivers of this world are not only themselves,
they are the one bright pearl.
This statement is key to appreciating what
this koan is addressing. We routinely get stuck in dualities. Our tendency is to
fall into one side or the other. Our minds work dualistically almost out of
necessity. We constantly hear the same point being made in talk after talk yet
nobody seems to get it. We need to appreciate the fact that both sides of
reality exist simultaneously. The stalks of grass, a tree, the mountains and
rivers of this world have not only their own individuality but they are also the
one bright pearl. That is hard to grasp because the two views seem mutually
exclusive. What we are talking about is a thing being unified with the whole
universe and, at the same time, having its own distinctive characteristics and
karma. Both aspects exist at once. How do you understand that? Realization is
seeing that point clearly.
The metaphor of the Diamond Net of Indra is
the finest way I know of appreciating this point. In the diamond net each
diamond is an individual and has an existence of its own. Yet, each is also
interconnected with every other diamond in the universe. Within each diamond you
can see every other diamond. Each diamond contains every other diamond. They are
mutually arising. When one diamond arises, the entire diamond net arises. You
move just one diamond and the entire net of diamonds moves. This phenomenon
exists not only in the three dimensions of space but also extends in the fourth
dimension of time. In the diamond net time moves into the past and future. To
affect a single particle of this universe is to affect its totality - past,
present, and future. When you see the diamond net in its totality, it is just
this one bright pearl.
Every particle, every event is interpenetrated,
codependent, mutually arising, with mutual causality. What happens to one thing
happens to all things. That is the nature of the universe, the nature of the
self. That is Buddha-nature; that is who we are. Whether we realize it or not,
that is the way the world functions. When we live our lives out of the deluded
notion of separateness, inevitably we clash with the natural order of the
universe. We run into difficulty, pain, misfortune and suffering. And that too
is the one bright pearl.
Dogen said: Although the monk still seemed to be
bound by karmic consciousness when he asked, how do we interpret that, actually,
even that state is manifesting the great function which is the great
dharma.
The monk's way of dealing with his teacher's statement was to
simply accept and mimic it. There was no genuine attempt at understanding it.
That is where he got lost. Even so, in his misunderstanding, he was still
manifesting the one bright pearl.
The commentary says: When our lives are
not free of fixed positions we drown in a sea of poison. It is precisely the
fixed position that turns truth into something stagnant. It is precisely when we
grab on to something that we turn medicine into sickness, and clarity into
poison. We create with our minds a reality that does not in fact exist and is
contrary to who we are, to our own Buddha-nature. We do that with everything.
Holding on doesn't only happen within the domain of the secular world; it
happens in the spiritual world too. Right in the midst of Buddha-dharma, in our
practice, the habit of grabbing on to views and beliefs and clinging to them
continues. Just because we put on a robe and a rakusu doesn't mean that our
deepest conditioning miraculously disappears. We just find ourselves holding
onto robes and rakusus, the precepts or the liturgy. We cling to holiness,
spirituality, perfection and Zen. The minute we grab onto anything we separate
ourselves. In order to attach to something you need two things. When you are
really unified with it, there is no way to attach to it. You are the thing
itself.
Following after another's words and mimicking others' actions is
the practice of monkeys and parrots. Unfortunately, most of what we call
education is exactly that - parroting and regurgitating information. There is no
creativity, freshness or aliveness. This comes up frequently in koan study. What
koan study aims at is to get students to take a new and unique approach to what
they see in a koan, to make the koan their own. For example: A monk asked
Chao-chou, "What is Buddha?" Chao-chou said, "Three pounds of flax." Students
working with this koan replace the "flax" with something else, something
equivalent. They mimic Chao-chou and make the same point. What is Chao-chou
really saying when he says, "three pounds of flax?" Leap out of the vessel
created by Chao-chou. Create your own vessel and display it. If we constantly
repeat what we hear from others, the Dharma becomes stagnant and dies. It does
not evolve as the culture evolves. The Dharma has stayed alive for 2500 years
because it was transmitted mind-to-mind. We didn't hand down sutras or dogma
from generation to generation; we handed down the vital mind-to-mind teachings.
This means that in each generation it is possible for the Dharma to manifest in
accord with the circumstances. We are now in our third generation for many Zen
lineages in America. There are many teachers and many books. We have become a
sophisticated group of practitioners and there is a lot to choose
from.
There are plenty of exciting and troublesome aspects of American
Zen. We have people teaching koans who have never passed a koan in their life.
They may have an intellectual grasp of what the koan is about but this has
nothing to do with realization of the koan. We even have scholars publishing
commentaries on koans. This usually means the death of a koan. You can reach
only an intellectual understanding by taking a college course on
Buddhism.
Dharma is dark to the mind but radiant to the heart. When you
do an intellectual presentation of a koan, the presentation is radiant to the
mind but dark to the heart; and it is seeing with the heart that makes the
teachings transformative and changes our way of perceiving ourselves and the
universe. We need to be able to realize the teaching in order to show some of
our own fresh provisions.
The last line in the commentary says, Be that
as it may, you should understand that even in the cave of demons on the black
mountain the one bright pearl's radiance is not diminished. Although situations
may seem to change, everything is always the one bright pearl. Knowing that the
pearl reaches everywhere is the experience of the one bright pearl. In this
manner we encounter the pearl's sounds and forms. This reaching everywhere is
the pearl's nature. Dogen said: Even if doubts arise or if we affirm, negate or
are puzzled by its existence these are only partial, incomplete observations. Do
we not cherish the infinite brilliance of the bright pearl? Who can surpass the
virtue of this brilliant, radiant pearl that covers the universe?
I added
footnotes to clarify this koan. In the first line the monk said to Hsuan-sha,
The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. The footnote says,
Tens of thousands know it but how many have realized it? It's easy to say we
have realized it, but hard to really realize it. The second line says, How can I
understand the meaning of this? The footnote says, What is the meaning of
meaning?
I included this footnote because it reminded me of a radio
program I used to listen to back in the seventies, Lex Hixon's In the Spirit on
WBAI, a progressive station out of New York City. Lex was wonderful as the
moderator of that program because he had a naive way of dealing with
spirituality that made him a very lively spiritual teacher himself. He asked the
things you wanted to know about, the questions you wanted to ask. Lex had
different masters and gurus as guests on the show every Sunday and it was my
Sunday routine to listen. One morning he was interviewing a Zen master, asking
many questions and getting answers.
The teacher mentioned meditation so
Lex suggested, "How about leading us in meditation?" Now, meditation on a radio
show is pretty deadly. However, the teacher consented and asked everyone to sit
up straight. He then hit the gong three times and everything got quiet. I guess
the studio engineer piped in some bird songs so that people scanning the dial
would know that something was going on. The tweeting of birds lasted two or
three minutes when suddenly Lex asked in a quiet voice, "Roshi, what is the
meaning of this?" Silence. The Roshi cleared his throat and said, "What is the
meaning? What is the meaning? What is the meaning of meaning? There's even a
book called What Is the Meaning of Meaning. Time to shut up and sit!" That
phrase popped into my head when I heard the monk in this koan looking for the
meaning of "one bright pearl."
In the next line Hsuan-sha answered, The
entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. Why is it necessary to
understand the meaning of this? The footnote says, There's no place to take hold
of this, yet it is sure to be misunderstood. The next line states, On the
following day Hsuan-sha said to the monk... The footnote says, When he raises
his head, I can see horns. Be careful here. Then, The entire world of the ten
directions is one bright pearl. How do you understand the meaning of this? The
footnote says, First he inflicts a flesh wound, now he goes for the throat. The
monk replied, The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. Why is
it necessary to understand the meaning of this? The footnote says, This monk is
not very alert. He sees a pit and jumps into it. In the last line Hsuan-sha
said, Now I know that you are living inside a cave of demons on the black
mountain. The footnote says, Hsuan-sha is a competent teacher of our school. Why
doesn't he just drive him out? Keep in mind that the last line is not only
disapproving of the monk, but also teaching him. Hsuan-sha is not only saying,
"You are missing it;" he is also saying, "Though you are missing it, this too is
one bright pearl."
The Capping Verse to this koan says:
The
question came from the cave of demons -
The master answered with a
mudball.
Beyond telling, absolutely beyond telling,
Ultimately we can only
nod to ourselves.
The monk was in the cave of demons and the master
answered with a mudball. Referring to his own teacher, Dogen once said, "My late
master even used the mudball to explain the one bright pearl to his students."
What does it mean to use the mudball? In Zen literature you find reference to
offering any kind of teaching as playing with mudballs. In order to talk about
the Dharma you need to separate yourself from it. In order to point to it, you
need to be separate from it. There is no way for any teacher, the Buddha
included, to avoid wallowing in the mud in order to communicate the teachings.
It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. The mudball referred to here is
what Hsuan-sha said to the monk: Why is it necessary to understand
this?
Beyond telling, absolutely beyond telling. Needless to say, this
refers to the fact that the heart of the Buddha-dharma cannot be communicated.
We can explain it, but it doesn't make sense. Or we grab onto the words and
ideas that describe it, and think that is it, that we have it. Words and ideas
will satisfy us for awhile, but sooner or later we begin to realize that they
don't impart any strength, change our lives or transform our way of seeing
things. This kind of understanding is just more information. Somehow it is not
enough. It doesn't fulfill our spiritual hunger.
Ultimately we can only
nod to ourselves. The reason we can only nod to ourselves is that there is
nobody else in the whole universe. If you contain everything, there is no one
outside. There is no one to acknowledge or communicate with, there is no one to
give and nothing to receive.
Dogen has a beautiful and powerful way of
talking about this. He said: When the right time comes the essence of the bright
pearl can be grasped. It is suspended in emptiness, hidden in the lining of
clothes, found under the chin of dragons and in the headdresses of kings. This
pearl is always inside our clothing (inside our real nature). Never attempt to
wear it on the surface. It should be kept in headdresses and under jaws. When
you are drunk (in a state of delusion) there will be a close friend who will
give you a pearl (the Buddhist teaching) and you must, without fail, give the
same reward to your close friend. When the pearl is placed around the neck the
person is always drunk. Even in one's present deluded state one is still in the
universe of one bright pearl. Although situations seem to change, everything is
always the one bright pearl.
When you realize the one bright pearl, you
transform your life. When you don't realize it, it's still there. It's why you
are here, realized or not. Some of us will go to our graves never having
realized it, but the fact is we are always making the journey with that one
bright pearl. Our practice is to discover that pearl. It can't be given; it
can't be received. But it can be discovered, and the way you discover it is to
strip off all of the extra, all the excess baggage. When everything is gone,
when there is nothing else to let go of - there it is! The one bright pearl.
Your life, my life, the life of the entire universe.
©2003 Zen Mountain
Monastery
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