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LAUGHING, Continued: 1
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Don’t Ask
“‘Itself’ cannot be named or said. The whole method is
knowing how to fly.” -- T’IEN
T’UNG
WANG-SUN SAID:
“Noticing, mirroring and stretching are details for the mediocre
and the inferior. If you add to this mounting a fancy chair and sporting
demon eyes, don’t be surprised if a bystander who does not agree comes
forward.”
His point, as Thomas Cleary explains in "Kensho: The
Heart of Zen," is that erudition is a distraction. (And worse, it’s a
distraction that ensnares others.) Really, there is nothing that should be
said: Being so is only understood by being so.
I asked the panel to
speculate if there is laughter in Nirvana. David observes:
“To my
perception this question fits squarely into the category of ‘useless
speculations’ that the Buddha recommended we don't spend our time on.
...[P]lease refer to Episode 22 of Dharma The Cat -- it's titled, ‘Dont
Ask!’
“You really want to know if there is laughter in Nirvana?
Okay, ask yourself two questions: 1) If the answer to your above question
were 'yes,' what would you do with that information, and 2) If the answer
to the above question were 'no,' what would you do with that
information?”
A broader and more-worrisome question then occurs: Is
the pursuit of gaining an understanding of humor just time taken from
action (and non-action) that would lead to enlightenment?
Hui-neng
is said not to have wanted his words to survive him. He believed in
‘direct seeing.’ Yet it is curiously useful to have Hui-neng’s words in
the Platform Sutra with us today to tell us about ‘direct seeing’ -- and
the bases for his insights. [It seems hard for any Buddhist to know
beforehand what books or teachings to do without! Must we have the courage
to be like Layman P’ang, who is said to have put all his belongs into a
boat and then set it adrift?]
In David’s “Don’t Ask!” cartoon, the
question that is an example of useless speculation is “Does a dog have
buddha-nature?” The decision of using that particular question in the
cartoon creates a complication, since it is a Zen koan that has utility as
a tool to achieve enlightenment. Ch’an Master Joshu was enlightened by
delving into the question, and was inspired to write a powerful -- and
funny -- poem (or bit of doggerel):
Mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu,
mu, mu. Mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu.
Any translation
of Joshu’s words is problematic, but a current-day equivalent of the poem
can be heard in a movie now in theatres, “Being John Malkovich.” This
modern version is ‘recited’ when Malkovich goes into the portal of his own
Mind, and runs something like this:
Malkovich, Malkovich,
Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich,
Malkovich. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich,
Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.
So ...
does a dog have buddha-nature!? Joshu’s ‘mu’ is often said to mean that he
rejected the question as one that can be dealt with rationally. But that
is not to say that he was sorry the question was asked!
Does John
Malkovich, the puppet well-rigged, have buddha-nature?
Mu.
One at Play
- “Countin’ flowers on the wall. It don’t bother
me at all/ Playin’ solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one/ Smokin’
cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kangeroo/ Don’t tell me I’ve nothin to
do.” -- OLD STATLER BROS.
SONG
THE SWEDENBORGIAN philosopher Wilson
Van Dusen wrote in The Natural Depth in Man, “The purpose of creation is
that the One playfully experience all its possibilities, so to speak, just
to pass the time. Each individual is a possibility that leads back to the
One.”
Scholar, writer and zenyk Ken Wilber in an interview in
Pathways Magazine, titled “A Ticket to Athens” [reprinted at the Shambhala
Publishers website], said much the same, in an elaborate answer to this
question: “Why does Spirit bother to manifest at all, especially when that
manifestation is necessarily painful and requires that It become amnesiac
to Its true identity? Why does God incarnate?”
He said, “Here you
are, the One and Only, the Alone and the Infinite. What are you going to
do next? You bathe in your own glory for all eternity, you bask in your
own delight for ages upon ages, and then what? Sooner or later, you might
decide that it would be fun -- just fun -- to pretend that you were not
you. I mean, what else are you going to do? What else can you
do?”
He went on to say, “[it] is exactly the core of the answer
given by the mystics the world over. If you are the One, and -- out of
sheer exuberance, plenitude, superabundance -- you want to play, to
rejoice, to have fun, then you must first, manifest the Many, and then
second, forget it is you who are the Many. ...”
Perhaps, then, the
ultimate cosmic joke is that we are here to laugh at our own ultimate
cosmic joke. Like a troup of storytellers from the Decameron or
Canterbury, we journey a pathway home, laughing at our strangly precious
foibles and follies.
Tom Armstrong
lives in San Francisco where he earns his
bread as an accountant. He is a rogue Buddhist who is also the webmaster
of the currently indisposed Zen Unbound, an ezine about mystical Zen and
popular culture.
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