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Reginald Horace Blyth
(3 December 1898 – 28 October 1964)
was an English author and devotee of Japanese culture.
"Santoka"
by R. H. Blyth
in: A History of Haiku. Tokyo:
The Hokuseido Press, 1964. Volume 2: From Issa to the Present. pp. 173-88.
R. H. Blyth
on Bashô
"Bashô" by R. H. Blyth
in: Haiku, Hokuseido, 1951, pp.
328-36.
"Bashô" by R. H. Blyth
in: A History of Haiku, Volume 1:
From the Beginnings up to Issa, The Hokuseido Press, 1963, pp. 105-29.
Early
life
Blyth was born in Essex, England, the son of a railway clerk. In 1916, at the
height of World War I, he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector at
Wormwood Scrubs, before working on the Home Office Scheme at Princetown Work
Centre in the former and future Dartmoor Prison. After the war, he attended the
University of London, from which he graduated in 1923, with honours.
Blyth played the flute, made musical instruments, and
taught himself several European languages. In 1924, he received a teaching
certificate from London Day Training College. The same year, he married Annie
Bercovitch, a university friend. Some accounts say they moved to India, where
he taught for a while until he became unhappy with British colonial rule. Other
scholars dismiss this episode, claiming it to have been invented by Blyth's
mentor Suzuki Daisetsu. (Pinnington, 1997).
Korea
(1925-1935)
In 1925, the Blyths moved to Korea (then under Japanese rule), where Blyth
became Assistant Professor of English at Keijo University in Seoul. While in
Korea, Blyth began to learn Japanese and Chinese, and studied Zen under the
master Hanayama Taigi of Myōshin-ji Keijo Betsuin (Seoul branch temple).
In 1933, he informally adopted a Korean student, paying for his studies in Korea
and London. (Pinnington, 1997). His wife returned to England alone in 1934. He
later followed her and they were divorced shortly thereafter, in 1935.
Japan
(1936-1964)
Having returned to Seoul in 1936, Blyth remarried in 1937, to a Japanese woman
named Kishima Tomiko (Pinnington, 1997), with whom he later had two daughters,
Nana Blyth and Harumi Blyth. He moved to Kanazawa in Japan, and took a job as
English teacher at the Fourth Higher School (later Kanazawa University).
When World War II broke out, Blyth was interned as a
British enemy alien. Although he expressed his sympathy for Japan and sought
Japanese citizenship, this was denied. During his internment his extensive
library was destroyed in a bombing raid.
After the war, Blyth worked diligently with the
authorities, both Japanese and American, to ease the transition to peace. Blyth
functioned as liaison to the Japanese Imperial Household, and his close friend,
Harold Gould Henderson, was on General Douglas MacArthur's staff. Together,
they helped draft the declaration, Ningen
Sengen, by which Emperor Hirohito declared himself to be a human being, and
not divine.
By 1946, Blyth had become Professor of English at
Gakushuin University, and tutored Crown Prince (later emperor) Akihito in
English. He did much to popularise Zen philosophy and Japanese poetry
(particularly haiku) in the West. In 1954, he was awarded a doctorate in
literature from Tokyo University, and, in 1959, he received the
Zuihōshō (Order of Merit) Fourth Grade.
Blyth died in 1964, of a brain tumour and complications from
pneumonia, in the Seiroka Hospital in Tokyo.
Sazanka ni kokoro nokoshite tabidachinu
I leave my heart
to the sasanqua flower
on the day of this journey
Note: The sasanqua is a camellia that blooms heavily and for long periods in autumn and early winter.
Blyth
and haiku
After early imagist interest in haiku the genre drew less attention in English,
until after World War II, with the appearance of a number of influential
volumes about Japanese haiku.
In 1949, with the publication in Japan of the first volume
of Haiku, Blyth's four-volume work, haiku was introduced to the post-war
Western world. Blyth produced a series of works on Zen, haiku, senryū, and
on other forms of Japanese and Asian literature, the most significant being his
Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942); his four-volume Haiku
series (1949-52), dealing mostly with pre-modern haiku, though including Shiki;
and his two-volume History of Haiku (1964). Today he is best known as a major
interpreter of haiku to English speakers.
Present-day attitudes to Blyth's work vary: On the one
hand, he is appreciated as a populariser of Japanese culture; on the other, his
portrayals of haiku and Zen have sometimes been criticized as one-dimensional.
Many contemporary Western writers of haiku were introduced to the genre through
his works. These include the San Francisco and Beat Generation writers, such as
Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as J. D. Salinger. Many
members of the international "haiku community" also got their first
views of haiku from Blyth's books, including James W. Hackett, Eric Amann,
William J. Higginson, Anita Virgil, Jane Reichhold, and Lee Gurga. In the late
twentieth century, members of that community with direct knowledge of modern
Japanese haiku often noted Blyth's distaste for haiku on more modern themes and
his strong bias regarding a direct connection between haiku and Zen, a
connection largely ignored by modern Japanese poets. (Bashō, in fact, felt
that his devotion to haiku prevented him from realising enlightenment. In addition,
many classic Japanese haiku poets, including Chiyo-ni, Buson, and Issa were
Pure Land rather than Zen Buddhists.) Blyth also did not view haiku by Japanese
women favourably, downplaying their substantial contributions to the genre,
especially during the Bashō era and the twentieth century.
Although Blyth did not foresee the appearance of original
haiku in languages other than Japanese when he began writing on the topic, and
although he founded no school of verse, his works stimulated the writing of haiku
in English. At the end of the second volume of his History of Haiku (1964), he
remarked that "The latest development in the history of haiku is one which
nobody foresaw... the writing of haiku outside Japan, not in the Japanese
language." He followed that comment with a number of original verses in
English by the American James W. Hackett (b. 1929), with whom Blyth
corresponded.
Selected
Bibliography
Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, The Hokuseido Press, 1942.
Haiku, in four volumes, The Hokuseido
Press, 1949-1952,
Volume 1: Eastern Culture.
Volume 2: Spring.
Volume 3: Summer-Autumn.
Volume 4: Autumn-Winter.
Senryu: Japanese Satirical Verses, The Hokuseido Press, 1949
Japanese Humour, Japan Travel Bureau, 1957
Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, The Hokuseido Press, 1959.
Oriental Humor, The Hokuseido
Press, 1959.
Zen and Zen Classics, in five volumes,
The Hokuseido Press.
Volume 1: General Introduction, from the Upanishads to Huineng. 1960.
Volume 2: History of Zen,1964.
Volume 3: History of Zen. 1970.
Volume 4: Mumonkan.1966.
Volume 5: Twenty-Five Zen Essays.1962.
Edo Satirical Verse Anthologies, The Hokuseido Press, 1961.
A History of Haiku, in two
volumes. The Hokuseido Press, 1963-1964.
Volume 1: From the Beginnings up to Issa.
Volume 2: From Issa up to the Present.
Games Zen Masters
Play: The Writings of R. H. Blyth. Selected,
edited, and with an introduction by Robert Sohl and Audrey Carr. New York, New
American Library, 1976.
R. H. Blyth. Drawn by Susumu Takiguchi
Robert Aitken
Remembering Blyth Sensei
Reginald Horace Blyth was born near London in
1898, the only child of working-class parents. By the start of World War I, he
was eighteen and already an eccentric in his contemporaries’ eyes: he ate
no meat, loved George Bernard Shaw, and became a conscientious objector to the
war, for which he was jailed. After serving a three-year sentence of hard labor
and fed up with the rigidity of Britain’s class system, he left his
homeland for what he thought would be a life of wandering.
But after just a year of traveling, Blyth was smitten by
Asia. He settled in Korea in the mid-1920s, and began teaching English at Seoul
University. He returned to England briefly to complete a B.A. in English literature
in order to further his Korean teaching career. Back in Seoul, Blyth met a monk
from Kyoto’s Myoshin-ji temple, the traditional headquarters of the
Rinzai Zen sect in Japan. The meeting was auspicious, inspiring Blyth to take
up the study of Japanese and to begin Zen practice at the Seoul branch temple;
within weeks, he had moved into the temple to become the disciple of the
resident Zen master, Kayama Taigi.
In 1940, Blyth moved to Japan and remained there for the
rest of his life, despite being interned as an enemy alien during World War II.
He married a Japanese woman and supported their two daughters working as a
teacher (he even tutored the Crown Prince of Japan) and began a prolific
writing and translating career. For Blyth, almost anything could be interpreted
as an example of Zen, including the Western literary canon. He expounded his
theories in Zen in English Literature and
Oriental Classics (1942), Japanese Humor (1957), and the four-volume
Haiku (1949-52), and through those books, spurring a generation of Westerners
to investigate Zen and Japanese culture. Blyth died in 1964 of a brain tumor.
I was a civilian internee from Guam, held with forty-four
other men in what we called the “Marks House” (named after the
former British owner) in the foreign district of Kobe, near the Tor Hotel. By
the winter of 1942�43, we had been interned for one year in Japan. I was not
too well, suffering periodic bouts of bronchitis and asthma, but I kept up with
my reading from the library we had brought with us from our first camp in Kobe,
the Seaman’s Mission on Ito Machi. I also had bought books with money
supplied to us through the Swiss consul by the United States government. These
books included works on haiku in English, a subject that had interested me
before the war.
One evening a guard came into my room, quite drunk, waving
a book in the air and saying in English, “This book, my English teacher .
. .” He had been a student of R.H. Blyth at Kanazawa, and the book
was Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, then just
published. I was in bed but jumped up to look at the book and was immediately
fascinated. I persuaded the guard to lend it to me, and weeks later he bought
another copy for me so that he could have his own copy back.
I suppose I read the book ten or eleven times straight
through. As soon as I finished it, I would start it again. I had it almost
memorized and could turn immediately to any particular passage. It was my
“first book,” the way Walden was the “first
book” for some of my friends, the way The Kingdom of God Is
Within You was the “first book” for Gandhi. Now when I
look at it, even the type looks different, far smaller in size, and the
references to Zen seem less profound. But it set my life on the course I still
maintain, and I trace my orientation to culture - to literature, rhetoric, art,
and music - to that single book.
In May 1944, all the camps in Kobe were combined, and we
were housed in a former reform school named Rinkangaku, in Futatabi Park near
Nunobiki Falls in the hills above Kobe. Mr. Blyth had been held in one of the
other camps, and now at last we could meet. I think he was rather overcome by
my adulation, and he rejected it at first, not wanting, as he said, a disciple.
But we straightened out this initial misunderstanding and soon established the
intimate relationship we were to maintain until his death in 1964, and which we
still maintain today, though he has been dead a long time.
Rinkangaku consisted of three large, connected buildings,
containing dormitories, commons rooms, and classrooms. One hundred seventy-five
men completely filled this complex, and Mr. Blyth lived with six others in what
had apparently been the commons room for the teachers. He had his bed in
the tokonoma, the alcove usually reserved for scroll and flower
arrangement in Japanese homes and offices. His books teetered on shelves he
himself had installed over the bed. All day long he sat on the bed, sometimes
cross-legged and sometimes with his feet on the floor, writing on a lectern placed
on a bedside table, with his reference books and notebooks among the bedcovers.
It was during this time that he was working on his four-volume Haiku and
his Senryu, as well as Buddhist Sermons from Christian
Texts and other works. I recall that he wrote rapidly, with his words
connected, using two sets of pen and ink, black for his text and red for his
quotations.
With my interest in haiku and my new enthusiasm for Zen,
we agreed that I should learn Japanese, so he obtained some elementary school
texts from his Japanese wife (families were permitted a weekly visit) and gave
me a couple of dictionaries. He loaned me what Zen texts he had; I remember
particularly D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series in
the original Luzac edition and Wong Moulam’s Sutra of Wei-lang in
its original paperbound edition, from Shanghai, I believe.
I would study and read during the day while he wrote at
his lectern, and in the evening I would visit his room to read my lesson to
him, perhaps show him a new haiku I had written, and talk generally with him
and his roommates, all of them old Japan hands, some of them partly of Japanese
ancestry.
Generally, Blyth
Sensei was well liked by his fellow internees, and
though he was regarded as pro-Japanese by the Americans from Guam, they
respected his learning and his diligence and knew that they could get straight
talk from him and learn something in the process. They called him Mr. B., a
nickname he rather liked. It seemed to express the balance between familiarity
and formality that he sought.
With the part-Japanese internees, he seemed to have a more
uncertain relationship. Perhaps they regarded him as a kind of
Johnny-come-lately. They busied themselves with studies of Japanese politics,
history, and economics, while he devoted himself to literature and religion. He
would always swing the talk from their interests to his own, which he regarded
as more fundamental. They seemed to feel that his interests were quite outdated
and irrelevant, and there were many heated arguments in his crowded, smoky
room.
If the American internees had known their Mr. B. more
intimately, they would have understood that his attitude toward Japan was
realistic and not blindly supportive. He had begun the process of applying for
Japanese citizenship before the war, but he allowed this process to lapse after
the war began, saying that if Japan lost the war, then he would renew his
application. (It turned out that he died a British subject.)
“Can you imagine people like these guards occupying
your country?” he once asked me. Somehow he sensed how badly the Japanese
were handling their responsibilities as occupation forces in Southeast Asia,
and he felt a national defeat might be the salutary experience the country
would need for true maturity.
So my lessons from Blyth Sensei included political
science, as well as language, literature, and religion. He seemed to regard his
understanding of culture as the ground for making judgments. After the war,
while teaching and in residence at the Gakushuin (the Peers School), he pointed
to an encyclopedia in his bookcase and said, “I would like to make a book
of commentary that would follow the main topics of the compendium of
facts.”
Blyth Sensei often mentioned how as a boy he was inspired
by Matthew Arnold’s ideal of developing one’s self to the fullest,
to be one’s own best linguist, musician, artist, and scholar. Thus he
learned Spanish in order to read Don Quixote, Italian to read
Dante, German to read Goethe, and he made a valiant effort to learn Russian in
order to read Dostoyevsky. And, of course, he was a deep student of Chinese,
Korean, and Japanese.
As a musician, he loved the oboe particularly but played
virtually all the Western orchestral instruments. While he was at the
Gakushuin, he constructed an organ, a remarkable feat of technical and musical
skill. His words about Bach influenced my taste during the war and directed me
on the path of music appreciation I still follow. And somehow just his passing
words on Turner, Sesshu, and other artists established my understanding of art.
There were flaws in this Renaissance man, however. He did
not go far enough in his Zen practice to justify his confidence in commenting
on the Mumonkan (The Gateless Barrier)and that book is probably the
weakest of his works. He loved women and scorned them, his relations with those
close to him were stormy, and his remarks about women, particularly in the
essays he published after the war, infuriate readers and alienate them to this
day.
I accept these flaws as I accept the flaws in my own
father. The one brought me into physical being and shaped my character, the
other put me in touch with myself and with this rich, wonderful world. If we
had not met, I might well have spent my life mundanely, saying and doing
trivial things. His words rise in my mind as I speak to my own students, and
his face still appears in my dreams.
R. H. Blyth
ZEN AND ZEN CLASSICS
Volume One
From the Upanishads
to Huineng
The Hokuseido Press
http://boozers.fortunecity.com/brewerytap/695/B-Hsin.html
p. 46 ff.
The Hsinhsinming
The "Hsinhsinming" ("Shinjinmei") was
one of the first treatises
on Zen, at least, of those that remain to us. The author of this
Buddhist "hymn", Sengtsan (Sosan), the third (Chinese) Zen
patriarch from Dharma, the first Chinese and the twenty-eighth
Indian Zen patriarch, lived during the sixth century, dying in
606 A.D. His place of origin is unknown. The conversion of
Sengtsan at the hands of Huike (Eka), the Second Patriarch, is
recorded in the "Chuantenglu" ("Dentoroku"), Part 3:
Sengtsan asked Huike, saying, "I am diseased: I
implore you to
cleanse me of my sin". Huike said, "Bring me your sin and I
will
cleanse you of it". Sengtsan thought for awhile; then said, "I
cannot get at it". Huike replied, "Then I have cleansed you of
it".
Sengtsan realized, not simply in his mind, but in every
bone of
his body, that his sinfulness was an illusion, one with that of
the illusion of self. As soon as we are aware of our
irresponsibility, all the cause of misbehaviour disappears in so
far as the cause, (the illusion of the self) is removed. If we
have no self, it cannot commit sin. Yet, it must be added,
"I can't see how you and I, who don't exist, should
get to
speaking here, and smoke our pipes, for all the world like
reality". (Stevenson, "Fables")
And from another point of view, our self is real entity,
real in
so far as we know (physically) that, as Yuima said, your illness
is my illness. When one part of the body is diseased, all is
diseased, for "We are members one of another". In this sense,
there is no rest for any one of us, still less for God himself,
while one restless soul remains. But the real rest of God, the
rest of "the man who has arrived", is something much deeper
than
this, which no simile or metaphor can express, lying as it does
essential in the restlessness itself. An old waka says:
Do not think,
After the clouds have passed away,
"How bright is has become!"
For in the sky, all the while,
The moon of dawn.
It is the region of Arnold's lines, "In Kensington
Gardens":
Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep cries come!
To go back to Sengtsan. He became the disciple of the
Second
Patriarch and practiced austerities and led a life of devotion and
poverty, receiving the bowl and the robe, insignia of the
transmission through Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch (of China)
of the Buddha Mind. At this time, one of the periodic
persecutions of Buddhism broke out. Sutras and images were burned
wholesale; monks and nuns were returned to the lay life.
Sengtsan wandered for fifteen years all over the country,
avoiding persecution. In 592, he met Taohsin (Doshin), who became
the Fourth Patriarch. His enlightenment was as follows:
Taohsin came and bowed to Sengtsan, and said, "I ask
you for your
merciful teaching. Please show me how to be released". Sengtsan
answered, "Who has bound you?" "No one", he replied.
Sengtsan
said, "Why then do you ask to be released?" Taohsin immediately
came to a profound realization. (Chuantenglu, 3)
This is very much like, even suspiciously like, the
enlightenment
of Sengtsan himself. The question of historicity is quite
different, however, from the "truth" of the incident, which is
that of the "Hsinhsinming" itself, which owed its composition,
no
doubt, to the fact that during these troublous times the wordless
message was in danger of being entirely forgotten, or worse
still, misunderstood. What this was may be seen in the Four
Statements of the Zen Sect [The originator of these seems to be
unknown. They are sometimes attributed to Bodhidharma, but are
more likely to have been formulated afterwards, during the Tang
and the Sung Eras.]:
1. No dependence on words and letters.
To apply this to poetry, whose medium is words and
phrases, may
seem absurd. It is like pictures without paint and music without
sound. But words are a peculiar medium, in being the vehicle for
all communication, whether poetical or otherwise. In poetry,
parallel with it, living a life of its own apart from that of
the so-called poetry, is an unnameable spirit that moves and has
its being. It is the darkness and silence of things, of which the
ordinary poetical meaning is the light and sound.
There is a transmission from poet to poet of the spirit of
poetry
deeply similar to that of Zen from monk to monk. A poet knows
another poet by indubitable yet invisible signs; the same is true
of the artist and the musician. But the poet especially (in the
wide and profound sense of the word) feels and transmits
unwittingly that attitude towards life that is the real poetry of
the world.
Two came here,
Two flew off, --
Butterflies.
Chora (1720-1781)
In this verse, the ordinary poetical meaning is discarded;
what
remains is that dark flame of life that burns in all things. It
is seen with the belly, not with the eye; with "bowels of
compassion".
3. Direct pointing to the soul of man.
How can there be such a thing as pointing without a
finger? How
can art subsist without a medium? What is this silence that
speaks so loudly?
Beat the fulling block for me,
In my loneliness;
Now again let it cease.
Buson (1715-1783)
A fishing village;
Dancing under the moon,
To the smell of raw fish.
Shiki (1866-1902)
The flame too is motionless,
A rounded sphere
Of winter seclusion.
Yaha (1662-1740)
4. Seeing into one's nature and the attainment of
Buddhahood.
Attaining Buddhahood means attaining manhood, being a
citizen of
the world, of double sex; besides this Shakespearean state, it
means attaining childhood, beast-hood, flower-hood, stone-hood,
even word-hood and idea-hood, and place-hood and time-hood.
As for the skin,
What a difference
Between a man and a woman!
But as for the bones,
Both are simply human beings.
Ikkyu (1394-1481)
Spring rains.
A letter thrown away,
Blown along in the grove.
Issa
A camellia flower fell;
A cock crowed;
Some more fell.
Baishitsu
It was the inner meaning of these Four Statements that
Sengtsan
desired to perpetuate in the five hundred and eighty-four
characters of the poem. In it he has condensed the essence of all
the Buddhist Sutras, all the one thousand seven hundred koans of
Zen.
The title of the work may be explained in the following
way.
First *hsin* is faith, not in the Christian sense of a bold
flight of the soul towards God, a belief in what is unseen
because of what is seen, but a belief in that which has been
experienced, knowledge, conviction. Second *hsin*, the mind, is
not our mind in the ordinary sense, but the Buddha-nature which
each of us has unbeknown to us. *Ming* is a recording, for the
benefit of others. The title thus means a description of that
part of oneself where no doubt is possible. This is the same
unshakable conviction that Shelley and Beethoven and Gauguin had.
They too recorded what they saw with their eyes and heard with
their ears, there to hesitation or indecision could enter.
Especially noteworthy is the absolute faith in the value of the
apparently trivial.
The old temple:
A baking pan
Thrown away among the parsley.
Buson
Young greens
Fallen on the outer verandah,
The earth with them.
Ransetsu
What is the Buddha? A baking pan thrown away in the
parsley. What
is the meaning of Dharma's coming from the West? Young greens on
the verandah, the dirt with them. But these things are not
something outside the mind. As Dogen (1200-1253) said:
If we seek the Buddha outside the mind, the Buddha changes
into
a devil.
But we must come to the poem itself.
The "Hsinhsinming", entitled "Inscribed on
the Believing Mind",
was translated, extraordinary well, in 1927, by Dr. Suzuki
Daisetz, in "Essays in Zen Buddhism", Series 1, pp. 182-187.
[Reprinted in "Manual of Zen Buddhism", 1935, pp. 91-97. The
title is changed to "On Believing in Mind".] (The present
translation is in many places little more that a garbled version
of his.) It consists of 146 unrhymed lines of four characters a
line, shorter than the general run of Chinese verse, which
usually has five or seven. Perhaps the brevity suits the mood of
Zen, and prevents any literary or rhetorical flourishes. There
have been many commentaries on the "Hsinhsinming", the first
perhaps being by Chou Myohon, 1263-1323, who quotes the
"Chengtaoke" ("Shodoka"), in illustration.
Of other verse expositions of Zen, we may mention first
this
"Chengtaoke" [Translated by Suzuki in "Manual of Zen
Buddhism",
1935, pp. 106-121.], a hundred years later than the
"Hsinhsinming", by Yungchia, (Yoka Daishi), d. 713, one of the
chief disciples of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch. It is three
times as long, and more flowery in style. In the Tang Dynasty we
have also the "Tsantungchi" ("Sandokai") [This means,
"Difference-identity-agreement", or
"Phenomena-reality-ite",
Zen as the harmony between the sameness and difference of
things.], by Shihtou (Sekito), 700-790. Then we have
"Paochingsanmei" ("Hokyosammai"), ascribed variously to
Yuehshan
(Yakusan), 731-834; Yunyen (Ungan), d. 841; and Tungshan (Dosan),
807-867. To the Tang period also belongs the most famous of the
strictly Zen poets, Hanshan (Kanzan), whose dates are uncertain.
An examples of his verse is the following:
The Mind is like the autumn moon,
Like the mountain pool, clear and pure, --
But what can I compare it to?
How can I ever express it in words?
This reminds us of Shakespeare's "Shall I compare
thee to a
summer's day?" Coming to the Sung dynasty, we have the poetical
comments by Hsuehtou (Seccho), c.
("Hekiganshu") [Cases 2, 57, 58, 59 are based on the first
lines
of the Hsinhsinming, which Chaochou (Joshu) seems to have
admired.], edited by Yuanwu (Engo), who was born in 1135; and the
verses composed by Hungchih (Wanshi) [One would expect
"Kochi".],
1091-1157, for the "Tsungjunglu" ("Shoyoroku"), a
similar
compilation of "cases" of Zen.
All these, including the "Hsinhsinming" itself,
seem to me verse,
not poetry. It is true that, to parody Keats, the life of Zen is
the poetical life, and the poetical life in the life of Zen; this
is all we know, and all we need to know. But art in not life; it
is in some sense the very dissatisfaction with life, which if
perfectly satisfactory, (as in the case of the rest of creation,)
will never transform itself into those psalms and symphonies
which
Look before and after,
And pine for what is not.
The "Hsinhsinming" then, is rather the basis for
a theory of
poetry, or the philosophic background, an expression of the
implicit *raison d'etre* of the composition of certain kinds of
poetry, like that of haiku, of Wordsworth and Clare, of Tao
Chinnimg (Toenmei) and Po Chui (Hakukyoi). In explaining and
illustrating the "Hsinhsinming" I have therefore quoted the
poets
rather than the religious writers. The poetry is the flower, the
"Hsinhsinming" is the roots.
THERE IS NOTHING DIFFICULT ABOUT THE GREAT WAY,
BUT, AVOID CHOOSING!
We suffer, at one and the same time, from excessive pride
and
excessive humility. On the one hand, our intellect rushes in
where angels fear to tread. On the other hand, we are too humble
before the Buddhas and saints, not realizing that we too are the
Buddha, as the "Avatamsaka" ("Kegonkyo") declares:
The mind, the Buddha, living creatures, -- these are not
three
different things.
Haiku are divided, rather arbitrarily, into seven
sections: The
Season, Sky and Elements, Fields and Mountains, Gods and Buddhas,
Human Affairs, Animals and Birds, Trees and Flowers. With all
these but one, the fifth, in the petals of the barley leaf, the
tender smile on the lips of Kwannon, the moonlight on the valley
stream, the voices of insects in autumn, the coldness of winter,
we can see the Great Way that stretches out in every direction,
throughout past, present and future. But when we come to man, to
ourselves, it is a different story.
So, beneath the starry dome
And the floor of plains and sees,
I have never felt at home,
Never wholly been at ease.
The First Day of the Year:
I remember
A lonely autumn evening.
Basho
Scattering rice too,
This is a sin:
The fowls are fighting each other.
Issa
In "The Sphinx", Emerson tells us:
Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm.
But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals.
In other words, Sengtsan, in declaring that the Way in
not
difficult, is flatly contradicting the experience of mankind both
in regard to the complexities of ordinary life and the perception
of the natural poetry of apparently unpoetical things. His
meaning is faintly adumbrated by the well known verse of Yamazaki
Sokan, d. 1553, included in a collection of poems he made called
"Inutsukuba",
How I wish to kill!
How I wish
Not to kill!
The thief I have caught
Is my own son.
This corresponds to the English proverb,
He who follows truth too closely, will have dirt kicked
into his
face.
It is the very search, and the excessive zeal of it,
which
causes the truth to disappear. In our hot grasp the truth wilts
away.
There is no one
Who dyes them,
But of themselves
The willow is green,
The flowers red.
If we just remain quiet, and live in all simplicity, no
problems
arise.
Were I a king, pensively
Would I pace the corridors of the palace.
The path I walk goes through the pine-trees;
The sea is blue, a butterfly flits by.
Miyoshi Tatsuji
Sengtsan attributes all our uneasiness, our
dissatisfaction with
ourselves and other people, our inability to understand why we are
alive at all, to one great cause: choosing this and rejecting
that, clinging to the one and loathing the other. There is a
profound saying:
The flowers fall, for all our yearning;
Grasses grow, regardless of our dislike.
Other verses that express this fact of the life that comes
from
the death of self and its wants and distastes, are the following:
Just get rid
Of that small mind
That is called "self",
And there is nothing in the universe [Literally, "A major
chiliocosm", a thousand million worlds.]
That can harm or hinder you.
How delightful it is
To make all space
Our dwelling place!
Our hearts and minds
Are perfectly at ease.
D.H.Lawrence says the same thing in "Kangaroo":
Home again. But what was home? The fish has vast ocean for
home.
And man has timelessness and nowhere. "I won't delude myself with
the fallacy of home", he said to himself. "The four walls are a
blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to
sleep".
ONLY WHEN YOU NEITHER LOVE NOR HATE
DOES IT APPEAR IN ALL CLARITY.
There is love and Love, but only hate; there is no such
thing as
Hate. In Love is included that which might be called Hate, what
Lawrence calls "the dark side of love". In so far as we love,
in
the sense of being attached to a thing, we hate. In so far as we
Love, whether it be with pain or joy, the Way is walked in by us,
we are the Way. Ryoto, a pupil of Basho, says:
Yield to the willow
All the loathing,
All the desire of your heart.
Another didactic verse is the following:
In my hut this spring,
There is nothing,
There is everything.
Sodo (1641-1716)
A HAIR'S BREADTH OF DEVIATION FROM IT,
AND A DEEP GULF IS SET BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH.
A miss is as good as a mile. The slightest thought of
self, that
is, by self, and the Great Way is irretrievably lost. A drop of
ink, and a glass of clear water is all clouded. Once we think,
"This flower is blooming for me; this insect is a hateful
nuisance and nothing else; that man is a useful rascal; that
woman is a good mother, and she must therefore be a good wife",
-- when such thoughts arise in our minds, all the cohesion
between things disappear; they rattle about in a meaningless and
irritating way. Instead of being united into a whole by virtue of
their own interpenetrated suchness, they are pulled hither and
thither by our arbitrary and ever-changing preferences, out whims
and prejudices. We suppose this particular man to be a Buddha,
ourselves to be ordinary people, this action to be charming, that
to be odious, and fail to see how "All things work for good"
(Romans VIII, 28). In actual fact, Heaven and Earth cannot be
separated; one cannot exist without the other. Together they are
the Great Way.
The two points to bear in mind are first the nearness of
the Way
and second, its corollary, the fact that we and the Way are not
two things. It seems so far that we can never attain to it:
Far, far from here
Is the Heavenly Land,
A million million miles away;
We can hardly get there
On just one pair of straw sandals.
But as Ikkyu punningly says:
Paradise is in the West;
It is in the East also.
Look for it in the North
That you came through,
It is all in yourself (the South). [There is a pun on the
Japanese words *minami*, south, and *mina mi*, all oneself.]
The moment you place your happiness in the fulfillment of
any want
or wish, that is, outside yourself, outside the Way, in anything
but the thing as it is, as it is becoming, at that moment your
balance is lost and you fall straight from Heaven to Hell.
Things are one; things are many. The intellect cannot
grasp these
two simultaneously, but experience can, if it will. If we fall,
only by a hair's breadth, into the error of supposing that we are
different, weariness and envy and triumph and shame and fear
succeed one another in an endless train. We must be in the
condition that Paul describes:
Who is weak and I am not weak?
Who is offended and I burn not? (Corinthians, XI, 29)
If this state could only be attained, we can say of man
with
Matthew Arnold in "A Summer Night":
How boundless might his soul's horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency.
IF YOU WANT TO GET HOLD OF WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE,
DO NOT BE ANTI- OR PRO- ANYTHING.
Since the Great Way is one, it is impossible for us to be
for
this, and aiding that which needs no aid. There is a certain
current, a Flow of the universe. We may swim with it or against
it, float in the middle of the stream or stagnate in a
back-water, but nothing we can do will accelerate or retard that
Flow. Yet his Flow is not something separate from ourselves; it
is our own flowing; we are not corks bobbing up and down on a
stream of inevitability. It is not as Fitzgerald says:
The Ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes.
Or rather, it would be better to say that this is true,
and that
Henley's words are equally true, not in alternation but
synchronously:
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
This submergence and assertion of self, this living fully
without
taking sides which Sengtsan urges upon us, is the poetical life.
The unpoetical life is of two kinds. First, by aversion, we live
in a limited world, a half-world. Second, by infatuation, we
exaggerate, sentimentalize, weary by repetition.
THE CONFLICT OF LONGING AND LOATHING, --
THIS IS JUST THE DISEASE OF THE MIND.
Something arises which pleases the mind, which fits in
with our
notions of what is profitable for us, -- and we love it.
Something arises which thwarts us, which conflicts with our
wants, and we hate it. So long as we possess this individual
mind, enlightenment and delusion, pain and pleasure, accepting
and rejecting, good and bad toss us up and down on the waves of
existence, never moving onwards, always the same restlessness and
wabbling, the same fear of woe and insecurity of joy. So
Wordsworth say, in the "Ode to Duty":
My hopes must no more change their name.
In addition, the mirror of our mind being distorted,
nothing
appears in its natural, its original form. The louse appears a
dirty, loathsome thing, the lion a noble creature. But when we
see the louse as it really is, it is not merely neutral thing; it
is something to be accepted as inevitable in our mortal life, as
in Basho's verse:
Fleas, lice,
The horse pissing
By my pillow.
It may be seen as something charming and meaningful as in
Issa's
haiku:
Giving the breast,
While counting
The flea-bites.
There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical
about
the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for
the latter is full of life and warmth and energy.
The "Vaipulya-mahavyuha Sutra" says:
The lotus arises form the mud, but is not dyed therewith.
This is expressed less ambitiously in the following waka:
Just get rid of
The mind that thinks
"This is good, that is bad",
And without any special effort,
Wherever we live is good to live in.
Quite devoid of sententiousness or literary ambition, with
no
longing or loathing, Basho's verse on the mountain violets:
Coming along the path,
There is something touching
About these violets.
NOT KNOWING THE PROFOUND MEANING OF THINGS,
WE DISTURB OUR (ORIGINAL) PEACE OF MIND TO NO PURPOSE.
When we are in the Way, when we act without live or hate,
hope or
despair of indifference, the meaning of things if self-evident,
not merely impossible but unnecessary to express. Conversely,
while we are looking for the significance of things, it is
non-existent. Our original nature is one of perfect harmony with
the universe, a harmony not of similarity or correspondence nut of
identity. The "Tsaikentan" ("Seikontan") [By Hung Yingming.
fl.
1600 A.D. A compound of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.]
says:
The mind that is free form itself, -- why should it look
within?
This introspection taught by Buddha only increases the
obstruction. Things are originally one; why then should we
endeavour to unite them? Chuangtse preached the identity of
contraries, thus dividing up that unity.
PERFECT LIKE GREAT SPACE,
THE WAY HAS NOTHING LACKING, NOTHING IN EXCESS.
Without beginning, without end, without increase or
decrease, the
Great Way is perfect, like a circle, with nothing too small in
the smallest thing, nothing too large in the largest. And this
perfection in the dew-drop and in the solar system we are
enabled to see, we are driven to see, by the perfection in
ourselves. Beyond all this confusion and asymmetry there is a
deep harmony and proportion without us and within us that
satisfies us when we submit to it, when we take it as it is, but
can never be perceived or conceived intellectually. This supreme
Form of Things is called "Formlessness" in the
"Hannyashingyo":
All things are formless, without growth or decay, without
purity
or sin, without increase or decrease.
In poetry there three are expressed as follows:
Age cannot wither her not custom stale
Her infinite variety. ("Anthony and Cleopatra", II, 2)
The young girl
Blew her nose
In the evening glory.
Issa
The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall;
the
desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall. (Bacon, "Of
Goodness")
In poetry as in life, too much soon wearies. This is why
we turn
to Virgil, to Chaucer, to Basho. The circle expresses this
moderation however large or small it may be. In the Oxherding
pictures used in Zen, it portrays serenity. The circular mirror
is used in Shinto. Emerson has an essay on Circles.
TRULY, BECAUSE OF OUR ACCEPTING AND REJECTING,
WE HAVE NOT THE SUCHNESS OF THINGS.
Our state of mind is not to be fatalistic, saying of bad
things,
"It can't be helped", and of good things, "What difference
does
it make?" It must be to want what the universe wants, in the way
it wants it, in that place, at that time. This wanting *is* the
Way, this wanting *is* the suchness of things; there is no Way,
no suchness apart from it.
The suchness of things is what the poet is looking for,
listening
to, smelling, and tasting. And in so far as he and we listen and
touch and see, the suchness has an existence, a meaning, a value.
Unless we taste the world, it is tasteless; it is void of
suchness. But this tasting is not to be a choosing, tasting some
and not tasting others. Hung Yingming, following Chuangtse, and
using almost the same words as Sengtsan, says:
All the things in heaven and earth, all human emotions,
all the
things that happen in the world, when looked at by the
unenlightened eye, are seen as multifarious and disparate. When
viewed by the Eye of the Way, all this variety is uniformity; why
should we distinguish them, why accept these and reject those?
NEITHER FOLLOW AFTER, NOR DWELL WITH
THE DOCTRINE OF THE VOID.
We are not to be beguiled by the senses, by the
apparent
differences of things.
Rain, hail and snow,
Ice too, are set apart,
But when they fall, --
The same water
Of the valley stream.
On the other hand, we are not to fall into the opposite
error of
taking all things as unreal and meaningless. This is the basis of
much of the poetical thinking of Swinburne, of Shelley and Byron.
It tinges the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Clough, Christina
Rossetti. It is the basis of all passive, quietistic thought.
Both these extreme views are wrong; Yungchia describes the
position in the following way:
Getting rid of things and clinging to emptiness
Is an illness of the same kind;
It is just like throwing oneself into a fire
To avoid being drowned.
IF THE MIND IS AT PEACE,
THESE WRONG VIEWS DISAPPEAR OF THEMSELVES.
Dogen has a waka:
Ever the same,
Unchanged of hue,
Cherry blossoms
Of my native place:
Spring now has gone.
Here the eternal and temporal, the unchanged and changing
are
one, because the flowers are allowed to be the same colour as
always; they are allowed to fall as always. The flowers are not
separated, in their blooming and in their falling, from the poet
himself, nut neither is it a dream world, an eternal world where
all is vanity. It is a world of form and colour, of change and
decay, yet it is beyond time and place, a world of truth. A verse
by Gyosei Shonin,
All the various
Flowers of spring,
Tinted leaves of autumn,
Tokens in this world
Untainted with falsity.
The ordinary world and the world of reality are here one;
life
and death are Nirvana. The great mistake of life and of poetry
is the desire to get away from things, instead of getting into
them, escaping form this world into the dream world. Yet even
this world of day-dreams, of escapist poetry, Wagnerian music
and pictures of Paradise, is also a way of life, is also, when we
realize it, the Great Way. Thus it is again that enlightenment is
ignorance, salvation is damnation, Heaven and Hell are one self
place.
WHEN ACTIVITY IS STOPPED AND THERE IS PASSIVITY,
THIS PASSIVITY AGAIN IS A STATE OF ACTIVITY.
The modern theories of repression may be taken as an
example of
the meaning of this verse. When we thwart nature, suppress our
instincts, control our desires, the energy thus restricted and
yet augmented is still active, and may at any time burst forth
with volcanic force in some unsuspected direction.
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.
In the poetic life precisely the same thing happens. Only
the
charming, picturesque aspects of nature, only innocuous creatures
are described.
But this is only one half of life or less; this is not the
Way at
all. But all day and every day, Nature is giving us all kinds of
experiences, ghastly as well as pleasant. Germs of disease are
attacking us, wives are unfaithful, children ungrateful, the
cesspool awaits us, cats catch mice, and men kill one another. In
tragic drama, a great deal of this is expressed, but in general
poetry, vast tracts are omitted. A glance at the list of subjects
for Haiku [See the author's "Haiku", four vols.] shows us how
limited they are. Here and there a snake shows its head, a
dustbin or a corpse appear, but these are rare until we come to
modern times.
But whatever the subject may be, there must be what
Wordsworth
calls "a wise passiveness", that is, an active rest, such as we
find described in the following haiku:
I came to the flowers;
I slept beneath them;
This is my leisure.
Buson
In regard to everything, the double, compensatory use of
things
must never be lost sight of. In summer, we like airy, spacious
rooms. but the ceiling is low and the walls press in on us. Let
us bear it gladly:
My hut has a low ceiling:
What happiness,
In this winter seclusion!
Buson
"Every ceiling is a good ceiling", not merely
sometimes, but
always, for this means that it is good by the mere fact of being
what it is. And what is it? It is a no-ceiling, it is nothing, it
is everything, it is what we make it, -- and yet it is a
ceiling,and a low ceiling at that, in all the four seasons, hot
in summer, snug in winter.
REMAINING IN MOVEMENT OF QUIESCENCE,
HOW SHALL YOU KNOW THE ONE?
Not only movement and quiescence but enlightenment and
illusion,
life and death and Nirvana, salvation and damnation, profit and
loss, this and that, -- all these are our lot and portion from
moment to moment, if we do not realize that the Great Way is one
and indivisible however we delude ourselves that we have divided
it.
NOT THOROUGHLY UNDERSTANDING THE UNITY OF THE WAY,
BOTH (ACTIVITY AND QUIESCENCE) ARE FAILURES.
In other words, mere activity, activity without
quiescence, mere
quiescence without its inner activity, are no good, neither has
its proper quality and function. Freedom is impossible without
law, man is nothing without God, illusion non-existent except for
enlightenment, this is this because that is that. ut freedom and
law, illusion and enlightenment, this and that are two names of
one thing. Unless this is realized (in practical life) none of
these is its real self. This is not this until and unless it is
that; only when the two are one are they really two.
In practical life, this means that the composure we feel
at home
among our family, is only an illusion that is broken when we go
out into the world and meet with vexation and disappointment,
becoming irritated and depressed. Our activity when playing chess
is not the true activity, as we see when we are beaten and our
opponent's face and voice become hateful to us. It lacks the
balance that preserves the mind from spite though we properly
enough feel gloomy at losing.
In the poetical life it is equally important that we
realize,
through each all of the senses, that true diversity is the unity.
Even in the scientific world, the nature, for example, of a
many-legged caterpillar is only understood when we know it is a
six-legged insect. The nature of feathers, skin, nails, scales,
and so on is perceives when we find that they are all one thing.
The poet delights is all the many names of things, because he
knows in his heart that as Laotse said,
The name that can be named is not an eternal name.
All the various
Difficult names, --
Weeds of Spring.
Shado
More specifically referring to the present verse of
Sengtsan, we
may note that the poet has to regulate his creative and receptive
functions, that is, to unify them, otherwise the true fruit of
each will be list. On the one hand we get the effusions of
Swinburne, of Keats and Shelley, with their kaleidoscope of
words; on the other, the didactic and descriptive verses that
have nothing of the author in them, only the outside and shell of
things. A great many haiku suffer from the absence of the life of
the poet himself, whose abnegation is excessive, for example:
The thatcher
Is treading the fallen leaves
Over the bed-room.
Buson
IF YOU GET RID OF PHENOMENA, ALL THINGS ARE LOST;
IF YOU FOLLOW AFTER THE VOID, YOU TURN YOUR BACK ON THE
SELF-LESSNESS OF THINGS.
In this translation, the first @ is taken as things as
they
appear to us, the second @ as Real Things; the first # as
Emptiness, unreality, the second # as the Real Self-less Nature
of things. If we suppose that all things are illusion, that
everything is meaningless in the ordinary sense of the word, we
are misunderstanding the doctrine that all is mind, and losing
our grasp on the reality outside us. The difficulty is to hold
firmly in the mind the two contradictory elements.
In the early morning we work out into the garden and see a
spider
finishing its web. With skill and assiduity all is completed, and
it sits in the centre, a thing of beauty with its duns and deep
blue of arabesque designs. A butterfly flits by, drops too low
and is immediately struggling in the mesh. The spider, though not
hungry, approaches, seizes it in his jaws and poisons it. He
returns to the centre of the web, leaving a mangled creature for
a future meal. A nation conquers the then known world and
organizes it with intelligence and ability; a great man appears,
is caught and nailed to a cross, a spectacle for all ages and
generations. These two examples are identical, despite the
addition of intelligence, morality, and religion to the second.
Both are to be seen exactly in the same way though with differing
degrees of intensity. Whether your children are killed by God
(allias an earthquake) or by God (allias a robber) or by God
(allias old age) the killing is to be received in the same way.
One's attitude to the earthquake and to the robber as such is
different, since these two things are intrinsically different.
In the poetical attitude we must have the same lack of
censure.
Our response to things must be similar to that of Maupassant,
Somerset Maugham, D.H.Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, in so far as they
have no hatred for the villains or love of the heroes.
THE MORE TALKING AND THINKING,
THE FARTHER FROM THE TRUTH.
Haiku are the briefest kind of poetry consonant with
the
possession of form and rhythm. By the reduction of poetical
expression to seventeen syllables we narrow the circle around
that invisible, unwritable central poetic life until no mistake
is possible, no discolouration of the object is left, all is
transparent and as though wordless. Yungchia says:
When asked, "What is your religion?"
I answer, "The Power of the Makahannya". [The Great Wisdom]
Sometimes affirming things, sometimes denying them,
It is beyond the wisdom of man.
Sometimes with common sense, sometimes against it,
Heaven cannot make head or tail of it.
CUTTING OFF ALL SPEECH, ALL THOUGHT,
THERE IS NOWHERE THAT YOU CANNOT GO.
This does not mean that there is to be no speech, no
words, but
that there is to be speech that is non-speaking, silence that is
expressive; thought that is ego-less, mindlessness through which
the Mind is flowing. This mindless, speechless, thinking and
talking state is one in which we realize the impermanence of all
things. But this "realize", does not mean an intellectual
comprehension, but a "making real" in ourselves as
actual-potential state. It is not that all things are impermanent
and that we must perceive this fact, but that our "seeing" the
change that a thing is, and the change that is seen are one
activity, neither cause nor effect, neither hen nor egg.
"There is nowhere that you cannot go", in other
words, you are
the Buddha, -- not *a* Buddha, but *the* Buddha, beyond all time
and space, eternal and infinite, yet here and now. You have all
because you have nothing; having no desires, they are all
fulfilled, yet you own property; you hope for this and that, talk
and think, plan and day-dream.
RETURNING TO THE ROOT, WE GET THE ESSENCE;
FOLLOWING AFTER APPEARANCES, WE LOSE THE SPIRIT.
What is the "root" of the universe? Some say
man, some say God.
It is often convenient to have two names for one thing:
spiritual, material; human, divine; freewill, determinism;
relative, absolute. But if we think of the essence of things as
the root, and the things themselves as branches and leaves, we
are allowing these "thoughts" and "words", spoken of in
the
previous verse, to divide once more what is a living unity into a
duality that is dead as such. For whether we look at things in
their multifariousness, their variety and differences, or at the
common elements, the "Life-force", the principles of Science,
we
are still far from the root, which is not either, not both, not a
thing at all, -- yet it is not nothing. Buddhists say the mind,
#, is the root of things -- but it is not something inside us.
Christians say it is God, -- but it is not something outside us.
But to know, to *realize*, the inside and outside as one, that my
profit is your profit, that your loss is my loss, to make this
fact, this dead matter-of-fact into a living, yea-saying Fact, --
this is our own and our only problem. When this is solved, in out
thinking and speaking, all is solved. When it is not solved,
every thought is twisted, every word is sophisticated. Yungchia
uses the same metaphor of root and leaves in the following verse:
Cutting off the root (of life and death) directly,
This is the mark of Buddhahood;
If you go on plucking leaves (of creeds) and seeking branches (of
abstract principles),
I can do nothing for you.
IF FOR ONLY A MOMENT WE SEE WITHIN,
WE HAVE SURPASSED THE EMPTINESS OF THINGS.
Moments of vision, provided that we are watchful for
and
unforgetful of them, coming and going as they do, like a breath
of air, enable us to go beyond the transitoriness, the emptiness,
the unreality of things, -- into what? Our going is to nowhere,
our going is staying here. It is the timeless and spaceless that
cannot exist except in time and space. What happiness to have so
many of these moments, for them to run in a stream through our
lives! Nietzsche, Mozart, Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius, Basho, --
this is what these names mean to us, the painful-happiness of
these moments of seeing within.
CHANGES GO ON IN THIS EMPTINESS
ALL BECAUSE OF OUR IGNORANCE.
Once we realize that there is no such thing as reality,
nothing
can appear as real or unreal. All things are empty in their
self-nature, and when we realize that nothing is unreal, we are
at home in every place; every moment of time, whether past or
present, is now. In our yearning for what is to come, in our
regrets for what is past, time lives in eternity. Our thoughts
wander through infinite space, which is thus in this point of
feeling matter.
DO NOT SEEK FOR THE TRUTH,
ONLY STOP HAVING AN OPINION.
The drowning man searches for water. A more homely and apt
illustration is a man looking for the spectacles that are on his
nose. Confucius says, "making an axe looking for the one your are
using". There is no such thing as "the Truth". The nearest
approach to anything like it is our state of mind when we desist
form the search for it, and live our life. This is what the
"Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment" means when it says:
Positive views are all perverted views;
All no-opinions are true opinions.
And Yungchia says also explicitly,
Do not seek after the truth,
Do not cut off delusions.
DO NOT REMAIN IN THE RELATIVE VIEW OF THINGS;
RELIGIOUSLY AVOID FOLLOWING IT.
In every way the world is double, good and bad, profit and
loss,
here and there. But from another point of view, "There is nothing
good or bad but our thinking makes it so". We are to stop this
"thinking", this "having an opinion", this
"judging". Yet if you
say, this is the right view, this is the wring, this the
relative, this is the absolute, we are still "following" it.
Truth is attained only when we realize that there is nothing to
attain to. Eternity has its fulness of perfection in us only when
we are engrossed in the temporal and imperfect.
IF THERE IS THE SLIGHTEST TRACE OF THIS AND THAT,
THE MIND IS LOST IN THE MAZE OF COMPLEXITY.
The Middle Way is indeed the difficult path to tread,
a
razor-edge from which we fall into the common errors of mankind.
When we compare we Chinese above with the Hebrew,
Thou shalt worship no other God; for the Lord, whose name
is
jealous, is a jealous God,
we cannot but be struck by the variety of expressions of
an
identical, inexpressible truth. There is here a variety in which
the Mind is *not* lost; this *is* that, however well disguised.
DUALITY ARISES FROM UNITY;
BUT DO NOT BE ATTACHED TO THIS UNITY.
It is the One that unites the Two; without It, the
Buddha-nature,
the Void, the Mind, this and that could not exist. But do not
despise this and that and yearn after the Ground of Existence.
Things and circumstances are in themselves neutral, not
meaningless, but *not* coloured intrinsically with the
"opinion"
we have of them.
When we clap our hands,
The maid serves tea,
Birds fly up,
Fish draw near, --
At the pond in Sarusawa.
The clapping of the hands is It. The sound as interpreted
by the
maid-servant, by the bird, by the fish, is only half of It. But
without halves there is no whole, just as without whole there are
no halves. As we endeavour to release ourselves from phenomena,
the relative world, we became attached to something even more
non-existent, the thing in itself, the noumenon, and thus also it
is said,
Holding to the One in not Truth.
WHEN THE MIND IS ONE, AND NOTHING HAPPENS,
EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS UNBLAMEABLE.
"Nothing happens" means our realizing that
nothing increases or
decreases, things are as they are. This is "realized" when the
mind is undivided, when in my own person you and I, he and I are
different names of one thing, that is nevertheless two things.
When nothing in the world is "blamed" as itself and nothing
else,
or everything, when, that is, nature has done its part and we do
ours, when we do not upbraid circumstances or indulge in
self-reproach, the mind is the mind and nothing untoward can
occur. Chesterton rightly says,
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly understood.
An
inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. ("On
Running After One's Hat")
Things are unblameable, unpraiseable as they flow from
change to
change:
Whatever arises from the nature of the whole, and tends towards
its well-being, is good also for every part of that nature. But
the well-being of the universe depends on change, not only of the
elementary, nut also of the compound. (Marcus Aurelius)
IN THINGS ARE UNBLAMED THEY CEASE TO EXIST;
IF NOTHING HAPPENS, THERE IS NO MIND.
When we neither censure or praise anything, all things are
devoid
of censurable and praiseworthy qualities. When we do not judge
things, things do not judge us. When things simply flow, every
atom according to its own nature, according to Nature, according
to its Buddha-nature, there is no mind as something separable
from what is not mind. Yungchia says:
Walking is Zen, sitting is Zen;
Whether we speak or are silent, move or are still,
It is unperturbed.
WHEN THINGS CEASE TO EXIST, THE MIND FOLLOWS THEM;
WHEN THE MIND VANISHES, THINGS ALSO FOLLOW IT.
Subject and object, I and that, here and there, -- when
one or
the other (it does not matter which) ceases, both cease.
According to our temperaments, we find it less difficult to
become aware of the emptiness of the ego-concept or the emptiness
of the thing-concept. It is the same difference that gives us the
*jiriki* and *tariki* sects, self-power and other-power. The
first like refers to the former, and the second to the latter.
Yungchia says:
Trying to get rid of illusion, and seeking to grasp
reality, --
This giving up and keeping is mere sophistry and lies.
In other words, seeking for the truth and avoiding
discrimination, is itself discrimination. So long as we look for
reality outside ourselves, or inside ourselves, so long will
things refrain from following the (non-)ego into non-existence,
and the (illusory) ego refrain from following things into their
emptiness. Outside and inside are the same thing: what is
outside?
It is but a little blood, a few bones, a paltry net woven
from
nerves and veins. A little air, and this for ever changing; every
minute of every hour we are gasping it forth and sucking it in
again.
What is inside?
Sense-perceptions vague and shadowy... the things of the
soul,
dreams, vapours. (Marcus Aurelius)
THINGS ARE THINGS BECAUSE OF THE MIND;
THE MIND IS MIND BECAUSE OF THE THINGS.
The aim of Zen, the aim of the poetical life, is to reach
and
remain in that undifferentiated state where subject and object
are one, in which the object is perceived by simple
introspection, the subject is the self-conscious object. Subject
and object and to be realized as the two sides of one sheet of
paper, that is one and yet is two. The one piece of paper cannot
exist without the two sides, nor the two sides without the one
sheet. This analogy fails to satisfy if taken in any other way
but lightly and quickly, for to what should we compare the
universe? How can anything be true parable of the Essence of
Being?
IF YOU WISH TO KNOW WHAT THESE TWO ARE,
THEY ARE ORIGINALLY ONE EMPTINESS.
The Emptiness is described in the following way: it is
perfectly
Harmonious, subject and object, Mind and Form are one. it is Pure
and Undefiled, things are, just as they are, delivered from all
stain of sin or imperfection. It is Unobstructed; all things are
free, interpenetrative. That is to way it is age-less, non-moral,
law-less. It is like light, containing all colours in it, but
itself colourless. It is not a thing but contains all things;
not a person but includes all minds; not beautiful or ugly but
the essence of both.
IN THIS VOID, BOTH (MIND AND THINGS) ARE ONE.
ALL THE MYRIAD PHENOMENA CONTAINED IN BOTH.
All mental phenomena are contained in things; all things
are
contained in the mind. But this "in" has an interpenetrative
meaning; it is not the "in" of "inside" and
"outside". An example
of this interpenetration:
The Rose of Sharon
At the side of the road
Was eaten by my horse.
Basho
IF YOU DO NOT DISTINGUISH "REFINED" AND
"COARSE",
HOW CAN YOU BE *FOR* THIS AND *AGAINST* THAT?
By "refined" and "coarse" is meant all
the pairs of relatives
under which we look at the world. Habit makes it seem a necessity
that we should view the world so, since custom lies upon us "with
the weight heavy as frost, and deep almost as life", but moments
of vision, all moments profound enough to reach through to the
Void, the Ground of Being, the Way, tell us that refined or
coarse though things be, they are something which is neither, yet
which is not neither. Thoreau gives us an example, all the truer
because it is an unconscious one, of the way in which the rough
and the smooth are the same:
The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in
which the
woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new
regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with
lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely
distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over
fairy-land.
Thus all our preferences, from the weakest down to the
strongest,
must be seen as one-sided, not in the sense that there are other
justifiable points of view, but that the thing is simply *not*
what we suppose it to be, the quality ascribed to it is entirely
absent. Then what is the thing if it is devoid of all qualities?
It is devoid of absence of those qualities, and what is meant by
this unpalatable conglomeration of negatives is that in some
mysterious way the thing is alive, it exists with a palpitating
stillness. A dark, invisible radiance comes from it, it moves
from nowhere to nowhere, its future and its past ever present. It
is the Way it travels; however small it fills all space; it is
the Ground of Being and the Flowers of the Spirit that spring
from it. It is the intimations of immortality and the certainty
of annihilation.
THE ACTIVITY OF THE GREAT WAY IS VAST;
IT IS NEITHER EASY NOR DIFFICULT.
The Way is called Great because there is nowhere else to
walk but
on it:
I make myself a slave and yet must follow.
There is nothing difficult or easy about it, for it
includes all
existence and all non-existence, all that is and all that can
never be. We think it is easy and it is not; we suppose it to be
difficult, and it is not. The ease or difficulty in entirely in
our fancy. But this fancy also is included in the vastness of the
activity of the Great Way and forms an essential part of it.
Marcus Aurelius says:
Forget not that all is opinion, and that opinion subject
to thee.
Then cast it out when thou wilt, and, like the mariner who has
doubled the cape, thou wilt find thyself in a great calm, a
smooth sea, and a tideless bay.
SMALL VIEWS ARE FULL OF FOXY FEARS;
THE FASTER THE SLOWER.
Nothing can be achieved without courage. We fear to give
up the
bird in the hand for the two in the bush. This bird in the hand
is not only life itself, but, for example, the Fatherhood of God.
When we give up life, we pass beyond life and death. When we
give up the Fatherhood of God, we lose also the feeling of
dependence and servility. But we are still alive, God is still
Our Father, -- but with a difference. Even with doubt there is
small view and large view, the former an over-cautiousness,
unadventurousness like that of the fox who will not venture on
the ice until it is safe for an elephant; and the Great Doubt,
which is the positive, active, thrusting doubt akin to curiosity
but much stronger and deeper.
Ordinary study is cumulative, but with Zen it is not so,
because
it belongs to the timeless. This is why it is said, "The faster
the slower". The more you search, the farther away it gets, for
it is an open secret. To love God and love one's fellow man, --
there is nothing beyond this, nothing that requires explanation.
Marcus Aurelius says:
Life and death, fame and infamy, pain and pleasure, wealth
and
poverty fall to the lot of both just and unjust, because they are
neither fair nor foul, neither good nor evil.
WHEN WE ATTACH OURSELVES TO THIS (IDEA OF ENLIGHTENMENT),
WE
LOOSE OUR BALANCE;
WE INFALLIBLY ENTER THE CROOKED WAY.
Our experience, our deepest experience has taught us
something;
we wish to convey it to others. When they question its validity,
we become angry, losing our mental serenity by holding so firmly
to what is after all more intangible than snow-flakes or the
rainbow. It is not merely calmness of mind that we have lost,
however, but what is this and more, the Middle Way, the knowledge
(and practice) that our profoundest interpretation of life also
must be thrown overboard together with the sentimentality,
cruelty, snobbery, and folly that make our lives a misery. The
Crooked Way is not a morally distorted manner of life. It is
composed of virtues as much as of vices, of ideals, religious
dogmas, principles of freedom and justice, as much as of
degradation and tyranny. The Crooked Way is over-grieving at
inevitable sorrows, over-clinging to joys which must cease; it is
regarding as permanent what is but transitory; always looking for
the silver lining, desiring to be in the non-existent and
impossible "Land beyond the morning star".
WHEN WE ARE NOT ATTACHED TO ANYTHING, ALL THINGS ARE AS
THEY ARE;
WITH ACTIVITY THERE IS NO GOING, NO STAYING.
Seize it and your hands are empty; drop it and they are
full to
overflowing. Ask, and ye shell not receive, is the iron law. But
this non-asking is no indifference of blankness. It is like the
"weakness" of women that overcomes the strongest man. It is
like
the force of gravity which pulls down the highest towers with not
a single movement on its own part. Buds open in spring without
straining; leaves fall in autumn without reluctance. The seasons
come and go, years and centuries, -- but not the Activity, not
the Great Way. There is no presence or absence, no increase or
diminution with that.
OBEYING OUR NATURE, WE ARE IN ACCORD WITH THE WAY.
WANDERING FREELY, WITHOUT ANNOYANCE.
Our own nature is not different from the nature of all
things in
which there is nothing unnatural. The fiends of Hell, the
monsters of the deepest seas, the bacteria of our bosoms, the
perversions of maniacs cannot surprise or distrust us. Living by
Zen or without it, in perpetual fear and irritation; sadism and
masochism; the destruction of life and beauty; the annihilation
of the universe, -- none of these things can appal us. Our own
faults and shortcomings, crimes and follies are a pleasure to
us; the punishment they bring to us and the others are yet
another confirmation of our insight into our true nature,
overlaid as it is with illusions and superimposed habits that
have become instincts, and usurp the authority of the Activity
that yet works unceasingly within and without us.
WHEN OUR THINKING IS TIED,
IT IS DARK, SUBMERGED, WRONG.
It is *dark*, so that we cannot distinguish the true
nature of
things; we see friends as enemies, strengthening trials as
useless annoyances. We fail to perceive the so-called defects and
errors of others as an aspect of their Buddha nature. It is
*submerged*; it does not float upon the waves of circumstances
that can both drown or buoy us up. When all things work together
for good because we love God, that is, we seek not to change that
which is inevitable, the outside, but only the free, the inside,
then we are as light as corks however low the billows descend,
however high they mount aloft. It is *wrong*, because our nature
is freedom. Perfect service, no task left undone or scamped, as
best exemplified in a mother's unfailing, tender care, is right
because not tied by duty or public opinion. When we look around
and see odious people, a world of stupidity and spitefulness, the
weather always too warm or too cold, all the elements conspiring
to annoy us, death approaching nearer with ira prophetic twinges
and dull throbs, this is to be tied, pressed down by dark,
mournful waves of thought; Marcus Aurelius again:
Thou art stricken in years; then suffer it not to remain
a
bond-servant; suffer is not to be puppet-like, hurried hither and
thither by impulses that take no thought of thy fellow-man;
suffer it not to murmur at destiny in the present or look askance
at it in the future.
IT IS FOOLISH TO IRRITATE YOUR MIND;
WHY SHUN THIS AND BE FRIENDS WITH THAT?
Our ordinary mind, our ordinary life consists of nothing
else but
avoiding this and pursuing that, but the life of "reason", that
rises up at times from some submerged realm into conscious life
is far other:
The mind, when once it has withdrawn itself to itself
and
realized its own power has neither part nor lot with the soft and
pleasant, or harsh and painful motions of thy breath. (Marcus
Aurelius)
IF YOU WISH TO TRAVEL IN THE VEHICLE,
DO NOT DISLIKE THE SIX DUSTS.
The Six Dusts are qualities produced by the objects and
organs of
sense: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and idea. The One
Vehicle is the Mahayana, the vehicle of Oneness. The
"Saddharmapundarika Sutra" ("Hokkekyo") says:
Only one vehicle of the Law,
Not two, and not three.
The Six Dusts, that is, the body and its attendant
misguided
ideas, are the cause of all our unhappiness and suffering, and
prevent us from seeing things as they really are and from having
the peace of mind that is our birthright. But an old waka says,
illustrating the way in which nothing is good or bas of its
nature, but thinking makes it so:
Sin and evil
Are not to be got rid of
Just blindly;
Look at the astringent persimmons!
They turn into sweet dried ones.
If you get rid of the unripe, astringent persimmon, how
shall you
obtain the ripe one? Get rid of the Six Dusts, and where will the
One Vehicle be? A well known poetess has said the same thing in a
more sentimental manner:
He would not give me a lodging;
How disagreeable it was!
But through his kindness,
I could sleep beneath the cherry-blossoms
Under the hazy moon that night.
INDEED, NOT HATING THE SIX DUSTS
IS IDENTICAL WITH REAL ENLIGHTENMENT.
This absence of hatred, of intolerance, disgust, righteous
indignation, discrimination and judging, is itself the state of
Buddhahood. This negativeness, however, is not that of the
opposite of affirmation. It is not the passive condition it seems
to be, neither can it be described by the words "love our
enemies". It is not absence of feeling, of indifference, but some
unnameable attitude of mind in which evil is accepted as such
though not condoned. It is descried by George Eliot in following
way:
"Ay sir", said Luke, as he gave his arm to his
master, "you will
make up your mind to it a bit better, when you've seen
everything; you'll get used to it. That's what my mother says
about her shortness of breath -- she says she's made friends wi'
it, though she fought against it when it first came in". ("The
Mill on the Floss")
In a word, we must not hate hatred.
THE WISE MAN DOES NOTHING,
THE FOOL SHACKLES HIMSELF.
The wise passivity is that of nature:
The buds swell imperceptibly without hurry or confusion,
as if
the short spring day were an eternity. (Thoreau, "A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers")
We bind ourselves with our likes and dislikes, we are
bound with
fancied bonds. There is nothing so strong in the world as a
delusion, nothing so indestructible as this imaginary,
non-existent self and its temporary profit and loss, loving and
loathing.
THE TRUTH ES NO DISTINCTIONS;
THESE COME FROM OUR FOOLISH CLINGING TO THIS AND THAT.
There is the distinction between the wise man and the
fool, a
wise thought and a foolish one, but none in the Nature of Things.
Here there is perfect uniformity, law and equality. Mountains and
rivers, birds, beasts and flowers are all on undivided
indivisible thing. Yet on the other hand, each thing is itself
and no other thing, unique, irreplaceable and invaluable. Sameness
and difference are also one thing, yet two things. At one moment
we see the separate meaning of a thing, at another, its meaning
as being all things; and at some most precious moments of all,
incommunicable in speech but yet heard also through it, we know
that a thing, a person, a flower, the cry of a bird, is both one
thing and all things. Sameness and difference, and *their*
sameness and difference are the same and yet different from our
own non-existence.
SEEKING THE MIND WITH THE MIND, --
IS NOT THIS THE GREATEST OF ALL MISTAKES?
Clinging to the search for the mind is the last infirmity
of the
religious soul, and the most self-evidently absurd, for why
should we search for the Buddha that we have already, why seek
to release ourselves from bonds that are only fancied? But it is
the greediness of our searching which invalidates it. This is
beautifully expressed in the following:
There is a treasure in the deep mountains;
He who has no desire for it finds it.
ILLUSION PRODUCES REST AND MOTION;
ILLUMINATION DESTROYS LIKING AND DISLIKING.
The state of the ordinary man is one in which he is
continually
either peacefully contented by successful activity, or in the
anxious throes of that activity, either winning or losing, having
won or having lost. The enlightened man loses well and wins well.
ALL THESE PAIRS OF OPPOSITES
ARE CREATED BY OUR OWN FOLLY.
Once Dogen was approached by a short-tempered man and
asked to
cure his short-temperedness. Dogen asked him to show his
shortness of temper, but the man confessed his inability to do
so. It had no real existence, any more than his patience. Both
are created by our own folly and idle fancy. When our minds are
full of something, not part of a thing, but all of it, when there
is no vacancy for odds and ends of passion to occupy, we act
without rashness or hesitation. What the Third Patriarch says is
very much akin to the old proverb, "Satan finds some mischief
still for idle hands to do".
DREAMS, DELUSIONS, FLOWERS OF AIR, --
WHY SHOULD WE BE SO ANXIOUS TO HAVE THEM IN OUR GRASP?
These creations of the mind, so common and habitual that
there
seems to be some concrete reality behind them, are the
protagonists of all tragic drama. Fixed notions of honour,
propriety, faithfulness, conflict of necessity with the
imperturbable, ineffable, and intangible truth ultimately
destroys them. Rigidity versus fluidity, the name versus the
nameless; yet in this very willingness to die for some impossible
creed we see once more that just as the ordinary man, as he is, is
the Buddha, so these delusions are, as they stand, the truth, and
without them there is no reality. What is wrong is the anxiety to
get hold of them or the anxiety to reject them. Error or truth,
profit or loss, -- if we accept them readily, cheerfully, as in
some sense ministers of God, remembering that even the devils
fear and serve Him, these flowers of the air also have their
beauty and value, for
Every error is an image of truth,
and in every illusion there beats the heart of mankind
that
aspires for the truth that error masks. But the mask *is* the
face.
PROFIT AND LOSS, RIGHT AND WRONG, --
AWAY WITH THEM ONCE FOR ALL!
What Sengtsan means here, is that we are to give up the
false
idea that profit actually profits us, that there is any
individual self to suffer loss or gain. Forgetting all moral
principles, we are to "Dilige, et quod vis fac". (Love, and as
you please.) This abstention from choosing, from judging, does
not mean that we do not choose as pleasant or judge as wrong.
What is means is that God does it for us, God who is so often
disobeyed, who turns the other cheek and forgives his enemies.
When for example we give an order, as a teacher, or an official,
it is to be given peremptorily without a thought of the
possibility of its not being obeyed. But if it is not obeyed,
there is no *personal* irritation and wounded vanity in the angry
remonstrance w make. A law of nature, of human society has been
broken and it is right that our emotion should be arouses by
this.
The doctrine that in all our acts we are to be vicegerents
of
Nature is a dangerous one, but every truth is dangerous, for it
liberated universal energies that may easily go astray. Religious
persecution, megalomania, political fanaticism are all misuses of
what the Third Patriarch inculcates. But we know them by their
fruits; by the defects, the distortions, the hatred of the
dictators.
IF THE EYE DOES NOT SLEEP,
ALL DREAMING CEASES NATURALLY.
Human life is a dream, not is its brevity and
discontinuity, but
in the fact that we see things almost always as related to our
own personal interests. But w must "persist in our folly" to
the
bitter end, and say,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken *me*?
At such moments we wake and see things as they really are,
in
their suchness, the nails in the wood, the wood in the ground,
the sun setting in the western sky, a mother weeping for her son,
a man-less, God-less universe, each thing fulfilling the law of
its being. When we wake from our sleep of relativity and
subjectivism, nightmares of glory and disgrace, flattery and
condemnation will cease of themselves.
IF THE MIND MAKES NO DISCRIMINATION,
ALL THINGS ARE AS THEY REALLY ARE.
Things are all right, if only we will let them be alone,
cooperate with them, take lead as heavy and use it as a plummet,
take swords as sharp and receive the surgeon's knife, take pain
as dreadful but nor as something distinct from ourselves, adding
imagination to reality. Yungchia describes this condition in the
following way:
The moon reflected in the stream, the wind blowing through
the
pines
In the cool of the evening, in the deep midnight, -- what is it
for?
It is all for nothing, for itself, for others. This is
the
suchness of things.
IN THE DEEP MYSTERY OF THIS "THINGS AS THEY
ARE",
WE ARE RELEASED FROM OUR RELATIONS TO THEM.
Things as they are, the coldness of ice and the sound of
rain,
the fall of leaves and the silence of the sky, are ultimate
things, never to be questioned, never to be explained away. When
we know them, our relations to them, their use and misuse, their
associated pleasures and pains are all forgotten.
WHEN ALL THINGS ARE SEEN "WITH EQUAL
MIND",
THEY RETURN TO THEIR NATURE.
This "equal mind" of Matthew Arnold is that which
speaks in the
words of Marcus Aurelius:
All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in
spring
and the crop in summer.
NO DESCRIPTION BY ANALOGY IS POSSIBLE
OF THIS STATE WHERE ALL RELATIONS HAVE CEASED.
Metaphors and similes, parables and comparisons may be
used to
describe anything belonging to the relative, the intellectually
dichotomised world, but even the simplest and commonest
experience of reality, the touch of the hot water, the smell of
camphor, are incommunicable by such and any means; how much more
so the Fatherhood of God, the Meaningless of Meaning, the
Absolute Value of a pop-corn, for in such matters, the unity of
our own emptiness and that of all other things is perceived as an
act of self-consciousness, and nothing remains to be compared
with anything. In Chapter VII of the "Platform Sutra" we are
told
of Nanyueh, 677-744, and hid meeting with Huineng, the Sixth
Patriarch, who asked him from whence he had come. "From Suzan",
he replied, "What comes? How did it come?" asked the Patriarch.
Nanyueh replied, "We cannot say it is similar to anything". At
the beginning if Chapter IX of the same sutra, Huineng quotes
form the "Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra":
The Law has no analogy, since it is not relative.
WHEN WE STOP MOVEMENT, THERE IS NO-MOVEMENT;
WHEN WE STOP RESTING, THERE IS NO-REST.
Neither rest or movement has any reality as such; they are
two
names of one thinglessness which cannot be caused to cease,
because it is uncreated. There is a waka which says:
When it blows,
How noisy
The mountain wind!
But when it blows not,
Where will it have gone?
Blowing, not blowing, what is there but nothingness,
an
invisible, intangible something-heard-and-not-heard?
WHEN BOTH CEASE TO BE,
HOW CAN THE UNITY SUBSIST?
There is no more a unity than there is duality; relative
and
absolute are named of the nameless. Zen, that is to say, is a
word that is used like an algebraic sign, for all that is
nameless, all that escapes thought, definition, explanation, yet
breathes through words and silence; is communicated in spite of
our best efforts to communicate it. Actions are either good or
bad; yet nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. That
is to say, things are both good or bad and neither; relative and
absolute; or, if you wish, neither relative nor absolute, there
is neither duality nor a unity.
THINGS ARE ULTIMATELY, IN THEIR FINALITY,
SUBJECT TO NO LAW.
"No law" means no scientific, psychological,
logical,
philosophical, Buddhist, or any other kind of law. As
D.H.Lawrence says, "Life is what one wants in one's soul". It
is
indeed an intellectual, rational conception, and applies only to
the intellectual, rational aspect of things abstracted from the
whole.
FOR THE ACCORDANT MIND IN ITS UNITY,
INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITY CEASES.
When the mind is in accord with all creatures and with
the
Buddha, one with all things, its activity as an individual entity
ceases. What Mozart was at the piano, Bach at the organ,
Shakespeare with his pen, Turner with his brush, we are with out
most trivial and personal affairs of life. When this is not so,
when our acts are hesitant, our work repugnant, our life full of
fears for the morrow and regret for the past, even the spider in
its web, the violet by the stone give us that feeling of envy, a
realization of our alienation from God that no pleasure can
assuage.
Some minds have a tendency to over-emphasize difference,
some to
make everything of a meaningless sameness. Both are wrong, the
latter perhaps more than the former. To correct this there is a
saying,
A high place has a high level;
A low place has a low level.
ALL DOUBTS ARE CLEARED UP,
TRUE FAITH IS CONFIRMED.
Doubt and faith are concerned with one thing and one thing
only,
the Goodness of the universe. And this is tested by us most
intimately and searchingly within ourselves. If at the outset we
stipulate a personal Deity, individual immortality and so on, no
resolution of doubt and establishment of faith is possible. We
are to make no demands whatever upon the world. "Judge not" is
the word here too. Standing apart from things and questioning
them, praising and condemning -- this is the cardinal error.
Living their life, dying their death, being cloven with the worm
and shrivelled in the candle flame with the moth, is the only way
to solve the mystery of the fruitless suffering, the problem of
the waste of beauty and goodness.
NOTHING REMAINS BEHIND;
THERE IS NOT ANYTHING WE MUST REMEMBER.
We are not bound by any "imitation of the Buddha".
There are no
snags, no undigested material, no fitting in with preconceived
notions, no formulae to follow in the way of our life or manner
of death. We may be confirmed or baptized if we feel it is good
for us, or dye at the stake rather than submit to it. And we
extend the same privilege to everyone else. No one need be
converted to this or that religion. When we do wrong or make
mistakes, we go on with renewed vigour to the next task; a faux
pas cannot heck us or make us dwell on it with self-torturing
shame.
EMPTY, LUCID, SELF-ILLUMINATED,
WITH NO OVER-EXERTION OF THE POWER OF THE MIND.
Empty means with nothing clogging the mind, no trace
of
self-interest. Lucid means seeing unreason as clearly as reason,
reflecting ugliness as serenely as beauty. Self-illuminated means
truth is not revealed to it from some outside agency.
Over-exertion of the power of the mind is that of
Othello,
Mr.Tulliver, Mr.Dombey, and the protagonists of all tragic drama.
There is nothing tragic or comic, but thinking makes it so, the
thinking of the actors and the sympathetic thinking of the
self-illuminated spectators, who see their self-interest and
grieve for it, perceive the self-defacement and unreasonableness
without the reflecting surface of their own minds being marred by
it.
THIS IS WHERE THOUGHT IS USELESS,
WHAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOT FATHOM.
This verse looks back to a passage in the "Lotus
Sutra":
This law cannot be known properly by thought and
description,
and looks forward to the reply of Yunmen to a certain
monk, who
asked, "What is this place where though is useless?",
"Knowledge
and emotion cannot fathom it!" To express this thoughtless,
knowledgeless, emotionless state, in which thought and knowledge
and emotion are sublimed into instinct of the highest order, we
have such a phase as,
The lotus blooms in the midst of the fire.
But this is too intellectual in its denial and rejection
of the
intellect. Better in the following, from Thoreau:
The weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream,
shaken by
the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk, but
ere long to die and go down likewise; the shining pebbles, not
yet anxious to better their condition; the chips and reeds, and
occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling
their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last
I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither is
would bear me. ("A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers")
IN THE WORLD OF REALITY,
THERE IS NO SELF, TO OTHER THAN SELF.
To say this is easy, to believe it intentionally is
not
difficult. It has an emotional, a poetical appeal which few can
withstand. With a full belly, a bank balance, when all is going
well, such a doctrine will be readily adopted. But when food is
scarce, when a man has lost his job, in hours of boredom, when
children die, and our own death is not far off, -- can we then
rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those that mourn?
In my own case, I must say that nothing makes me more contented
with my lot that to see the sufferings of others, to find my
children cleverer and prettier than those of my colleagues. How
far indeed is this from the lines above.
SHOULD YOU DESIRE IMMEDIATE CORRESPONDENCE (WITH THIS
REALITY),
ALL THAT CAN BE SAID IS, "NO DUALITY!"
But even this "No duality!", no relativity, no
choosing, no
judging, is not to be elevated into a principle of living. It may
be used as a touchstone of past conduct, or as an ideal for some
possible future situation, but for living, which is the eternal
present only, all that can be said is nothing whatever.
WHEN THERE IS NO DUALITY, ALL THINGS ARE ONE.
THERE IS NOTHING THAT IS NOT INCLUDED.
When Thoreau lay dying, he was asked if he had made his
peace
with God; he answered, "We have never quarreled". In Thoreau's
world, everything was included, nothing rejected and made into an
enemy. When God lived for two years by Walden lake, Thoreau did
not criticize, praise, or condemn Him. As St.Augustine says,
To live happily is to live according to the mind of
God.
("Retractions", i.1)
THE ENLIGHTENED OF ALL TIMES AND PLACES
HAVE EVERY ONE ENTERED INTO THIS TRUTH.
This sound rather depressing, as though ordinary people
were
excluded, but what Sengtsan means is that comparatively few know
that they have entered into the realm of Buddhahood, where all
men and all things without exception have their (unconscious and
unwitting) being. Not a sparrow can fall out of God's care, nor
can anyone, for all his hair-shirts and flagellations enter into
His presence. It is only a question of becoming aware of our true
condition, and this becoming aware is called "entering".
TRUTH CANNOT BE INCREASED OR DECREASED;
AN INSTANTANEOUS THOUGHT LASTS A MYRIAD YEARS.
The bonds of time and space do not prevail against the
Truth, the
Way, the Buddha Mind. Long and short, here and there, a moment
and eternity are all included in it, as names alone. Blake says,
One thought fills immensity.
THERE IS NO HERE, NO THERE,
INFINITY IS BEFORE OUR EYES.
Here and there are dualities and therefore obstructions to
the
life of perfection. Infinity is under our noses, our noses are
infinitely long. Yungchia says,
The Mirror of the Mind brightly shining,
unobstructed,
Passes transparently through everything in the universe.
When this Mind is our mind, when we are not bored with
here and
longing to be there, when the life of things is breathed in and
breathed out with every breath we take, when we live in the past
of our world and into the unborn future without desiring to undo
what is done, or avoid what must be, then we live a timeless live
mow, a placeless life here.
THE INFINITELY SMALL IN AS LARGE AS THE INFINITELY
GREAT,
FOR LIMITS ARE NON-EXISTENT THINGS.
This is a kind of *reductio ad absurdum* of the
unpoetic,
commonplace position, that great and small are mutually exclusive
qualities. If the extremes meet, so does the middle and the
rest. Limits and boundaries are man-made things, and what man has
put together, man can put asunder. A doka which illustrates this
is the following:
Mount Fuji, --
Good in fine weather,
Good in the rain:
The Original Form
Never changes.
Thoreau says:
The shalowest still water is unfathomable.
THE INFINITELY LARGE IS AS SMALL AS THE INFINITELY MINUTE;
NO EYE CAN SEE THEIR BOUNDARIES.
Lying at night in camp Thoreau speaks of
The barking of the house dogs, from the loudest and
hoarsest bark
to the faintest aerial palpitation under the eaves of heaven.
WHAT IS, IS NOT;
WHAT IS NOT, IS.
There is the most extreme form of expression of the
Mahayana
theory that corresponds to the Christian doctrine (mystical, and
strictly speaking heretical) that God is above all qualities, all
predications, even of existence. The "is-ness" of things is a
fantasy of life's fitful fever, -- but so is their
"is-not-ness".
Life is a dream, but so is the statement. This last fact is hard
to catch. When we say that unreality is also unreal, in our
normal moments, and especially when the mind is tired, this means
nothing, or less than nothing. It irritates by its illogicality,
and is repugnant because of the demand it makes that we are
unable to supply. It is therefore necessary that we say such
things, to ourselves or others, only then we are in a condition
of mind to know what we are saying, otherwise by frequent vain
repetitions we shall become as the heathen, unable to recognize
moments of vision when they visit us. So for example, death is a
fearful thing because of its irrevocableness, but at times, when
perhaps least expected, or even unwanted, the realization comes
to us that what has never existed, the individual soul, the ego,
has not done and cannot go out of existence. What was born,
immediately ceases to be. At every moment, neither existence nor
non-existence can be predicated or denied, -- yet what a world of
difference between a living child and a dead one!
Consider the following sentence of Thoreau's, put into the
form
of a haiku:
Over the old wooden bridge
No traveller
Crossed.
This no-traveller, like deserted roads, empty chairs,
silent
organs, has more meaning, more poetry, solidity and permanence
that any traveller. "No traveller" does not mean nobody,
nothing
at all; is means everyman, you and I and God and all things cross
this old rickety bridge, and like the bold lover on the Grecian
Urn can never reach the goal.
UNTIL YOU HAVE GRASPED THIS FACT,
YOUR POSITION IS SIMPLY UNTENABLE.
Common sense is revolted by the above assertion that what
is, is
not, what is not, is, but in actual practice it is found to be
the only valid one. The story of the monk who was praised for
bringing a basket to catch the drips from the leaking roof
illustrates this identity of what is and what is not. A bucket or
a basket, there is no difference. One man's meat is another
man's poison. A leaf of grass is a six-foot golden Buddha. Life
is a perpetual dying. And if you keep to the so-called
commonsense point of view (which is more elastic than supposed)
you will find that your hard and fast divisions between right and
wrong, profit and loss, useful and harmful, are inapplicable to
all your problems and indeed to every circumstance of life that
is deeply felt and profoundly experienced. So Blake says,
Listen to fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!
and Yungchia says the same thing, a thousand years before
him,
Let me allow others to speak ill of me, trespass against
me;
It is like trying to burn the sky with fire, only wearing
themselves out.
Listening to them is like drinking the Nectar of Eternal Life;
All fades, and I am suddenly in the Wonderful World.
ONE THING IS ALL THINGS;
ALL THINGS ARE ONE THING.
This expresses in an extreme form the state of Mind
towards which
things are constantly tending, called paradox by logic, metaphor
by literature, genius or madness by popular consent. The humorist
says. describing the beauty of a certain film actress. "When she
comes into the room, the room comes in with her", and forget it,
but another step has been taken towards the region where
One sentence decides heaven and earth;
One sword pacifies all sublunary things.
When you have really seen one flower, you have seen not
only all
flowers, but all non-flowers. One principle, one life, one
animate or inanimate manifestation moves and upholds all things,
and thus it is said,
One sight, and all is seen,
Like a great round mirror.
IF THIS IS DO FOR YOU,
THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PERFECT KNOWLEDGE.
Worry in the great enemy. The search for enlightenment
obscures
and delays it. What is wrong is not the pain and grief suffering,
but thinking about ourselves as sufferers. As Mussolini said,
"Never look back". Therefore, when, if only temporarily, we see
into the unity of the life of the multifarious things of this
world, do not let us lose our firm conviction of this vision by
thoughts of our sins of omission and commission, inconsistency of
words and actions. Thoreau says of the cry of the cock:
The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom form
all
plainliveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or
laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning
joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our
wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the
house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow for or near, I think to
myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate", -- and with a
sudden rush return to my senses. ("Walking")
It is the same spirit that breathes in the words of
Miyamoto
Musashi, great swordsman and painter:
As far as I am concerned, I regret nothing.
THE BELIEVING MIND IS NOT DUAL;
WHAT IS DUAL IS NOT THE BELIEVING MIND.
When we believe in *something*, this is not the believing
mind.
If we say we believe in ourselves, this again is a mistake, of
experience or of expression. "The believing mind believes in
itself", -- this, rightly understood, contains no error. The
"Lankavatara Sutra" says,
Believing in the truth of timeless life is called the
Believing
Mind.
Clearer still is the "Nirvana Sutra":
The Believing Mind is the Buddha nature.
Here there is no danger of one thing believing in another
thing.
The Buddha nature is the true nature of every thing and of
everything. The believing mind is this Buddha-activity. A Haydn
minuet or the Lord's prayer, or a kitten catching at the falling
autumn leaves is a clear thought of this mind, a harmonious
movement of the Buddha nature. It is perfect because it is
single, unique, complete, all-including.
BEYOND ALL LANGUAGE,
FOR IT, THERE IS NO PAST, NO PRESENT, NO FUTURE.
Language is vitally concerned with time, with tense. The
Way is
timeless and breaks through language, but does not discard it.
Silence itself is a form of speaking, just as the blank spaces
between the marks of the printing are as much part of the
printing as the letters themselves. The Way is timeless yet it
cannot dispense with time. Eternity and time are in love with
each other, continually embracing in a divine union, yet always
separate to the purely human eye.
THE HSINHSINMING
There is nothing difficult about the Great Way,
But, avoid choosing!
Only when you neither love nor hate,
Does it appear in all clarity.
A hair's breadth of deviation from it,
And deep gulf is set between heaven and earth.
If you want to get hold of what it looks like,
Do not be anti- or pro- anything.
The conflict of longing and loathing, --
This is the disease of the mind.
Not knowing the profound meaning of things,
We disturb our peace of mind to no purpose.
Perfect like a Great Space,
The Way has nothing lacking, nothing in excess.
Truly, because of our accepting and rejecting,
We have not the suchness of things.
Neither follow after,
Nor dwell with the Doctrine of the Void.
If the mind is at peace,
Those wrong views disappear of themselves.
When activity is stopped and passivity obtains,
This passivity is again the state of activity.
Remaining in movement or quiescence, --
How shall we know the One?
Not thoroughly understanding the unity of the Way,
Both (activity and quiescence) are failures.
If you get rid of phenomena, all things are lost.
If you follow after the Void,
you turn your back on the selflessness of things.
The more talking and thinking,
The farther from truth.
Cutting off all speech, all thought,
There is nowhere that you cannot go.
Returning to the root, we get the essence;
Following after appearances, we loose the spirit.
If for only a moment we see within,
We have surpassed the emptiness of things.
Changes that go on in this emptiness
All arise because of our ignorance.
Do not seek for the Truth;
Religiously avoid following it.
If there is the slightest trace of this and that,
The Mind is lost in a maze of complexity.
Duality arises from Unity, --
But do not be attached to this Unity.
When the mind is one, and nothing happens,
Everything in the world is unblameable.
If things are unblamed, they cease to exist;
If nothing happens there is no mind.
When things cease to exist, the mind follows them;
When the mind vanishes, things also follow it.
Things are things because of the Mind;
The Mind is the Mind because of things.
If you wish to know what these two are,
They are originally one Emptiness.
In this Void both (Mind and things) are one,
All the myriad phenomena contained in both.
If you do not distinguish refined and coarse,
How can you be for this or against that?
The activity of the Great Way is vast;
It is neither easy nor difficult.
Small views are full of foxy fears;
The faster, the slower.
When we attach ourselves (to the idea of enlightenment) we
lose our balance;
We infallibly enter the Crooked Way.
When we are not attached to anything, all things are as they are;
With Activity there is no going or staying.
Obeying our nature, we are in accord with the Way,
Wandering freely, without annoyance.
When our thinking is tied, it turns out from the truth;
It is dark, submerged, wrong.
It is foolish to irritate your mind;
Why shun this and be friend of that?
If you wish to travel in the True Vehicle,
Do not dislike the Six Dusts.
Indeed, not hating the Six Dusts
Is identical with Real Enlightenment.
The wise man does nothing;
The fool shackles himself.
The Truth has no distinctions;
These come from our foolish clinging to this and that
Seeking the Mind with the mind, --
Is not this the greatest of all mistakes?
Illusion produces rest and motion;
Illumination destroys liking and disliking.
All these pairs of opposites
Are created by our own folly.
Dreams, delusions, flowers of air, --
Why are we so anxious to have them in our grasp?
Profit and loss, right and wrong, --
Away with them once for all!
If the eye does not sleep,
All dreaming ceases naturally.
If the mind makes no discriminations,
All things are as they are.
In the deep mystery of this "Things as they
are",
We are released from our relations to them.
When all things are seen "with equal mind",
They return to their nature.
No description by analogy is possible
Of this state where all relations have ceased.
When we stop movement, there is no-movement
When we stop resting, there is no-rest.
When both cease to be,
How can the Unity subsist?
Things are ultimately, in their finality,
Subject to no law.
For the accordant mind in its unity,
(Individual) activity ceases.
All doubts are cleared up,
True faith is confirmed.
Nothing remains behind;
There is not anything we must remember.
Empty, lucid, self-illuminated,
With no over-exertion of the power of the mind.
This is where thought is useless,
This is what knowledge cannot fathom.
In the World of Reality,
There is no self, no other-than-self.
Should you desire immediate correspondence (with this Reality)
All that can be said is "No Duality!"
When there is no duality, all things are one,
There is nothing that is not included.
The Enlightened of all times and places
Have entered into this Truth.
Truth cannot be increased or decreased;
An (instantaneous) thought lasts a myriad years.
There is no here, no there;
Infinity is before our eyes.
The infinitely small is as large as infinitely
great;
For limits are non-existent things.
The infinitely large is as small as the infinitely minute;
No eye can see their boundaries.
What is, is not,
What is not, is.
Until you have grasped this fact,
Your position is simply untenable.
One thing is all things;
All things are one thing.
If this is so for you,
There is no need to worry about perfect knowledge.
The believing mind is not dual;
What is dual is not the believing mind.
Beyond all language,
For it there is no past, no present, no future.