Can there be humour in spirituality? It depends which religion, or none, you are thinking of. Some faiths are very definitely humourless, others mildly good natured.

But Zen can be uproariously funny. In its attempts to shake the student out of the torpor of familiar thought patterns, it will adopt almost any subterfuge.

Here’s a passage from my book, The Nirvaneans, to be published by Humdrumming next year. It concerns Master Rinzai of Chinese Ch’an, founder of the Rinzai Zen sect of Japan:

Master Rinzai (Lin Chi, died 866 AD) was undoubtedly a tough character. The transmission from Huang Po (Obaku) appears to be full of violence and mayhem. First Huang Po administers thirty blows to his hapless charge, then chases Rinzai out. Later, Rinzai returns and slaps Huang Po, with the comment, “There really isn’t much to Master Obaku’s Zen!” The two giants of Ch’an seem to be constantly squaring up like boxers intent on flattening each other.

In later years when Rinzai was a fully-realized master, he had an encounter with Tokusan in similar style. On hearing that this master would instruct his monks and say: “Whether you can speak or not, either way thirty blows,” Rinzai told Rakuho: “Go and ask him why the one who understands gets thirty blows. When he starts to beat you, grab his stick, hit him back, and see what he will do.”

Rakuho did as he was bidden, then returned to Rinzai with the news that when he had hit Tokusan, the master immediately retired to his quarters.

“So far I have suspected that fellow,” mused Rinzai, “but since it has happened like this, do you for yourself now see Tokusan?” When Rakuho hesitated, Master Rinzai hit him.

The nub of this story seems to be the egolessness, or otherwise, of Tokusan. But why should there be such a welter of blows? It has a certain entertainment value, but is it religion?

Zen arose out of Buddhism because the Chinese eye spotted what it saw as a major weakness in the Indian Buddhist system. The flaw was a tendency to formularization. As in other religions, the basic principles, intended to help the novice towards understanding, had lost their original force. Now they were just familiar phrases for chanting and disputation. What had once contained a powerful meaning for unlocking the truth had “degraded” to mantra, a repetitious, magical formula for inducing a trance-like state, which might have its uses in other contexts, but not in this one.