A Life of Huang Po by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

A demonstration of Huang Po’s fearlessness is given in one of P’ei Hsiu’s anecdotes. His master was attending an assembly at the Bureau of the Imperial Salt Commissioners in the presence of the Emperor. The Son of Heaven noticed Huang Po make three bows before a statue of the Buddha and asked him what he expected to gain from this — the Emperor must have been aware of his general teaching that all rituals are a waste of time since all is the Buddha-mind. Huang Po replied that it was his custom to show respect in this way. But the Imperial grandee insisted on a doctrinal answer: “What purpose does it serve?” he persisted. Whereupon Huang Po slapped him. “You are uncouth,” cried the Emperor. “What!” rejoined the master, “you are making a distinction between uncouth and refined?” And another slap landed on the Imperial visage. It is reported that the Emperor withdrew in the face of this onslaught and Huang Po went on his way unmolested — a remarkable fact, indeed for the times.

It follows from this that Huang Po’s teaching is also a deathless doctrine. In a non-dual world there is no such thing as death — where would we go? There is only the continuous transformation of the swirling cloud of forms which is the working of the great Buddha-mind. As Dogen has it (see Chapter 5): “Because there is Buddha in birth and death, there is no birth and death.” That is, the unborn mind produces the born from itself, but remains in essence unborn. Difficult as it is to grasp discursively, the nirvanic experience reveals this process explicity. Zen is not making it up.

Huang Po’s philosophy begins and ends with the Original Mind and his students’ response to it.

The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no
distinction between the Buddha and sentient things…
sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek
externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they
lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the
Buddha and using mind to grasp mind.

The physicist Stephen Hawking’s statement that he could understand how the universe could exist, but not why it would want to exist, gives us a flavour of this. Where religions, and even science, shade into mysticism, all distinctions between them disappear.

The so-called esoteric doctrine, supposedly kept veiled from the purview of ordinary folk who might not be expected to understand, is none other than this basic insight into the nature of reality, often cloaked in a mess of unnecessary occultism — jargon designed to raise the status of those who practise it. The great masters like Huang Po, however, have nothing to hide and dismiss the esoteric as the creation of the dissembling intellect. “The greater the master, the simpler his technique.” We shall have occasion to observe this epigram in action in chapter 6 when considering the life and work of Bankei.

Although in Huang Po’s monastery everything was laid out freely on the table, so to speak, there were monks who did not grasp the truth as effortlessly as they would have wished. This was usually not because the aspirants were too simple, but rather because they were over-intellectual. Huang Po would tell them that he had no thing to offer them. They should not seek for insight or search for enlightenment. Instead they should follow four simple injunctions:

1. Make yourself unreceptive to sensations arising from the external world of forms.
2. Pay no heed to distinctions between one phenomenon and another.
3. Do not distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant sensations.
4. Avoid “mulling things over” in the mind.
As these are four of the skandhas, representing the “individuality” of a person, we are on firm Buddhist ground here. Quite often when Zen masters received pupils of various levels of intractability, they would fall back on traditional methods of the lore. Thus, iconoclasm was only for the highest “kindling” among their followers, and the Hua Yen system of five stages to enlightenment was widely in use.

Having said that, however, Huang Po never held back on the summit of his teaching. “…the realisation of the One Mind may come after a shorter or a longer period. There are those who, upon hearing this teaching, rid themselves of conceptual thought in a flash. There are others who do this after…passing through the Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva’s Progress. But whether they transcend conceptual thought by a longer or a shorter way, the result is a state of BEING…” It is true that there is nothing to attain, he says, no pious practising and no action of realisation. “Moreover,” he emphasises, “whether you accomplish your aim in a single flash…or after going through the Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva’s Progress, the achievement will be the same; for this state of being entails no degrees…” And again, “The ever-existent Buddha is not a Buddha of form or attachment. To practise the six paramitas and a myriad similar practices with the intention of becoming a Buddha thereby is to advance by stages, but the ever-existent Buddha is not a Buddha of stages.” Here he means that realisation comes suddenly, and usually unexpectedly, when the consciousness simply flips into the nirvanic condition and things are seen as they are.

All the qualities typified by the great Bodhisattvas
are inherent in men and are not to be separated from
the One Mind. Awake to it, and it is there. You students
of the Way who do not awake to this in your own minds,
and who are attached to appearances or who seek for
something objective outside your own minds, have all
turned your backs on the Way.

In the 20th Century, Ramana Maharshi, whose Advaita Vedanta is quite close to Zen, has said the same thing: “Mind is by nature restless. Begin liberating it from its restlessness: give it peace; make it free from distractions; train it to look inward; make this a habit. This is done by ignoring the external world and removing the obstacles to peace of mind.”

Go to Part 4.