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

Rinzai, like all Zen masters, spent much time cautioning his students against the trap inherent in words. In the above anecdote, the Governor compares the scriptures and meditative practices with gold dust in the eyes: valuable certainly, but clouding to the vision. This meets with Rinzai’s approval, “And to think I took you for a common fellow!”

In a lecture to the monks, the master states that he expounds nothing but the Buddha-mind (or heart-ground). “This pervades everything; it is in the worldly and in the sacred, in the pure and impure, the fine and the coarse.”

The essential thing is not to make labels such as fine and pure and then to imagine that, because of the labelling, you now know the truth, “for these are like pen-names, only creating mystery.” The Dharma he is expounding is different from all others.

“My seeing is different,” he says. “In the outside world I do not lay hold on either the worldly or the sacred; and inside, I do not stick to rock bottom (this would seem to mean false dreams, the lowest common denominator).”

Then he enjoins his audience to be their ordinary selves with no pretensions, nothing further to seek. Simply to have faith in the one who is functioning at this moment is enough, for that one is the unborn, the heart-ground, the Buddha-nature.

The question of words has always been uppermost in Zen literature — not surprising perhaps since Zen is not supposed to have any literature at all. However, it has, and the way Zen has got round this paradoxical situation is by using words rather differently. An interesting anecdote, which throws some light on Zen word usage, concerns Zen master Baso Doitsu who often used the phrase, “Mind is Buddha”. One day he was asked why he always used these words.

“To stop the child crying,” he responded.

“But what if the child has stopped crying? (perhaps confronting a more advanced student).”

Baso said: “I would say that it is neither mind nor Buddha.”

The monk pursued the point: ”And what if you were speaking to someone without an interest in religion, who was neither crying nor had stopped crying?”

“Then I would say that it is not the mind.”

At the first level Baso labels the mind as Buddha. Then he says it is not the Buddha, nor for that matter is it the mind. This is not a nihilistic stripping away of essentials, leaving the questioner with nothing. It is in fact a positive rejection of words and labels, leaving the hearer with exactly what there is in reality — we might say, Buddha-nature, but these are only words too.

Zen uses words to destroy words; to peel away the superfluities of the intellect (the skandhas and samskaras: more words), and to undermine our faith in this labelling process, precisely so that we can see things as they are and not how we are conditioned to see them by past learning and structuring. The latter is dead, life now is alive; the difference is Zen.

Modern students, said Rinzai, speaking in the 9th Century, are always grasping at names and terms. This obstructs them and obscures the clarity of the eye. The teachings themselves are only surface explanations. Unfortunately, students take to these superficial notions “of words and letters and deliver interpretations of them…So they search heaven and earth, run around asking others and keep themselves busily occupied.”

Those who have nothing more to find do not waste time in disputing points or splitting hairs about “this and that, is and is not, form and essence, and other vain propositions.”

As for me, if anyone comes with a question, I know
him to the bottom, whether he be monk or layman.
Whatever position he may come with, all are only
words and names, dreams and phantoms. The aim of
the profound teachings of all the Buddhas is rather
to see the man who can ride all circumstances (the
man of buji; the Buddha; yourself)…Freely roaming
about, you see everywhere that there are only empty
names.

This is the height of Mahayana thought: the emptiness of names. For beyond names and description, there is no thought and nothing more to be said. And what is more, Rinzai perseveres, the Buddha is only a name and as empty as the rest. If he were not, then, “how does it come that at the age of eighty he died…at the town of Kushinagara? The Buddha, where is he now?”

It is obvious that he is not different from us. And he quotes an old master: “The (three) bodies of the Tathagata (similar to the Christian Trinity), are but adaptations to the sentiments of the world, fearing that otherwise men might fall into nihilism. Empty names are only expedient means.”

Here we have the ultimate assault on the citadel of words. Even the name “Buddha” is put to the sword. Nothing survives on the plane of description, and then, says the master, everything is revealed. These passages remind us of the Diamond Sutra with its, “Words cannot explain the real nature of a cosmos.” And then, “‘Cosmos’ is merely a figure of speech.”

Master Rinzai was not a man for soft-soaping his followers. Not for him the honeyed weasel words and a kinder, gentler leading by the hand. Master Rinzai was a warrior of enlightenment.

You bald idiots! What is the frantic hurry to deck
yourselves in a lion’s skin when all the while you
are yapping like wild foxes? A real man has no need
to give himself the airs of a real man.

You do not believe in yourselves, he tells them, so chase about outside falling for the clever words of the old masters; of yin and yang and all the rest. The fact is you cannot arrive at any real understanding of your own. “So, encountering circumstances, you enter into relationship with them. Encountering the dusts, you cling to them. Everything you touch leads you astray, for you have no standard of judgement of your own.”

Go to Part 4.