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

It could not have been a very comfortable experience studying with the doughty Rinzai. Clearly Huang Po had summed him up very well: drop all explanation and never spare the rod.

Sometimes, however, Rinzai seems to have gone a shade too far. One can almost visualize parts of his audience, particularly the older ones, walking out en bloc when he tells them to seek enlightenment by committing the Five Heinous Crimes; or when he urges them not to take the Buddha for the supreme goal. “I myself see him as a privy hole!”

Once again, though, he is talking about names and phrases. “All (such things) are but expedient means, temporary remedies for curing diseases. There is no real Dharma; it is all but surface manifestations, like printed letters on a sign board to indicate the Way”.

The matter of the Five Heinous Crimes is an example of using shock tactics to shake his audience out of a well-established torpor. He blazes away at the assembled gathering of “bald heads”, and you may be sure that none is sleeping, and none is harbouring cosy fantasies about pure spiritual lands in the West. Here they are forced to face up to the enemy within, their own egos, by waging war on the mental tendencies which separate them from enlightenment.

Venerable ones, committing the Five Heinous Crimes,
deliverance can be won…(The Crimes are) to kill
the father, to harm the mother, to spill Buddha’s
blood, to break the peace of the sangha, and to burn
scriptures and statues …

The father, he explains is ignorance. When you have nothing further to seek, the father is killed.

The mother is desire. To see the emptiness of all forms and attain non-attachment is the harming of the mother.

Spilling the Buddha’s blood is when you have no urge to judge or interpret.

To understand that the passions are empty and without support is to break the peace of the sangha.

“To see that the causal relations are empty, that the heart is empty, and that the Dharma is empty — and in one stroke decisively to cut it all off in order to transcend all, and to have nothing further to seek, this is burning the scriptures and statues.”

Rinzai certainly lived up to these uncompromising sentiments in his relations with other masters. In the following anecdote one wonders who is the master and who the pupil:

One day the student monks, including Rinzai, were out gardening in the monastery fields. When he saw Huang Po approaching he stopped work and leant nonchalantly on his hoe. The master saw this and said:

“Now would this fellow be tired?”

To which Rinzai replied, “I have barely lifted my hoe. Why would I be tired?”

As usual Huang Po struck him. Rinzai grabbed his stick and hit him a mighty blow which knocked the master over. As a supervising monk helped Huang Po to his feet, he asked: “How can you put up with this madman?”

At this, the master hit the supervisor. Rinzai, who had started to hoe, remarked: “Cremation is a custom everywhere, but here, I bury alive with a single stroke.”

In a similar vein, this time with the hapless Tokusan: at one period of his training, Rinzai was an attendant to Master Tokusan. On one occasion the master said: “Today I am tired.”

Rinzai muttered, “What is this old fellow mumbling in his sleep?”

When Tokusan inevitably hit him, Rinzai tipped up the master’s cushion sending him sprawling onto the floor. Tokusan rose and immediately retired to his quarters.

For Rinzai’s view of Huang Po, we have this anecdote: on a visit to another master, Suiho, he was asked: “Where do you come from?”

“From Huang Po,” he answered.

“How does Huang Po instruct his monks?”

Rinzai replied: “Huang Po has nothing to say.” (A compliment in Zen).

“Why has he nothing to say?” asked Suiho.

“Even if he had something to say, there would be no place to say it.”

The master persisted: “Tell me and let me be the judge.”

Rinzai said: “An arrow flies into the Western sky.” Here Rinzai seems to be sending Bodhidharma back to India. Because of the obtuseness of the master, his mission having failed.

In these animated conversations, the masters are constantly probing Rinzai’s level of attainment. Not to be outdone, Rinzai also seems to be testing his masters. There is no doubt that he was a most precocious student. Huang Po was always well aware of the talents of his young charge as is borne out by the following story:

Huang Po was watching Rinzai planting pine trees in the monastery fields. “Why do you plant so many pine trees in this remote mountain monastery?” he enquired.

“Because they add to the view from the monastery gate, and they are for those who come after.”

At this Rinzai struck the ground three times with his hoe. Huang Po replied: “This may be so, but I’ll still give you thirty blows as a taster.”

Again Rinzai struck the ground three times with his hoe and sighed deeply.

Huang Po said: “Because of you, our school will flourish throughout the world.”

Rinzai was a general who laid siege to castles in the air. Nothing seems to have mattered to him except instilling the “genuine insight” into those who sought his advice. He had no apparent social graces and was a “democrat” in an Imperial age. I don’t care if you are Ministers of the Emperor himself, he would tell them; nor if you are well versed in the scriptures, nor if your eloquence is like a mountain torrent. “The great ocean does not retain corpses.” Just keep yourselves from doubting, he would urge. “Work diligently. And take good care of yourselves.”

He died in the year 866 AD. On his death-bed he said to his monks: “After my death do not allow my ‘true Dharma eye’ to perish.”

One of them said: “But how could it perish?”

Rinzai replied: “What then will you say when in future people put questions to you?”

The monk gave a katsu (a loud cry, or shout, characteristic of Rinzai).

“Who would have guessed” mused the dying Rinzai, true to form, “that my true Dharma eye would perish through this blind ass.