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

Master Rinzai (Lin Chi, died 866 AD) was undoubtedly a tough character. The transmission from Obaku (Huang Po), described in the previous biography in this series, appears to be full of violence and mayhem. First Obaku administers sixty blows to his hapless charge, then chases Rinzai out. Later, Rinzai returns and slaps Obaku, with the comment, “There really isn’t much to Master Obaku’s Zen!” The two giants of Ch’an (Zen in China) seem to be constantly squaring up like two 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 bid, 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 formularisation. 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. The very sound of well-loved passages from the scriptures produced in the hearer a soothing reassurance, a warm, self-satisfied glow that made him feel good…and spiritual. The Christian Church has the same problem today when trying to change from the old known texts to modern versions in the vernacular. A storm of protest from traditionalists greets every textual alteration as if the very doctrine were at stake. The feel good factor is a strong motivator in popular religion, which is often a branch of the entertainment industry.

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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.

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

Huang Po’s most original achievement was the doctrine of one mind.

P’ei Hsui, who put together the collection of Huang Po’s talks now known as The Zen Teachings of Huang Po on the Transmission of Mind, was in no doubt about the greatness of his master.

…his words were simple, his reasoning direct, his
way of life exalted and his habits unlike the habits
of other men. Disciples hastened to him from all quarters,
looking up to him as a lofty mountain, and through their
contact with him awoke to Reality. Of the crowds which
flocked to see him, there were always more than a
thousand with him at a time.

It must have been very crowded in there. This biographer was himself an abbot of a monastery and on two occasions gave hospitality to Huang Po. Each time he spent days in his presence questioning him on the Way. In the event he was only able to put down about a fifth of what the master told him. But despite this summarizing, he proclaimed it a direct transmission of the doctrine. Like any good historian, however, he had the manuscript taken back to Huang Po’s monastery and checked by the resident monks. Not only can we be grateful for the translucent clarity of the master’s words, but also for the care and devotion of Huang Po’s Boswell, P’ei Hsui.

The doctrine of One Mind, as held by Huang Po and his followers, is a diametrically opposite viewpoint to our normal ego-prompted way of seeing. Generally, we take matter as solid and real, and we recognise a rather ineffable substance called mind or spirit (or both), which in some way interacts with matter to produce our consciousness of the hard, metallic landscape out there. This duality of matter and spirit, however, serves to fracture the actual reality of the world and gives rise to all our false notions of separateness and alienation.

Buddhists accept the relativity of the phenomenal world but seek to heal the duality by adopting a viewpoint based in the Absolute. they do not talk of mind and matter, but of mind and form, where form is not a separate substance like matter, but the shape that mind assumes in this case and that. Mind is the only reality. Form is the way that mind works, its play and way of expressing itself.

“All very well,” say the materialists, “but how do you explain the solidity of the world? If I hit you on the head with this hammer, will you still believe that the hammer is ‘mind only’?” The reply is that both the hammer, the interaction and the pain are all products of mind’s activity. A stage hypnotist, for example, tells his subject that there is a fierce dog on the stage. Immediately, the subject sees the dog and moves away from it. Later he is told to pat it on the head. Now he feels the solidity of the animal, its skin and bones, its hot breath. To the hypnotised man, the dog is totally real. The same effect occurs during dreaming. We recognise the absolute presence of the dream world, until, that is, we awaken and realise that it was all the product of our mind.

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A Life of Bankei by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

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Another disciple was concerned about his wandering mind. He could not concentrate on the Unborn all the time without his mind sloping off to other thoughts. Bankei insisted, however, that he was never separated from the Buddha-mind. If you were, he said, you would not be asking this question now. Your mind is not really somewhere else. It is just that you have not yet learned correctly about it. You do not know your own self. Instead of just dwelling in it, you change and distort it into other things. When you are in this state, your mind is at a low level of efficiency and you cannot absorb information or function at your maximum potential. You are not absent-minded, just tying up part of your mind by making it do things which it would not normally do.

The psychological aspect in Bankei’s teaching is paramount. This is because he laid so much stress on practice and actually living in the Unborn. Theory, theology and metaphysics take a back seat in the exposition of Unborn Zen. Even the psychology is narrowed down and sharply focused: “Your self-partiality is at the root of all illusions. There aren’t any illusions when you don’t have this preference for yourself.” And, of course, without illusions one lives in the Unborn as an enlightened Buddha.

The Buddha-mind has wonderful illuminative wisdom, he constantly taught. All past experiences and actions are fully reflected in it. It is good spiritual practice, therefore, not to fix onto these reflecting images. If you do, you are creating illusion. Originally, these thoughts had no substance, so the prudent way of dealing with them is to ignore them, whether they are rising or stopping. Then, no matter how many thoughts there are, it is the same as if none had arisen. The tyranny of memory and past conditioning is broken, and with it, neurotic behaviour patterns and other psychological problems.

Brushing off thoughts which arise is just like
washing off blood with blood. We remain impure because
of being washed with blood, even when the blood that
was first there has gone — and if we continue in this
way the impurity never departs. This is from ignorance
of the mind’s unborn, unvanishing, and unconfused
nature. If we take second thoughts (normal thinking)
or an effective reality, we keep going on and on
around the wheel of birth and death. You should
realise that such thought is just a temporary mental
construction, and not try to hold or to reject it.

A close examination of most religions reveals a hefty weight of self-partiality, myth, and dubious authority; so much so that the underlying impulse to reveal God/the Unborn is lost in a welter of forms and ceremonies. The absolute makes an appearance only in distorted or anthropomorphic terms, rarely in its suchness.

The impression left after a reading of Bankei’s talks is that of religion, philosophy, and psychology, merged and distilled down to the finest essence, until all that remains is the bare, ungarnished truth of the non-dual Unborn, fully revealed in the consciousness of each individual.

The conscious act of steadfastly being in the Unborn, is the basis of many Japanese art-forms and activities, including Zen archery, flower arranging, landscaping and gardening, the tea ceremony and brush drawing and calligraphy. The practitioner, by concentrating his mind, submerges himself in the Unborn, where the seer, the seeing and the seen, subject and object, dissolve one into the other and into effortless, non-dual activity.

Dr. D.T. Suzuki, who trained in the Rinzai Zen school, wrote this about Japanese artistic expression: “How does a painter get into the spirit of the (subject)? The secret is to become the (subject) itself…The discipline consists in studying the (subject to be painted) inwardly with his mind thoroughly purified of its subjective, self-centred contents. This means to keep the mind in unison with the emptiness or suchness (of the subject)…and transform himself into the (subject) itself.”

The result is an elegant, artless performance, devoid of ego and self-partiality, in which the Buddha-mind expresses itself with perfection as the True Man of the Way.

Bankei always claimed that he was the only master to give proof that the Unborn Buddha-mind was, as he declared, the sole ground of human consciousness.

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