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

Huang Po thought the world was generally in decline (it was ever thus), and that Zen students of his day were not at all concerned with the Original Mind.

“Let your mind be like the vacuity of space,” he would enjoin them, “like a chip of dead wood and a piece of stone, like cold ashes and burnt-out coal.” Then he added a mischievous note, “Otherwise some day you will surely be taken to task by the old man of the other world…” One day Huang Po was going out for a walk. Handing him his hat a monk said:

Monk: You are enormously big, but your hat is none too large for you, is it?

Huang Po: That may be so, but the entire cosmos is readily covered underneath.

Monk: And what about me?

Huang Po put the hat on and walked off.

Here is the atom, in this case the master’s head, which contains within it the entire cosmos. The monk’s concern to include his own head shows his lack of understanding. His question obviously does not merit a reply. But by not resorting to an intellectual explanation, Huang Po is acting directly out of the Buddha-mind. This is standard Zen practice.

A similar non-dual interpenetration, here over time, is implied by Ma Tsu (Huang Po’s teacher) in his reply to a monk’s question:

“What was the mind of Bodhidharma when he came from the West?”

“What is your mind this moment?” answered the master. Ma Tsu would sometimes make the statement that, “your everyday thought is the Tao.” In a non-dual reality what else could it be?

Today, nostalgia or aversion to events of the past, or planning or longing for the future, make up a great deal of our mental furniture. Twenty-five year olds are advised to take out a pension plan. The fashion industry creates a yearning for a particular decade: the sixties or the forties. Old films remind us of better days. Now we have digital cameras to recreate our personal past and of those we care for. People, places and events can be brought up on a screen with extraordinary realism. Futurologists and astrolgers look into tomorrow for us, diverting us from the present moment. By fixing the past and fixing the future we allow ourselves to look away from the present moment, rendering it tenuous and transient. Dogen reminds us that, “When we have no aversion or longing, only then do we reach the heart of the Buddha.”

When asked why his disciples were so happy, the Buddha said: “They do not repent of the past, nor do they brood over the future. They live in the present. Therefore they are radiant. By brooding over the future and repenting the past, fools dry up like green reeds cut and left out in the sun.”

The simplicity of this is often beyond the complex machinations of the intellect, which specialises in mental time travel. Huang Po’s students sometimes had the same problem. When told that “Mind is the Buddha”, one asked, what sort of mind do you mean, the ordinary mind or the enlightened one? Huang Po replied, “Where on earth do you keep your ‘ordinary mind’ and your ‘enlightened mind’?” The student remained sceptical. The master said: “If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own mind. When Bodhidharma came from the West he just pointed out that the substance of which all men are made is the Buddha.” That is, Buddha-mind.

Huang Po’s followers continued to misunderstand by holding onto their concepts of ordinary and the like, thoughts which “gallop about like horses”.

So I tell you, mind is the Buddha. As soon as
thought or sensation arises, you fall into a dualism.
Beginningless time and the present moment are the same.

This and that do not exist. And just to comprehend this matter is to realise “complete and unexcelled enlightenment”. Since beginningless time and the present moment are the same, there is obviously no point in repenting over the past or brooding over the future. The timeless present moment contains it all, and to live in the present is to live “radiantly” as a disciple of the Buddha.

Go to Part 5.

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

Buddhism is often mistakenly believed to be the worship of Gautama Buddha. A more precise definition of the word, however, is “the doctrine of enlightenment”, and its root is the Sanskrit budh meaning awaken, or know. The suffix “-ism” means “the doctrine of”, or it creates an action, giving “the practice of awakening.” Therefore “Buddhism” has the sense of doing, as well as of a body of teaching, method as well as doctrine.

This is just as well because method is the central principle in Zen. Moreover, no Zen master placed so great an emphasis on the method of awakening — as opposed to the practice of doctrinal forms — as did Huang Po. Here he is in characteristic style:

As to performing the six paramitas and vast numbers
of similar practices, or gaining merits as countless
as the sands of the Ganges, since you are complete in
every respect, you should not try to supplement that
perfection by such meaningless practices.

An echo of Hui Neng, the sixth Patriarch, is detectable in Huang Po’s dismissive iconoclasm, though he does qualify this statement for the fainter hearts in his audience, who are probably experienced Buddhist monks.

“When there is occasion for them, perform them; and, when the occasion for them is passed, remain quiescent.” The master is an adherent of the direct path to enlightenment. Huang Po was a disciple of the great Po Chang who remains famous in Buddhist circles for his no nonsense attitudes to the religious life.

“A day without work is a day without food,” he would insist. He it was who set up the very first Zen training establishment, which was more of a school than a monastery. No doubt he had plenty of opportunity to exercise his dictum on many a lazy youth — perhaps even Huang Po himself. By this time the lessons of Hui Neng had been learnt and thoroughly assimilated into the teaching.

“Don’t cling, don’t seek,” said Po Chang, a master of the “sudden” school. When asked what was the nature of Buddahood, he replied: “When hungry, eat; when thirsty, drink; when tired, sleep.” For such a man enlightenment was never going to be an esoteric business. His own satori came when his equally famed teacher Ma Tsu shouted at him so loudly that he was left deaf for three days. Those with ears to hear …

Huang Po, known as Hsi Yun during his lifetime, takes his (posthumous) name from the mountain where he taught. His biographer, P’ei Hsiu, said that he lived below the Vulture Peak on Mount Huang Po in Hung Chou prefecture. He came originally from Fukien, but was ordained into the sangha, or Buddhist order, on Mount Huang Po while he was still very young. It was said by way of description that, “In the centre of his forehead was a small lump shaped like a pearl. His voice was soft and agreeable, his character unassuming and placid.”

Third in a direct line from Master Hui Neng, Huang Po scorned many of the dearly-held tenets of his path. He was said to believe only in the efficacy of the intuitive system of the “Highest Vehicle” (the Mahayana), which by its very nature could only be transmitted silently, mind to mind.

P’ei Hsiu writes that he “taught nothing but the doctrine of the One Mind; holding that there was nothing else to teach, in that both mind and substance are void and that the chain of causation is motionless”. He summed up Huang Po’s teaching in words so simple and direct that they deserve to be etched into the memory of every true spiritual seeker:

That which is before you is it.
Begin to reason about it and you will at once fall into error.

This same intuition is put by Soko Morinaga Roshi in his commentary on The Ceasing of Notions: “Enlightened masters do not possess anything at all — and just because of this they see that all things, just as they are, are the manifestations of the truth.”

One is also reminded of the Zen master confronting a sceptical Confucian who asks about the nature of enlightenment. As the scent of spring flowers wafts into the hall, he says: “There, I’m holding nothing back.”

Such was the simplicity of Huang Po’s views that one of his disciples, Lin Chi — better known to history as Rinzai, after which the Japanese Rinzai School of Zen was named — complained bitterly that the master ignored all his questions and just hit him with a stick every time he opened his mouth. “Be thankful for his grandmotherly concern,” said the monk to whom he reported this apparent lapse in taste. Whereupon Rinzai returned to the monastery and hit Huang Po, presumably out of grandmotherly affection.

The bond between these two men could not be broken though, for during the 17th Century, Ingen brought the Obaku school to Japan (Obaku is Huang Po’s Japanese designation) as the third Zen stream in that country after Rinzai and Soto. Obaku has now virtually been absorbed by the larger school of Rinzai, giving the latter the final hit of the stick.

Zen Master Torei (1721-1792) records the transmission between these two giants of Zen as follows (Huang Po is here given his Japanese name, Obaku):

Rinzai, first getting sixty blows from Obaku, then had
suddenly great satori. He returned to Obaku, “mingling
eyebrows” with him and threw down both body and life into
(the challenge). For twenty years he forged and tempered
a hundred and a thousand times over. After that, he went
to Obaku midway through the summer retreat, stayed a few
days only, and left again. Obaku said: “You came here
breaking the summer retreat, and now you are leaving
before it is over.” Rinzai answered: “I have only come
to pay my respects to you, Master.” Obaku hit him and
chased him out. After Rinzai had gone a few miles, he
had some doubt as to his conduct, so he went back to
Obaku and stayed until the end of the retreat. On taking
leave then, Obaku asked him: “Where are you going?” Rinzai
answered: “If not to the South of the river, then to the
North of the river.” Obaku hit him. Rinzai grabbed Obaku
and slapped him. Obaku burst out laughing and called to
his attendant: “Fetch me the meditation board and stool
of the late Master Hyakujo (in order to make the
transmission). At that, Rinzai called out: “Attendant,
fetch fire!” Obaku remarked: “Even so, but just take
these things; later they may come in useful to cut off
the tongues of all people.”

Despite these minor contretemps, conducted in the cause of the enlightenment of an advanced but irascible pupil, Huang Po comes across as a very simple man concerned only with the spiritual condition of his pupils.

Go to Part 2.