October 27, 2014
This Very Place; This Very Body
Koans for Springs Mountain Sangha
November 2, 2014
Dear Bodhisattvas,
Next Sunday, Nov. 2, we’ll meet for the second of our five koan sessions for this Fall.
We’ll be coming back to the expanded version of the koan we took up this Sunday (see below). It’s rich, and its imagery can unfurl beautifully if you’re willing to offer it the space to do so. It was simply fascinating to see what emerged as responses in the group the first time, and we’ll all meet it again freshly next time.
For those of you who have Acequias and Gates, I’d like to encourage you to let Acequias guide your inquiry this week, using the instructions on pages 58 to 62. I think you’ll find it a worthwhile adventure, whether you’ve done any koan work or not. Reminder: you can buy an electronic version of the book inexpensively from Blurb.com .
Our Acequias selection for this week:
Koans use the language of poetry and myth because they want to engage more of us. As people often say, koans are meant to subvert the habitual processes of the rational mind, but that’s just a first step toward something else. When discursive thinking isn’t running the show, the engagement of the whole person—body, heart, intuition, personal psychology, deep psyche, and rational mind—becomes possible.
Baling Haojian’s Three Turning Words
From a new translation by John Tarrant and Joan Sutherland
What is Zen?¡
A silver bowl filled with snow.¡¡
What is the Way?
A clear-sighted person falls into a well.
What is the sword so sharp it cuts a hair blown against it?
Each branch of coral holds up the moon. ¡¡¡
Footnotes
¡ Literally, “What is Kanadeva’s school?” Kanadeva (‘One-eyed Deva’) was an Indian Buddhist teacher considered the founder of the Dhyana (Chan/Zen) school, which Bodhidharma brought to China; he was the dharma heir of Nagarjuna, one of the greatest of Buddhist philosophers, and was himself a renowned philosopher, writing a major work of the Madhyamaka School on emptiness. The Japanese teacher Tenkei comments, “The Kanadeva school means the Buddha-mind school, the school of the enlightened mind…Ultimately the whole universe should be seen as the school of the enlightened mind.”
¡¡ Dongshan’s “Jewel Mirror Samadhi” begins:
The teaching of suchness, intimately given by buddhas and ancestors—
now that it’s yours, keep it well.
A silver bowl filled with snow; a white heron hidden in the moonlight—
Apart, they seem similar; together, they’re different.
¡¡¡ Yunmen said to his student Baling, “When you hold memorial services for me after I’m dead, just restate these three turning phrases and you’ll have repaid my kindness,” and that’s what Baling did. When he became a teacher, Baling didn’t create a document of succession for his dharma heirs; he used these three phrases to transmit the essence of the Yunmen school.