November 26, 2014:
Revisiting Layman Pang
KOAN FOR SUNDAY, NOV. 30, 3 TO 5 PM
Dear Friends,
The koan group last Sunday spent a rich time with Layman Pang, and….didn’t come close to exhausting this rich koan. So we’ll return to it for this Sunday. It doesn’t matter whether you were there last week; the inquiry is always new. I may bring in another koan to converse with this one, but for now, please travel with this one and see what happens.
DIALOGUE WITH A MEDITATION TEACHER
The Layman dropped in at a temple where a priest was giving a public lecture on the Diamond Sutra. When the priest came to the part that says “There is no I and there is no other,” the Layman asked the priest, “About the part that says, ‘There is no I and there is no other,’ who then is lecturing now and who is listening to it?”
The priest did not reply, so the Layman said, “I am only a layperson, but I have a rough idea about the teaching involved.”
The priest said, “So what are the Layman’s thoughts about it?”
The Layman then composed a verse:
“There is no I and there is no other.”
How can there be intimacy or estrangement?
I recommend giving up trying to get there by meditation.
But rather, directly seizing the reality at hand.
The message of the Diamond Sutra is:
Nothing is excluded from our experienced world.
From beginning to end,
It inevitably exposes our false identities.
Upon hearing this verse, the priest was delighted and expressed his gratitude.
And here’s a selection from Acequias and Gates:
Sometimes there is a relentless quality to this practice, and a profoundly destabilizing one. All the attempts to tame the process—turning it into some sort of contest, or something mystifying that leaves us feeling helpless, or a solely psychological event that reinforces the self it claims to free us from—are testimony to the subversive power of the koans. It’s because they’re so deeply unsettling that we sometimes want to domesticate them, to yoke them to our own purposes. But their subversion is in the service of integration, of healing the split between the large and unfathomable and the particular and insistent–the very split that is at the heart of so much human suffering.
Looking forward to seeing you on Sunday,
Sarah