Matthew Sullivan’s The Garden of Flowers and Weeds — Blue Cliff Record, Case 6: Every Day Is a Good Day
Unmon addressed the assembly, saying, "I do not ask you about the fifteenth of the month. Say something about after the fifteenth." When no one said anything, he answered for himself: "Every day is a good day."
Now, Unmon was a contemporary of Rinzai, fellow student of Ōbaku. He could be said, generally, to belong to the tough-old-bastard school of Zen. So whatever he meant by "every day is a good day," I don't think we should reduce it to a little Unmon smiley face. He was trying to say something other than that.
The story of his own enlightenment experience is very famous. As a student of Ōbaku, apparently, if you wanted to ask a question or have an interview with the teacher, you had to go to his hut, knock on the door, be admitted, and ask your question. But when anybody approached Ōbaku like this, as soon as he opened the door, he would just scowl at them and say, "Speak! Speak!" And if you at all hesitated, or were tongue-tied, he would just slam the door in your face.
And apparently this happened to Unmon once. He tried again; it happened twice. The third time, he figured, all right, I get the routine — I'm not going to let him slam the door on me this time. So when Ōbaku tried to shut the door on him, Unmon put his foot in the door to try to block it, but Ōbaku just slammed it that much harder and broke his leg. And while he screamed in pain, supposedly this brought about his great realization.
So the way his question to the assembly is usually understood, the fifteenth of the month is, in that calendar, the time of the full moon — the full moon typically taken to be a sign of enlightenment. And so the question is framed: what can you say about after enlightenment?
But by now we should have learned to be very suspicious about any koan that's set up in terms of before and after. It sets up an either/or. In addition to before and after the fifteenth, we're given "every day is a good day," which seems to get us into the realm of the dichotomy of good and bad. So how are we going to evade the trap of before and after, and good and bad?
To say "every day is a good day" should be heard as something that's deeply paradoxical. It just really doesn't make any sense to say every day is a good day. Every day has its own particular quality and feeling. Some days may be bright and sunny. Other days, the country could be invaded. The volcano could erupt. It could be a typhoon. There's no ordinary sense in which every day can be a good day. And so to say that is to say something so startling that it's supposed to call into question our whole idea of what we mean by good and bad — is that ordinary sense of it the only sense there can be?
In a way, it's reminiscent of saying "ordinary mind is the way." We sometimes, I think, lose track of how paradoxical that originally sounded. Ordinary mind is the mind of suffering. It's the mind of deluded thoughts, the mind of attachment. The way is supposed to be the very opposite of all those things. How can we say ordinary mind is the way? How can we say one thing is the same as its opposite?
What both of these point to is a kind of direct experience of now, or just this, prior to any kind of separation into this or that, good or bad, ordinary or transcendent. There's just this.
Sullivan, in his commentary on this koan, says that Unmon's question refers to the phases of the moon — that sometimes the moon is illuminated, full; sometimes it's completely in dark, the new moon. But the moon hasn't actually changed in any way at all. It's still the same craggy lump of rock floating out there in space. Nothing has changed, except we're seeing it differently. That doesn't give much valence to good or bad. These things are, in that sense, fleeting epiphenomena on the surface of the real thing.
But I think that Unmon's "good" actually carries a certain kind of — if not value judgment — a way of talking about the absolute in the present, without talking about it in terms of our ordinary sense of, oh, this is good, I want it to stay this way for a while.
This is how Joko always tried to talk about the absolute: as non-separation from the moment, whatever its content, including all our resistance and avoidance and anger and anxiety and so forth. In Unmon's terms, all of those are good. Every feeling is a good feeling, in Unmon's terms, because each thing is just what it is. It perfectly expresses, perfectly illuminates just what it is in this moment. Can't miss. And there is a kind of perfection in each thing just being itself.
I've often tried to talk about that duck-rabbit shift of perspective that we call awakening as a shift from lack to okayness. From a perspective in which we're always sorting through good and bad — How's it going? Are we there yet? — something that's always being evaluated and calibrated and scored. How am I doing? Nope. That whole world can just shift into: okay, it's like this. Even when "like this" can have a whole range of content, including, I'm getting old, my back hurts, whatever's happening. Well, okay.
And that okayness is not a smiley-face sense that everything is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But there is a definite shift in how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about our life in that kind of non-separation. It's not neutral. We're so constituted that that non-separation feels immediate and live and vital, present. In that sense, it's all good — but perhaps not in our ordinary sense of good.
So what is it that I can say about after the fifteenth of the month?
Today is Saturday.