This morning I’ll continue with a couple more stories about Dongshan from Chapter Six, and we’ll try to discern whether these have a particular personal flavor to them or more generally a flavor we can describe as Soto. What is the style or flavor displayed here and how much does it align with how we think about things now?
So the first story takes place before he becomes a teacher himself, and when he’s on pilgrimage with a fellow dharma brother, Sengmi, who is actually his elder in the dharma. They’re both students of Yunyan. They go on pilgrimage, walking through the countryside, when they suddenly see a white rabbit dart across their path. Sengmi says, How swift! Dongshan looks at him and says, How so? Sengmi says, It’s just like a commoner becoming a high minister. Dongshan retorts, How can such a venerable person speak like that? Sengmi asks Dongshan for his understanding, for which he replies, After generations of nobility, temporarily falling into poverty.
Well, that might not be the clearest or most spontaneous sounding dialog, but I think the first thing we might note is that Dongshan, as the younger of the two, is abrading the senior dharma brother for his comment, so we’re already alerted to the idea that things may be turned upside down. I think particularly in that Asian culture, the idea of the junior person challenging the senior is already something out of the ordinary and worth taking note of almost regardless of what the content is. He is displaying a kind of freedom of convention that is out of the ordinary.
But I think we want to look at how each of them is using the white rabbit as a metaphor. When Sengmi says, How swift, Leighton points out that that word is translated in a number of ways, from swift to elegant, but clearly he’s saying something like – That’s one special rabbit! That’s some rabbit! Right? Then he says, like a commoner being elevated to a high minister. It’s like the idea of an ordinary animal managing to display extraordinary power, really standing out from what you’d expect from an ordinary animal. Dongshan criticizes this and basically makes a point from the opposite direction. He says, After generations of nobility, temporarily falling into poverty. It’s rather that instead of the rabbit by dint of special powers or exertions doing something extraordinary, we’re going to see something extraordinary in this ordinary animal.
What are we going to say this is a metaphor about? I think we want to put it into a context of the question about the nature of effort in practice, and whether we become something extraordinary, swift or elegant or special, through our practice, or whether practice allows something that is already there and wondrous to essentially shine through or show up in the midst of our ordinary life. In some ways this can seem like an abstract or metaphysical kind of problem, but I think it can illustrate very different attitudes we have as to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
Certainly we’ve all encountered varieties of practice in which realization is presented as something that is attainable only by the very few and then only after years and years of strenuous if not nearly life-threatening kinds of devotion to the sitting practice. I think the image of the second patriarch cutting off his arm standing in the snow, becomes that kind of model, for the teaching is only going to be for those who are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices. Generations of students are made to feel like they would never measure up by that kind of standard. Who do you think you are to receive the teaching? Are you prepared to do a tenth of that?
On the other hand, you get stories that seem to give the opposite moral. Maybe there the paradigm is the young illiterate Huineng hearing one verse of the Diamond Sutra recited in the marketplace by the itinerant monk, and he’s completely awakened just on the first time he ever hears such a thing. Never practiced, never putting in any effort. Oh! Obviously! That’s it! Right? So in a way we can be whiplashed between these two very different pictures of what’s involved in practice and realization.
To some extent we separate a school that is about intensity and rigor as a means to an end with kensho versus a school that suggests realization is present already in our sitting, in what we already are, and our practice simply reveals what’s already there. It doesn’t make anything special happen.
The second story, which takes us another step, is from the days when Dongshan was still a student of Yunyan, and in that story the teacher asks him, How is your practice going? And Dongshan says, Well, I have to admit that I have lots of karmic habits that have not yet been eliminated, and Yunyan nods and asks, Well, how are you practicing with those? And Dongshan says, I don’t even think about the Four Noble Truths. And Yunyan goes further and says, Has your practice made you joyful yet? Dongshan says, I wouldn’t say that I’m not joyful, but it’s like finding a pearl in a pile of shit.
How are we going to take this one? In a way, I think the first half is as important as what sounds like a more dramatic conclusion. He says, How is your practice going? And he says, Well, I still have all these karmic bad habits floating around, and we would think, if he was telling this to somebody like Joko, she’d want to hear what they are, how are you going to practice with that, what is the edge of your anger and anxiety? How are you practicing with those? We’ve got to eliminate that. But Dongshan says, I don’t even think about the Four Noble Truths, including any of the precepts. I don't concern myself with any of that. I’m leaving all those bad habits completely alone.
There we might see a kind of back-handed expression of Ordinary Mind is the Way. I’m not making any distinction at all between this ordinary mind of mine, which is, of course, full of its old habits and conditioning and thoughts and emotions, and my practice of some image of what I’m supposed to become as a monk. And he asks, Are you joyful yet? You know, you don’t usually get asked a question like that. Is practice supposed to make you joyful? I suppose the implication is that joyfulness is the counterpart to all those bad karmic habits, because the idea is that karma is the result and cause of suffering. If you’ve got all this bad karma, it’s going to make you suffer. Right?
So the idea here, I suppose, is that he’s challenging him, saying Have you been able to eliminate suffering in your life as a result of practice? And again, Dongshan is sort of responding in a way that is challenging the whole dichotomy between joyful and suffering and where we are and where we’re supposed to be. But he uses this sort of problematic metaphor, and he says, It’s sort of like finding a pearl in a pile of shit, where I think he would like to imply that joy and suffering are inseparable, that my realization and my karma are inseparable, and in that sense he is saying something like I believe the lotus grows in the mud. Where else are you going to find a lotus? Where else is joy going to be found but in the middle of this existence?
The danger with that, of course, is that he still seems to be drawing some dualistic distinction between pearls and shit. When we say Ordinary Mind is the Way, that seems instead to collapse distinction, that what we ordinarily think of as exalted or maybe the pearl, the Way, is nothing but our ordinary mind, is nothing but the shit that we’re going to collapse in the very distinction. Donshan is doing something a little different, maybe, when he says we can still distinguish the two, but we’re never going to be able to separate them out. We’re never going to just have the pearl and not have the shit. We’re never going to have the pearl and not the shit, the pearl without the oyster, the lotus without the mud.
I think that there’s a certain way in which that is bringing those seeming opposites into a kind of, if not harmony, at least dialectic where we see that there’s not going to be one without the other. I was thinking if there is some way we want to try to bring down that dichotomy. You know, if Yunam said, Oh, you mean your life is still full of shit? Then Dongshan might reply, Ah, there’s nothing better than taking a good shit! Somehow trying to break down that either/or. So I’ll leave it to you to think about to what extent this aligns with how we feel about practice.
As I’ve said before, I’m not aligned with Joko all the time. She would certainly have a different attitude with how you work with karmic habits, but I think it’s important that we allow some of these old teachers and teachings to have their own flavor, their own emphasis, and stay aware of difference. I also don’t think it’s a good idea to say that there’s just one thing that’s a timeless realization, so all Zen teachers must have the same thing, and when we read something by Rinzai and Dogen and Joko, our job is to find out how they're really all saying the same thing. I don’t think that does them justice.
I think that we want to be able to say that different times, different teachers are going to emphasize different things, and realization can show us many different faces, and I think we don’t do it any service if we try to either homogenize it into one universal realization or what might be worse, to think the way we see it is the one final, mature way of looking at things, and isn’t it a shame that those poor Chinamen never got to where we are. I don’t think that does us any good either. So pay attention to what you think they’re saying, and let’s not be afraid whether it’s the same or different from how we do things.