Our endless pursuit of once and for all Barry Magid March 4^th 2017

The Gateless Barrier Case 38

It is as if a buffalo has jumped through the window. His head, horns, body, legs have all passed through the window. Only his tail can’t pass through. Why can’t the little tail pass through the window?

Hakuin included this koan in the group of koans that he singled out as being especially difficult, yet when we first hear it, we may be misled about the nature of the difficulty, which does not lie in the paradoxical nature of the riddle that is posed, but rather in coming to terms with the issue that is being grappled with once we understand what the koan is about, so first I’ll unpack a little bit of the imagery for you.

A buffalo passes through or jumps through a window. We think of the window the same way we think of the gate, like the gateless gate, something that has to be passed through, something that has an outside and an inside, something that is characterized seemingly by an inner-outer, before-after.

On one side, we have our world of differences, dualisms, and passing through we seem to enter a world where those differences are dissolved, where they’re transcended, where we’re in the realm of emptiness or oneness, where the whole notion of a barrier dissolves. Most of us, one way or another, will think about practice in terms of before and after, what I was like before, what I hope to be after.

And when we have some kind of experience of passing through a barrier, of having the internal splits and the confusions that brought us to practice seemingly dissolve for a little while into a state of some kind of acceptance of “just this,” we quickly feel like we’ve gone from the before to the after and yet then we fall back, and in no time at all it seems that all the dualisms and splits and problems reassert themselves.

And so we get back on the cushion and practice harder. We want to do it again, except this time bigger, this time longer lasting, this time once and for all, and that in a way is, I think, the beginning of the real difficulty that Hakuin is pointing to, our sense that we want to pass through, go beyond once and for all, and yet we have this experience over and over, of coming back to where we were before. No matter how much seems to be transcended, something is always left over, that tail, some little thing is stuck.

Now how we approach that is really the crux of our practice, and there are many people who really practice with the idea that if they only had a deep enough or full enough kind of enlightenment experience, they would transcend their self, their attachment, their desire, their suffering, once and for all. I’ve heard students and even teachers talk about wanting to or aspiring to attain anutara-samyak-sambodhi in this lifetime, a once and for all kind of passing through the window with nothing getting stuck.

Another kind of approach to the problem is to see the tail that’s stuck as a need for endless practice, that there are delusions and attachments that have to be endlessly worked on, that no matter how much we think we’ve done, we always have to do a little more, and there’s no end to this practice because there’s always something left. This turns practice into a treadmill. You’re always a day late, a dollar short, never getting there, always running.

And then there are those who see that tail sticking out, and they decide, Well, the only thing to do is cut the tail off, and they think that by cutting off some version of themselves, some kind of desire, some kind of neediness, or dependency or some aspect of humanity, well, then they’ll pass through once and for all, once they got rid of that troublesome part.

The real difficulty in this koan and in our practice is coming to terms with the reality of that tail. When I opened sesshin, I said, After forty years of practice, I’m still me. One way of looking at that tail is, That’s me! That tail! Forty years of practice, and it’s not gone yet. See, from one perspective, the tail that we can’t get rid of, is the problem. But from another perspective, after forty years of practice and I’m still me, comes the answer.

See, I think what happens is that when we give up the curative fantasy of wanting once and for all passing through the window and once and for all, staying in a state of transcendence, being who we are is no longer the problem. Having problems is no longer a problem. It means that we change our relationship to this moment where it is not something to be dissolved or something to be fixed, but it just is.

Now, there are lots of things that we will endlessly work on and problems we will try to solve, but doing so becomes much more an ongoing expression of our life as it is, the same way that we need to brush our teeth, we brush them every day. We don’t assume that we’re going to brush them once and for all, and if we really give them a good brushing, we’ll never have to do it again. There’s something ongoing about it. There’s something ongoing about simply how we live in a world where there are needs and problems and things that need to be done, and the fact that there are things and needs and dependencies and things that need to be done, is not in itself a problem that needs to be fixed. But I think it is very, very hard for us to actually understand and put this into practice in our lives.

At the end of our sittings, we bow to the Buddha and we bow to each other. Bowing to each other is very important. In many ways it’s much easier to bow to an abstract or an idealized figure up on the altar. Bowing to each other means something else. Sometimes we have to recognize and accept the limitations in other people before we can accept them in ourselves. Sometimes we have to recognize the perfection in other people before we can recognize it in ourselves.