We’ve been talking about Suzuki Roshi’s commentaries on the opening lines of the Sandokai. The version we chant says, “The mind of the great sage of India was intimately conveyed from West to East. Among human beings are wise ones and fools, but in the way, there
Is no northern or southern ancestor.”
His version is basically the same except the part where he substitutes something like, Human faculties may be sharp or dull, rather than Human beings are wise ones and fools, and that gives him a chance to tell a nice personal anecdote about, in his training, he was considered the dull one. His teacher always teased him about being defective and called him a crooked cucumber and said that at his temple all the smart ones ran away but he didn’t have the sense when the opportunity came to run away and he had to stay and he became his teacher’s successor by default, as he humorously tells it.
The idea is to say that sharp and dull are not related to one another in a hierarchy. One is not good and the other is bad, but each has its own characteristic nature. Each is perfectly what it is and is not a version of the other. So that’s one way he introduces the dilemma of the relationship between sameness and difference. The other is in his line about In the way, there’s no northern or southern ancestor.
That line was vividly brought home to me this past weekend when I was teaching a workshop up at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. The Center is basically attached to a Theravada Training Center, including a Forest Retreat for monks, and I was there basically presenting a Zen perspective on practice that seemed quite new and different to many of the people who were attending. It would be easy to see Zen and this Theravada tradition as a version of the Northern and Southern ancestor, two very different kinds of traditions, and the question is: Do we share a common way? What is it that makes us both Buddhists? What is the way that we have in common even if the forms seem very different?
It’s not an easy question. It’s sometimes said that monastics from one tradition to another often feel like they have much more in common with each other than with lay people, even if the lay people are in their same tradition. So a Trappist monk and a Zen monk may feel they have a lot of affinity because they both get up really early in the morning, they both wear robes, they both shave their heads, and somehow that’s a lot more important than whether they believe in god or not. It’s a form of life that they have in common.
When we talk about the way in comparison to Northern and Southern ancestor, in a certain sense, we’re mixing categories. We’re talking about two different kinds of things. It’s like talking about nature versus mountains and rivers and gardens. Now you could say that the only things that actually exist are mountains and rivers and gardens. These are real objects in the world and we relate to them in a very particular way and we might try to identify what mountains and rivers and gardens have in common. You might wonder whether people who are mountain climbers and people who are gardeners share the same love of nature. Well, yes and no.
On the other hand, you could turn the metaphor around completely and say that mountains and rivers and gardens are arbitrary distinctions, that what actually exists is only this complex unified ecosystem of nature. It’s one big thing and it’s a very human and arbitrary division to separate it out into mountains and rivers and gardens and see these things as if they were distinct, separate things. So do we see the reality as the indivisible whole or as each particular object? Are the objects arbitrary abstractions or is the whole an abstraction we make to put together individuality?
That’s the kind of thing I think he’s trying to play with in this dialectic between sameness and difference. Each thing has its own intrinsic value and is related to everything else in function and position. I’ll just skip ahead a little. Each thing, mountains and rivers, has its own unique and separate and full existence, and at the same time they only exist and have meaning in terms of this unified whole.
Suzuki also talks about the history of the poem and how it was composed by Sekito Kisen, who was supposed to have been the dharma grandson of Huineng, the sixth ancestor. This is complicated because as we read some time ago in the book Fathering Your Father, there’s a whole line of thought that says that Huineng and the Platform Sutra were composed a generation later and Huineng himself may be a composite mythological figure created in the service of someone trying to give their particular lineage authenticity and therefore patronage. So again, we have this complex relationship between the particular and the abstract. What is our relationship to something like the Platform Sutra and the Sandokai?
In thinking about Huineng’s legacy, remember that the poem that he composed convinced the Fifth Patriarch to make him his successor. It was written in contrast to one written by the head monk, who compared the mind to a mirror and said we have to carefully polish the mirror so no dust can ever alight, whereas Huineng was presented as offering a contrasting poem that says the mirror and stand is from the beginning empty, and there’s no place for dust to alight, and the dust itself, we would say, is empty. Those two poems, again, provide a kind of dialectic, a contrast that the Sandokai is playing with, back and forth. How do we encounter the absolute? How do we think of it in relationship to the relative? Are we going to embody a tradition where wiping the mind clean of dust and having that kind of pure empty mind that simply reflects whatever is put in front of it? Is that going to be our picture of the absolute?
Some traditions are very much oriented around that kind of metaphor, that kind of practice. On the other hand, are we going to say the only place to find the absolute is in particles of dust? The absolute manifests in our mind as the mind’s contents, as our thoughts, our feelings, our sensations, one after another after another, each itself a perfect dharma, each a thing coming forth just as it is in its perfection. Our practice is not wiping those aside to find a pure awareness underneath, but to fundamentally change our perspective on all the things that we thought of as contaminants of our mind, to see these as the manifestations of capital M Big Mind, of the Way, of reality.
These are two very different ways of thinking about practice that one way or another still have to dialog with each other. Joko famously said that Huineng’s picture could be one of realization but the head monk’s picture is actually what we do all the time. She thought wiping the mirror was equivalent to the practice of labeling thoughts. So for her, each had its own place in relation to realization of the emptiness of things. The labeling of thoughts might be a means to an end for realization. Then again, we have this basic dialectic between thinking of practice as a means to an end and Dogen’s more radical presentation of practice as the fulfillment of that end, the expression or realization, the identity of practice and realization.
I think sometimes we are presented with a metaphor that all these different ways of practice are paths up the same mountain, that we may take lots of routes to get there, and the climb may appear very different if you go up one face versus another, but ultimately we’re all trying to reach the same peak. I’m not sure I particularly believe that. I think there are lots of different peaks and I think the route makes a big difference, because basically the route is our life, the route is the form our life is going to take, and I think it makes a very big difference whether we spend our life on one route or another. It’s not so much about in the end we all have this great view. I don’t think it’s all about getting the great view at the end of everything. I think you’re going to have a very different kind of life depending on how you practice and what tradition and what forms and which things you value and don’t value.
I presented up there at Barre the case of Lou Nordstrom’s memoir of an American Zen Pioneer, and very clearly his life took a very particular shape because of the particular traditions that he followed, and the limitations of those traditions during his lifetime. It was sort of ironic that he singled out a passage from Suzuki Roshi, who we’re so used to seeing in a kind of beatific halo around everything he says. But for Lou, he singled out this passage about the waterfall in which Suzuki says that originally we are all part of the stream that heads to the waterfall, and only when it goes over the edge, does the water break into droplets, differentiate itself into individual drops for a little while when it’s falling, and that’s our life, and then we return to the undifferentiated stream.
Suzuki says that what distinguishes us, is that we have human feeling while we’re separated little drops, but the goal of practice is to return us to this undifferentiated state, beyond feeling, which we might say is beyond likes and dislikes. But for Lou, he felt he spent his whole life in a practice that told him to become one with some abstraction. The goal is oneness, capital O, capital B being, and all his early history and trauma and feelings and needs for recognition, well, that’s all just being one of these separate drops, and you need to transcend that, get over that.
So for him it was a very powerful moment when he recognized that he did not want to get erased into undifferentiated oneness. He wanted somebody to really see his pain, see who he was, and that was what realization was going to be about. Let me show you the dust. Stop trying to get me to look into the empty mirror. It makes a big difference, which path up the mountain you take. The path is your life.