The World as Just So, Part 17: The Truth of Birthless Mind

There was, though—you see—there was a division in the history of Zen. There was a critical point in the 17th century when there were two very great masters: Hakuin and Bankei. Now, the 17th century is tremendously important in Japanese history because that was a time of what you might call the democratization of culture. Bashō invented haiku poetry so that everyone could be a poet. Not necessarily for publication, but for one's own fun. People didn't write poems for publication, necessarily—they wrote poems for parties. And he invented the 17-syllable haiku as a result of his Zen feeling for nature so that he could put this within the reach of everybody.

What had happened to poetry before that time was that it had become so obscure, and so effete, and so sophisticated that only great literati could do it at all. This happened to Chinese poetry; there were so many references to other poems it was like reading T. S. Eliot. You know, the Four Quartets. You could get an annotated Four Quartets showing you the sources of all the phrases he's borrowed, and sometimes you have to know the source in order to see what he means by it.

All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.

Alright, that's straight from the Revelations of Divine Love by the dame Julian of Norwich, but whoever would know that? You have to understand the scene she was digging in order to know, really, what Eliot's getting at in that All shall be well. And he's full of that. He quotes the Bhagavad Gita, he quotes everybody. So, if we all had to write that way, nobody could be a poet unless he was a great scholar.

So Bashō popularized the haiku, and the haiku are originally based on the Zenrin poems. They take their flavor from that. There is one, you see: Those bird calls, mountain changes to be more mysterious. The first line of that says, The wind drops, but the flowers keep on falling. The bird calls, and the mountain becomes more mysterious. And so haiku developed from that kind of short insight, that glimpse of nature.

Now, while Bashō was taking poetry to the peasants, Bankei was taking Zen to them as well—to the farmers. And he ran his Zen on an entirely different system. He talked, mainly, about what he called fushō. Fushō is the unborn; that which has not yet arisen and which, as a matter of fact, never does arise. And so he said there is in you the unborn mind which was given to you by your parents. Let me just read you a few quotations from him to show you what sort of a person he was:

The mind, begotten by and given to each of us by our parents, is none other than the Buddha-mind. Birthless and immaculate, sufficient to manage all that life throws upon us. A proof: suppose at this very instant, while you face me listening, a crow caws and a sparrow twitters somewhere behind you. Without any intention on your part to distinguish between these sounds, you hear each distinctly. In doing so you are hearing with the birthless mind, which is yours for all eternity.

Well, we are to be in this mind from now on, and our sect will be known as the Buddha-mind sect. To consider my example of a moment ago, once again, if any of you feel you heard the crow and the sparrow intentionally, you are deluding yourselves, for you are listening to me, not to what goes on behind you. In spite of this there are moments when you hear such sounds distinctly, when you hear with the Buddha-mind of non-birth. Nobody here can deny this. All of you are living Buddhas, because the birthless mind which each possesses is the beginning and the basis of all.

Now, if the Buddha-mind is birthless, it is necessarily immortal, for how can what has never been born perish? You've all encountered the phrase “birthless and imperishable” in the sūtras—not born, not dying—but hitherto you've not had the slightest proof of its truth. Indeed I suppose like most people you've memorized this phrase while being ignorant of the fact of birthlessness.

When I was twenty-five I realized that non-birth is all-sufficient to life, and since then, for forty years, I've been proving it to people just like you. I was the first to preach this greatest truth of life. I ask, have any of you priests heard anybody else teach this truth before me? Of course not.

A priest said to him, Once in the Buddha-mind, I am absent-minded.

Bankei says, Well, suppose you are absent-minded as you say. If someone pricked you in the back with a gimlet, would you feel the pain?

Naturally!

Then you are not absent-minded. Feeling the pain, your mind would show itself to be alert.

A layman says, Though I undertake Zen discipline, I often find myself lazy, weary of the whole thing, unable to advance.

And he replies, Once in the Buddha-mind there's no need to advance, nor is it possible to recede. Once in birthlessness, to attempt to advance is to have receded from the state of non-birth. A man secure in that state need not bother himself with such things: he's above them.

The Buddha-mind in each of you is immaculate. All you've done is reflected in it, but if you bother about one such reflection, you're certain to go astray. Your thoughts don't lie deep enough—they rise from the shallows of your mind.

Remember that all you see and hear is reflected in the Buddha-mind and influenced by what was previously seen and heard. Needless to say, thoughts aren't entities. So if you permit them to rise, reflect themselves, or cease altogether as they're prone to do, and if you don't worry about them, you'll never go astray. In this way let one hundred, nay, one thousand thoughts arise, and it's as if not one has arisen. You will remain undisturbed.

The only thing I tell my people is to stay in the Buddha-mind. There are no regulations, no formal discipline. Nevertheless they have agreed among themselves to sit in Zen for a period of two incense sticks daily. All right, let them. But they should well understand that the birthless Buddha-mind has absolutely nothing to do with sitting with an incense stick burning in front of you. If one keeps in the Buddha-mind without straying, there's no further satori to seek. Whether awake or asleep, one is a living Buddha. Zazen means only one thing—sitting tranquilly in the Buddha-mind. But really, you know, one's everyday life, in its entirety, should be thought of as a kind of sitting in Zen.

Even during one's formal sitting, one may leave one's seat to attend to something. In my temple, at least, such things are allowed. Indeed it's sometimes advisable to walk in Zen for one incense stick's burning, and sit in Zen for the other. A natural thing, after all. One can't sleep all day, so one rises. One can't talk all day, so one sits in Zen. There are no binding rules here.

And so that's what happened, you see? Bankei was the abbot of Myōshin-ji—the rōshi—and he stopped the monks from using the kaiseki stick to hit them when they weren't meditating or sleeping in meditation, because he said, Even a sleeping man is still a Buddha, and you shouldn't be disrespectful. And he attempted a Zen of no methods. You can meditate if you want to, that's fine. But that's like polishing a brick to make a mirror. And he used to say, too, that trying to purify your mind is like trying to wash off blood with blood.

But Bankei's Zen was elusive. Hakuin had 80 successors, Bankei had none. And some people think that that was the most admirable thing about him.