The World as Just So, Part 4: The Origins of Zen

So here is this extraordinary phenomenon. Now, let me say—having presented you with all these fireworks—let me say a few sober things about Zen as a historical phenomenon. Zen is a subdivision of Mahāyāna Buddhism. And, as you know, that is the school of Buddhism which is concerned with realizing Buddha-nature in this world; not necessarily by going off to the mountains, or by renouncing family life, everyday life, et cetera, et cetera—as if that were an entanglement—but realizing, in the midst of life, the possibility of becoming a Buddha.

And so, the great ideal personality of Mahāyāna Buddhism is the Bodhisattva—a word now applied to somebody who has attained Nirvāṇa, but instead of disappearing, comes back in many, many guises. There’s a famous painting of one of the Bodhisattvas in the form of a prostitute. And Bodhisattvas in Zen art are often represented as bums. There’s the beautiful one over there, painted by Sengai, of the bum Hotei—or Bùdài in Chinese—who is always immensely fat. And he’s saying, Buddha is dead. Maitreya—who is supposed to be the next Buddha—hasn’t come yet. I had a wonderful sleep and didn’t even dream about Confucius. And he’s just stretching and yawning as he wakes up.

So Zen is Mahāyāna—Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism—translated into Chinese and therefore deeply influenced by Taoism and Confucianism. Zen monks brought Confucian ideas to Japan. And the origins of Zen lie actually around the year 414 A.D., at which time a great Hindu scholar by the name of Kumārajīva was translating—with a group of assistants—the Buddha sūtras into Chinese. One of his students taught that all beings whatsoever have the capacity to become Buddha, to become enlightened—even rocks and stones—and that even heretics and evil-doers have the Buddha-nature, or Buddha potentiality, in them. And everybody said he was a dreadful heretic. But then a text called the Nirvāṇa Sūtra came from India, which said precisely that. So everybody had to admit that this man was right. He also began to teach that awakening must be instantaneous; it's a kind of all-or-nothing state. I don't mean that there aren't degrees of its intensity—but once you see the pinciple, you see the whole thing. As they say: when the bottom falls out of the bucket, all the water goes together. Those men, then, promulgated the way of sudden awakening. Bodhidharma came later, and he is supposed—in legend—to have been followed by a line of six patriarchs, of which he was the first.

The second was named Eka—I’m using the Japanese pronunciation—who was formerly a general of the army. Then the third was Sōsan, who wrote the Xìnxīn Míng, which is the most marvelous little summary of Buddhism in verse. And so on, until they came to Enō, the sixth patriarch. You know—perhaps, more familiarly—his Chinese name, Huìnéng. He died in 715 A.D. He’s the real founder of Chinese Zen; the man who synthesized the whole thing, and was the—at least, his collected discourses are contained in what is called the Platform Sūtra. And any student of Zen should read the Platform Sūtra.

But Enō really fused Zen with the Chinese way of doing things, and he emphasized very thoroughly: Do not think you are going to attain Buddhahood by sitting down all day and keeping your mind blank. Because a lot of those students who practice Dhyāna—which is Sanskrit for Chán, which is Chinese for Zen, which is, in turn, Japanese—it means ‘meditation’—or ‘contemplation,’ perhaps, would be a better translation in English. And everybody thought that the proper way to contemplate was to be as still as possible. But, according to Zen, that is to be a stone Buddha instead of a living Buddha.

Now, I can knock a stone Buddha on the head, clunk, and it has no feelings, and so it’s a stone Buddha. There was a famous Zen master called Tanka, who went to a little lonely temple on a freezing cold night. And he took the Buddha image—one of the Buddha images—off the altar, split it up, and made a fire. And when the attendant of the temple came in the morning—horrified! Broke the image, and Tanka took his stick, started raking in the ashes. And the temple priest said, What are you looking for? He said, I’m looking for the śarīra, that is to say, the jewels that are supposed to be found in the body of a genuine Buddha when he’s cremated. So the priest said, You couldn’t expect to find śarīra from a wooden Buddha. In that case, said Tanka, let me have that other Buddha for my fire.

That’s, you see, the difference between living Buddha and stone Buddha. But a person who thinks that, in order to be awakened, you have to be heartless—to have no emotions, no feelings, that you couldn’t possibly lose your temper, or get angry, or feel annoyed, or depressed—those people haven’t got the right idea at all. If that’s your ideal, said Enō, you might just as well be a block of wood or a piece of stone. What he wanted you to understand is that your real mind—while all those emotions are going on—is imperturbable. Just like when you move your hand through the sky you don’t leave a track. The birds don’t stain the blue when they pass by. And when the water reflects the image of the geese, the reflection doesn’t stick there.

So, to be pure-minded, in the Zen way—or clear-minded is a better way of translating it—is not to have no thoughts; it’s not a question of not thinking about dirty things. One great master of the Tang dynasty, when asked, What is Buddha? believe it or not, answered, A dried turd. So it’s not that kind of purity. It is purity, clarity, in the sense that your mind isn’t sticky. You don’t harbor grievances. You don’t be attached to the past. You go with it, with life. Life is flowing all the time. That is the Tao: the flow of life. You are going along with it whether you want to or not. You’re like people in a stream. You can swim against the stream, but you’ll still be moved along by it and all you’ll do is wear yourself out in futility. But if you swim with the stream, the whole strength of the stream is yours. Of course, the difficulty that so many of us have is finding out which way the stream is going. But certainly, as it goes, all the past vanishes. The future has not yet arrived. And there is only one place to be, which is here and now. And there is no way of being anywhere else. None whatever. If you understand that thoroughly, your task is finished. You then become instantaneous and also momentous.