The World as Just So, Part 5: The Golden Age of Zen

So this was Enō’s principle. As I said, he died in 715 A.D., and he left five very great disciples who taught, substantially, the same sort of thing. But as things go, then, these disciples had disciples, and those disciples had disciples, and there’s a genealogy. And Zen broke into what are called Five Houses. And these—some of them didn’t go on. Zen went on in two main forms: one is called, by the Japanese, Rinzai Zen, after the great master Rinzai, who lived towards the end of the 9th century, and the Sōtō School comes from another line, and they have a slightly different emphasis. Sōtō is more serene in its approach; Rinzai more gutsy. Rinzai people use the kōan method in Zen studies. Sōtō people don’t—at least not in the same way.

But this period between the death of the sixth Patriarch, Enō, and about the year 1,000 A.D., is the golden age of Zen. These were the really formative years. And after that, Zen began to decline in China. It became mixed up with other forms of Buddhism, and it suffered the fate of many, many forms of meditation-type, or Yoga-type, discipline. It got a little bit sidetracked into occult and psychic matters; what are called, in Buddhism, siddhi, or the development of supernormal powers. For Zen, this is completely beside the point. But it got involved with Chinese alchemy, with Taoistic alchemy, and all sorts of foolishness in that direction.

But a very strong strain of Zen went to Japan. The first being in about 1,130 A.D., the monk Eisai, and then about 1,200 A.D., the monk I told you about, Dōgen, who founded the great, beautiful, gorgeous, galluptuous monastery at Eihei-ji—which exists to this day. Now, in this golden age of Chinese Zen, the main method of study was walking Zen rather than sitting Zen. All monks were great travelers, and they walked for miles and miles through fields and mountains, visiting temples to see if they could find a master who would cause their spark to flash. To get what is called in Mandarin wú—or in Japanese, satori, or in Cantonese, ng.

This always rather fascinates me; the way this character is written. The word ‘I,’ in Chinese, is sometimes represented by this right-hand side of the character alone: five mouths, five senses. This one means your mind or heart, the heart-mind, xīn. Now, when we say something very surprising happened, My heart came into my mouth. Here it comes into all five. So this character means ‘awakening’—it’s the same, in a way, as the Sanskrit bodhi—awakening from the illusion of being a separate ego locked up in a bag of skin; discovering that you are the whole universe. And, of course, if you do discover that, and you see into it all of a sudden, it’s a shock—because your whole common sense is turned directly inside out. Everything is the same as you’ve always seen it, but completely different. Because you know who you are; you know that—what the devil were you worrying about? What was all that fuss? What was all that to do? Well, you see, it was part of the game. Everything, from one point of view, is fuss and to do. To do, to do, what is there to do?

But when you wake up, you see, and discover that all this ‘to do’ wasn’t you—what you thought was you—but was the entire works, which we can just call ‘it.’ That you’re ‘it,’ and that ‘it’ is it, and everything is ‘it,’ and ‘it’ does all things that are done—then that is a great surprise. But it sounds tasteless. It sounds empty, it sounds void, because if I say Well, you’re all ‘it,’ that is a statement without the slightest logical sense—because we don’t know what is ‘it’ unless there’s something that isn’t ‘it’. But if it’s both all is’s and all isn’t’s, then we can’t think about it. Nevertheless, it is highly possible to see that that’s so in a way that’s so vivid it brings your heart into all of your five mouths.