The Sound of One Hand Clapping - Koan Practice
By Yin DeIn the Zen tradition we say there are three essentials of spiritual practice if it's going to bear any fruit - Great Faith, Great Doubt and Great Determination. Great Faith is the faith that we can achieve what countless others before us have achieved. Great doubt is to go to the very bottom of questioning, to question absolutely everything, most of all our selves, and to continue questioning. Great Determination is not allowing ourselves to be fooled into thinking that we've mastered our practice and that therefore there's no need to sit in meditation, or work with a teacher.
Our talk today deals primarily with Great Doubt, and one of the methods that Zen Buddhists use to generate it and work with it for spiritual development.
Have you ever heard any of these strange little nonsensical riddles that Zen Masters go around asking, or Zen students go around repeating?
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
"What was your original face before your parents were born?"
"Does a dog have Buddha-nature?"
Or my personal favorite: "Who is dragging this corpse around?"
What are we to make of these questions? How are they used by Zen Buddhist teachers and students to produce an awakening experience? Are there right and wrong answers? Can't we just get the answers from someone who has already solved them?
This is what we are going to talk about today.
These little questions or riddles are called Koans in the Japanese Zen schools, or Gong-an in China and they are accounts of interactions between Zen teachers and students and are documented and maintained to be used by future generations of practitioners. The idea is to give a student whose mind is already ripe for awakening as a result of his meditation practice an assignment that will cause him to completely drop away logic and thought - leading ultimately to the kensho or awakening experience.
The mind works to figure out answers to these questions, and when the student has sufficiently tortured himself he approaches the Master to present his "answer" in a private consultation session known as dokusan. Invariably, the Master tells the student that he has failed to solve his koan, but is getting close to an answer, and so exhorts the student "try harder" "you're so close" "please, come back when you have the answer".
Many of us, even non-Buddhists, have practiced something similar to koan work whether we realize it or not. Have you ever had an experience… think back to your childhood… an experience where for whatever reason you repeated an everyday word over and over again until eventually the word began to sound strange and lost its meaning? Try it sometime with a word like… pencil. Say the word pencil out loud a couple of hundred times and eventually you will no longer be sure what the word is referring to. You may actually begin to doubt whether it has ever had any meaning and you could find yourself unable to use the word in public for the next few days for fear that someone will say "Pencil? What does that mean?" "Did you just make that word up?"
In the old days koan practice wasn't done in private interviews like this. In fact the word koan, or Gong-an, actually means "public case" or "case under consideration in public". Back in the old days, in smoke filled candle lit monasteries in China, when the student felt he had solved his koan, the teacher would call him in front of the entire assembled Sangha, a group which could include thousands of monks, and ask him to give his answer. Then the Master would proceed to laugh at the student's answer and embarrass him in from of the whole group. This was done quite intentionally in many cases to cause the students mind to loosen its grip on the false sense of self or ego. The idea being that if one was sufficiently embarrassed and demoralized, even he could not stand himself and would begin to question how he could have been so fooled. The same technique was used in the military to break down a soldier's old sense of who he was so that he could be rebuilt as a killing machine to meet the needs of the army. It was successful more often than not.
But the Buddha didn't teach koan as a practice method to his disciples. Rather, it evolved over a period of time in the hundreds of years after the Buddha's death. But some people believe that even though it wasn't called by the name koan, or prescribed as a common practice tool, the first koan was indeed asked and answered in the time of the Buddha.
The story goes something like this. The Buddha and twelve-hundred and fifty of his disciples were staying on Vulture Peak on Gridhakuta Mountain. They were encamped near a lake. After going into a nearby village for the morning alms round, the Sangha returned to their camp, ate their meal, washed and put away their bowls, and gathered in assembly to hear the Buddha give a sermon. It was routine for the Buddha to give a sermon after the morning meal. As the Buddha ascended to the head of the assembly, he noticed a beautiful lotus flower blooming from the mud near the shore of the lake. The lord plucked the flower from the muck and held it high for the whole assembly to see. He never spoke a word; rather he stood there twirling this magnificent lotus flower between his thumb and forefinger as he gazed out at the faces in the assembly. Finally the Buddha's eyes met with the eyes of a senior disciple named Mahakashyapa.
Mahakashyapa was smiling as if he and he alone understood the meaning of the Buddha's gesture with the flower. And indeed Mahakashyapa did understand. The Buddha finally spoke and he said "What can be said I have said to each of you, and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa." Mahakashyapa became the first Patriarch of the Zen sect on that day. You see, what had happened is that everyone in the gathered assembly was furiously searching their memories for an answer to what this flower sermon could mean. Everyone had answers racing through their minds and each was summarily dismissed as it arose. Some of the gathered monks were struggling so hard to figure out the significance of this gesture that they were sweating, and avoiding eye contact with the Buddha so that he would not call upon them for an answer. Everyone was using reason, logic, and discrimination to try and figure it out. Everyone that is, except for Mahakashyapa. Mahakashyapa had progressed in his meditation practice to just the right point and his mind was ripe for enlightenment. When the Buddha held up the flower, he instantly dropped all discursive thinking and judging and penetrated the great mystery. He understood instinctively what the Buddha meant. In those moments when we perceive without subjecting our thoughts to the scrutiny of conditioned reasoning and logic, our minds become one with the mind of Buddha. This is the origin of the Zen School. The intention of this Gong an (koan), of course, does not define the origin of koan practice academically, but stresses the fact that Zen is a "special transmission, outside the scriptures, with no dependence on words and letters"; it is "a direct pointing at the human mind; seeing into one's own nature and the attainment of Buddhahood."
This was the first evidence of koan practice. Over time, koan practice has evolved going through periods of favor and disfavor among various teachers. The practice that survives today is much like that interaction between the Buddha and Mahakashyapa in that the intention is to cause the student to drop away all logical discriminating thought and experience directly what is in the mind of Buddha.
Fast forwarding about thirteen-hundred years, we come to a time when Zen as we know it today was beginning to solidify in China before being exported to Japan several hundred years later.
There was a prominent and respected Zen Master named Chao-Chou (Zhao Zhou, or in Japanese Joshu) living in North China. Chao-Chou had a teaching encounter with a novice monk that has somehow been retained over the centuries and codified into one of the famous koans I mentioned earlier. The novice asked Chao-Chou "Does a dog have Buddha-nature?" The Master without a moment's hesitation answered "Mu". The most widely accepted translation for Mu is no; although some would argue that a closer translation might be "It doesn't matter" or "makes no difference". But for the purpose of this koan, we accept the translation of the word Mu as meaning simply "no". Now on the surface of it, this wouldn't seem like anything special in the way of a teaching encounter. Until you consider the fact that Chao-Chou was on record as having long held the view that all living things have Buddha-nature. Now he was asked directly "Does a dog have Buddha-nature?" and had responded negatively. This was a puzzle indeed. Was Master Chao-Chou contradicting himself? Did he really mean that all living things except for dogs have the Buddha-nature? Or did he have some other purpose for answering as he did? I think it's safe to say that he definitely did have a purpose for giving this answer to this student at this time, but it was now up to the disciple to ponder the encounter until he could present Master Chao-Chou with his understanding of the meaning behind the interaction.
Jumping forward in time once again; in a letter dated May 14th, 1953 Beat Poet Alan Ginsberg writes:
"I am on a new kick 2 weeks old, a very beautiful kick which I invite you to share… I am now spending all my free time in Columbia Fine Arts library and NY Public leafing through immense albums of Asiatic imagery. I'm also reading a little about their mystique and religions… if you begin to get a clear idea of the various religions, the various dynasties and epochs of art and messianism and spiritual waves of hipness… you understand a lot of new mind and eyeball kicks. I have begun to familiarize myself with Zen Buddhism through a book by one D.T. Suzuki… Zen is a special funny late form with no real canon or formal theology, except for a mass of several hundred anecdotes of conversations between masters and disciples. These conversations are all irrational and beguiling… they are given to the Zen novitiates, and made up as they go along sometimes, until the novitiate is completely beflabbered intellectually and stops thinking…then finally one day he gets the big point and has what is known as SATORI, or illumination. This is a specific flash of vision which totally changes his ken… They refuse to have a theology or admit that one exists, or anything verbal at all. That's the point of these anecdotes, to exhaust words. Then the man sees anew the universe."
I have only worked on koan practice with a couple of students. Recently, one of them contacted me with a question. He said "When I practice my koan I was wondering if I should concentrate directly on the question itself, or be looking for the answer using my awareness. I have had this problem for a while, but keep forgetting to ask you when we talk. It probably doesn't matter which way I go about it, because it seems both ways lead to the other, and back and forth."
I knew that I had him right where I wanted him. He's getting close. Just needs to try a little harder.
You see, the purpose of koan practice is not to show how smart you are, or to prove how many stale old stories of Zen monks and masters that you've been able to memorize. The purpose of koan practice is to realize and experience Mind for your self. Now what is this Mind? It is the true nature of all sentient beings, that which existed before our parents were born and hence before our own birth, and which presently exists exactly the way it always has. So in Zen circles it is sometimes called "your face before your parents were born". This Mind is intrinsically pure. When we are born it is not newly created, and when we die it does not perish. It has no distinction of male or female, nor has it any nature of good or bad. It cannot be compared with anything, so it is called Buddha-nature, or God, or All-knowing Universe.
If you want to realize your own Mind, you must first of all look into the source from which thoughts flow. This is what we're doing when we ruthlessly examine our koan. Eating and sleeping, standing and sitting, profoundly asking yourself, "What is my own Mind?" with an intense yearning to resolve this question. This is called "training" or "practice". The practice we call koan is really nothing more than looking into one's own mind. It is better to search your own mind devotedly than to read and memorize hundreds of sutras and koans from the past every day for countless years. Because searching one's own mind leads ultimately to enlightenment, this practice is a prerequisite to becoming a Buddha.
Who is the master that currently reads these words or that moves our feet as we walk? We know these are functions of our own mind, but we don't know exactly how they are performed. It may be asserted that behind these actions there is no real entity, yet it is obvious they are being performed at the direction of someone or something with volition. On the other hand, it may be asserted that these are the acts of some entity; yet the entity is unnamable. When the profound questioning penetrates to the very bottom, and that bottom is broken open, not the slightest doubt will remain that your own Mind is itself Buddha, the Void, and the Universe.
Upon such a realization you should question yourself even more intensely, like this: "My body is like a phantom, like bubbles on a stream. My mind, looking into itself, is as formless as empty-space, yet somewhere within sounds are perceived. Who is hearing?" If you would question yourself in this way with profound absorption, never slackening the intensity of your effort, your rational mind will eventually exhaust itself and only questioning itself will remain. Your long-held conceptions and notions will perish in the way that every drop of water vanishes from a bucket broken open at the bottom and perfect understanding will follow.
You need only to fully become the question that is your koan: "What is this Mind?" or "Who is dragging this corpse around?" When you realize this Mind you will know that it is the very source of all Buddhas and sentient beings.
Think about all of this and exert yourself to the utmost, and give me an answer. What is the sound of one hand clapping?