How would you greet a stranger on the road of life?
"In Zen, practitioners use kung-an as subjects for meditation until their mind come to awakening. There is a big difference between a kung-an and a math problem - the solution of the math problem is included in the problem itself, while the response to the kung-an lies in the life of the practitioner. The kung-an is a useful instrument in the work of awakening, just as a pick is a useful instrument in working on the ground. What is accomplished from working on the ground depends on the person doing the work and not just on the pick. The kung-an is not an enigma to resolve; this is why we cannot say that it is a theme or subject of meditation." (Nhat Hanh 1995:57)
I had a dream. Ok, so I always have these dreams. It is not like they are all the same! I was in school. Sitting in my old sixth grade classroom, I opened a math book. It was very advanced math. It was not just a simple problem it was a very advanced "proof". In a proof, one has to solve the problem and show that the answer is true and correct with supporting calculations and theory. The question had to do with loves. "How can you calculate one-and-a-half loves?" the question read. I immediately threw out the possibility of solving the problem by weight as well as displacement and pondered how emotions and feelings could be measured and calculated somehow. I went to work diagramming the problem to get the feel of it, drawing hearts and having them half overlap each other.
I think I dream in Koan. I wonder if everyone does? I read that Dogen came back to Japan and criticized the way koan study was being practiced in certain areas. It was his opinion that koans had been reduced... no longer being expressions of enlightment but tools to attain a desired end without real penetration. What do I really know about Koans? Nothing really but I do enjoy them. There is formal Koan study, but that is not something I have participated in. But I feel that everyone is always facing Koans in the world and the symbolism and riddles of dreams are so rich, sometimes it is difficult to see the meaning. Life has its paradoxes too, and its meanings. Lately, I have been able to solve a few koans. Not that anyone has checked my answers... For someone like me to have this feeling with an answer that makes a huge light go on and I can see it... I call that an answer. It is not simply the answer one just tries for but that feeling of knowing that seems to improve. I wonder if koans studies are the creators of the lightbulb that clicks on when a character is hit by an idea in cartoons. I am no koan expert, but I like them now, especially after "getting" a few and having a taste of the experience of it. At one time I despised koans but read them anyway pondering what the deal is. There were some or even most of the koans that I read with the answers that I did not get even when given the answer. For a storyteller, that is an amazing thing. These are not just stories, but a true existing puzzle that one has to solve in such a way that the paradox they represent must lived or experienced in some manner in order to be understood!
What is the fundamental teaching? No question, no answer. ---Yumen
"The koans do not represent the private opinion of a single man, but rather the highest principle ... [that - tmc ] accords with the spiritual source, tallies with the mysterious meaning, destroys birth-and-death, and transcends the passions. It cannot be understood by logic; it cannot be transmitted in words; it cannot be explained in writing; it cannot be measured by reason. It is like [...] a great fire that consumes all who come near it." (Chung-feng Ming-pen [1263-1323] quoted in Miura and Sasaki 1966:5)
My calculations are disturbed suddenly by an announcement. It seems that I have been the only person selected by my school to go off to war. I stop working on the problem shocked by this news. I trudge off to the front lines and quickly encounter a prison camp. I see people, all men, on a conveyer belt that is going up at a 45 degree angle. They are riding the belt and as they go up and into the dark hole at the top of the belt, some of their limbs are torn off. I cry and cry as I see this. "I don't want to go there!" I panic as I see they are all men and not even the same nationality as I am. A nurse comes and softly tells me that I do not have to go. I can assist her for the war. I continue to help these poor people happily assisting the nurse in this terribly difficult work. Watching the dream, I realize that this work has put me in a much better place than it looked like I was going to.
My understanding of the usual koan process is that the Master gives the student a koan to solve. The student meditates and works on this koan and gives an answer to his teacher. The teacher can respond in all sorts of ways to the answers. He can congratulate the student on solving the koan and maybe even have a little saki in celebration. I read one account where a student gave a wonderful answer which the monk acknowledged as doing well and then struck him twice to reward him. :-0 A rotten answer can get you thrown out of the room or looking at the teacher sadly shaking his head in pitty. They might even nick-name you for your rotten answers with such banner names as "Poor Bag of Bones." Shunryu Suzuki's biography is called "Crooked Cucumber," after the name he was called by. His teacher claimed that he was too absent-minded and dim-witted to ever become a successful priest. Geez. It is bad enough when the "other kids" give you a name!
All the peaks are covered with snow - why is this one bare?
To solve the illogical question would mean to burst apart, let fall all pre-conceptions and supports. But I am not ready to let go, and so I shall not resolve my koan... ---The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
I return to school after my war duty. As I am walking up the stairs to my sixth grade class, I hear another student talking about me. She points me out to her friend. "The school chose her because she is so odd! Did you even see the guy she goes out with?" This caught me by surprise. I thought about the man I go out with and I could not see anything "wrong" with him at all! It shocked me that the school singled me out simply because I was so different. I had often wondered why the school would have chosen a female who was so different in appearance from everyone else going off to war. The dream ended.
Meditation is often a vehicle transporting one somehow to the answer. Just letting the mind be free, often the answer just simply appears to "pop in there." Suddenly some of the most subtle, conflicting, and misunderstandable stuff has a message. That is the magic of the cup without a bottom or a top with the energy just continuing to flow through, the student (or cup) being a strong conduit and temporary focus. This dream does not seem clear at first. Kellog had helped me with a similar dream and this assists me in resolving the koan. My dreams have literally been about how people get out of "hell" whether they are living on earth or in "the next world." The puzzles do not seem clear at first, but they all have a general theme. By helping others you have a ticket to a nice place where you win even when you lose and never actually leave where you are. Service to others is one of those principles that has been in clear sight all the time. It is in prayers as the keys to heaven, Buddhas dedicate their lives, including future ones, to the betterment of mankind. Great people tell us the secret to life is to plant trees that one knows they will never sit in the shade of. Others did this for us with the trees we sit under today.
I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god. --Homer Simpson
"The 18th green had a totally different speed from any other hole," Rotella says. "It had been redesigned wrong. It hadn't been mowed in days. You could see the golfers' faces when they got on that green, asking themselves, 'How do I putt this one?' "And therein was the problem �?thinking �?which, Rotella says, is not what successful golfers do. "The sport is all about preparation," he says. "When you're in a moment like that, you don't want to think. You just want to do. You want to go unconscious."-- From USA Today, "Botched putts show thinking can lead to trouble."
I have another dream. A man who suicided looks like a scarecrow. He is walking by with a bamboo stick that is used to give drowing victims something to hang onto. This allows a rescuer to pull the drowning person out of their predicament without getting pulled under themselves. Another man runs and tells me very excitedly, "He is going to throw away your rescue stick!" I simply smile and softly say, "I will just get another one." I am told there is far more art work than wall space in the world, and many more divas than stages, but there is no shortage of rescue sticks. It is not like this is the only priceless Cosmic Orbitron version 5.5 stick issued once in a lifetime and only to Harry Potter. The man runs off happily. He reminds me of a joyful little dog in energy. A smart dog can wield a rescue stick.
There are stories about cats, souls, and other things being split in half. To me they represent the duality of thinking. You have to be on one side or another in this world? Must you be good or bad? Democrat or Republican? Can the same nice guy be a jerk too? A koan is a story to get us to non-dual enlightened thinking. Not good or bad, but being. They say you cannot speak even one word without making a judgement. Not split in half and not one. Not Democrat, Republican, nor even Independent party but an enlightened vehicle no longer hindered with the paradoxes of the worldly. Not a nice guy or a jerk, despite the fact that some might call you either. Just ask yourself, "If someone comes to give you a gift and you do not receive it, to whom does the gift belong?" A cat split in half is perhaps not one cat, nor could you say it is two cats. I can tell you the way I see the Koan the cat simply arrives perhaps never pondering this split at all, happily unharmed and meowing. A number like one-and-a-half just cannot be truly assiged but means more than anyone can see with earthly eyes. :-D
The one way to be truly universal is to be very particular, moment by moment, detail by detail. If you are merely 'universal," you lost the feel of life, you become abstract, facile. All is the Dharms, everything is enlightenment! OR everything is okay!--according to Beat Zen, which lacked that vital particularity. But if the emphasis on everyday detail is too rigid, our existence loses the religious power of the universal. To walk with one foot in each world--that was Dogen's way, and Dogen's life. In a single sentence, he walked from both points of view, the absolute and the relative, the universal and the particular. He was not only living in both, he was switching so fast between the two he was in neither! He was entirely free! And this is wonderful, just as it should be! Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Relative is absolute, absolute is relative. But all of reality is in the is---the now of this very moment! Generally we favor one realm over the other, but our real existance is that 'is.'
---Nine-Headed Dragon River, Peter Matthiessen
Tonic for Tots for the season if you need it and even if you dont. :-) Happy holidays if you celebrate.
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