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"MUMONKAN CASE 5" - a provisional title of
an originally untitled teisho.
This text addresses some of the most fundamental and delicate religious issues.
Therefore, it should be read, quoted and analysed in a mindful way.
All copyrights to this document belong to John Tarrant, California Diamond
Sangha, Santa Rosa, Cal., USA
Enquiries: The Editor, "Mind Moon Circle", Sydney Zen Centre, 251 Young St.,
Annandale, Sydney, NSW 2038, Australia. Tel: + 61 2 660 2993

Please note - the text contains some gaps - caused by a defective tape used for
recording of the  teisho  - the coombspapers - 
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				TEISHO 

                       John Tarrant Roshi
                            Zazenkai
             September 13, 1992, Oakland, California

This is from the Mumonkan, the koan collection.  This is the
Fifth Case of that collection.  It's called "Hsiang-yen: Up a
Tree".
     The priest Hsiang-yen said, "It is as though you were up in
     a tree, hanging from a branch with your teeth.  Your hands
     and feet can't touch any branch.  Someone appears beneath
     the tree and asked, `What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's
     coming from the West?'  If you do not answer, you evade your
     responsibility.  If you do answer, you lose your life.  What
     do you do?"
Wu-men has a comment here.
     Even if your eloquence flows like a river, it is all in
     vain.  Even if you can expound cogently upon the whole body
     of Buddhist literature, that too is useless.  If you can
     respond to this dilemma properly, you give life to those who
     have been dead and kill those who have been alive.  If you
     can't respond, you must wait and ask Maitreya about it.
Wu-men's verse.
          Hsiang-yen is just blabbing nonsense;
          his poisonous intentions are without limit.
          He stops up everyone's mouths,
          making his whole body the eye of a demon.

Please sit comfortably.

Hsiang-yen was an old Chinese teacher, probably around the Ninth
Century of our era.  There are a couple of interesting things
about his history.  He was an intellectual, intelligent person
who studied with Kway-shan (sp?) who was a great teacher of his
era.  He really couldn't quite grasp what his teacher was saying. 
He had a conversation with his teacher and his teacher said,
"Well, you're very smart but you don't understand life.  So I
suggest you take up this koan and tell me, "Who were you before
your parents were born.  Hsiang-yen was stopped by this bizarre
question.  He went off into his room and looked through all the
notes he had made through the years.  (A good reasonable
technique.  The answer must be here somewhere.)  But he couldn't
find anything that would help him and so he went back to his
teacher several times trying to extract the answer from his
teacher.  His teacher said, "I could tell you, but afterwards you
would blame me for it."  I think of this time as being the time
when he was hanging from the tree the koan spoke about--as if he
were hanging off a cliff.
He gave up.  He had heard there was a great old teacher.          
              had been active.  He decided, "I will just live a
simple life and I will go and  keep the garden around the tomb
and live a life that has some sort of simple reverence and piety,
although I know it's not the real life.  I just can't do any
better.  He did that for years.  (I'm not sure how long.)  But
for quite some time he was there and just living a very simple
life.  He had given up trying to walk The Way in the way in he
had originally intended to.  He couldn't quite do that.  He just  
             a very deep moment when you just have to           
be hopeful.  I fancy he became rather serene, actually from that. 
What else could he say?  There was no hope for him.  But he
didn't give up completely.  He didn't go out and kill himself or
dissipate his life in some way.  He decided to do something
simple that he could do.  He was sweeping the garden one day and
a stone flew up from his broom and hit a bamboo and went "tock". 
That wonderful sound.  And at that moment he heard the sound as
if for the first time and his whole universe opened up.  And he
understood the whole of the teachings.  This was a great moment
for him and for him it came all in a rush.  As if there were ice
and all along it had been melting from underneath, but you
couldn't see it until one day the ice was gone.
He composed a poem, and the poem was
          One tock! and I have forgotten all that I knew.
It's one of the great lines of zen, I think.  Sometimes it's said
that in zen we just become blind, really blind.  You start out
with false blindness and end up with true blindness.  Because you
are blind to the things that deluded you.  You forget the things
that obsessed you and persecuted you and the sufferings.  It's
there and it's all marvelous in its own way.  Everybody knows
that phenomenon of the things that were so hard for us when we
were a certain age, a certain time in our life when we look back
seem rather rich and interesting.  We can dine out on the
stories.  But this is something even more penetrating.  He really
did forget.

He said another interesting thing.  His next line is
          No artificial discipline was ever needed. (no effort)
          In every movement, I uphold the ancient Way

So we always start out with a sense of struggle, and most of us
do in meditation because it doesn't immediately seem natural to
our lives to meditate and sit still.  We're always wiggling--
attention deficit.  The human being is an attention deficit
creature.  So we have a sense of going against something in our
nature, of subduing something.  And it is good to struggle a
little.  But he is pointing out that, really, when the mind is
clear there is no struggle.  If we completely let go to what is
and become truly present, we don't have that wrestling match
going on.
          No discipline is ever needed.
          In every movement, I uphold the ancient Way.

He also said
          Wherever I walk, no traces are left,
          and my senses are not fettered by rules of conduct.
          Everywhere those who have found this truth
          declare it to be the best.


So he went along to his teacher, who was pleased, but his teacher
had a great student called Yang-shan who said, "Bah!  I don't
believe this.  I'm not sure your experience is real."  So
sometimes we can have an experience in meditation that is very
persuasive, but it doesn't last and we need to keep going.  So
Yang-san pressed him, this newly enlightened person who was so
pleased with what he could see, his enlightenment, and asked him
for something more.  Hsiang-yen immediately came out with another
poem, he said
          Last year's poverty was not true poverty.

(Last year I thought I was poor, but I was only miserable.)

          this year is the real thing.

(I thought I was blind before, but now I am really blind.)

          Last year a fine gimlet could find a place;
          this year even the gimlet is gone.


Yang-shan was a kind of hard person to please and said, "Well,
that's really as good as the buddha, but it's not really as good
as zen."  He was sort of pushing.  He wasn't completely sure that
this person was the real thing.  Hsiang-yen didn't have a fit or
anything, he just gave him another poem and he said,
          I have a single potential;
          that can be seen in a blink of an eye.
          If you still don't understand,
          call the newest person in the zendo and ask him about
            it.

And with this Yang-shan was happy.


As a teacher, in this poem he emphasized that moment of darkness
and difficulty and suffering in just hanging there from the tree. 
When doubt takes us over, when an obsession fills our lives. 
There's nothing like a good obsession to           zen.  That
thing where you are arguing with somebody in your head proving
that you're right or proving that they should have done this or
how they didn't love you enough.  Whatever it is.  Weve all
experienced this.  It just goes on and on in our lives.  And
finally, we come down to even if we're right, what are we doing
arguing in our heads like this, chasing after, making shadows. 
We are living in the ghost world fighting with the demons there. 
But we all do it.  Everybody in this room does this sometimes. 
He is showing us at that moment, in a sense when we become aware
that--and I think our awareness starts to creep in.  Sometimes
when we become aware it's worse for awhile.

Ikkyu, the great old Japanese zen teacher who was an eccentric
teacher, was asked the essence of zen and he said, "Attention,
attention, attention."  Zen always depends on attention.  Really,
that's enough, that will get us through.  However, when we attend
sometimes we notice how much pain we're in and there really is
that sense of hanging from a branch and seeing that you can't
reach anything.  It's a metaphor of--the literal minded part of
me always wants to grab this thing and hang from it, but there is
some sense in which we are stuck and hanging in the world.

One of the very curious things about human beings is that human
beings seek such situations, I think.  You will find that if
there is a situation that gives you great difficulty, you'll find
yourself going back to it again and again.  This is why a
friend's good advice is always true, but doesn't help.  If you
tell somebody--if they come to you with a problem and you say,
"Oh yes, I have that problem, why don't you do this?"  They'll
give you ten reasons why they can't.  And that's good, I think. 
We need to find our own thread through, our own route through. 
But when you come back, it really helps when you come back to
that difficult situation hanging on a cliff, it really helps to
notice that this is what it is.  And if you just notice that you
are hanging from a tree, that is the beginning of the
transformation.  Most of the time we don't notice, awareness
doesn't get in.  We're too busy screaming and panicking.  We're
too busy being unhappy.  Running through our minds, "What will we
do?" or "What horrible thing will happen?" or "How can I make
something good happen?"  That's very different from being present
and having attention.  With attention we just notice and we let
bare awareness alone when the world just rises up, and we notice,
"Oh, that hurts."  That's very different from panicking.  Just
the way of noticing, "Oh, anger" is very different from hitting
someone.  It's more powerful.

Hsiang-yen is trying to give our attention to suffering in the
world.  But also, too, there is that intense, gritty quality of
life.  Not just suffering in some vague sense, but what a strong
taste it has.

Then he complicates matters.  He says, "Someone appears beneath
the tree and asks, `What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming
from the West?'"  This is the fate of a teacher.  This is what
being a zen teacher is like.  You're there dangling in your life
and somebody comes along and says, "I have this problem, Roshi"
and goes into great detail and you have to help them.  He's
putting out a truth of the bodhisattva.  There is a lovely thing
here.  A great truth of the bodhisattva path that one of the
things you can do, that you need to do often, is to make that
effort for the good even if you're in a very difficult time. 
Often there's something you can do to make the world a little bit
better.  And if it's a very small thing it counts a lot at such
times.  It is like a crystal, the one bit of dirt that's dropped
into this ocean that causes crystallization to occur.  One good
deed can be very powerful when you're in trouble.  And you must
respond, help save beings.  How do you respond in this case?  
When we take this up as a koan in our meditation, this is the
dilemma.  All the time we are living our way through but also
helping others.

And he says, "If you don't answer you evade your responsibility;
if you do answer you lose your life." which is not going to help
either, is it?   What will you do?  A good question always is
impossible.  A good path always can't be walked.  If you think of
the four vows we have in zen, you will immediately understand
this koanlike quality.
          Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
          Buddha's way is beyond attainment, I vow to embody it.
Something very beautiful is being pointed to here and that is
that we can't do everything, but sometimes when you do the one
thing, that is a great thing.  What Hsiang-yen did was go on and
just led this simple life--cleaning the temple grounds, fixing
the plumbing.  And all in that time while he was doing that, he
didn't completely panic.  He just kept his life together and then
did what he could.  Then something was growing in all that time. 
He was watering the seeds without knowing it.  But when you are
just faithful to your practice, when you do your zazen, even if
you feel miserable.  If you trust that and do your zazen and try
to bring awareness into your life gradually, over the years, that
seed grows into                and you can't stop it from
bursting into growth and flower.  Practice just grows in us in
spite of ourselves.

Wu-men's comment is typical of him.  "Even if your eloquence
flows like a river, it is all in vain."  No matter how much we
can explain things, we have to live it.  And this can be quite
hard.  You have an experience where you really do understand
zazen and zazen really opens for you and it's quite genuine. 
Then the next day you're in a mess again.  And once again you are
hanging from the tree.  I think we need to accept this.  If you
can begin to accept this, then the whole thing becomes much more
lovely.  The world begins to silver over again and becomes much
more workable.  It is not yet gold, but something precious is
happening.

And he says, "If you respond properly, you give life to those who
have been dead and kill those who are alive."  Everybody knows
this is the truest goal of zen.  And anything that we thought was
lost will be returned to us.

And he says, "If you can't respond, you must wait and ask
Maitreya about it."  Maitreya is due to come in a few eons.  Long
after it would be of any help to us.  So if you can't respond--in
other words, you must respond now.  You can't wait.  In zazen you
don't need to wait to do good zazen.  Just do it now.  Don't wait
to do something good--an action for the good in your life.  Do it
now.  Don't wait to notice your life.  Do it now.

In his verse Wu-men says, 
          Hsiang-yen is just blabbing, he's talking nonsense;
          but his poisonous intentions are limitless.

He poisons all our delusions.  All the things we hang onto, we
will take away.  Even if we hang onto something that is pious and
we think is wonderful, we will still take that away.

When you go deeper and deeper into your zazen the world does
become clearer and clearer.  And that is true.  You can really
test that.  If you are faithful to the way the road opens out and
it does get wider.  You will also find that as you go, you will
still meet realms of darkness.  You will still find times when
you are hanging from the tree.  This happens at the advanced
levels as well as the beginning levels of practice.  All we can
say is that if you really set out to follow wisdom, it becomes
quite demanding.  It just asks that we grow and grow and grow and
that we not just lie down and go to sleep with a little bit of
knowledge.  We have to go the whole route.  As one of my great
teachers said                                          .  But the
truth is we don't have much choice, I think, really.  We went and
started.  Once you've started it, it's really hard to go back. 
It's hard to go back to sleep once you've opened your eyes a
little to the world.  I think we just have to enjoy that and
relish its strong garlic.  You can complain about it or you can
just get to like garlic.  I think it's delicious myself.

It's that strong taste of life that is really with us.  I think
that we find our joy there up in the tree hanging.  Soen Nakagawa
Roshi had a period when he was quite interested in Christianity. 
This new religion                      .  He was reading about
how Jesus was hanging on the cross with the thieves.  It's the
story of the theives who were crucified with Jesus.  One of the
thieves says something that pleases Jesus.  And Jesus says, "You
will be with me Paradise."  Including no matter what you've done
or what you're suffering, to have a pure heart at this moment you
enter the kingdom of                 .  He says, "You will be
with me in Paradise.  Soen Roshi was very disturbed about this    
                                on the cross.  He asked around a
lot and somebody came up with a translation from one of the
Orthodox Christian schools, I can't remember which one--          
                  Orthodox, I think.  "You are with me in
Paradise, right now, hanging on the cross."  Yes, that's right.

So it is at that very moment when we are suffering the light is
there, too, if we open our eyes and experience it.  The light of
the buddha is always there.

Thank you very much.  Keep up your zazen.
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