..续本文上一页who records the human experience in loving detail, insisting on its unconventional aspects. He has the romantic single-mindedness of a Victorian heroine, windswept on the moors. This sampling of his stories begins, as Hakuin tends to, in the middle of things, when he was pretty sure his meditation practice and his whole spiritual journey was going badly:
Still deeply dejected, I took up my begging bowl early the next morning and went into the village below Iayama Castle. My mind was hard at work on my koans. It never left them. I stood before the gate of a house, my bowl in hand, lost in a kind of trance.
A voice within yelled, “Go on! Go somewhere else!” But I was so preoccupied I didn”t even notice it. This must have angered the resident of the house, because she suddenly appeared, flourishing a broom upside down in her hand. She flew at me flailing out wildly, whacking away at my head as if she was bent on dashing my brains out. My sedge hat lay in tatters. I was knocked down and ended heels-up on the ground. I lost consciousness and lay there like a dead man.
As I regained consciousness, my eyes opened, and as they did, I found that the unsolvable and impenetrable koans I had been working on—all those pointed cat”s paws—were completely penetrated. Right to the root. They had suddenly ceased to exist. I clapped my hands and laughed great shouts of laughter, frightening the people who had gathered around me.
—From Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, translated by Norman Waddell (Shambhala Publications)
Hakuin takes a close interest in the texture of experience and the interactions between people. He is aware that motives and consequences are wide apart in human affairs, so he just reports what happens—someone chases him with a broomstick while he is lost in meditation—and he allows us to imagine the motives. He waves toward the consequences of his awakening, but doesn”t really tell us much about how things changed for him, and this might be important. If enlightenment is unique then the exact consequences of someone else”s experience are not going to be much like yours anyway. The story isn”t meant to be a close map of a journey you might take, but rather news that such events happen, and that they might come from any direction at any moment.
There seems to be a lot of inpidual variance in how awakening happens. Some people have grand experiences that transform them overnight, and others have smaller glimpses of freedom that seem to run together over time and change their lives. There”s a lot of tradition about awakening, and plenty of terms are floating around to name transformative experiences. Here are a few:
Aha!
Epiphany
Enlightenment
Awakening
Conversion
Satori
Breakthrough
Second order change
Kensho
Realization
Metanoia
Shift
These words describe a discovery that changes the discoverer, a change in direction of at least 180 degrees. They also indicate that this sort of change can happen suddenly, overnight. I”ve come to think that the overnight, life-changing epiphany is actually not rare. You can escape from pirates, and princes will offer you a glass slipper. Here is one of the basic Western stories:
St. Paul had a revelation that knocked him off his donkey on the way to Damascus, an occasion commemorated in the church calendar by the Feast of the Epiphany. St. Paul had a harsh, intemperate streak both before and after his conversion to Christianity. But his experience touched him with a deeper vision that made him able to write the words on love that are still used in wedding ceremonies all over the world. When I Googled them, I was happy to find that the first hit (with a misspelling) was on a website called Weddings Vegas Style:
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does n…
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