The Luminous Life - John Tarrant, Roshi
Teisho by John Tarrant, Roshi Originally published in MOON MIND CIRCLE, Autumn 1992 pp. 1-12. Copyright 1992 (c) by John Tarrant and Sydney Zen Center
There”s a kind of circulation of energy on the path of Zen, whereby we first go inwards and even downwards and then try to set things right at the centre, to set our hearts and minds at rest and then naturally that energy carries us onwards and upwards into the world. Then after some time in the world, we naturally get carried downwards and inwards, refreshing ourselves.
We begin the inward motion when we ask ourselves a question. Questions have a great magical power. Children ask them all the time because they sense their force and they have the added virtue of catching adults off balance. Wallace Stevens has a poem called "This green sprout - why
" And he also has a line, "questions are remarks".
If you think about a question, it is a marvellous thing. Suddenly we don”t just expect that our breakfast will be there in the morning, the way the dog does. We wonder, where does it come from
How do I come to be here
Who am I
How on earth did I get to be doing this
And that question is a seed which grows in us and it changes us as it grows.
One of the first important things about the question occurs when we realise that other people cannot answer it for us. This is shocking at first and we keep thinking perhaps it”s not true, but alas, it is true, other people cannot answer it for us.
The good news about this is that we have what need to answer it. And the reason other people can”t answer it for us is because that it would not be our own true answer. It would not be our own unique response to life.
An old Zen student called Hsiang-yen went to dokusan with Keui-shan, the T”ang dynasty master, and Keui-shan gave him the koan, "What is your original face before your parents were born
" The koan is a ready made question.
The student was a considerable scholar and a learned person and decided to do a little research and read through all the books, which seemed a reasonable approach to him. Nowadays we may find that approach naive, but there is something good about his sincerity and thoroughness that he decided to exhaust the avenues he knew before embarking on avenues he did not know. However, he couldn”t find anything that answered this question, so he went back a few times and prodded and poked his teacher, but the clam didn”t give out any pearls, because clams don”t give pearls.
And he eventually went back in desperation and he threw away his notes and said, "You must tell me, I am obsessed, I can”t sleep, I can”t rest, what is the answer to this question
" And Keui-shan said, "Well, I could tell you, but you would blame me later."
And so this is a situation where both the teacher and the student have integrity. The student has integrity, he comes up and grabs the teacher by the lapels. There”s another famous case in which the student said, "If you don”t tell me I”ll hit you," and the teacher said, "You can hit me but I won”t tell you." So the student hit him. So it was like that. And the teacher”s integrity was not to diminish the force of the question.
So this student Hsiang-yen decided that it was all too much for him and he would surrender, he would give up. He decided that perhaps the best he could do in this life, given his karma, was to accumulate a little virtue and maybe get a better rebirth next time around. He wasn”t going to make it this time but he decided that if he led a blameless life, perhaps in the future he would do better and he wouldn”t have to deal with questions like this. But you can see that he understood that there is a reality, just that he couldn”t see it.
So he went away and found a sacred site, the grave …
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