broken_form

Master:  In clapping both hands a sound is heard: what is the sound of the one hand?
Student:  The pupil faces his master, takes a correct posture, and without a word, thrusts one hand forward.
Master:  If you've heard the sound of the one hand, prove it.
Student:  Without a word, the pupil thrusts one hand forward.

........ long Q/A sequence omitted ........

Master:  The source of the one hand, what is it?
Student:  "On the plain there is not the slightest breeze that stirs the smallest grain of sand.
                All communication with places north of the
                White Wolf River is disconnected,
                And south to the Red Phoenix City,
                autumn nights have grown so long."

Ok, so everybody knows the answer now.  That's cool.  There's a whole book full of lots more, just waiting for you to read it.  Well, unless you happen to attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in which case you'll have to wait for me to return the library's only copy.  Which I swear I will do as soon as I remember to.  And you get the rough idea - a koan isn't so much one riddle as it is an illustrative anecdote or point to ponder, followed by a sequence.  Question, answer, question, answer, request for a quoted poem, student quotes a poem at the end.  And student advances further within the discipline of Zen. 

"Why did Bodhiharma come from India to China?" This phrase is common in the book and means many things.  It means - why does Zen exist?  A Buddhist discipline travelled from India to China and founded Zen, which was then eventually  transferred to Japan (in some sort of political way similar to how the Kuomintang ended up in Taiwan).  Why is Zen there in Japan?  It also means "what is the meaning of life?"  And the answer - the answer cannot be expressed.  For life is here because it is here.  And Bodhiharma came from India to China because that's what he did.

But now it's time to backtrack.  Is this whole book a joke?  Since when do Zen koans have answers?  Isn't the whole point of Zen koans that they have no answer, but the mere pondering of them can induce enlightenment?  Isn't this book a hoax, and a silly one at that?  And what about if a tree falls in the woods, but there is nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?

We'll talk about the tree more later.  For now, let's talk about the book.

The book claims, as I stated in the intro, to be a commented translation.  Yeol Hoffman is the translator.  He has some friends who help him out, including an actual Zen master who writes the introduction to the book and justifies the publication.  Apparently Mr. Hoffman was in Japan, learning about Zen, when he came across a bookshop that a bunch of Zen novices were visiting.  The bookshop sold Xeroxes of a set of Zen koans - with answers! - naturally Mr. Hoffman was shocked to see such a thing.  The copies were of a 1911 work, "a critique of modern-day pseudo-zen" by a renegade monk who had grown frustrated with the direction of Zen particularly as practiced by the main Rinzai sect of the time, with the instruction consisting of rote learning and no real enlightenment - to be short, a fundamentalist monk.  I know that many people distrust fundamentalist religious types, but here is a good example of one who works to open knowledge rather than suppress it, and we owe the pseudonymous Ha Ho U-O a debt here. 

It turns out that Zen masters don't accept some random evidence of enlightment from a novice, but rather expect certain answers.  These answers indicate mastery of the Zen philosophy - and the master will ideally guide the novice to them, without directly giving the answers.  As a sometime teacher myself, I totally sympathize.  And of course some small number of the students, as in any field, will become teachers themselves.  As such, they keep good notes of their koan answers, and if someday they leave for a teaching post they run their notes by their master to make sure they're all there and in line with the tradition.  To do that, of course, they'd need to take the degree of Zen Master, which involves lots and lots of fairly advanced koans.  But if you can manage "one hand" or "mu!" that oughta qualify you for a post as a village priest, which probably isn't that bad a job and most students will be happy to stop there.  Plenty of room for political "just pass him" manuevering too.  What's not to like?

As far as enlightenment, apparently that's something you just don't ask a Zen monk if he's got and that he doesn't brag about if he has got anyway.

Why do most Westerners imagine that Zen koans have no answers?  Well, the answers are naturally kept somewhat secretive.  And Ha Ho U-O has not managed to blow that impression wide open, despite his best efforts, as the public image of Zen as a mystery is so greatly old that even today, nearly 100 years after his 'critique' came out, we still believe the public front of Zen as just too, too out there for little people like us.  Also, Zen koans have no answers that can be deduced logically, by our Western ideas of "logic"!  They are solidly monistic and deny the two-valued syllogistic logic of science inherited from the Greeks  They also deny the analogy logic originally of the  Middle East, used mainly today within legal proceedings.  But Zen monistic logic has a sense of itself, and does hang together.  Read this book, you'll see what I mean.  Maybe you'll learn some of it.

What is a "koan"?  It's an anecdote of a situation.  Many of them describe conversations between Zen monks and masters from even older times.  The task is to analyze the situation according to Zen logic.  And the student shows his understanding by knowing the answers, when to say this and when to say that and when to make a certain gesture or action.  And usually the student caps his recital with a poem.  Sometimes two poems!  The master might ask for a "classical quote", meaning one of the poems of classical Chinese literature.  Or for a "popular quote", meaning something from Japanese literature.  Then he passes the koan.  A koan is pretty much a final exam.

Why a poem?  Well, "Why did Bodhiharma come from India to China?"

This is just my theory right now, but I think it fits the facts better than any other possible explanation.

Classical Chinese civilization used a system of standardized tests in order to select the most intelligent youths to staff the government bureaucracies.  These jobs paid well!  The highest of them required castration, which meant no descendents.  Still, though, a son with a civil service job would raise the perceived status of any peasant family, and they all wanted their sons to pass the exams.  This ensured that hereditary classism would not keep the men with ability from the seats of governmental power.  Government men would be intelligent.  This would help keep China stable.

Exams are still a big deal in East Asia.  There's always stories on the news of how seriously the youth take them over there.  Chinese girls late to an exam due to traffic, denied entrance, and then committing suicide.  Japanese boys who never leave their desks from morning to night, and  - I can't write that here.  This is a family website isn't it?  Stories like that.  The exams.  Still a huge deal over there in China and in Japan.

Ambitious peasant families in old China would push their most promising children to study for these exams.  The teacher of these exams - well, where could a village find a teacher?  It would be, almost certainly, someone who had already taken the exam and failed it.  Maybe multiple times.  Anyone who had passed that exam wouldn't be hanging out in the sticks anymore.  But at least he had been one of the bright kids in a previous generation - he could help some.  And what was the material for the exams?  The Chinese were testing for "intelligence", after all.  A very fuzzy concept that is really hard to define in real life.  But it has been empirically observed, over many cultures and many years, that some kids do well on tests and some don't.  Those who do well on one kind of test - like an SAT or something - will do well on another - say an IQ test.  An IQ test doesn't test anything directly except for being good at tests.  The material of the test - well, just use something convenient.  For us it's pretty much word and number puzzles.  For the Chinese, the material was obvious - their millenia-old literature of poetry.

Chinese poetry is preserved by the writing system.  While spoken Chinese language has changed greatly over the millenia, the written language has changed hardly at all.  Each written symbol is not a sound, but a word or concept.  Chinese writing is almost a language of its own, which can be used to write many spoken dialects such as Mandarin, Cantonese, or even Japanese.  If any of us had the time to care about it, we could probably use it to read and write English.   Some Taiwanese students, even today, still study Chinese poetry.  None of the poems rhyme anymore, because of the drift in spoken language, yet people are pretty sure that once upon a time a lot of them did.  The culture continues on, thanks to an exceptionally resilient non-phonetic writing system.

And into this situation, a country largely composed of peasant villages, each one with a failed exam taker who teaches a new batch of children the old poetry in the hope that they will do better than he did, into this country strolls Bodhiharma.  A Buddhist monk with begging bowl in hand.  And soon the exam teachers realize that there is more open to them than trying to help someone younger succeed where they failed.  They realize - they can become Buddhist priests!  They were the segment of Chinese society in the most convenient place to become a new priesthood, and many of them did so.  Soon every village had a Buddhist temple.

When Zen migrated into Japan, the old teachers brought their Chinese poems along with them.  And they kept the heavy emphasis on memorizing of poetry.  Hence the persistence of poetry in Zen koans.  Hence the whole system of Zen novices, initiates, priests, and masters, all ranked on passing an exam on koans. 

And hence the need for some serious cheat-sheets!  Why DID Bodhiharma come from India to China?


So Ha Ho U-O, though helpful to those of us who want to know the secret Zen koan answers, was a fool.  He was trying to remove something from Zen that lay at it's very root, something that had been present long before Bodhiharma came from India to China.  Ha Ho U-O was trying to remove a core part of the entire culture he lived in, to regain an "original faith" that never existed in reality.  Many fundamentalists are like this, today, in every era this is common.  Rewriting history to excise unwanted concepts and bring about a more pure faith, one based on a personal connection to things greater than oneself - on the purest enlightenment.

Yet his book is useful to us.  Although it pulls down Zen's pants a bit, it does allow more people to get a sense of Zen thinking than they could otherwise.  The exam system was the tool that Bodhiharma had to work with, when he came from India to China, but is not sacred in and of itself.  The answers are out there.  The way of thinking that gets one there, it's out there.  And someday, some century or millenium, we may all be enlightened, we may all be Buddhas.  Zen looks at things long-term.  The Zen master who opens the book has nothing against the answers getting out, obviously.  Nor does the author.  Nor should we.

The tree falling in the woods?  Not in the book.  Not in any other Zen compilations that I've ever seen.  I suspect it to be a Western interpolation.  But if a Zen master asked me, I'd go "creeee---aaaa---aa----kkkkkk. paaa-WUMP!"

And then again, I could be totally off base here.  I could have been taken in by a clever fraud.  It's all a hoax.  Zen koans don't have answers.  Only a naive person who believes everything he reads could ever think so.

That's my book review for the evening.  Hope you all enjoy.  And I do hope that someone reads this and decides to check out the book.  I promise to return the UMass Amherst library's copy as soon as possible.