Bodhisattva

In a chapter called "Ikka No Myoju," or "One Bright Pearl" in the Shobogenzo, Dogen quotes a famous Zen story. Gensa, a guy who will later go on to be one of the great Buddhist teachers is still a young monk. He's an extremely sincere Zen student. One day he decides to leave the temple where he's staying and go out traveling around the area. He's probably feeling a little dissatisfied. Like maybe he's not getting the whole deal at the temple and if he goes looking around he might just find the truth he's looking for. As he's heading out the gate, he stubs his toe on a big rock. He's hopping around in terrible pain, bleeding from under his toenail, going "Ow! Ow!" And he thinks, "I've heard that the body is an illusion. So where the Hell did all this pain come from?"

All at once he gets it.

Later on his teacher, named Seppo Gisan, asks him what's up and he says, "I just can't be deceived by others."

Seppo really got off on this statement. "Is there anyone who doesn't have these words?" he said. "But who else can speak them?"

There you have the key to understanding Buddhism. That one sentence, "I cannot be deceived" says all you need to know. I could stop the lecture right here. But I'm supposed to go on for an hour.

There's lots of ways you could take this statement. Most people who say things like this say them as a way of bragging. "Nobody can make a fool out of me!" But that's not what it means here. He's not bragging. He might even be a little bit sad when he says, "I can't be deceived."

The idea that we can ever be deceived is an illusion. It never happens. We pretend to be deceived. We even fool ourselves into believing we've been had. But it just doesn't happen. When you stub your toe on a rock, in other words, when you suddenly come face to face with the undeniable fact that you are living in this world, you can understand that you can't be deceived.

In my first year of college, I went to some lectures by the head of the Cleveland Hare Krishna temple. I was really interested in the Hare Krishnas because George Harrison was into them and The Beatles were big heroes to me. This guy was very clever. He had the whole guru thing down. He played the role of the enlightened master exactly as everyone expects one of those guys to be. The lecture was in somebody's apartment. He sat on a chair while the rest of us gathered around sitting on the floor at his feet. There was incense burning. He had on an orange robe, his head was shaved, his voice was soothing and even. I remember sitting there and thinking, "I could sit at this man's feet forever and learn so many wonderful things."

Ultimately, though, I couldn't be deceived by him. I wanted to. But the Hare Krishna philosophy was just too full of holes for me to accept. But I can understand why so many people, even really smart people, run off and join cults. They want so desperately to be deceived that they're willing to put up with philosophies that make no sense, just so they can have the experience of being deceived. But people who pretend to be deceived by this kind of thing are a bunch of dopes, just fooling themselves. Anyone who falls for any dogma or religion is just trying hard to make people believe they've been deceived. See, 'cuase when you've been deceived nothing you do is really your fault. You can be just like the Nazis. "I was just following orders," you can plead. "I was deceived!" You might even get away with it because this whole world is run by dumb-asses who also want to be able to use that excuse if it ever comes down to it.

But it's a lame excuse. No decent Zen teacher would ever accept it. I used to come to my teachers with variations of that one all the time. "I was deceived! Please help me. Please tell me what's really true!"

"Nobody's tricked you, you moron," they'd say. "You know what the truth is. Stop being such a bonehead and take a look at it."

Putting away the idea that you can be deceived is hard work. You want to believe that the Answer to Everything is hidden somewhere really far away. That you'll have to look all over the world to find it. That you need to read lots and lots of books, visit lots and lots of teachers, think hard, study hard, then maybe one day you'll find it. All you're doing, though, is denying the fact that the answer is staring you right in the face and has been ever since you were born. It won't go away. It can't go away.

If you can understand that you can't be deceived, you can answer any koan.

Koan means "public case." Koans are stories of conversations between Zen students and teachers. Sometimes they include strange non-sensical sounding questions. The most famous one is, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" In the Rinzai school of Zen, they give these questions to students and have them concentrate on them while doing zazen. They then having meetings with their teachers and try to answer them. The koans are ranked. Some are supposedly easier than others. So the students go through a series of koans moving from the ones that are supposed to be the easiest up to the more "advanced" ones.

I've never done this kind of practice myself. But it doesn't sound like a good way to do zazen. In zazen you need to face yourself, discover your own mind. Thinking about questions like this just seems distracting.

Still, koans are very useful for understanding Buddhist logic. In the ordinary way of thinking, they just seem like a bunch of nonsense. One hand clapping? What is that? But these little stories express Buddhist logic very clearly. Much clearer than I can in a lecture like this.

Dogen collected 301 of his favorites in a book called Shinji Shobogenzo. I thought I'd start going through these in my lectures.

The first one goes like this:

Master Seigen Gyoshi asks his disciple Master Sekito Gisan, "Where have you come from?"

Master Sekito says, "From Mount Sokei."

Master Seigen holds up his whisk and asks his student, "Is there anything like this on Mt. Sokei?"

Master Sekito says, "Nope. Not even in India."

Master Seigen says, "You've never been to India, have you?"

Master Sekito says, "If I went to India, that whisk would be there."

Master Seigen says, "Stop talking about India and say something about your own experience."

Master Sekito says, "Can't you say something concrete? Why do you leave everything up to me?"

Master Seigen says, "It's not that I refuse to say anything. It's just that if I did,you might not be able to understand things for yourself in the future."

You can see the idea of wanting to be deceived pretty easily in this story. When Sekito asks his teacher to say something concrete instead of leaving it all up to him, he's just asking to be deceived. But Seigen refuses. No matter how right Seigen's explanation might be, it's Seigen's explanation. Every one of us has to understand the Universe for him or herself. Somebody else's description will never do. Seigen was a great teacher and probably could have articulated his understanding pretty clearly. But he had too much faith in his student's ability to do that.

If you find a Zen teacher who won't explain anything to you, you should be extremely grateful. There are plenty out there who would gladly fill your head with all kinds of explanations. That guy from the Hare Krishna temple certainly tried. He could answer everything. What happened to John Lennon after he died? Lennon was reincarnated as a tree. Seriously. He really said this. John Lennon apparently answered the door stark naked once when the head of the Hare Krishnas came to visit. Therefore he was an exhibitionist. And exhibitionists get reborn as trees. Case closed.

If you want to be deceived by stuff like that, there's plenty of it out there. But I don't.


-Brad Warner

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