Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - Yen-kuan’s Rhinoceros Fan
Notes
CHAPTER 2 - Ma-ku’s Two-Place Ring Staff
CHAPTER 3 - Yao-shan’s Elk of Elks
CHAPTER 4 - National Teacher Chung’s Seamless Monument
CHAPTER 5 - Nan-ch’uan’s Flowering Tree
CHAPTER 6 - Te-shan Carrying His Bundle
CHAPTER 7 - Yang-shan Asks San-sheng, “What Is Your Name?”
CHAPTER 8 - Tung-shan’s No Cold or Hot
CHAPTER 9 - Te-shan Carrying His Bowls
CHAPTER 10 - San-sheng’s Golden Fish Who Has Passed Through the Net
CHAPTER 11 - Ho-shan’s Knowing How to Hit the Drum
CHAPTER 12 - Jui-yen Calls, “Master!”
CHAPTER 13 - Yun-men’s Bell Sound and Seven-Fold Robe
CHAPTER 14 - Tung-shan’s Three Pounds of Flax
CHAPTER 15 - Hsuan-sha’s Three Kinds of Sick People
CHAPTER 16 - You Are Hui-ch’ao
CHAPTER 17 - Hsiang-lin’s Meaning of the Coming from the West
CHAPTER 18 - Tou-shuai’s Three Gates
CHAPTER 19 - Manjushri’s Before Three, Three
CHAPTER 20 - Vimalakirti’s Not-Two Dharma Gate
CHAPTER 21 - The Diamond Sutra’s Extinction of Sinful Karma
CHAPTER 22 - Aspects of Failure: A Woman Comes Out of Samadhi
About the Author
From the Publisher
Index
Copyright Page
Praise for Elegant Failure
“It’s refreshing to read intelligent reflections on the Zen tradition that come from a true grounding in life and practice rather than mere intellectual interest.” —Zen Master Dae Kwang, Abbot, International Kwan Um School of Zen, and senior editor of Primary Point, Journal of the Kwan Um School of Zen
“Full of Zen stories both from historical times and from his own current experience, Richard Shrobe (Zen Master Wu Kwang) weaves a poetic tapestry of the old with the new. In Elegant Failure we have the opportunity to experience the relevance of kong-ans that could otherwise be perceived as esoteric. It is as though the ancient worthies are still alive today, living in New York City, speaking their timeless truth through the voice of one of the great living Zen masters in America today. Excellent!” —Zen Master Jane Dobisz, Guiding Teacher, Cambridge Zen Center, and author of The Wisdom of Silence
“A generous and insightful guide and commentary on Zen kong-ans. Because of his many years of practice, Richard has the ability to point directly to the marrow of these ancient teachings.” —Zen Master Soeng Hyang (Barbara Rhodes), School Zen Master, International Kwan Um School of Zen
“Richard Shrobe’s Elegant Failure extends the tradition of kong-an commentary into the current situation, exposing these old Zen enigmas one by one as the stories of our lives. His writing is informed, personal, and deeply rooted in practice. A brilliant success.” —Stanley Lombardo, Professor of Classics, University of Kansas, and editor of Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea and Japan
“With wisdom, deep learning and unshakable integrity, Zen Master Richard Shrobe presents the old masters in all their strangeness and familiarity. Fully human, fully alive, without explicit exhortation, he and they urge us to wake up right now to our original nature.” —Judy Roitman, Guiding Teacher, Kansas Zen Center, and editor of Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea and Japan
Dedication In memory of J.W. Harrington, executive administrative director, Kwan Um School of Zen, who embodied helpfulness, kindness, and unceasing diligent effort.
Acknowledgments
I want to express my appreciation for the efforts of my editors, John Holland and Elizabeth McGuinness, who were able to retain the lively (I hope) conversational style of the original dharma talks while making the material flow in readable form. My grateful thanks also go to Mary Ekwall, Sonya Lazarevic, Eugene Lim, Daniel Michael, and Jeff Timmins for their painstaking work in transcribing the original material, and to Clare Ellis, Eugene Lim, Nick Gershberg, and Paul Majchrzyk for reading the final manuscript and providing many useful ideas and suggestions. I bow to my teacher, the late Seung Sahn Dae Soen Sa Nim, whose encouragement, compassion, and clarity continue to flow to me and to countless others.
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor lookthrough eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of thebeginning and the end,But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
The term kong-an (koan in Japanese) is typically translated as “a case of public record.” The concept was borrowed from the ancient Chinese legal system, where a case of public record set a precedent. Later legal issues of a similar kind could then be weighed and tested against the earlier precedent. Zen kong-ans usually recount sayings of ancient masters or interchanges between a master and student or between two masters. Occasionally a kong-an is based on a short section of Buddhist scripture or an allegorical tale of interaction between humans and a deity or supernatural being. Some of these interchanges and tales were recorded and used by subsequent generations of Zen teachers as teaching tools for their students. The cases that stood the test of time were eventually compiled into collections in China between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. So the Zen kong-an, like the legal kong-an, became a case of public record that later generations could use to test their clarity and insight by “looking into the old cases.” However, unlike legal cases, Zen cases are not meant to be studied intellectually, analyzed, or approached using the usual style of conceptual thinking. The Zen kong-an acts as an experiential learning tool. It is used as a prod to encourage the Zen student to wake up, stay awake, and engage with the actual universe of experience, rather than clinging to self-constructed concepts and opinions. By stripping away previously accumulated ideas and knowledge, the kong-an points the Zen student directly toward facets of spiritual perception, functioning, and relationships. Kong-ans are probably best known for their unusual use of language and for the seemingly nonrational quality of their dialogues. For this reason, kong-ans are often described as riddles or paradoxes. Or they are viewed as encrypted capsules of spiritual wisdom that can be penetrated only by those of special ability or after many long years of difficult struggle. Zen Master Wu-men (Mumon; Mu Mun), the compiler of the Wu-men-kuan, spent six years as a young monk struggling with Chao-Chou’s “Mu” kong-an, sometimes wandering the temple at night and knocking his head against the stone pillars in an attempt to break through. Most Zen students have experienced at some level this feeling of frustration and self-doubt that kong-an work engenders. However, once the point of the kong-an is perceived, we realize that we have been struggling not with the kong-an but with one of our many illusory opinions. As Wu-men points out in his preface to the Wu-men-kuan, “There is no gate from the beginning.” When I worked on kong-ans with my teacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn, he taught me by example the value of self-reliance, and he approached even the kong-ans of the ancient masters with a healthy degree of skepticism, which has always existed in the Zen tradition. For example, Zen practitioners may be tempted to regard every case in The Blue Cliff Record as having equal weight. It was therefore refreshing to have my teacher periodically remark, “This case not so interesting.” Or he would indicate that some particular case was almost the same as a previous case we had worked through. Further, he would sometimes comment on the dialogues in the kong-ans, saying, “This dharma combat not so clear.” Then he would pause and say, “But at the time it was clear.” On other occasions his eyes would get bright, and he would exclaim, “Ah! This case very interesting!” After I had struggled through, he would point out the alternative ways of seeing what was being alluded to in the kong-an. Based on my experience working with kong-ans for over thirty years, I have selected a group of cases for this book that I have found to be deeply meaningful and helpful to Zen practice. While there is no substitute for doing kong-an work in the interview room, kong-ans are also teaching tales. The material in them can be unpacked and presented in ways that can make them more accessible and meaningful to Zen students and other readers without losing the original spirit and without falling into intellectual analysis or speculation. Therefore, for each kong-an, I have presented both the traditional Zen teaching points and anecdotes that illuminate the kong-an’s connection to modern everyday life—or to Zen as “ordinary mind.” In the years that I have been giving talks on the kong-ans, listeners have often commented afterward that they had previously found kong-ans to be remote and impenetrable, and that they had not realized how these cases related to their everyday lives. It is my hope that these chapters will open your eyes to the different layers of meaning contained in these kong-ans, and that this will serve to aid and encourage your spiritual practice.
Traditionally there are said to be 1,700 kong-ans. From these, three main kong-an collections emerged in China during the Sung Dynasty (960-1280 CE). These are The Blue Cliff Record, containing 100 cases, the Wu-men-kuan (Mumonkan; Mu Mun Kwan), containing 48 cases, and the Book of Serenity, which also contains 100 cases and is used primarily by the Soto Zen sect. These three collections share a number of cases in common. Most of the kong-ans in this book are taken from The Blue Cliff Record, along with a few from the Wu-men-kuan. The Blue Cliff Record was originally compiled by Zen Master Hsueh-tou (Setcho) in the first half of the eleventh century. Hsueh-tou selected 100 kong-ans, to which he added short verses and occasional brief comments. About a hundred years later, Zen Master Yuan-wu (Engo) elaborated on Hsueh-tou’s work by adding an introduction to each case, frequent short comments, a dharma discourse on the main case, and a dharma discourse on Hsueh-tou’s verse. Yuan-wu’s version of The Blue Cliff Record is a multilayered work with many subtleties of meaning, so much so that, shortly after its completion, it began to be used as the province of intellectual study and speculation. It was for this reason that Yuan-wu’s successor, Zen Master Ta-hui (Daie), gathered all the copies that he could find and had them burned. Ta-hui’s motivation was “better to preserve the core intent of his master’s teaching, which was certainly not about intellectual speculation, than to preserve his master’s volume.” The Wu-men-kuan, compiled during the thirteenth century (ca. 1229 CE), is a much simpler work. Zen Master Wu-men gathered forty-eight kong-ans, to which he added a short commentary and a verse. Many teachers favor Wu-men’s collection, due to its directness and clarity. Often the dialogues in The Blue Cliff Record seem opaque, in need of a good deal of clarification; not so with most of the cases in the Wu-men-kuan.
The teachings in these chapters were originally presented in dharma talks to the Zen students of the Chogye International Zen Center of New York. The edited transcriptions of these talks form the chapters of this book. The cases are organized into three sections. Chapters 1 through 5 contain kong-ans involving Zen masters from the early period of Zen in China. These teachers were active shortly after the time of the Sixth Patriarch and are regarded as the precursors of the five main schools, or houses, of Zen. Chapters 6 through 18 contain kong-ans connected with teachers from these five main schools or, in a few cases, an immediate predecessor. Chapters 19 through 22 contain kong-ans that are based on short sections from the Buddhist scriptures or from a fable or mystery tale. I begin each chapter with a four-line encapsulated presentation of the essence of the kong-an, following the Korean Zen style for beginning a formal Dharma speech. In practice, the Zen Master holds the Zen stick in the air, hits the lectern, and then presents the first line. This is repeated before the second and third lines, followed by the traditional Zen shout (Katz! or Ho! or Haahh!), a deep, penetrating sound coming from the gut that is intended to wipe away all traces of conceptual thought. The last line is then presented, a sentence that reveals the true meaning “just as it is.” The translations of The Blue Cliff Record and the Wu-men-kuan that I have used as the starting point for this book are by my teacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn. Zen Master Seung Sahn’s translation of The Blue Cliff Record is limited to the main cases, and his translation of the Wu-men-kuan includes the cases and verses but omits Wu-men’s commentary. When referring to comments, discourses, or verses not translated by Zen Master Seung Sahn, I have used other sources, as noted. Zen Master Seung Sahn is not the only teacher to view the main case as what is most vitally important. In Crooked Cucumber, a biography of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, I remember reading a short dharma talk by the Zen master on a kong-an from The Blue Cliff Record in which he also focused on the main case alone, with no reference to the introduction, verse, or incidental comments. For the names of the masters in these kong-ans, I have used the Chinese form, but I have also included the Japanese and Korean equivalents wherever possible. This is because in the West we now have strong practicing communities from all three traditions who are familiar with the teachings of our Zen ancestors.
CHAPTER 1
Yen-kuan’s Rhinoceros Fan
If you attain the fundamental point, then you understand that the horn on the top of its head is sharp. If you don’t stop there, but move past, then it becomes clear: Wind blows, pinetree shakes. However, these two are not yet complete. What is it that completes these two? Haahh!! In winter it chills to the bone. In springtime it caresses the skin.
Case 91 of The Blue Cliff Record states: One day Yen Kuan called to his attendant, “Bring me my rhinoceros fan.” The attendant said, “The fan is broken.” Yen Kuan said, “If the fan is broken, bring the rhinoceros back to me.” The attendant had no reply.1 Hsueh-tou (Setcho), the compiler of The Blue Cliff Record, then added responses from other monks to Yen-kuan’s (Enkan; Yom Kwan) challenge to produce the rhinoceros and also added his own short comments to each response: T’ou-tzu said, “I do not refuse to bring it out, but I fear the horn on its head will be imperfect.” Hsueh-tou commented, “I want an imperfect horn.” Shih-shuang said, “If I return the rhino to the Master, then I won’t have it.” Hsueh-tou commented, “The rhino is still there.” Tzu-fu drew a circle and wrote the word rhino inside it. Hsu...
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