"Does a Dog Have the Buddha Nature?"
Woof! Woof!
Hello Spark Zen readers! I’m typing this while visiting my mother (who’ll be 85 on September 4th, BTW) outside Los Angeles, where it is blazing hot! I haven’t had a moment to finish my Sunday Spark since I arrived. So I thought I’d send one of my earlier posts from Dec. 2021. Back then there was only 24 subscribers. Now there’s close to 600 of you wonderful people! Thank you so much for your support and your virtual presence. I’d love to hear from you! Peace, Rev. Shoren Heather
A monk asked Jōshū: “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?”
Jōshū answered: “Mu.” —Case 1, The Gateless Gate
The monk’s question is a reasonable one: he wants to know whether Buddha nature—emptiness or Absolute Truth—animates all sentient beings, not just human beings. His simple question elicited a short, profound, and enigmatic response: mu! Centuries later, this solitary sound still sounds in the hearts, minds, and bodies of Zen practitioners and other seekers of The Way.
Th Mu kōan is probably one of the most popular sayings associated with Zen. Perhaps only surpassed by the kōan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” A kōan is the Japanese word for "a matter for public thought." In Chinese, gōng'àn, it means “official business.” A kōan is an enigmatic anecdote that can help us deepen our experiential knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings. The practice of Zen or Chan (both mean “meditation” in Japanese and Chinese, respectively), after all, is a body practice. Illumination and transformation happen below the neck. These paradoxical, puzzling stories point to the Buddha’s teachings of the Relative Truth and the Absolute Truth or form and emptiness.
Although puzzling, kōans are not puzzles to be solved by the thinking mind. They are utilized by Zen teachers, mostly in the Rinzai tradition, to confound the logical mind and break through the barrier of words and phrases to a spiritual epiphany or what is called in Zen kenshō. In Japanese, ken means seeing and sho means essence. Kenshō is a non-intellectual, non-dual somatic experience of our deep and boundless connection with all sentient and non-sentient beings: the unifying source of Buddha nature or emptiness.
When the Chan master Jōshū (Zhàozhōu in Chinese) experienced his first kenshō at age 17, he described it this way: "Suddenly I was ruined and homeless." In his book Two Zen Classics, Katsuki Sekida interprets this to mean that Jōshū, who lived during the Tang Dynasty, “was thrown into a great emptiness.” Eihei Dogen Zenji, the 13th century founder of Sōtō Zen in Japan, calls this great emptiness “the wisdom that runs through all things” in his discourse titled “Fukanzazengi: Universal Recommendations for Zazen.”
Kōans are often short dialogues between teachers and students where the students are attempting to clarify their practice, demonstrate their understanding, or challenge their teachers’ instructions or knowledge. Sometimes the students asking the questions are novice monks or nuns and other times they’ve already had kenshō. Some kōans are questions that the teachers themselves used for contemplation and clarification of the Great Matter of Life and Death. Kōans also capture mondō, or verbal exchanges, between mature teachers who represent different schools of Zen.
In the United States, the two main schools of Zen are the Rinzai and the Sōtō. The putative distinction between the two is that the Rinzai tradition emphasizes “kōan introspection” or “story contemplation.” The Sōtō school emphasizes “just sitting” or “silent illumination.” Although these methods are often viewed as an either or, either you study kōans or you just sit, the late Buddhist scholar and translator, Thomas Cleary states in his introduction to The Book of Serenity, that this division has “no basis in the actual Chinese records” from the Song Dynasty of China (960 to 1279).
Cleary states that the two Chan masters of Song China, Daie Sōkō (1089-1163), of the Rinzai school, and Tendō Sōkaku (1091-1162) of the Sōtō lineage, supported each other and “provided a counterpoint to shake the attachments of students who were merely wedded to a particular form of practice or school.” In fact, Daie Sōkō, although a proponent of kōan introspection, ordered copies of The Blue Cliff Record (another kōan collection compiled during the Song Dynasty) to be burned because the kōan practice had become a perfunctory literary exercise rather than a practice of vibrant, rigorous contemplation to attain kenshō or satori (an enlightenment experience). Cleary writes that two characteristics of Chan literature are to: “engage the reader in mental dialogue rather than professing doctrines and dogmas,” and “to enforce the demand for patience, suspension of preconceptions and judgments, and sustained concentration without which progress cannot be made.”
The Mu kōan is the first case in The Gateless Gate, which has 48 cases. In Japanese, the title is Mumonkan. Mu means “nothingness;” mon means "gate;" and kan means "barrier." So mumonkan means a gate that has no barrier, hence, The Gateless Gate. Sekida Sensei writes that the ideograph for kan might also be translated as a checkpoint where travelers must show their credentials to the authorities. So another possible understanding of mumonkan is "a checkpoint that is not blocked in any way."
The Gateless Gate was composed in 1228 by the Zen monk Mumon Ekai. In this collection, Mumon adds his own commentary about each kōan and a poem that expresses his understanding. In Mumon’s commentary as translated by Sekida Sensei, Mumon says that
“to master Zen, you must pass the barrier of the patriarchs. To attain this subtle realization, you must completely cut off the way of thinking. If you do not pass the barrier, and do not cut off the way of thinking, then you will be like a ghost clinging to the bushes and weeds. Now, I want to ask you, what is the barrier of the patriarchs? Why, it is this single word ‘Mu.’ That is the front gate to Zen. Therefore it is called the ‘Mumonkan of Zen.’ ”
The mind fumbles over the phrase “gateless gate” as it attempts to make sense of this oxymoron: how is it possible that there’s a gate to pass through that has no gate? And, this single syllable mu is the key to entry? If there’s no barrier, then what prevents us from passing through?
Our thinking mind creates the barriers—or perhaps more accurately, it IS the barrier—with its constant naming, categorizing, and storytelling. And, more to the point, the mind is only a barrier when we believe or identify with arising thoughts and think that’s who were are and that’s what the world is like. When life is obscured by this “veil of conceptualization,” we’re like ghosts clinging to the “bushes and weeds.” This is a metaphor for how we desperately cling to sense objects—including ourselves—as if they are substantive and permanent.
Jōshū’s response of mu slices through the monk's attempt at arriving at intellectual certainty where he can say, “Now I’ve got it! What’s next?” This striving for progress and attaching to a fixed understanding are indeed barriers to passing through the gateless gate of Zen. When we think we know something—a dog has Buddha nature, a dog does not—we, as Mumon says, are “dead on the spot.”
The goal-less goal of Zen practice is to drop below the thinking mind with its ceaseless striving for certainty amid the flux of life. Through a dedicated meditation practice and an exploration of what’s arising in our heart-mind-body, it’s possible to stroll through the unguarded checkpoint. This bare, felt sense of life unfolding each moment is the liberation that we are seeking and it’s our birthright.
Although the path of Zen is a path that has no borders and cannot be mapped by the mind, mu is a guidepost that illuminates The Way: A single syllable that expresses and manifests the boundless, ineffable, and immutable Buddha nature from which the 10,000 things arise, persist, and fade.
I leave you with my modified version of this kōan:
A novice monk asked her teacher: “Does mu have Buddha nature?”
Her teacher responded: “Woof!”
References:
Sekida, Katsuki. Two Zen Classics. Boston & London, Shambhala, 2005.
Cleary, Thomas. The Book of Serenity. Boston & London, Shambhala, 2005
I understand. My favorite posts are your own writing. What I'm thinking is, if you have a lot of new fans, they might not have seen the older stuff. I know we could go back and look, but don't hesitate to post them.
This is a good one. Maybe you should post more of the old stuff.