8
Rhetoric of Uncertainty in Zen Buddhism and Western Literary Modernism

Uncertainty as a Model of Self‐Realization

This chapter examines the role of the rhetoric of “uncertainty” that was initially generated in the voluminous kōan collections of Zen Buddhism composed and catalogued during the cultural heights of Song dynasty (960–1277) China, as seen in relation to some key aspects of the movement of literary modernism as representations of comparable trends in Western thought. The principle of uncertainty in Zen indicates a resourceful approach to gaining philosophical awareness conducive to spiritual liberation that is characterized by fundamental ambiguity and purposeful inconclusiveness. This outlook places full responsibility for attaining self‐realization on an individual trainee, who through engaging multiple discursive perspectives without fixation or limitation gains spontaneous freedom from intellectual fetters and emotional attachments.

In particular, I analyze the role of the evaluative (Ch. pingchang; Jp. hyōshō images ) form of kōan commentary presented in the Blue Cliff Record (1128) and related texts from the era. Kōan commentators during the Song dynasty did not try to offer definitive explications or solutions for enigmatic kōan cases but, rather, a way of exploring and making an assessment of various viewpoints that serves as a model for self‐reliance in attaining spiritual awareness. Their highly stylized prose and poetic remarks on encounter dialogues seek to upend dramatically or reverse radically staid and stereotypical opinions via a Zen adept’s symbolic ability to “overturn a trainee’s meditation seat and chase away the great assembly,”¹ or more expansively to “reverse the flow of the great seas, topple Mount Sumeru [the mythical cosmic Buddhist summit], and scatter the white clouds.”²

That approach stressing the ongoing need to subvert and invert conventional interpretations of kōans in order to stimulate self‐reflection has a resonance with the notion of epiphany established by James Joyce in Dubliners and other works, including Ulysses. Joyce highlights the way an instantaneous awakening emerges based on insight into the unconscious implications of everyday actions and words. His inventive narrative style unfolds the experience of an epiphany, a term he singlehandedly transformed from its prior usage in medieval religious ritual to refer to personal spiritual cognizance. This enables the reader to gain in sudden yet momentous fashion a profound understanding of a character’s deeper motives or reactions that are deliberately suppressed or otherwise remain hidden from view in the story’s action.

Both the traditional East Asian and contemporary Western views emphasize the crucial role of observing and contemplating the inner meaning of fine details of human behavior and expressive interaction in order to trigger a sudden moment of self‐discovery. Such a breakthrough is most compellingly disclosed in a highly refined literary fashion featuring innovative rhetorical devices, including wordplay, allusions, paradoxes, contradictions, and other examples of deliberately elusive and ambiguous writing that is indirect, incomplete, and inconclusive yet conveys pointedly the heart of the matter. This approach surpasses ordinary conceptual structures, which are incapable of capturing the true meaning of mystical insight.

I developed this topic while trying to come to terms with two separate but intertwining hermeneutic issues in regard to analyzing the meaning and significance of Zen kōans. One issue involves providing an interpretation of the creativity of evaluative commentaries. As there is no simple translation or explanation for this complicated discursive method, I came to favor the notion of uncertainty by borrowing from various usages of the term in the modern West. The second hermeneutic matter has to do with responding to the perennial question about why it is that so many aspects of Zen literature and art produced by what seems to have been a reclusive, utopian, medieval mystical sect originating a millennium ago enjoy so much correspondence to contemporary culture. Elements from Zen are continually being appropriated and adapted in diverse ways through scholarly translations and artistic innovations. In responding to the query, I argue that understanding the social environment of Song China, during which highly educated literati at once gained mobility in the court and sought solace from pervasive anxiety through sophisticated Buddhist‐based literary pursuits, makes it clear that Zen’s rhetoric of uncertainty originally flourished in a historical setting known for imaginative forms of self‐expression that is much more similar to our times than generally recognized.

Both of these interpretative issues point to the importance of appreciating the function of self‐realization in Zen that is comparable to literary modernism. The Ten Oxherding Pictures is another twelfth‐century Zen text frequently adopted by interpreters today that provides a sequence of images and poems exploring the transformation of a seeker who finds and tames an ox symbolizing the attainment of enlightenment. During the middle of the path, the bull is tagged with a nose ring, an image frequently evoked in kōan commentaries, but then no longer requires this device when it is able to act in full harmony with the pursuer. An ad for a recent Japanese edition of this text tried to capture the essence of this work by using a bilingual phrase: “Search for Your Own Bull” (Sagashite goran kimi no ushi).³ This demonstrates that Zen uncertainty represents the disclosure of an individual’s chronicle about struggling with the feeling of doubt before undergoing a breakthrough to awakening, which has an affinity with contemporary literary modes of gaining spiritual realization through indirect forms of creativity.

How does one attain a sufficient degree of confidence in his or her capacity to embrace uncertainty as the key to an experience of liberating? Zen master Xuedou, who in eleventh‐century China was one of the two authors of the multilayered Blue Cliff Record along with Yuanwu a hundred years later, writes that the effort to reach enlightenment is symbolized by the image of seizing a precious gem from the jaws of a proverbial undersea dragon. This effort has left Xuedou in a perpetual state of angst that is a crucial yet constructive part of uncertainty. According to Xuedou’s four‐line verse:

For twenty long, hard years I have suffered,

By dredging up time and again from the blue dragon’s cave for your sake.

Such is the grief that can hardly be recounted;

If you want to be a clear‐minded Zen monk, you’d better not take this lightly!

Yuanwu then comments, first by playfully calling into question Xuedou’s claim that he reached enlightenment, and next by proclaiming an ultimatum that each reader must find the proper pathway and be able to disclose what the jewel really means through his own efforts.

The notion of uncertainty as an innovative interpretative tool for deconstructing each and every standpoint put forth indicates that the Blue Cliff Record endorses indeterminacy on experiential and literary levels as the key to undergoing enlightenment. There is no attempt on the part of either Xuedou or Yuanwu – in fact, such an effort is deliberately avoided and disputed – to reach a firm or clear‐cut conclusion that may become the source of a preoccupation or attachment. However, an emphasis on uncertainty is not intended to indicate a form of nihilism, pessimism, or radical relativism that abandons the quest for awakening. The Blue Cliff Record is especially buoyant and optimistic that each and every person has the potential to develop the skill or knack for attaining and conveying insight, and is thereby able to become an adept in his or her own way. As Yunmen declares in case 6, “Every day is a good day,” regardless of extenuating circumstances or divisions and distinctions made in ordinary life.

Therefore uncertainty can be referred to more positively as the expressive activity (hyōgen sayō), borrowing a Nishida Kitarō philosophical notion, of “sharpening a (critical discursive) sword” (jifeng, Jp. kippō 機鋒, literally a “crossbow arrow” hitting its mark or any “razor‐like device” that cuts through obstacles). This term implies a quick‐witted talent for answering effectively no matter the situation and breaking any impasse that emerges in Zen’s combative spiritual encounters. That notion is supported by the verse and capping phrases on case 75, which declares: “Observe carefully the interaction of action points [between interlocutors]! (One entry, one exit. Two adepts are both parrying with the same staff, but which one is really holding it?).”⁴ By indicating a vivid, alert, and timely elucidation of words and gestures, Zen expressions are deployed either sparingly but with great precision and effect or with parsimony yet a generosity of spirit by nimbly communicating clever retorts that at first disarm the adversary in a dialogue, yet in the end disclose deeper wisdom available to all parties.

Evaluative Method of Kōan Commentary

The evaluative method of kōan commentary, or pingchang/hyōshō, literally indicates a “critical responsive (ping/hyō) calling out or singing (chang/shō),” and implies the variability and adaptability a Zen adept exhibits in his teaching style. Rather than functioning as a form of literary criticism in the conventional sense of offering an objective analysis, evaluative commentary represents the standpoint of assessing through judgments made yet continually modified or overturned how and to what extent the discourse of a kōan case features a creative use of language, which is unimpeded by the constraints of logic and rationality so that the record can succinctly and immediately cut through obstacles and untie the bonds of ignorance.

Evaluative commentary is the rhetorical vehicle used to express uncertainty in that whatever standpoint is provisionally upheld at any given juncture in interpreting a kōan, which is designed to foster disturbance by challenging commonly accepted notions of reality or expectations about the capacity of thought, is invariably disputed or confirmed in ironic or deliberately disingenuous fashion. However, uncertainty must not be posited as an end in itself as this perspective also needs to be overthrown from its pedestal. Yuanwu comments several times on the perpetual deconstructive process by citing an old Chinese saying, “The correct question is situated within the answer, and the answer is situated within the question.”⁵

As Yuanwu remarks of the provisional quality of discourse in a passage in case 8 of the Blue Cliff Record that greatly influenced Dōgen’s “Being‐Time” (“Uji”) fascicle of the Treasury of the True Dharma‐Eye (Shōbōgenzō), “Sometimes a phrase is like a lion crouching on the ground; sometimes a phrase is like the Diamond King’s jewel sword; sometimes a phrase cuts off the tongues of everyone on earth; and sometimes a phrase follows the waves and pursues the currents.”⁶ These images refer to the variability of teaching styles that must be constantly redesigned and refashioned so as to correspond to the learning requirements of disciples.

Moreover, Donghan Liangjie suggests in the Jewel Mirror Samadhi (Ch. Baojing Sanmei; Jp. Hōkyō Zanmai), “Meaning does not abide in words, but a pivotal moment of change brings forth truth” images (alternatively: “Because intention is not evident in speaking, truth appears when one reaches the point of change”).⁷ According to this standpoint, a particular instance of verbal exchange must be comprehended in terms of a broader sense of expressiveness that encompasses nonverbal demonstrations, such as examples of masters striking and slapping disciples during an encounter, as well as more passive gestures like shaking one’s sleeve or raising the ceremonial fly‐whisk to indicate a comeback or rebuttal or to cast a dismissive tone. In Dongshan’s saying, the character 機 (Ch. ji; Jp. ki) – also the first syllable in the compound jifeng used extensively by Yuanwu – indicates a transformative opportunity realized by summoning one’s utmost proficiency in smashing through all barriers.

The notion of uncertainty conveys a spiritual condition of upholding and perpetuating the interior illumination of Zen ancestors gained through undergoing experiential upheavals and reversals. This indicates that the primary aim of the Blue Cliff Record is to acknowledge a foundational ambivalence and irreconcilability while engaging and trying in utter frustration yet with graceful acceptance to reconcile perennial philosophical issues that are crucial elements of the quest for spiritual awakening. The ability to turn the tables by circling around an adversary or dialogical partner while finding areas of cooperation for mutual benefit enables a crossing of the proverbial Zen checkpoint known symbolically as the Dragon’s Gate.

The Blue Cliff Record’s method begins by identifying problematic stances derived from conceptually or volitionally based explanations of kōans that are generally either too literal or overly abstract. For example, Yuanwu complains in case 3 that in his day people were often saying of a famous phrase attributed to master Mazu, though without any firm basis, that the “Sun‐faced Buddha represents the left eye, whereas the Moon‐faced Buddha is the right eye.”⁸ Yuanwu similarly grouses in his comments on case 56 that when a teacher once hit a disciple seven times, learners spent their time wondering unproductively why it was not eight times or six times, as if determining the exact number might make a difference.

Xuedou’s verses consistently demonstrate that the poet‐monk functions as an active and inspired interpreter, rather than a passive observer or distant reflective voice, by suggesting in dramatic fashion the merit of his own approach, the aim of which is to challenge any and all opinions, including those of masters portrayed in kōan narratives. In case 30, in which Zhaozhou answers a monk’s query with the non sequitur, “Zhen province produces big radishes,” Xuedou follows up his four‐line ode with the exclamatory, “Thief! Thief!”⁹ Examples of Xuedou’s facility with paradox appear in cases 28 and 50 when he refers to seeing the Big Dipper in the north by looking to the south, yet indicates that while its handle hangs down below and is available to be grasped it remains ever elusive and out of reach.

To show that Xuedou’s expressions must not be either taken at face value or reified but are, like all other sayings and doings cited in the text, subject to criticism, Yuanwu adds to case 30, “Well! It’s none other than Xuedou himself who is the one being held in stocks, thus giving evidence of his crime.”¹⁰ In many instances, such as cases 4, 19, and 24, Yuanwu offers great praise for Xuedou’s literary composition, which he says is “consummately accomplished” and “the best of its kind,” since only Xuedou truly understands kōans in an appropriately effective manner. Yet, Yuanwu’s approval is almost always peppered with disclaimers. In case 78 when Xuedou tells his followers, “Although you’ve washed in fragrant water I’ll spit right in your face,” Yuanwu notes, “Too bad! He adds a layer of mud on dirt and should know better than to defecate on pure soil.”¹¹ Yuanwu’s testing and contesting with alternative attitudes and outlooks does not stop there. In case 56 he takes Xuedou to task for attributing a Zen saying cited in the verse to the wrong teacher, while in case 79 in which master Touzi strikes an unwary monk Yuanwu demands with irony, “[The inquirer] deserved to be hit, but why did Touzi stop before his staff was broken?”¹²

The Blue Cliff Record’s creative interpretative approach based on the appraisals of the evaluative method is also revealed in the verse and prose comments to case 1. This involves first patriarch Bodhidharma’s conversation in which he tells the Emperor there is “nothing holy” and he does “not know his own name,” and then departs the territory to return to his homeland, a loss the ruler deeply regrets. Xuedou begins the poem in an evaluative fashion through upending expectations by reversing stereotypes and demanding members of the audience make their own assessment by saying, “The holy truths are empty/How do you understand this?”¹³ He then addresses the Emperor with, “Stop your vain yearning!”¹⁴ At the end of his poetic remarks Xuedou turns to the assembly after the line, “Looking around to the right and to the left,” and asks boldly, “Is there any patriarch here?” while answering himself with, “There is. Call him over so he can wash my feet!”¹⁵ Yuanwu reacts by suggesting that Xuedou is the one who “deserves a beating of thirty blows of the staff.” Yet, Yuanwu further comments that “by his acting in this [deliberately eccentric] way, still [Xuedou] has made an accomplishment.”¹⁶

My view that the Blue Cliff Record is founded on expressing the rhetoric of uncertainty is intended to encompass but not be limited to the Zen emphasis on undergoing a profound experience of existential doubt, which destabilizes and undermines all assumptions and presuppositions that otherwise obstruct the journey toward religious awakening that consists of freedom from such fetters. According to the commentary on case 51, an unenlightened person is one whose “eyes go blurry and sightless, so they only know how to answer a question by raising a question or react to an answer by giving an answer, but without realizing how much they are being swayed by the views of others.”¹⁷ The passage reflects the negative meaning of uncertainty in the sense of one who is unsure and unstable while wavering aimlessly among attitudes that are influenced by external factors. However, this condition functions as a stage on the path in that it causes the need for everyday awareness to be tossed upside‐down and cast topsy‐turvy by a worthy teacher’s elusive instructions that set the stage for a total reorientation of standpoints. According to one of the frequently used capping phrases, such an insecure and apprehensive person “falls back three thousand miles” prior to attaining recovery and redemption by being able to overcome all impediments.

Such a reversal represents a bottoming out that ultimately results in the positive meaning of uncertainty, which pertains to the open‐ended outlook of the Zen adept who confidently embraces all possible perspectives without clinging to one side or the other while exercising supreme agility along with the ability to adjust to circumstances at the spur of the moment. Yuanwu further writes in case 51, “Whoever upholds Zen teaching is able to discern how to take charge of a situation [or seize an opportunity] by knowing when to advance or retreat, how to distinguish true from false, and understanding whether to kill or give life or to capture or let go [of the disciple].”¹⁸ According to the verse comment on case 52 in which the master’s response to a disciple’s question uses concrete everyday imagery, the best approach is “not to make a show of transcendence and, in that way, you reveal true loftiness”; that is, by resisting the urge to appear overly clever, crafty, or mannered, an authentic teacher displays his or her wisdom through rhetorical prowess.

Therefore, in contrast to the unenlightened “one who needs to be punished by having their meditation seat overturned,” since their stereotypes must be shifted upside‐down, Yuanwu maintains that the enlightened master represents “one who is able to reverse the flow of the great seas to topple Mount Sumeru.”¹⁹ In his evaluative reactions Yuanwu uses the same verb 倒 (overturn, topple), which indicates falsity in traditional Buddhist scriptures, to suggest both the negative and positive meanings of the impact of uncertainty. Whichever consequence the act of capsizing represents depends on whether the state of being uncertain befalls a learner who stands prior to and awaits the experience of awakening or is enacted by an adept existing in the aftermath of said experience. In either instance the term suggests a diversion, inversion, or subversion that epitomizes upending fetters and, thereby, gaining liberation from conventional views by virtue of the Zen master’s facility with utilizing diverse sorts of discursive devices. These techniques are apropos to the conditions and circumstances of trainees, who may need to be either symbolically captured and slain if they are incorrigibly stubborn in their fixations or released and given a new lease on life if they are already making good progress in the path toward self‐discovery.

According to the commentary on case 2, Zhaozhou is considered an exemplary adept whose agility in responding in compelling and unflappable ways to challenging questions posed by disciples reveals the rhetoric of uncertainty by means of a dynamic approach to teaching that is singularly unbound by the need to resort to any particular technique, such as the extreme methods that were typical of Linji and Deshan, who frequently struck and screamed:

Zhaozhou never used beating or shouting to deal with people and only evoked everyday speech, but there was no one in the world who could manage to get the best of him. This was all because he never made typical kinds of calculating judgments. Instead, on the basis of having attained a great self‐liberation, he could take up the matter at hand from a sideways standpoint or use an inverted (upside‐down) perspective by either going against or going along [with the needs of a student] to help them attain great freedom.²⁰

While discussing in case 45 the way Zhaozhou responds to a challenge by dodging with dexterity a monk’s bullet‐like probing inquiry Yuanwu comments: “See how at the ultimate point where it seems impossible to make a turn 轉 he does find a place to turn, and this act spontaneously covers the whole universe. If you are not able to make such a turn then you will not get stuck wherever you set foot on the path.”²¹

The components of the turnabout experience expressed in the Blue Cliff Record include in a more or less sequential pattern:

Transmission of truth takes place by engaging with examples of untruth, or communication that uses various sorts of indirection ranging from metaphor and parable to obscure allusion or obtuse references, and to non sequitur or absurdity, silence, nonverbal gestures or symbols, or natural or innocuous sounds; illumination occurs through disclosing a level of insight that has always been available in everyday experience but was long hidden by ignorance and attachment.
Tendentious tendencies on the part of dialogue participants are exposed at each and every turn as seemingly impenetrable obstacles and obstructions, so that a dramatic reversal is needed to force change to occur by ending the gridlock derived from stubborn insistence in regard to any and all one‐sided or partial views.
Topsy‐turvy sayings and doings create a profound sense of doubt, or generate what is often referred to as the Zen malady (comparable to Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” as the cause of anxiety and dread); it is necessary for one to have their fixations drastically confronted and overturned so that barriers or checkpoints are transformed from an impediment, whether conceptual or practical, into a vehicle for realization.²²
Tension between dialogue partners is dialectical, as reflected in the teacher’s ability to mix censure, reprimand, dismissal, and rejection with acceptance, tolerance, admiration, and praise by virtue of a compassionate lowering oneself to the “in‐the‐mud (or weeds)” level of the trainee’s ignorant standpoint in order to help ripen and polish their understanding.
Turnabouts occurring in a dialogue reveal the adept’s knack for maneuvering, so that in case 10 involving master Muzhou, a disciple of Huangbo (and Dharma brother of Linji), an inquiring “monk is speechless and at a loss: he is no longer able to turn the circumstance freely. On the other side, Muzhou is neither scared nor stuck. He waits in confidence for the opportune moment. When the moment comes, he recognizes it immediately and turns it around.”²³
Transformational experiences are continually deepened in the aftermath of awakening as the master seeks ways to describe the mystery through evoking serene natural imagery or to apply the metaphorical acupuncture needle exactly where it hurts most but without wounding healthy tissue; this effort culminates in his ability to criticize all those who have gone before by uttering the equivalent of the German saying, “Others think this, but I (Aber Ich) think…” and then taking the challenge to the audience/reader by demanding, “What do you think?”

This teaching results in a trainee transitioning from the desperation of “fishing for a whale but coming up with a frog” to the triumph of “buying iron but getting gold.” As Xuedou says in the verse comment on case 10, “Adepts know how to seize the opportunity for change,”²⁴ while also implying that Muzhou, the apparent victor in the dialogue, is just as blind as the anonymous disciple. This stands in contrast to case 9 in which he suggests that both Zhaozhou and his monk‐adversary are winners for “showing their ability in direct encounter.”²⁵ However, blindness, which can symbolize delusion, also has virtue in representing transcendent wisdom as in the non‐preferential sense that “justice is blind.”²⁶

As Yuanwu’s comments on case 45 indicate, the opposite of Zhaozhou’s turnabout approach, which is eminently capable of moving in different directions depending on pedagogical demands, and thus the bane of Zen practitioners everywhere who are seeking to overcome their own limitations, is the fixed and obstructive standpoint of calculation that derives from what the text calls the inauthentic mentality of “being unconcerned” (wuji). This refers to a passive and inactive state of expecting enlightenment to occur automatically rather than being vigilant and vigorous in actualizing attainment. The Blue Cliff Record commentary mockingly says, “These days everyone makes unconcern the basis of understanding. Some suggest, ‘Since there is neither delusion nor enlightenment it is not necessary to go on seeking Buddha.’”²⁷

One example of uncertainty, as found in a couple of dozen kōans, usually takes the form of final remark by Yuanwu on the case or verse, of the declaration, “I strike,” which represents the commentator’s entering or intruding directly into the topic raised by the dialogical encounter in his own inimitable way but without indicating a firm conclusion. His aim is not to persuade the audience to adapt a particular viewpoint that may become the source of an attachment but, rather, to encourage and demand that they think through the answer for themselves.

The need for readers to understand kōans in their own fashion is addressed in case 20 when Yuanwu lists six different masters before his day who had responded to the quixotic exchange cited as the main case, and then makes it clear he does not agree with any of these but instead offers his own alternative interpretation of the topic. While Xuedou’s verse is highly commended as superior to other versions Yuanwu also prods the reader to question its meaning. At the end of the section of his prose commentary on the poem he follows up several rhetorical queries with the exhortation, “When you reach the pathway, who else is there to point to the matter at hand?”²⁸

Song Dynasty Resonances with Modernism

An understanding of the significance of uncertainty expressed through the evaluative commentary of the Blue Cliff Record as developed in the context of Song Chinese intellectual history is enhanced by seeking out reverberations with contemporary Western worldviews beginning in the nineteenth century that are often at least indirectly influenced by the influx of East Asian writings and ideas. The Song dynasty, an era when the creative impulse evident in religion was expressed through literary, fine, and performing arts, featured meritocracy reached through the educational exam system as well as some indicators of the arising of democracy. These conditions fostered a focus on erudition enhanced through leisure activities spent, not as a mindless passing or killing of time for the sake of entertainment, but in order to heighten self‐awareness through intense personal reflections on selfhood in communion with nature.

This state of aesthetic spirituality was accompanied by an admiration and appreciation for those talented individuals who could bridge sacred pursuits with secular accomplishments, while fearing the possible consequences of social upheaval or political turmoil. Possible exile or imprisonment could be a consequence of imminent dangers of invasion from the north or through coming in conflict with current Chinese leadership, which often reacted strongly to domestic turmoil if linked to the kind of foreign threats that might lead to the fall of the empire. This caused a sense of melancholy and world‐weariness based on sensitivity to the fleetingness of opportunities for gaining spontaneous flashes of insight through an instantiation of mystical insight. Analyzing the Song worldview that informed the composition of kōan commentaries suggests the following elements:

The main goal was to gain self‐knowledge realized by means of creative self‐expression, sometimes free from and sometimes adhering to literary rules and regulations in a way that can be likened to harmonizing with a song, chant, ode, or recitation, or listening to a tune played with a wind, percussion, or string instrument.
This involved undergoing a profound experience of doubt and anxiety leading to physical in addition to psychological symptoms associated with the “Zen illness” that could be intense and prolonged, and could make one feel that he or she put his life at stake in the pursuit of knowledge that sometimes had “real world” implications since Yuanwu and other masters underwent extensive periods of persecution and exile.
The goal was reached by seizing opportune moments (Ch. jiyuan; Jp. kien 機縁) during the course of verbal and nonverbal exchanges or testing situations in order to develop an intensely intimate yet forbearing mentor–mentee relationship that fostered spiritual growth through spontaneous awakening, rather than the gradual accumulation of evidence or data lacking intuitive awareness.
There was no specific religio‐literary destination, as realization required that one continued to probe further by looking into a matter from all sides and every angle (upside down, inside out, sideways, and backwards), whereby a single word or phrase, or sound or gesture, becomes an entryway for demonstrating what can be compared to the knack of a card player finding his way out of being dealt a losing hand in knowing “when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.”
The result was an ambiguous and inconclusive state of mind based on making one’s own personal judgment through an assessment in accord with circumstances by accepting, sometimes reluctantly, alternative views while also severely criticizing those who fall into the trap of conceptualization and cliché or use idle contrivances.
Adepts were expected to be able to persuade others by example while admitting that, ultimately, literary and artistic expression is a matter of the scattering of sand into the eyes of the reader, although this could not be helped as teachers hoped to inspire without predetermining their learners’ power of observation and insight.

One caveat in my approach, as indicated, is that there is no term used in the Blue Cliff Record or other Zen records that can be translated as “uncertainty.” The modern construction buqueding 不確定 (Jp. fukakutei) comes close in implying what is not to be relied on or what cannot be known in a definitive way, while the traditional Japanese term hakanai 儚い (はかない) suggests a sorrowful acceptance of what is invariably absent, lost, missing, or inconclusive. Part of the impetus for using the term is that uncertainty corresponds to or evokes some contemporary Western attitudes about accepting chaos and finding purpose through abandoning the pursuit of certitude, ranging from scientific investigation in theoretical physics to literary modernism and philosophical existentialism. These outlooks stress awareness of the limits of human knowledge as well as the incapacity of speech acts in conveying information or achieving articulation. Such a view reflects a different state of mind than mere inaccuracy or indecision in the ordinary sense because it represents a sense of confidence and prescience while recognizing indeterminacy.

The term uncertainty is perhaps best known today from Werner Heisenberg’s principle as part of quantum mechanics, which argues that only probabilities can be calculated. Unlike Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, where everything follows clear‐cut laws on how to move and prediction is fairly easy if you know the starting conditions, the uncertainty principle enshrines a level of ambiguity and indecision into the theory of physics. Calculation of either position or momentum will be inaccurate in that the act of observation itself affects the situation by skewing the particle being detected, thus delimiting the possibility of exactitude.²⁹

Perhaps more pertinent to the meaning of Zen rhetoric are various cultural notions that emphasize the role of uncertainty in terms of personal growth in seeking spiritual realization. For example, a professor of leadership studies, Richard Shell, in an unorthodox recent approach to self‐attainment, celebrates the “power of uncertainty,” and says of the viewpoint of his book Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success, “You don’t need to avoid uncertainty… The truth of the matter is that nobody is certain.”³⁰ A sophisticated philosophical outlook was developed by nineteenth‐century poet John Keats in the theory of “negative capability” that links the indeterminacy of finding a single fixed truth, which Keats felt was being pursued in futility by some of his colleagues, to the inexhaustible richness and aptitude of an individual to perceive, think, and function beyond any presupposition. Keats’ notion further captures the rejection of the constraints of any particular context and the ability to experience phenomena free from the bonds of conventional epistemology, or the assertion of one’s own will and individuality upon their activity.³¹

In that vein, though not necessarily through direct influence, American author Stephen Crane once told an editor of his struggles with creative writing, “I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait.”³² Similarly in On Late Style Edward Said examines the production of great modern Western writers, artists, and musicians at the end of their lives and shows that, rather than the resolution of a lifetime’s artistic endeavor, most of the late works are rife with unresolved contradiction and almost impenetrable complexity.³³ Their artistic genius was evident through foreshadowing in their word of future developments in respective disciplines, even if this stood in contrast to general tastes and expectations.

Perhaps the single main example of a Western like‐mindedness with Zen rhetoric of uncertainty involves novelist James Joyce, who epitomized the movement known as literary modernism with his early collection of short stories, Dubliners, published in 1914, and his massive tome Ulysses, published in 1922. This was around the same time as comparable literary developments with fusing form and function to capture and convey interiority in the literature of T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Woolf, and others who innovated expressionism or stream of consciousness. Like his peers Joyce experimented with style and typography including the use of discontinuity, the juxtaposition of contradictory or ironic narrative elements such as the uninterrupted depiction of feelings and an unreliable or perspective‐bound narrator, and intertextuality through the use of classical allusions as well as borrowings with wordplays from other languages, cultures, and texts. Critic L.J. Morrissey notes that the narration in the first story in Dubliners first reveals but then withdraws judgments and confidences just when the reader needs the most help in building to the denouement, so that “the method of telling itself forces us to judge, to interpret, to participate in the text.”³⁴

Joyce’s primary contribution to modernist discourse that touches base with classical Zen experience is his formation of the notion of epiphany, which is comparable to satori and represents an idea he almost single‐handedly transformed from an obscure medieval theological term to a vital aspect of contemporary spirituality attained through literary refinement and aesthetic sensibility. Each of the fifteen stories of Dubliners is composed so as to crescendo in the revelatory experience of an epiphany. In these writings, to at least one of the characters based on the fine details of conversation or observation and in an altogether unexpected and unintended way through a sudden awareness of quiddity or what Joyce calls the “whatness” of a single common object that has become radiant, in a moment suddenly and open‐endedly the meaning of all things emerges in a way that is crystal clear in its uncertain and ephemeral nature. The theme is perhaps best summed up by a passage in Ulysses, which was originally conceived as the sixteenth story of Dubliners. This occurs in Episode 3, Proteus: “remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world.”³⁵ A Joycean scholar further notes:

By the time he scrawled those words, James Joyce had long been working to claim the term “epiphany” on behalf of secular literature. Hitherto, the word had an ancient, and predominantly religious, history. It has its genesis in ancient Greece (ἐpιfάνeιa), where it was used beautifully to refer to the first glimmer of dawn, the first sight of the enemy in battle, or the first vision of a god. It became Judaised in 2 Maccabees, when it was used to describe the God of Israel, and was Christianised in 2 Timothy, where it mainly referred to the Second Coming; thereafter it came to describe the personal realisation that Christ was the Son of God.³⁶

An interesting Zen connection with the early Greek meaning of the term as the first glimmer of a truth that is about to unfold, whether in the human or natural realm, is expressed in case 41 of the Blue Cliff Record, in which Zhaozhou asks about “one who has died the great death and returns to life” and Touzi says, “He must not go by night; he must get there in daylight.”³⁷ A modern Chinese scholar suggests this rendering (emphasis added): “He is not permitted to walk in the night, but must get there as soon as the day starts to become bright.”³⁸

The main link with kōan literature is that Joyce rejected his Catholic upbringing to apply the term epiphany to the humanist context of self‐awareness as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. [Joyce] believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”³⁹ For Joyce, as for Xuedou and Yuanwu, revelation occurs in the context of a brief, cryptic exchange in which the delivery of truth is indirect and unintended, and by no means apparent in the words themselves. This requires a reading between the lines to realize a fleeting visionary instant, as when one suddenly becomes aware that a romance is exposed as hollow at the core or, indeed, never really existed, although this is not seen until a flash of understanding occurs based on a stray comment or unconscious body language. That approach resembles the works of Marcel Proust, for whom the scent of a blossom, or just an appropriately inspired recollection of this sensation, could instantly trigger new levels of memory and self‐awareness.

An intriguing affinity with the breakthrough type of turnaround experience depicted in the poetic or narrative remarks of the Blue Clue Record occurs in the final passage of “The Dead,” the fifteenth story of Dubliners, that evokes mystical hearing associated with the lyricism of natural events. Joyce writes with deceptively simple eloquence of the main character’s experience of epiphany as a kind of cosmic resonance in dealing profoundly with newfound understanding based on a revelatory view of his wife’s past: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”⁴⁰

However, a basic difference with some of the melancholy implications in Joyce’s worldview, which focuses on everyday narratives rather than the adventures of mystical pilgrims, is the conviction as expressed in several Yunmen dialogues of the fundamental level of self‐attainment that constitutes the universal potentiality of Buddha‐nature. This is conveyed in case 27 on the “Golden breeze” that constitutes the body even when trees wither and leaves fall, case 83 on “Buddhas and pillars communing” symbolizing the unity of ultimate and mundane reality, and case 86 in which Yunmen proclaims, “Everyone has a light,” although he acknowledges the conundrum that it appears dark and dim as soon as you try to look right at it. This difficulty occurs, he suggests in Joycean fashion, because the function of gazing without genuine insight represents a futile attempt to reduce the pure subjectivity of awareness that encompasses objectivity into a mere entity that stands over and is opposed to the perceiver, thereby distorting what should be characterized as a fundamentally holistic act of perception.⁴¹

Uncertain of Uncertainty

One way to look at the perpetual pedagogical conundrum regarding knowledge related to language is to consider the observation made by Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth about how a sense of intellectual frustration and futility becomes a necessary psychological stage that gives way to an undying effort to gain understanding. Cassirer writes: “All the energy devoted to [trying to resolve a basic quandary] seems only to lead us about in a circle and finally leave us at the point from which we started. And yet the very nature of such fundamental problems entails that the mind, though it despairs of ever finally solving them, can never quite let them alone.”⁴² Cassirer’s view is complemented from an opposing angle through a comment offered in a preface to the Blue Cliff Record by Zhou Chi (Yucen Xiuxiu) from a 1305 edition that presumes full awareness as a base condition of human experience, but highlights impediments that all too easily obstruct it from being manifested:

Human mind and the way are one; the way and myriad things are one. This oneness fills cosmic space – is there anywhere that the way is not found? When ordinary people look for it they can only see what they see and not what they do not see. They seek [the way] from others and leave it to others to tell them about it. This is like [Su Shi’s] metaphor of the sun. In turning an object of inquiry over and over in their minds to try to figure it out, investigators move further away and lose sight of it all the more.⁴³

Su Shi’s parable of the sun is similar to the classic fable of blind men trying to understand an elephant by mistaking each part for the whole (e.g., a leg as a tree). The thoughts of Cassirer and Zhou coincide in suggesting that the more we seek to express, the greater the distance from the object, but this is exactly the impulse that drives our continual striving.

In order to show the complexity of uncertainty so that the notion is not reduced to a simplistic interpretation, it is helpful to distinguish between three levels of Zen ambiguity based on using the model of “toward awakening (satori) and from awakening” (satori e, satori kara); that is, by distinguishing whether one is still on the path of striving to achieve self‐realization (satori e) or one has already attained this goal (satori kara) and is endeavoring to teach it persuasively to sometimes stubborn or seemingly incorrigible disciples.⁴⁴ As Musō Soseki writes based on his understanding of a passage from Yuanwu’s comments, “For one who has yet to attain realization, it is better to study the intent [or meaning] than to study the words; for one who has attained realization, it is better to study the words than to study the intent.”⁴⁵

The first level of uncertainty, or its negative meaning, refers to the pre‐satori experience that is characterized by feeling a vague sense of underlying doubt or disturbance about unchallenged assumptions so that one must cling to meaning while forgetting words as empty containers of intentionality. Feelings of instability and unsettledness persist but are productive in pointing beyond ordinary barriers to the possibility of attaining transcendence. The second level, or the positive meaning of uncertainty, involving the post‐satori experience, reflects the flexibility of the master in trying to determine the most appropriate instructional method that best addresses the pedagogical stage of his trainees. This involves dazzling the reader with elegant language that indulges their current deficient level of understanding by allowing for a gradual process of growth, or puzzling the learner through compelling him to abruptly cast aside misconceptions while spontaneously accepting and adapting to a higher truth.

In addition to pre‐satori uncertainty about how to gain awakening and post‐satori uncertainty about how to lead followers, the third level of uncertainty is hermeneutic reflexivity. Objective observers researching the history and ideology of the text continually face indecisiveness about how to read and appreciate the complex quality of the Blue Cliff Record. This is due to the text’s facility in evoking eloquent prose and poetic rhetoric that is obscurely rooted in Song dynasty locutions so as to craft a vision of the “knack” (another rendering of ji) for expressing Zen awakening and how to get it. I express this ongoing quandary through postulating a faux dialogue: “What about uncertainty? What about it? You tell me. I am uncertain. About? I am uncertain about uncertainty. Are you certain of that? Certainly (not).”

I conclude by citing the poems of two Zen masters from Kamakura era (1185–1333) Japan, who inherited the legacy of the Song Chinese views. Dōgen wrote a verse explaining that, long after he was enlightened and had begun teaching a large group of disciples in the mountains of Japan, he was continually filled with self‐doubt that enhanced his illumination:

For so long living in this world without attachments;

Since giving up the use of paper and pen,

I see flowers and hear birds without feeling much.

While dwelling on this mountain, I am embarrassed by my own lack of talent.⁴⁶

A similar verse by Musō Soseki conveys what it means to be creatively uncertain in communing with the ephemeral beauty of nature:

Autumn‐colored word‐branches dropping many leaves,

Frosty clouds carrying rain pass through this nook in the mountains.

Everyone is born with the same sort of eyes –

So why don’t we all see the kōan that is right in front of us (genjōkōan)?⁴⁷