Liu (Jap. Ryutetsema) arrives at Kuei-shan’s (Jap. Isan) place, and Kuei-shan said, “Old cow, you’ve come!” Liu said, “There’s a big feast on Mt. Taishan tomorrow, teacher. Are you going?” Kuei-shan lay down. With that Liu left.
Boundaries make us what we are.
Biologists have suggested that the most fundamental requirement of a living organism is the creation of a boundary—something that demarcates inside from outside. In order for any sort of molecular self-replicating chemical processes (which would form the basis of reproduction and evolution) to occur, there must, first of all, be something like a membrane or cell wall that keeps the chemical reactants from simply being washed away in the surrounding primordial soup. Anything that we consider to be alive must, at the most basic level, be engaged in maintaining this basic organizational integrity.
When we go on to speak of the inseparability of any organism from its ecological surround, we must not lose sight of the other side of the equation in which separation is as necessary as integration for life to exist. While our Buddhist practice will traditionally decry the way we all too typically become trapped on the separation side of that equation, many practitioners may become equally trapped in the fantasy of living exclusively on the side of integration and nonseparation. What they neglect or lose sight of is precisely any sense of what is allowed to count for them as a psychologically necessary boundary. Psychological boundaries are as fundamental to what it is to be alive and human as cell membranes. The violation of necessary and appropriate boundaries is the basis of what we mean by incest, assault, and rape.
Beyond the need to ward off actual trauma, at the more ordinary, everyday level we need to maintain a stimulus barrier, a psychophysiological mechanism for filtering informational and emotional input, lest we be flooded by both sensory and informational noise. One of the clear benefits of meditation (and medications like Prozac and other SSRIs) is the way it strengthens our stimulus barrier so we are less prone to be frazzled, frustrated, or (at the extremes) reactively provoked by our emotional surround. On another level, a cell wall is literally a semipermeable membrane; that is, it regulates what and how much passes from outside to inside and vice versa.
We can regard the psychological (and/or Zen) equivalent of such a membrane as the capacity to let thoughts come and go, without their impinging, sticking, or disrupting our sitting still. When we are psychologically fragile, we may try to protect ourselves by setting up a rigid barrier to keep certain thoughts or feelings at bay. But such barriers are almost always brittle and self-defeating; they lead us to see the outside world in terms of threats of impingement or intrusion and leave us in the position of forever trying to plug leaks in our emotional dykes. An optimally functioning membrane efficiently moves nutrients in and moves wastes out of the cell. Our psychological equivalent likewise lets thoughts and feelings move freely in and out of our minds, not getting stuck in them and not having to ward them off.
An account of human civilization could be written entirely in terms of the transformation of the way we perceive boundaries between ourselves and others. From what we imagine about our prehistoric ancestors living in small, family-centered clusters (or tribes dominated by an alpha male), we could trace our evolution in terms of the organization of the group, be it around direct bloodlines, geography, ethnicity, race, or religion. The formation of any self-identity by definition involves the creation of a boundary, the identification of what’s “not-me,” an Other. Part of our practice will involve dissolving those boundaries, but another equally important part of practice will involve coming to respect them, and to both acknowledge and accept difference.
In the words of Zen teacher Carolyn Atkinson:
The practice of acceptance is what we do with our own minds, with the discouragement and the anger and the fatigue and the wanting, the endless longing for things to be different than they are. When we extend this accepting mind to others, extend it into the realm of our endlessly longing for them to be different than they are, we can call this practice love.
I admire the way Atkinson is not afraid to bring the word “love” into Zen practice. We don’t struggle to “be compassionate” to our spouse or our children; we struggle with what it means to love someone who so repeatedly hurts, disappoints, and misunderstands us.
My partner once gave me as a present a cartoon drawn by the artist Susan Miller. It shows a scowling, pointy headed, scruffily bearded man with his arms folded across his chest, saying, “Why can’t you be more like me?” I have it displayed on a table over which hangs a scroll depicting another scowling old man, Bodhidharma, whom it uncannily resembles. Self-righteousness, often masquerading as Zen practice or as “compassionate” teaching, is the antithesis of love. It demands an elimination of difference and pursues a uniformity of opinion, desire, and taste.
A fantasy of twinship, thought Heinz Kohut, is one form identificatory love can take in childhood when I want to be just like Mommy or Daddy and dress up in their big shoes and shirts. But too often as adults we confuse love with a Procrustean version of twinship, where the other is expected to either diminish or stretch themselves in some painful way to accommodate themselves to our picture of how they should look, feel, and behave. When there is difference, what is supposed to give? Am I supposed to change how I like to do things in order to hold on to the one I love? Or should the other do the changing? Such false either/or choices are the stuff of koans, the koans of everyday life. And they can’t all be solved simply by an appeal to oneness and an elimination of difference.
Difference and boundary are not words that we normally value in Buddhism; they tend to stand in for everything we imagine we are supposed to overcome in the name of oneness and nonseparation. But how we handle difference will be one of the hallmarks of our mature practice. We can’t eliminate difference and we can’t blend opposites into a conflict-free synthesis—or mush. If your idea of a treat is a chocolate ice cream sundae and mine is sushi, we cannot compromise by having sushi with chocolate sauce. Boundaries must be maintained, differences respected, turns taken, acknowledgments made that, at some very important levels, you are not me. That is one very important meaning of love.
Consider the koan with which we began this chapter:
Liu arrives at Kuei-shan’s place, and Kuei-shan said, “Old cow, you’ve come!” Liu said, “There’s a big feast on Mt. Tai tomorrow, teacher. Are you going?” Kuei-shan lay down. With that Liu left.
We have here a dialogue between Kuei-shan and one of the few women mentioned by name in the koan collections, Liu, an old student of Kuei-shan’s who has now come for a visit.
She is known, in other cases, by her nickname Iron-Grinder Liu, the implication being that she grinds to dust any monk with whom she has Dharma combat. Maybe our equivalent of Iron-Grinder would be something like Old Ball-Buster. She was evidently a very formidable character, and for better or for worse, she illustrates the kind of equality women have been traditionally offered in Zen practice. The teaching and the training is open to women but they prove themselves by being as tough as the men—if not tougher. There is very little of the feminine that comes through in women in these cases. That’s a big part of what is changing for the better in our generation of American Zen.
So Liu comes to visit Kuei-shan and he says, “Old cow, you’ve come!” “Old cow” is the kind of a humorous pejorative that Zen teachers like to throw around, but “cow” apparently also means a female water buffalo, and the water buffalo is the ox of the ox herding pictures, a symbol of enlightenment. So it’s also a backhanded form of praise to call her the old cow. Kuei-shan himself is known to have said, “After I die, two hundred years from now, a water buffalo will be born in this valley with the characters Kuei-shan on its side. Tell me, will you call that creature Kuei-shan or Water Buffalo?” So Kuei-shan is also identified with the water buffalo and in a certain sense there’s a level of identification and familiarity in him tossing this image back and forth. It’s this image of the water buffalo and the old cow that’s referred to in the preface, “With splendid noses each is endowed with a powerful appearance.” Two fine-looking animals.
What’s also unusual about this case is that it is a story about play among equals. It’s not the usual kind of koan, where a novice student comes to an old master asking a question, and whether he leaves bewildered or enlightened, there remains a great gap between the teacher and the monk. This is a very different kind of dialogue that comes at the end of the lives of two old teachers enjoying themselves together. The little game that they’re playing is about coming and going and is there anything to get or not. Kuei-shan makes the first move when he says, “You’ve come.”
When we go someplace we are usually looking for something. Lots of people have come to me from far away in order to practice. I might ask them: What are you lacking? What are you looking for? Don’t you know there is nothing to gain? Nothing to get? Don’t you realize that just by showing up you are making a terrible mistake? That’s the way he’s teasing Liu with “You’ve come.” And she immediately shoots back, “There’s a big feast on Mt. Taishan tomorrow, are you going to go?”
Now Mt. Taishan is supposedly hundreds if not a thousand miles away from where this is taking place. So she teases him in turn, “Oh there’s a great thing happening far away, are you going to be part of it or are you missing it?” She tosses the ball right back, and in response Kuei-shan just lies down on the ground. There’s no place to go, I’m right here, any big feast is happening right here right now. And with that Liu leaves. They started their game with “You’ve come?” and “Are you going?” and they volleyed back and forth with him lying down—he’s not going anywhere—which she counters by leaving. There’s no winner, no loser here, they are playing out a little game about coming and going; is there anything to get, is there anywhere to go?
The verse that accompanies this koan uses the imagery of battles and Dharma combat: With a hundred battles’ merit, growing old in great peace, being serene, who is to pick at the details of strategy? They’ve both been through a hundred battles, a hundred Dharma combats, and neither of them has anything to win or lose anymore. They are growing old in great peace together. The jeweled whip and golden horse passing the day at leisure. A great general might ride into battle with a jeweled whip on a golden horse; these combatants dismount to enjoy the bright moon and refreshing breeze.
From a more modern and psychological perspective, we can use this koan to examine how we encounter and engage difference. First there is the difference of student and teacher, and second the difference between man and woman. What we’re presented with here are the ways differences both do and do not make a difference, the way they play at coming and going versus lying down and staying still. These actions are very different, but in a way it doesn’t matter which side one plays on and which side the other plays on. They fully occupy their own role, their own difference, and there is not one to be preferred over the other.
If I just lie down and say everything is right here, it’s true, but I might miss out on something else. Joko used to say, “You know how far I would go to meet a visiting Dharma teacher? Maybe across the room.” She wanted to emphasize that life is the teacher, everything you need to know is right here in your own mind, in your own body, on your own cushion. Don’t go running around thinking someone else has got it. “Oh the enlightened master is coming to town, I’ve got to go hear her.” She really made a big point of pooh-poohing all that stuff.
Of course, I traveled three thousand miles many times a year for a decade to hear her talk that way. Somehow, it was a great pleasure to travel all that way in order to play with someone else who knew there is nowhere to go and nothing to get. It’s fun to have playmates and sometime you have to travel to meet them. It’s part of the pleasure I’ve gotten over the years from going to Zen teachers’ meetings. There’s no point, there is nothing to get, but we can enjoy this kind of play together.
One of the recurring themes of this book is how practice engages the different sides of our self. Most koans can be thought of as having two or more characters that represent different aspects of our self. Most Zen dialogues were called Dharma combat and the metaphor of combat is deeply engrained in Zen literature. Often, in the past, teachers talked as if the way to achieve inner peace is to kill the ego. It’s a very curious mixed metaphor: we have to kill off something in ourselves in order to find peace.
I believe it was Michael Wenger who said, “People are always exhorting you to practice harder, maybe we should try practicing softer for a change.” The language of killing the ego or Dharma combat, or cutting through, vanquishing desire and attachment, is really the language of inner conflict projected out into the practice and into the student-teacher relationship. So much of what brings us to practice is the fact that we’re already at war with ourselves, one part is already trying to kill off another part.
It is all too easy for that kind of inner conflict to get co-opted by the language of practice and in the name of spirituality we try to kill our needs, kill our attachments, kill our vulnerability, kill our anger, kill our sexuality, kill our desire for love, kill off anything that will make us need other people and be vulnerable to them. It’s a great problem when practice is co-opted by those kinds of inner conflict, and yet, it’s also the skillful means of the language of Zen that it draws out that language of conflict and puts it into koans where we can really see it and can make it explicit. Then we can see what we’ve been up to.
We can see that we’re always engaged in feeling like there’s something wrong with me that I’ve got to get rid of, or there’s something missing I’ve got to get—the whole fantasy of he’s got it and I don’t. All these are the sources of inner turmoil and inner self hate that we project out into these old stories and try to wrestle with metaphorically and emotionally. But the real resolution of any of these conflicts is never going to be one side killing off the other. We never kill off anything in ourselves, or at least I hope we don’t. The resolution in our practice needs to look a lot more like the resolution in this dialogue where two old practice partners play with their difference, play with the whole idea of coming and going, getting or not getting.
The playful dialogue between Kuei-shan and Liu can illustrate for us both the peaceful resolution of different aspects of the self and the resolution of the conflicts that occur when we encounter real differences in the world, differences like those between men and women, that are not simply erased or dissolved into oneness.
What with all the images of cows and water buffalos in this koan, I find myself thinking of it in terms of a children’s book, one with animals as the characters. And I imagined a little children’s book about Duck and Bunny.
Bunny is always complaining that Duck just paddles slowly around in his little pond all day and never wants to go anywhere. Duck complains Bunny is always running around and doesn’t know how to sit still. Duck is noisy and quacks and quacks; Bunny is very quiet and just nibbles her food. (And she has this rather unpleasant habit of eating her own poop—rabbits are coprophagic after all—but maybe that wouldn’t be in a children’s book. Never mind … ) “Why can’t you be more like me?” each one says to the other.
And I would imagine this little picture book, with each page showing Duck and Bunny talking about their differences. One is fat and waddles, the other is sleek and fast. One loves the water, the other hates getting wet. But in the end, on the very last page of the book, you would see Duck and Bunny holding hands and the caption would be, Duck and Bunny are friends.
This is the lesson of our koan, as well. Kuei-shan and Liu are friends. They’re very different, yet they are also very much the same. Their differences both do and don’t make a difference.
Can we look this way at the different halves of ourselves that are so used to being in conflict, the differences that we think make such a big difference? Instead of having one half triumph over the other, instead of having a winner and a loser within ourselves, how about if the two sides were friends?