Hsueh-feng (Jap. Seppo) served as cook while at the monastery. One day the meal was late. Tê-shan (Jap. Tokusan) arrived at the Dharma hall holding his bowls. Hsueh-feng remarked, “Old fellow, the gong has not yet rung, the drum has not yet sounded. So where are you going with the bowls?” At that, Tê-shan returned to his quarters. Hsueh-feng told Yen-t’ou (Jap. Ganto) about this. And Yen-t’ou remarked, “As you might expect, Tê-shan does not yet understand the last word.”
Hearing of this, Tê-shan called an attendant to summon Yen-t’ou and asked, “Don’t you approve of this old monk?” Yen-t’ou whispered his intended meaning, whereupon Tê-shan desisted.
The next day when he went to the Dharma hall to speak, Tê-shan was not the same as usual. Rubbing his hands and laughing, Yen-t’ou cried, “Luckily, the old fellow has understood the last word. From now on, no one under heaven will be able to prevail over him.”
This koan starts out as a story about getting things right and getting things wrong. Hsueh-feng is the cook, and the meal is late. Somehow, that doesn’t figure in the story, though you’d think it was Hsueh-feng’s responsibility to get the food out on time. Instead, it features the old teacher Tê-shan who comes down to the Dharma hall at the usual time for meals. Hsueh-feng says, in effect, “Hey, what are you doing here? The gong hasn’t sounded yet.” Tê-shan doesn’t say a word, he just turns around and goes back to his room. Tê-shan has gotten the time wrong, but it’s not hard to see that Hsueh-feng might be doing something wrong in return by criticizing his teacher. We have in our zendo many moments like this. I give my students lots of opportunity to treat me like Tê-shan; I make lots of mistakes. I’m always getting the time wrong and during the week, I can somehow never remember whether it’s the night to have a service or not, whether we’re going to the altar in the back room or the front room. Someone’s always having to correct me, giving my students lots of opportunities just like in this case. I hope by the time I’m Tê-shan’s age (he’s supposed to be eighty in this story) I respond to corrections with as much grace as he does.
Hsueh-feng has a certain arrogance about him, a sense of being somebody. Being the cook is usually right up there with being the head monk in a monastery, and he’s a little proud of his position and at catching his teacher off. His friend Yen-t’ou sees that and does something subtle in response. He doesn’t reprove Hsueh-feng for his bad behavior in the way that Hsueh-feng reproved Tê-shan. He doesn’t fall into the trap of criticizing him for criticizing. He sets up a little game with Tê-shan for Hsueh-feng’s sake. He says to Hsueh-feng, “Tê-shan doesn’t understand the last word.” He’s really setting a little trap for him (and for us). Tê-shan hears about this and calls him in and says, “What are you doing?” and Yen-t’ou whispers something into his ear. Here, the koan is setting another little hook for you, the listener. In dokusan you might be asked, “What did Yen-t’ou whisper in Tê-shan’s ear?” Whatever it was, Tê-shan is silent and just nods. The next day, however, he’s different. Yen-t’ou gets up in front of everybody and says, “The old man has finally gotten the last word.” Now, we don’t hear how Hsueh-feng reacts to this whole little play. We end up standing in for Hsuehfeng; how do we react to this little drama, how do we react to the whole idea that the old man didn’t have the last word and now gets it? What’s the last word? It’s a wonderful phrase that Yen-t’ou apparently used a number of times in his teaching. It’s a phrase like “original face,” one that sends people running off looking in all the wrong places for its meaning.
What do we think of when we hear something like “the last word”? Here, it seems to imply a final insight that would make the old man impeccable—he wouldn’t make anymore dumb mistakes like the one he made yesterday. As I said, at one level this kind of story is about what it means to get it right or get it wrong. When we start out practicing it looks like the zendo is full of rules and rituals that are easy to get wrong, and we think that our task as students is to learn to get them right. But the deeper lesson is how to get them wrong, how to be able to get them wrong in the manner of Tê-shan. If we think that the way to avoid Hsueh-feng’s criticism is to never make a mistake, we end up endlessly judgmental and critical. Every zendo I’ve been in seems to contain a person who is the house scold; someone who has been around awhile and who thinks he or she has it right and that it is his or her job to remind everyone else what the right way is. For the rest of us, the challenge is to respond to scolding by not reciprocating it, to meet a scowl with a smile.
Another way to understand a koan like this is to try to identify in turn with each of the characters, the way we try to understand a dream by seeing each part of the dream as an aspect of ourselves.
Tê-shan can represent the wise part of ourselves, the part that feels stable and centered in what we are doing. After we’ve practiced even a little while, we may develop some feeling for that. Yet there’s always this other part, the Hsueh-feng part, that keeps nagging at us, “You’re not doing it right.” He says that even to Tê-shan. All of us have an inner voice that, once in a while, or maybe a lot of the time, tells us, “You’re not doing it right.” Here it’s done relatively playfully. There’s a little one-up-manship involved, but there’s none of the real nastiness that we tend to bring to the part when we play Hsueh-feng ourselves. So the question is going to be, how is the Tê-shan part of ourselves, the part that is settled, the part that we admire, the part that we want to be like more of the time, going to get in accord with the Hsueh-feng self-critical part that says, “See, you’re still making mistakes.” How many times in dokusan do I hear people bringing in some version of that. Even though I know this lesson, I’m still making the same mistakes. Over and over and over again.
Now, Yen-t’ou steps up and makes explicit our curative fantasy, the curative fantasy of the last word. If I get that, Hsueh-feng will shut up and leave me alone once and for all. In an interview, Joko was once asked, “Do you think some day you’ll finally achieve total complete enlightenment, the anutara samyak sambodhi in the Heart Sutra?” I can just picture the look on Joko’s face when she says, “I hope a thought like that would never even cross my mind.” Wu-men’s commentary says, “As for the last word, neither Yen-t’ou nor Tê-shan has ever seen it, even in a dream.” But Hsueh-feng has seen it in his dream, that’s the difference. And a lot of us see it in our dreams. It’s the fantasy of finally “getting it” in a way that’s going to eliminate inner conflict. Ideally, the way we practice is modeled on Tê-shan’s reaction to Hsueh-feng; when he’s criticized, he says nothing, he just goes back to his room. In that way, he models not taking it personally, just letting it roll off his back. And that’s fine, if we can do it. Sometimes we can see that the criticism is empty, and we can just let it go. But other times, even when we see it modeled by a mature teacher, the lesson doesn’t sink in. Somehow that nonreactivity by itself doesn’t show Hsueh-feng that his criticism was off the mark. Hsueh-feng is reveling in his gotcha moment. What it takes to move things along is for Yen-t’ou to step in as a third party and draw out and make explicit what’s going on behind the scenes in Hsueh-feng’s private curative fantasy.
Yen-t’ou is able to do that because he occupies the position that the psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg calls standing in the spaces. We might describe that position as more or less psychicly equidistant between Hsueh-feng and Tê-shan. We could say that he talks the language of both self-states. While we’re all very familiar with our inner Hsueh-feng and Tê-shan, we often lose track of the role of the inner Yen-t’ou, the part that has to stand in the middle and mediate between the part that we idealize and the part that’s critical. It is a fundamental psychological truth that no conflict can ever be resolved by having one side simply eliminate the other. In every conflict, each side represents a motivational interest that ultimately must be acknowledged and given its due. We may long for love and new relationships; equally we may fear rejection and reinjury if we risk trusting anew. We cannot simply override our fear. It contains important lessons that only past trauma can teach us, lessons about the reality of danger and impermanence in the world. These lessons must be respected. At the same time, we cannot protect ourselves to the point of living in isolation, for then we will die from the lack of emotional oxygen. Each side must be listened to, each side must have its truths acknowledged.
Dissociation results from our inability, or our unwillingness, to hold conflicting parts of the self in mind at the same time. Although we may experience the conflict between parts of ourselves as painful, conflict is actually the solution, not the problem. We must gradually develop the capacity to forego the relative safety afforded by dissociation and allow ourselves to bear and work through inner conflict. Like a painful or tumultuous family reunion, ultimately everyone must be offered a place at the table.
This case is resolved playfully. Play is one way of standing in the spaces, of having an accepting, ironic distance on the parts of ourselves we normally take to be incompatible. When I first read this case many years ago, it was commonplace to use the Japanese names for the characters. Thus, Hsueh-feng was Seppo, Yen-t’ou was Ganto, and Tê-shan, Tokusan. The names Seppo and Ganto always reminded me of the Marx brothers and made me smile. And if we think about the whole story as a sort of Marx Brothers routine, we’ll probably get close to its lesson. Yen-t’ou (Ganto) is playing with Hsueh-feng (Seppo), and Tê-shan (Tokusan) is playing along.
We might have the fantasy that, as the years go by, we are going to become more and more like Tê-shan and nothing’s going to affect us. Everything is going to roll off our backs. This is a fantasy of going beyond inner conflict. Is that really what’s going to happen in practice? We may imagine that when we’re twenty-five (I did), but now thirty or forty years later, most of us are starting to get the idea that that’s not what’s happening. That’s the advantage of finally getting to this age and this stage of practice. You start getting a little more realistic about what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen. And one way of summing that up is saying that our inner Hsueh-feng is not going anywhere. The critical part of ourselves, the intrusive part, the part that doesn’t conform to our ego ideal is not going away. We have to find some way to come to terms with all parts of ourselves. Now, it’s true that Hsueh-feng will go on to become a teacher in his own right and that the critical part of ourselves can mellow into self-reflection. But that can only happen if we learn to accept our own negativity and not fan its flames by adding self-hate on top of self-hate in the name of self-improvement.
This koan is a model of playful engagement with all different aspects of ourselves. What did Yen-t’ou whisper into Tê-shan’s ear? Why was Tê-shan different the next day? And what’s the last word? If you still want to know, ask yourself, how would Groucho respond?