6. The Psychological Antecedent and the Content of the Zen Experience
Since the early days of Zen, its practice has been mistakenly regarded as that of mere quietism or a kind of technics of mental tranquillization. Hence Hui-nêng's expostulation about it and Nan-yüeh's warning to Ma-tsu.2 The sitting cross-legged is the form of Zen, while inwardly the Zen consciousness is to be nursed to maturity. When it is fully matured, it is sure to break out as satori, which is an insight into the Unconscious. There is something noetic in the Zen experience, and this is what determines the entire course of Zen discipline. Tai-hui was fully conscious of this fact and was never tired of upholding it against the other school.
That satori or Zen experience is not the outcome of quiet-sitting or mere passivity, with which Zen discipline has been confused very much even by the followers of Zen themselves, can be inferred from the utterances or gestures that follow the final event. How shall we interpret Lin-chi's utterance, 'There is not much in the Buddhism of Huang-po'? Again, how about his punching the ribs of Tai-yü? These evidently show that there was something active and noetic in his experience. He actually grasped something that met his approval.
There is no doubt that he found what he had all the time been searching for, although at the moment when he began his searching he had no idea of what it meant—for how could he? If he remained altogether passive, he could never have made such a positive assertion. As to his gesture, how self-assuring it was, which grew out of his absolute conviction! There is nothing whatever passive about it.1
The situation is well described by Dai-o Kokushi when he says: 'By a "special transmission outside the sūtra-teaching" is meant to understand penetratingly just one phrase by breaking both the mirror and the image, by transcending all forms of ideation, by making no distinction whatever between confusion and enlightenment, by paying no attention to the presence or the absence of a thought, by neither getting attached to nor keeping oneself away from the dualism of good and bad. The one phrase which the follower of Zen is asked to ponder (kung-fu) and find the final solution of is "Your own original features even before you were born of your parents."
In answering this one ought not to cogitate on the meaning of the phrase, nor try to get away from it; do not reason about it, nor altogether abandon reasoning; respond just as you are asked and without deliberation, just as a bell rings when it is struck, just as a man answers when he is called by name. If there were no seeking, no pondering, no contriving as to how to get at the meaning of the phrase, whatever it may be, there would be no answering—hence no awakening.'
While it is difficult to determine the content of Zen experience merely by means of those utterances and gestures which involuntarily follow the experience—which is, indeed, a study in itself—I give in the appendices some of them which are culled indiscriminately from the history of Zen.1 Judging from these utterances, we can see that all these authors have had an inner perception, which put an end to whatever doubts and mental anxieties from which they may have been suffering; and further, that the nature of this inner perception did not allow itself to be syllogistically treated, as it had no logical connection with what has preceded it.
Satori as a rule expresses itself in words which are not intelligble to the ordinary mind; sometimes the expression is merely descriptive of the experience-feeling, which naturally means nothing to those who have never had such feelings within themselves. So far as the intellect is concerned, there is an unsurpassable gap between the antecedent problem and its consequent solution; the two are left logically unconnected. When Lin-chi asked about the ultimate principle of Buddhism, he was given thirty blows by his master Huang-po. After he had attained satori and understood the meaning of his experience, he merely said, 'There is not much in Huang-po's Buddhism.' We are left ignorant as to what this 'not much' really is. When this 'what' was demanded by Tai-yü, Lin-chi simply poked his ribs.
These gestures and utterances do not give the outsider any clue to the content of the experience itself. They seem to be talking in signs. This logical discontinuity or discreteness is characteristic of all Zen teaching. When Ch'ing-ping1 was asked what the Mahāyanā was, he said, 'The bucket-rope.' When asked about the Hīnayāna, he replied: 'The coin-string'; about the moral impurities (āsrava), 'The bamboo-basket'; about the moral purities (anāsrava), 'The wooden dipper'. These answers are apparently nonsensical, but from the Zen point of view they are easily digested, for the logical discontinuity is thereby bridged over. The Zen experience evidently opens a closed door revealing all the treasures behind it. It suddenly leaps over to the other side of logic and starts a dialectics of its own.
Psychologically, this is accomplished when what is known as 'abandonment', 'or 'throwing oneself over the precipice', takes place. This 'abandonment' means the moral courage of taking risks; it is plunging into the unknown which lies beyond the topography of relative knowledge. This unknown realm of logical discontinuity must be explored personally; and this is where logic turns into psychology, it is where conceptualism has to give way to life-experience.
We cannot, however, 'abandon' ourselves just because we wish to do so. It may seem an easy thing to do, but after all it is the last thing any being can do, for it is done only when we are most thoroughly convinced that there is no other way to meet the situation. We are always conscious of a tie, slender enough to be sure, but how strong when we try to cut it off! It is always holding us back when we wish to throw ourselves at the feet of an all-merciful One, or when we are urged to identify ourselves with a noble cause or anything that is grander than mere selfishness. Before being able to do this there must be a great deal of 'searching', or 'contriving', or 'pondering'.1 It is only when this process is brought to maturity that this 'abandoning' can take place. We can say that this 'contriving' is a form of purgation.
When all the traces of egotism are purged away, when the will-to-live is effectively put down, when the intellect gives up its hold on the discrimination between subject and object, then all the contrivances cease, the purgation is achieved, and the 'abandonment' is ready to take place.2
All Zen masters are, therefore, quite emphatic about completing the whole process of 'contriving and searching'. For an abandonment to be thoroughgoing, it is necessary for the preliminary process to be also thoroughgoing. The masters all teach the necessity of going on with this 'searching' as if one were fighting against a deadly enemy, or 'as if a poisonous arrow were piercing a vital part of the body, or as if one were surrounded on all sides by raging flames, or as if one had lost both his parents, or as if one were disgraced owing to one's inability to pay off a debt of a thousand pieces of gold'.
Shōichi Kokushi, the founder of Tōfukuji monastery, advises one to 'think yourself to be down an old deep well; the only thought you then have will be to get out of it, and you will be desperately engaged in finding a way of escape; from morning to evening this one thought will occupy the entire field of your consciousness'. When one's mind is so fully occupied with one single thought, strangely or miraculously there takes place a sudden awakening within oneself. All the 'searching and contriving' ceases, and with it comes the feeling that what was wanted is here, that all is well with the world and with oneself, and that the problem is now for the first time successfully and satisfactorily solved. The Chinese have the saying, 'When you are in an impasse, there is an opening.' The Christians teach, 'Man's extremity is God's opportunity.'
The main thing to do when a man finds himself in this mental extremity is to exhaust all his powers of 'searching and contriving', which means to concentrate all his energy on one single point and see the farthest reach he can make in this frontal attack. Whether he is pondering a knotty problem of philosophy, or mathematics, or contriving a means of escape from oppressive conditions, or seeking a passage of liberation from an apparently hopeless situation, his empirical mind, psychologically speaking, is taxed to its limit of energy; but when the limit is transcended a new source of energy in one form or another is tapped.
Physically, an extraordinary amount of strength or endurance is exhibited to the surprise of the man himself; morally, often on a battlefield a soldier manifests great courage, performing deeds of audacity; intellectually, a philosopher, if he is a really great one, clears up a new way of looking at Reality; religiously, we have such spiritual phenomena as conversion, conformation, reformation, salvation to the Christians, and satori, enlightenment, intuition, parāvritti, etc., to the Buddhists.
All these various orders of phenomena are explainable, as far as psychology goes, by the same law; accumulation, saturation, and explosion. But what is peculiar to the religious experience is that it involves the whole being of the individual, that it affects the very foundation of his character. And besides, the content of this experience may be described in the terminology of either Christian faith or Buddhist philosophy, according to the nature of its antecedents, or according to the surroundings and education of the particular individual concerned. That is, he interprets the experience in conformity to his own intellectual resources, and to him this interpretation is the best and the only plausible one to be given to the facts in hand.
He cannot accept them in any other light, for to do so will be the same as rejecting them as illusive and devoid of meaning. As Buddhism has no such creeds as are cherished by Christians, who are Christians because of their intellectually conforming themselves to the theology and tradition of their forefathers, Buddhists give their religious experience an altogether different colouring. Especially to Zen followers such terms as divine grace, revelation, mystic union, etc., are foreign and sound quite unfamiliar. No matter how closely psychologically related one experience may be to the other, Buddhist or Christian, it begins to vary widely as soon as it is subsumed under categories of the Christian or the Buddhist ideology.
As stated before, the antecedents of the experience are thus designated by Zen masters altogether differently from those of the Christian mystics. Stigmata, ligature, expurgation, road of the cross, the anguish of love, etc.—all such terms have no meaning in Zen experience. The antecedents required by the latter are concentration, accumulation, self-forgetting, throwing oneself down the precipice, going over to the other side of birth-and-death, leaping, abandonment, cutting off what precedes and what follows, etc. There is here absolutely nothing that may be called religious by those who are familiar only with the other set of phraseology.
To make clearer this psychological process of 'self-forgetting' and 'cutting off both the past and the future', let me cite some of the classical examples.
The monk Ting came to Lin-chi and asked, 'What is the essence of Buddhism?' Chi came down from his straw chair, seized the monk, gave him a slap, and let him go. Ting stood still. A monk nearby said, 'O Ting, why don't you make a bow?' Ting was about to bow when he came to a realization.1
This is the brief statement in the language of Lin-chi of the event that happened to Ting. Brief though it is, we can gather from it all that is essential, all that we need to know concerning Ting's Zen experience. First of all, he did not come to Lin-chi casually. There is no doubt that his question was the outcome of a long pondering and an anxious search after the truth. Before the koan system was yet in vogue, Zen followers did not definitely know how to ask a question, as we saw in the case of Lin-chi.
Intellectual puzzles are everywhere, but the difficulty is to produce a question which is vital and on which depends the destiny of the questioner himself. When such a question is brought to light, the very asking is more than half the answering. Just a little movement on the part of the master may be sufficient to open up a new life in the questioner. The answer is not in the master's gesture or speech; it is in the questioner's own mind which is now awakened. When Ting asked the master about the essence of Buddhism, the question was no idle one; it came out of his inmost being, and he never expected to have it answered intellectually.
When he was seized and slapped by the master, he was probably not at all surprised, in the sense that he was taken aback and at a loss what to do; but he was surprised in this sense that he was entirely put out of the beaten track of logic where he was most likely still lingering, although he was not conscious of it himself. He was carried away from the earth where he used to stand and to which he seemed to be inevitably bound; he was carried away he knew not where, only that he was now lost to the world and to himself. This was the meaning of his 'standing still'. All his former efforts to find an answer to his question were put to naught; he was at the edge of the precipice to which he clung with all his remaining strength, but the master relentlessly pushed him over. Even when he heard the voice of the attending monk calling out to him, he was not fully awakened from his stupefaction. It was only when he was about to make the usual bows that he recovered his sense—the sense in which logical discontinuity was bridged over and in which the answer to his question was experienced within himself—the sense in which he read the ultimate meaning of all existence, having nothing further to seek.
This denouement, however, could not have been attained had it not been preceded by the regular course of concentration, accumulation, and abandonment. If Ting's question had been an abstract and conceptual one which had no roots in his very being, there could not have been truth and ultimacy in his understanding of the answer.
To give another illustration which will be illuminating when considered in connection with Ting, Yün-mên1 (d. 949) was the founder of the school bearing his name. His first master was Mu-chou, who had urged Lin-chi to ask Huang-po concerning the essence of Buddhism. Men was not satisfied with his knowledge of Buddhism which had been gained from books, and came to Mu-chou to have a final settlement of the intellectual balance-sheet with him. Seeing Men approach the gate, Mu-chou shut it in his face. Men could not understand what it all meant, but he knocked and a voice came from within:
'Who are you?'
'My name is Yün-mên. I come from Chih-hsing.'
'What do you want?'
'I am unable to see into the ground of my being and most earnestly wish to be enlightened.'
Mu-chou opened the gate, looked at Men, and then closed it. Not knowing what to do, Men went away. This was a great riddle, indeed, and some time later he came back to Mu-chou. But he was treated in the same way as before. When Yün-mên came for a third time to Mu-chou's gate, his mind was firmly made up, by whatever means, to have a talk with the master. This time as soon as the gate was opened he squeezed himself through the opening. The intruder was at once seized by the chest and the master demanded: 'Speak! Speak!' Men was bewildered and hesitated. Chou, however, lost no time in pushing him out of the gate again, saying, 'You good-for-nothing fellow!' As the heavy gate swung shut, it caught one of Men's legs, and he cried out: 'Oh! Oh!' But this opened his eyes to the significance of the whole proceeding.
It is easy to infer from this record that Yün-mên's Zen experience had a long and arduous preliminary course, although there is in the record no allusion to his psychological attitude towards the whole affair. His 'searching and contriving' did not of course begin with this experience; it came to an end when he called on Mu-chou. He knew no means of escape from the dilemma in which he found himself; his only hope was centred in Mu-chou. But what answer did he get from the master? To be looked at and shut out—what relation could this have to his earnest questioning about his inner self?
On his way home he must have pondered the new situation to the limit of his mental capacity. This pondering, this searching must have been intensified by his second visit to the master, and on the third visit it was fast approaching a culmination, and most naturally ended dramatically. When he was requested by Mu-chou to speak out if he had anything to say, to utter a word if there was something that required expression, his Zen consciousness became fully matured, and only a touch was needed to change it into an awakening. The needed touch came in the form of an intense physical pain. His cry, 'Oh! Oh!' was at the same time the cry of satori, an inner perception of his own being, whose depth now for the first time he has personally sounded so that he could really say, 'I know, for I am it!'
(This psychological process has been depicted here somewhat conjecturely, but it will grow more convincing later when the psychology of the koan exercise is described according to the various records left by the masters, and also according to the directions given by them to their devotees.)
2 First Series, p. 237 ff.
1 One day St. Francis was sitting with his companions when he began to groan and said, 'There is hardly a monk on earth who perfectly obeys his superior.' His companions much astonished said, 'Explain to us, Father, what is perfect and supreme obedience.' Then, comparing him who obeys to a corpse, he said: 'Take a dead body and put it where you will, it will make no resistance: when it is in one place it will not murmur; when you take it away from there it will not object; put it in a pulpit, it will not look up but down; wrap it in purple and it will only look doubly pale.' (Paul Sabatier's Life of St. Francis, pp. 260-1.) While it is difficult to tell what is the real purport of this, it may appear as if St. Francis wished his monks to be literally like a corpse; but there is something humorous about the remark when he says, 'Put it in a pulpit....' The Zen Buddhist would interpret it as meaning to keep one's mind in a perfect state of perspicuity which perceives a flower as red and a willow-tree as green, without putting anything of its own confused subjectivity into it. A state of passivity, indeed, and yet there is also fullness of activity in it. A form of passive activity, we may call it.
1 Some have already been given in my Essays in Zne Buddhism, Vol. i, pp. 248 et seqwhere I have collected more of these utterances as they stand in the original.
1 Ch ing-ping ling-tsun, 845-919. As regards his interview with T'sui-wei, see elsewhere.
1 The Christians would say, 'a great deal of seeking, asking, and knocking'.
2 James gives in his Varieties of Religious Experience (pp. 321 ff.) the story of Antoinette Bourignon, who, finding her spiritual obstacle in the possession of a penny, threw it away and started her long spiritual journey thus absolutely free from earthly cares. 'A penny' is the symbol of the last thread of egotism which so effectively ties us up to a world of relativity. Slender though the thread is, it is sufficiently strong for all of us. The cutter is given to the student of Zen in the shape of a koan, as will be seen later on.
1 Lin-chi-lu.
1 Yün-mên lu.