When the Indian monk Bodhidharma, the First Ancestor of Zen Buddhism, brought his realization of the Buddha's teachings to China in the sixth century C.E., there followed a legendary encounter with the Chinese Emperor Wu, which I'll retell here in my own words for those unfamiliar with it.
Having heard that a monk of great wisdom had arrived in his country, Emperor Wu, who was a devout Buddhist, commanded an audience.
“I have built many monasteries and erected temples to honor the Dharma,” the Emperor greeted his guest. “Is there not great merit in this?”
“No merit whatsoever,” answered the ragged monk.
“Is that so?” replied the Emperor, who was no doubt a bit flustered at having received such a bold response. “What then, is the meaning of the holy truth?”
“Vast emptiness,” replied Bodhidharma. “Nothing holy.”
“Well then who are you,” demanded the Emperor, “who stands here before me?”
“I do not know,” said Bodhidharma; with this he walked off and spent the next nine years in a cave meditating, facing a wall.
Thus began the school of Buddhism known as Zen (or Ch'an, in China), as well as the tradition of Zen stories—mind-to-mind encounters on the Great Matter of the dharma, the Buddhist teachings of enlightenment. For the roughly 1,500 years that have passed since this snaggle-toothed monk went into his cave, such stories have succeeded in delighting, bewildering, and occasionally awakening those who have heard them. Beginning, it seems, with the unfortunate Emperor Wu, who, it is said, wrote the following verse on the occasion of Bodhidharma's death:
I saw him without seeing,
Encountered without meeting.
Now, as before,
I regret and lament.
The teachings of Zen Buddhism have continued to travel since the time of Emperor Wu, passing through Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, and finally coming ashore in America and Europe. This book, in recording the sayings and doings of American teachers and students, is intended as a small addition to the literature of this tradition which, ironically, calls itself:
A special transmission, outside the scriptures;
No reliance upon words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind;
Seeing into one's own nature, and the realization of Buddhahood.
The idea of compiling a collection of American Zen stories has been with me for some time, nearly from the beginning of my own introduction to formal practice in the 1980s. I'd been inspired early on by the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps, which introduced many Americans to the seemingly eccentric and paradoxical world of the Chinese and Japanese Zen masters. I was particularly drawn to the first part of that book, a collection of 101 traditional Zen stories from Chinese and Japanese sources, which preserved the oral tradition of mind-to-mind transmission of the dharma, teacher to student, across the centuries. As the years went by, I noticed these stories and similar traditional tales cropping up again and again in other books—but where, I began to wonder, were the new ones? I was certainly hearing them from my teachers and fellow practitioners, both at the Zen centers where I practiced, and at the Naropa Institute, the Buddhist-inspired university where I pursued my MFA in writing. While a few of the collections coming out included some contemporary Eastern and Western sources, and others featured the teachings of a particular Western teacher, I had yet to see a volume of stories that dealt with a broad range of what seemed to me a remarkable phenomenon: the migration of the ancient tradition of Zen Buddhism to the New World.
When I spoke to my own teacher, Abbott John Daido Loori of Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York about my idea for this book, he offered guarded encouragement. “It seems to me,” he said, “that some of the recent attempts at these sorts of collections have missed the point, the heart of the practice.” He admonished me to be thorough, and to make the writing of the book an extension of my own Zen practice. More than that: to make it inseparable from practice itself.
Heeding my teacher's call to practice has included, over the past year and a half, sitting zazen and listening to talks at a variety of Zen centers; meeting, interviewing, and occasionally being challenged by nearly a hundred Zen teachers and long-time practitioners; trying to remain present while dealing with rental cars and airports, getting lost in major cities, and tussling with deadlines; and struggling with my own difficulty in articulating a tradition based on an experience—seeing into one's true nature—that is beyond words. As always, the practice continues.
I feel, as is sometimes said in Zen training, “like a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull.”