Dark-Enigma

 THE FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS WE HAVE BEEN tracing are Ch’an’s way of orienting us, its approach to the core aspiration of enlightenment as “seeing original-nature.” But once we are oriented, the next step is disorientation. And this, as we have seen, is the Ch’an wrecking-crew’s most fundamental methodology: the dismantling of our conceptual orientation. That means razing the entire Taoist/Ch’an ontology/cosmology that we have slowly come to understand through those foundational concepts, and that appears to be a system of answers. This understanding has brought us into a remarkable place, a remarkable way of knowing/experiencing consciousness and Cosmos and their interrelation. But in the end, Ch’an liberation resides outside words and ideas, answers and certainties and stories. And so, it requires that we dismantle them. As we will see, that is exactly what meditation and sangha-case (koan) training do: cultivate understanding outside of words and ideas and stories.

But this dismantling of concepts operates in the teachings too, the words and ideas, as in this moment from Bodhidharma that begins with the “original-nature” that is seen in awakening, then blurs a string of heavy-duty concepts together:

Original-nature is simply mind itself. Mind is Buddha.

Buddha Tao. And Tao is Ch’an.

Tao, Absence and Presence, tzu-jan (occurrence appearing of itself), ch’i (breath-force), rivers-and-mountains landscape, empty-mind, no-mind, Absence-mind, mirror-mind, original source-tissue mind, original-nature, original source-tissue face, Buddha, dharma, inner-pattern, ch’i-thought/mind, existence-tissue, Buddha-nature, Buddha-mind, prajna-wisdom: these are the terms that describe the contours of Taoist/Ch’an ontology/cosmology. Each term emphasizes a different aspect of that ontology/cosmology, but by now it is becoming clear that in the end they all blur into a single concept, a single linguistic darkness, and this darkness is itself the cosmological/ontological ground: that undifferentiated and generative tissue of the Cosmos seen as a single organic whole.

There was a name for this mysterious darkness: dark-enigma (), which is an image of two silk-cocoons suspended into a vat of purple-black dye, visible in the early version —where the horizontal element is either a rack from which the cocoons are suspended, or the water’s surface. Lao Tzu, with his sly humor, invented dark-enigma for the impossible task of naming existence-tissue as it is in and of itself before any names, before Absence and Presence give birth to one another, and before all those other words and concepts and distinctions we use to approach the fundamental nature of existence. For as we have seen, that undifferentiated existence-tissue is only differentiated when we begin to name it: individual things arising simultaneously with their names. And so, in the naming of words and ideas, that originary source tissue is unavoidably lost. Hence, dark-enigma as an opening into the wordless understanding that is essential to Ch’an.¹⁹ It is described perfectly in the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, which ends with its mysterious darkness:

In perennial Absence you see mystery,

and in perennial Presence you see appearance.

Though the two are one and the same,

once they arise, they differ in name.

One and the same they’re called dark-enigma,

dark-enigma deep within dark-enigma,

gateway of all mystery.

And dark-enigma appears in the name of the philosophical school that emphasized the ontological depths of Taoism and combined with newly-arrived Buddhism to form Ch’an (this page f.): Dark-Enigma Learning. There is a similar strategy in the Ch’an term emptiness empty (), which we have seen used a number of times (not least as a description of sky). Like dark-enigma, it is a way of saying emptiness emptied of conceptual content, before concepts including the concept of emptiness. But dark-enigma itself recurs at revealing moments in Ch’an texts. Sangha-Fundament, the Buddhist intellectual instrumental in combining Dark-Enigma Learning philosophy with imported Buddhism to create Ch’an, wrote in 410 that

a sage’s mastery of emptiness perfectly Absence-alive: that is the perspective of prajna-wisdom’s dark-enigma mirror.

And this passage from the Third Patriarch’s important “Fact-Mind Inscription” (commonly translated as “Faith/ Trust/Belief in Mind”) frames dark-enigma explicitly in the Taoist/Ch’an cosmological/ontological framework, with its fundamental concepts of dharma, emptiness, tzu-jan (occurrence appearing of itself):

When mind is undivided, the ten thousand

dharmas become primal unity existence-tissue,

primal unity existence-tissue all dark-enigma

in which you forget even emptiness itself.

Fathoming the ten thousand dharmas whole,

you return to occurrence appearing of itself.²⁰

Dark-enigma was taken as a dharma-name by many Ch’an figures, including Purport Dark-Enigma (Lin Chi: Jap. Rinzai). He spoke of dark-enigma in terms similar to Lao Tzu: “to grasp things and use them, but without names arising: that is called dark-enigma.”²¹ And he taught that once awakened to Buddha-nature, we “ride the surge of circumstances,” “a person of Tao dependent upon nothing,” and he calls this the “dark-enigma of all Buddhas.”²² Indeed, he said “Buddha-dharma is dark-enigma in quiet mystery,”²³ where quiet mystery () operates in a particular way at the deep cosmological/ontological level of dark-enigma, for its philosophical meaning is “things ever so slightly on the undifferentiated (not-yet-emergent) side of the ongoing origin-moment where the ten thousand things (Presence) emerge from Absence: forms not quite come into existence as differentiated entities or just barely vanished back into the undifferentiated ground.” And dark-enigma remained current in Ch’an thought: five-hundred years later, to take one example, No-Gate Gateway describes master Buddha-Land Mountain saying to his students:

Open wild origins and penetrate the depths of dark-enigma: that’s the only way to see your original-nature.²⁴

Dark-enigma is a return to consciousness prior to language and the distinction between consciousness and empirical reality, at a level where they are a single whole—vast and deep, everything and everywhere. Lao Tzu speaks of mind as a “dark-enigma mirror” and asks: “Can you polish the dark-enigma mirror / to a clarity beyond stain?” Hence, like Prajna-Able’s mirror (this page), empty-mind as a mirror prior to all concepts and distinctions (including the concept of mirror). As soon as it is conceptualized, named even with this first name, dark-enigma, the mirror’s immediacy and wholeness are lost.

Dark-enigma cannot be portrayed directly because it is exactly the generative existence-tissue prior to the distinctions of forms, of names, or even of consciousness separate from things. But in its blur of all the foundational ideas, dark-enigma points the way past language and the knowable to wordless awakening. Dark-enigma can only be known in immediate experience, but it is possible to suggest the nature of this experience—as Lao Tzu does when he describes meditation as cultivating “dark-enigma union,” or No-Gate Prajna-Clear when he says that we must “penetrate the depths of dark-enigma: that’s the only way to see your original-nature” (remembering the Ch’an description of awakening as “seeing original-nature”). And even at the beginning with Kuo Hsiang, the proto-Ch’an Dark-Enigma Learning philosopher, this dark-enigma mind is described as liberation:

no-mind inhabits the mystery of things…. This is the importance of being at the hinge of Tao. There, you can know dark-enigma’s extent. There, your movements range free.²⁵