Sangha-Case

 MEDITATION IS THE HEART OF CH’AN PRACTICE, its primary means of understanding the nature of consciousness and coming to inhabit that generative origin-moment/place. Ch’an’s form of meditation is at bottom a form of wu-wei practice, and it is supplemented by another quite different form of wu-wei practice: sangha-case training. Ch’an literature (written and oral) existed primarily as “records” of the lives and teachings of Ch’an masters. These records contained many moments of poetic distillation: enigmatic sayings and wild antics intended to upend reason and dismantle conceptual structures. These moments of story and fable operated with poetic immediacy, rather than the usual discursive or explanatory use of language. They were performative, enacting insight rather than explaining it. Eventually, Ch’an teachers began drawing especially revealing moments from these records, moments that distill the essential insights of Ch’an, and assigning them as puzzles for students to ponder, as for example the perplexing answers to the question “What is Buddha” (this page), or those from the Blue-Cliff Record suggesting thusness is the essence of Ch’an (this page), or these especially concise fables also from the Blue-Cliff Record:

A monk asked Hundred-Elder Mountain: “What is the grand and wondrous affair?”

“To sit alone on Valiant-Vast Mountain,” replied Hundred-Elder.

The monk bowed. Hundred-Elder struck him a blow. [chapter 26]

Head-monk Samadhi-Still asked Purport Dark-Enigma: “What is the Buddha-dharma’s great ch’i-mind meaning?”

Dark-Enigma descended from his meditation seat, grabbed hold of Samadhi-Still and gave him a single slap, then pushed him away.

Samadhi-Still froze and just stood there.

“Head-monk Samadhi-Still,” called out another monk, “why don’t you bow?”

Samadhi-Still thereupon bowed reverently, and suddenly had a great awakening. [chapter 32]

A monk asked Cloud-Gate Mountain: “What is the entrance every fleck of dust offers into samadhi’s three-shadowed earth?”

Cloud-Gate replied: “Rice in the rice-bowl, water in the water-pail.” [chapter 50]

Such scraps of story came to be known as kung-an (, now widely known in its Japanese pronunciation: koan), and they were gathered into collections for use by later teachers and students. Thus was created a remarkable new form of Chinese literature, the best-known examples of which being the Blue-Cliff Record (1125) and No-Gate Gateway (1228)—though that sense of the wild and paradoxical suffuses the seminal Taoist texts: Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu. And in the latter, Ch’an-like stories and fables proliferate, often functioning very much like sangha-cases:

When Lao Tzu died, Modest-Ease went in to mourn for him. He shouted three times, then left.

Kung-an means a “court case,” and more literally a “public case.” The term was adapted to the Ch’an situation for a number of reasons. Ch’an masters originally conducted kung-an training in “public,” when the monastic community was gathered together. A kung-an is a factual situation that needs to be “understood” accurately, like a court case. And finally, each kung-an represents a kind of precedent to which later practitioners can refer. Hence: “sangha-case,” sangha meaning “a Buddhist community.”

Like meditation, sangha-cases are a means of resolving what is the most fundamental question for Ch’an practice, and perhaps for human consciousness in general: how to move past the illusory separation between consciousness and Cosmos, which entails erasing the seeming separation between thought and silence, subjective and objective, mind and landscape, self and Cosmos. To do this, sangha-case practice used paradox to instill doubt and confusion, to deconstruct logical thought and explanation, eventually dismantling the very structures of self, whereupon the student acts without thought, spontaneously and selflessly. As in meditation, this returns consciousness to its original empty-mind nature: empty-mind that precludes the distancing of things as objects, allowing an immediate experience of landscape’s ten thousand things in and of themselves, as elemental mystery. Sangha-case practice also reveals empty-mind as indistinguishable from the elemental mystery of Tao’s great transformation—and as that great transformation is boundless and inexhaustible, consciousness is revealed as boundless and inexhaustible.

With its paradox and wild antics, sangha-case training may seem daunting; but once we understand how it works, it becomes quite straightforward. Like Ch’an meditation, sangha-case practice is most fundamentally wu-wei practice. And indeed, the two were closely related in the monastery, for it was meditation’s cultivation of empty-mind that prepared one to act from the generative Absence of empty-mind in response to a sangha-case. From the beginning, when Ch’an teachers examined students, they looked for a student who moved in a direct and single-minded way—forceful, without self-doubt or hesitation—for that was a student who had mastered wu-wei. And when that examination process was formalized into sangha-case training, wu-wei was the guiding assumption.

Solutions to sangha-cases always involve responding inside the enigma and with a spontaneous immediacy operating at a level that precedes thought and analysis. The correct answer to a sangha-case is never a seemingly reasoned and appropriate response. Instead, it is whatever emerges spontaneously from that silent emptiness where the logical construction of thoughts has not yet begun, and such answers are only possible when a student has come to inhabit the wholeness of wu-mind (“no-mind/Absence-mind”) at that generative origin-moment/place, a habitation that is cultivated in meditation practice. Hence, at the cosmological/ontological level, the response is wu-mind (“Absence-mind”) moving at the most profound level as wu-wei (“Absence-action”).

Such responses take two forms: spoken words or physical action. When a sangha-case plays out in words, it grows directly out of a meditative understanding of wu-wei in consciousness: an understanding in which thoughts are not the calculating machinery of an isolated self, but instead emerge with selfless spontaneity from that origin-moment/place. Hence, thought as Tao or tzu-jan occurrence. Ch’an masters described this mental process as already awakened, in contrast to the convenional dhyana idea of enlightenment as the perfection of thoughtless and tranquil emptiness.

And as physical action, a “correct” response is not unlike a master calligrapher at work (this page f.): selfless action as integral to the unfurling Cosmos, action moving with the dynamic energy of the Cosmos. But it is also meant to replace words and ideas with the sheer thusness of things, the master’s wild and surprising antics startling the student’s mind out of analytical thought and into the immediate empty-mind experience of that thusness.

Either way, words or actions, sangha-cases are about enacting awakening, rather than explaining it. They cultivate that sage belonging as an organic part of the great transformation of things. Here again is why Ch’an is described as a teaching outside of words and ideas. Even when words are used, they are used not for what they say, but for what they enact. In this, like meditation, sangha-case training directly transmits that experience of empty-mind belonging.

We find the roots of this practice in Kuo Hsiang, one of the great Dark-Enigma Learning philosophers who offered this distillation:

The ten thousand things can only take tzu-jan as their source. It is wu-wei action that makes tzu-jan tzu-jan…. If you move as wu-wei, you’re self-reliant; and so, act as source.

This self-reliance of wu-wei action as the source is crucial to Ch’an: in meditation, but perhaps most apparently, in sangha-case practice. It is in this self-reliance that one succeeds in sangha-case training, self-reliance that is radically transformative and liberating; and it was described that way from the beginning, as in this passage from Lao Tzu that might describe meditation, though in its play on the double meaning of (“not/Absence”), it is perhaps an even better description of sangha-case training:

To work at learning brings more each day.

To work at Way brings less each day,

less and still less

until you’re Absence’s own doing/action [wu-wei].

And when you’re Absence’s own doing/action, there’s nothing [wu] you don’t do/act [wei].

In wu-wei, we live integral to Tao, the Cosmos as the generative tissue that “does” everything. So, just as there is nothing Tao/Cosmos doesn’t do, “there’s nothing you don’t do.” And again, as that great transformation is boundless and inexhaustible, we are boundless and inexhaustible, and therefore radically “self-reliant.” This represents liberation not only from the conscribed limitation and alienation of self, but also from death, for death can only apply to that now-vanished identity-center self. This is self-reliance as radical liberation. In an account remarkably similar to descriptions we will see of awakening in the Ch’an literature, Chuang Tzu described those who have mastered that liberation as moving with a radical self-reliance in which they live a cosmological kind of wild freedom:

Companions in their realm to the Maker-of-Things [Tao], they’re in human form for now, wandering the one ch’I that breathes through all heaven and earth. For them, life is a useless appendage, a swollen tumor, and death is like a boil breaking open or pus draining from a festering sore. So how would they choose between life and death, before and after?

On loan from everything else, they’ll soon be entrusted back to the one body. Forgetting liver and gallbladder, abandoning ears and eyes, they’ll continue on again, tumbling and twirling through a blur of endings and beginnings. They roam at ease beyond the tawdry dust of this world, Absence’s own doing/action [wu-wei] wandering boundless and free through the selfless unfolding of things.³³