inquiry and koans-- one old lady's take

This is a subject that has come up on a few other threads; I find myself offering my opinion/experience-- for whatever it's worth. Lest my enthusiasm about "sharing" start to feel like a kind of intrusive "hovering" over those who have opened up their quandries, I thought I'd break out the topic in a more general way. That way anyone who's got something to say, or ask, doesn't have to feel a lot of personal pressure.

A couple or three years ago Jake and I got into a conversation about "Genjokoan." I had come across the idea that the word means something like "self-existing koan"-- that is, the riddle at the heart of your own life and experience. I was struck how that idea cleared up something that had bothered me: so many of these traditional formulations, whether the set questions of inquiry or of koans, seem archaic and unrelated to my life and preoccupations as a 21st century Western woman. I'm not so interested in an exercise of re-enacting something that was alive for someone else, long ago, somewhere else. I pretty much have my hands full with my life.

But the principle-- of "honoring the questions" that are alive, burning a hole in my gut-- that seemed like it could help a lot. And when I've taken the prerogative of bushwhacking off the traditional path, and articulating for myself what my own burning questions are-- there have been big surprises.

And the experience has made some of the historic canon open up: I can imagine being a dedicated monk doing all that meditation, studying the texts, making the Zen master the ultimate authority in all things, thinking I understood the basics of the buddhadharma-- that "all beings without exception have buddhanature," for instance. And I can imagine the confrontational moment of the master interrupting a bunch of us students arguing philosophy: "Does a dog have buddhanature? NO!"

It would be shock therapy! It would be the equivalent of your asking your teacher a reasonable philosophical or practice question and being shouted at to Shut the F*ck Up. And, you know, our lives deliver those shocks to us all the time: we don't get what we want so bad we can taste it. Terrible things happen to us and our loved ones. Or even some small, undramatic thing gets under our skin, and we can't explain our irrational reaction to it and how it changes our course.

Kate, are you able to describe how you have engaged a koan, what you do with it?

The only formal koan I've ever spent any time with was that classic dog-buddhanature-NO one. I did the usual repeating it to myself, meeting with the teacher, thinking about it-- and gave it up as something I couldn't get into. After some indeterminate time, I began to notice all the battles I had around being told "no," and about whether I was allowed to say "no." And I began to feel, bodily, what a big deal "no" was. You know, "stuff got real": it stopped being a kind of quaint old story about dead Zen guys and started to be "the story of my life." It stopped being an assignment from my teacher and became a kind of-- stalker, for awhile. It made things worse; it made me notice stuff I thought I had "dealt with" long before, stuff I thought I had "solved." It re-sensitized me to disappointment and grief and failure and fear.

Feeling all the stuff you've spent your life trying not to feel-- that can't possibly be the answer, can it?

"Feeling all the stuff you've spent your life trying not to feel-- that can't possibly be the answer, can it? "-- that's one way of re-stating the koan at the point at which it had taken on a life of its own and overtaken my practice. It wasn't anything I was doing-- or had the option of not doing. It just kept speaking to me out of the incidents and circumstances of my life.

A related version was "What if 'no' is the right answer?"

Interesting Kate. Inquiry questions certainly seem as prone as any other practice to the usual traps:

Outcome oriented: "I'm going to ask myself Who Am I until I get ________________ (outcome desired)."

or comparing/judging: "So and so said when he did this he realized x, so why am I not getting that result? Damn, it's not working." (which is also outcome oriented).

or intellectualizing: "Who am I? Well, I'm this, but I know it said in the book I'm actually that, so how can I figure that out...." (which still has an outcome oriented element to it, too.)

We are so wired to seek outcomes, to want things.

Bringing it back around to my own tradition, we want the relationship with God to be mercantile - if I do this, I get that. Here's the contract I wrote up, Lord. Now when do I get my paycheck? Hm? Come on, I keep doing all the things on this checklist here, where's my prize? But it doesn't work like that. This moment is the gift. This miracle - that I am alive, experiencing this mysterious and rich moment of life, participating in this moment of Creation, already held in God's embrace and loved just as I am right now. Recognizing that is the prize.

There's a great story in the Art of Just Sitting book about a zen teacher who when he was a student was always given kitchen duty. And he'd be in there cooking, and thinking about this and that. And one day he heard a story about a great zen master who was cooking, when an apparition of Manjushri appeared in the cloud of steam from the cooking pot. And the zen master said "Away with you!" and beat off the apparition with his spoon and kept cooking. And then the student, hearing that story, realized what he had been missing in his kitchen work: just cooking. Every time he was busy thinking about other things, or disliking it, or wondering or wishing, he wasn't "just cooking." The art of it was to simply cook, right here, right now. And that was a big moment of recognition for him.

A few wandering morning thoughts....

A related version was "What if 'no' is the right answer?"

I've had a difficult history with "NO".

I heard NO constantly while growing up. So frequently, in fact, that a YES couldn't be believed! Really? It's OK to _______? Whoa!!!

As a young adult, up until I was around 30, I had a hard time saying NO to others. I felt as though I was hurting them, the way it hurt me when I heard it. I was denying them something. Then I woke up from that and decided to consciously practicing how to say NO. And, guess what? People got over it. No one suffered any lasting damage.

Even now, there's some difficulty around NO in the world of work. What boss/coworker wants to hear NO? There's a feeling of having to tread lightly, since so much is at stake. A NO could mean insubordination, a negative comment on a review, or worse.

I have two nieces, and sometimes I have to request things of them, like asking them not to yell, curse, or to pick up after themselves. So now I'm the adult who wants the child to say YES, and not throw up the challenge of NO.

So in a sense, we're all like little kids again. We want things to go our way. We want life to be good to us, and sometimes it just slaps us on the hand with a firm NO! Then we throw our temper tantrums and say "no fair!"

What if NO is the right answer? Is that part of what life is trying to teach us? To be comfortable with NO?

I'd say that it seemed less a matter of "being comfortable" with ANYTHING-- than allowing myself to feel whatever I felt. Some of it distinctly UN-comfortable, to say the least. Some koans are subtle, and have to do with the interdependence of good and bad, sickness and medicine, success and failure, subject/object. This one is NOT subtle: do you feel THAT, mofo?

It seems half-measures, careful calculation must not be the way to enter the Path-- because this is often the first koan in the curriculum. Sweeping everything off the table and making a clean start. All I got is this breath, and this sensation, this disturbance.

Got another 'fundamental principles of qi work' book today, this one titled Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics. I'm apparently nudged in this direction lately. I joke with my friend that my course is guided by a Cosmic Border Collie that I can't see, only feel. So what's the what with "energy" is clearly "my thing" as of now.

60 pages in, the author states that the prime directive of Taiji is RELAX. [Funny how that one shows up everywhere: 's the prime directive for Dzogchen, too!] He-- surprisingly-- leads off with an epigraph by Ramana Maharshi: "A day will dawn when you will yourself laugh at your effort. That which is, on the day of laughter, is also now."

I had a flash memory of a Trager massage intro class I did, over 10 years ago. As the practitioner does the moves, there is a silent inquiry being made of the client's body-- and the practioner's efforts, as well-- "What could be lighter? What could be freer?" There is a subtle "listening"/feeling for a response. When it is felt, the practitioner thanks the response.

As I remembered this, it was I who thought of this question specifically as "inquiry," and it marked the beginning of that word having any personal significance to me. What I had been "taught" about inquiry, decades before, seemed self-conscious, over-determined, clumsy.

But this was more like Genjokoan-- an articulation of the question that I was already asking by my actions, and for the answer for which I was listening with my whole being.

As seems to be my wont, on the weekends lately, I discovered a book that I *had* to get: Teigen Dan Leighton's Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry. [Parenthetically, I note that he is teaching in Chicago these days, and wonder if this is the person Mark referred to in a recent post.]

Here's a great bit early on in the book-- applicable to many of our explorations here over the last few weeks:

"... the Zen master Yaoshan Weiyan was sitting very upright and still and a student asked him, 'What are you thinking of, sitting there so steadfastly?' Yaoshan said, 'I am thinking of not thinking,' or another way of translating it is, 'I am thinking of that which does not think.'

This student was very good, and so we remember this dialog. He said, 'How do you do that? How do you think of not thinking?' Or maybe, 'How is thinking of that which does not think?' Yaoshan responded using a different negative. He said, 'Beyond thinking.' It has also been translated as 'Nonthinking.'

This concerns foreground and background. We are used to thinking about the thoughts that are floating around in our sixth consciousness. We have been trained as human beings to have an ego; this is not only a problem in our culture, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. We need to be able to get through the day, pay the rent, take care of our lives. Buddhist practice is not about getting rid of the ego, it is about not getting caught by it and instead seeing this background that Yaoshan refers to as 'beyond thinking.'"

I love this, not least because that was exactly how I experienced the big insight that "cracked the code"-- that it was possible to play a kind of blinking game of foreground/background reversal. Like one of those ambiguous pictures: old grannie/debutante in evening wear with an ostrich plume. Discovering this expanded aspect of how mind works really reconfigures the notion of what "poor little, separate, limited me" is, and can do.

I'm not 100% sure this is relevant to your main point, though it might be! but I'm always interested in what we actually mean when we talk about the 'ego.' I suspect different commentators mean really different things.

Possibly they mean different things; possibly the difference is in the evaluation of whether that self-referring function is inherently a problem, or whether it's only a problem if it's the only function operating.

For me ego isn't just the mental functions of thinking or perceiving, it's also conditioned/fabricated by the body. Let's say, the body's needs, or "instinct". I think the "problem" of samsaric existence is largely a perceptual one. But maybe if I lived in Syria right now, or was scrounging for food in a garbage dump I'd think differently about that.

(Kate, when I lived in Minnesota, Teigen Dan Leighton would visit sometimes and was connected with the Soto, Suzuki Roshi folks. I got to hear him do a teisho once. I live in Rochester currently, and the zen group I hope to visit in the next few days is led by Rafe Martin who trained in the Rinzai/Soto hybrid line of koan practice Zen that includes Kapleau Roshi and Aitken Roshi. Rafe studied with both, I think.)

I was just listening to some of Reggie Ray's huge opus on Mahamudra-- some introductory considerations about the central impetus and practice on the path. He said something about the question of the "self"; it triggered a memory of something I'd forgotten. The first teacher I encountered in my first practice group took me through a little exercise of attempting to locate the self, asking questions: "feel your feet on the floor-- is your self there? feel your hands on your knees/ your seat on the chair/ your heart beating/ your breath coming in and out/ your thoughts telling you this and that, asking questions... is your self there?" Banal as this process may sound, summarized like this-- the cumulative effect felt like being pushed off a cliff into empty space. Surprisingly, given how cautious I tend to be, and averse to vertigo-- I was more delighted than disturbed; felt more like a feather than a rock. It was a kind of preview.

Remembering this incident, I realized that "noting" could function in the same way-- if it is kept simple and not allowed to trail off into thoughts about sensations or thoughts, preferences or expectations about sensations or thoughts. The habit that's so hard to break is assuming that any of our experience implies this solid "self," "the same yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever, amen." If we get into chalking up our accomplishments at any practice-- it is [unfortunately] in service to that habit. Failure is "chains of lead"; success is "chains of gold."

Kate Gowen wrote: "... the Zen master Yaoshan Weiyan was sitting very upright and still and a student asked him, 'What are you thinking of, sitting there so steadfastly?' Yaoshan said, 'I am thinking of not thinking,' or another way of translating it is, 'I am thinking of that which does not think.'


[...]

I love this, not least because that was exactly how I experienced the big insight that "cracked the code"-- that it was possible to play a kind of blinking game of foreground/background reversal. Like one of those ambiguous pictures: old grannie/debutante in evening wear with an ostrich plume. Discovering this expanded aspect of how mind works really reconfigures the notion of what "poor little, separate, limited me" is, and can do.

For what it's worth, I like the translation:

"I'm thinking 'not thinking' "

The word "of" throws me off (as in, I'm thinking "of" not thinking).

I think for many of us, it is really hard to just be dumb enough! Like Winnie-the-Pooh watching stuff float by down the stream: leaf... tin can... umbrella... boot...

We think there's some significance to the content, and start trying to decode it. "Just a minute! Umbrella! What does that mean?!" And instead it is about peeling off that one cognitive function of "bare attention"-- so that "leaf... leaf... ripple... ripple... foam... leaf" is just fine and we discover we CAN do the one simple thing: notice. Full stop.

Being clever doesn't help when what you're trying to do is see the simple.

"For what it's worth, I like the translation:

"I'm thinking 'not thinking' "

The word "of" throws me off (as in, I'm thinking "of" not thinking). "

Yeah, I've always felt I got the gist, and that every translation was impossibly clunky. I think probably that the Asian languages work so much differently about such subtle matters of practice that it would take a really great poet to do them justice, and that it wouldn't be a word-for-word translation, but a free rendering.

Chris Marti wrote: A Zen teacher once said to me, years and years ago, referring to my very first mediation attempts, "You are a thinker, so this is going to be very, very hard for you."

I remember Roshi Philip Kapleau saying that people intellectually inclined have a much harder time breaking thru but if they can, the break thru is often deeper. I think he may have said that his teacher Yasutani Roshi also had this experience with his students.

something like this: I say, with everything I've got-- "Failure is NOT an option."

"Mu" says, "Oh, yeah?"

Well, as I roll down the "memory lane" of poems of the last decade-- there was a certain amount of reacting to koans, there...

Like this--


Koan

The question with no answer
follows you home from school;
levels a look at you that you
can’t break; keeps hanging around;
won’t leave you alone.

The question is always there,
just over your shoulder, waiting
in doorways, watching quietly
with those little fires in its eyes:

you can’t forget it; you don’t
speak its language; it makes
you wonder about your own—
do you speak your language?

You start to think the question
is beautiful: you’d miss
it if it left. Now you notice
that everything has somehow changed.
© Kate Gowen 11/1999