Shambhala
Review by David Starkey
Those of us who are not practicing Buddhists, but are still “Zen-curious,” can turn for modest enlightenment to classics like Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, a helpful if at times tedious primer, and Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which is maybe a little too prescriptive for those not set on pursuing the Way. The many and very popular books by Thich Nhat Hanh, including The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching and No Mud, No Lotus, are welcoming, though, to my taste, a little corny, but, on balance, it’s not too difficult to find a book that offers something in the way of a useful explanation and guide to this often mysterious approach to being in the world.
And then there is David Hinton’s The Blue-Cliff Record, his translation from the Chinese of a famous series of eleventh century koans. The book’s title comes from the Blue-Cliff Monastery, the place where most of the work was compiled, and its koans are considered even more challenging than those in The Gateless Gate, with its famous opening parable in which a priest is asked if a dog has “buddha nature.” The priest replies, “Mu!” a character that can be mean both “No” and “Nonbeing,” that state of absolute awareness prior to learning.
Hinton cautions readers in his introduction: “There are no answers, only depths.” Ultimately, he says, the ability to understand the koans in The Blue-Cliff Record comes “not from a sage Ch’an master tucked away amid breathtaking mountains, but from anyone at all. And that answer is the sheer thusness of things—wordless and inexplicable, no answer at all—returning you to those empty Absence-mind depths.”
Hinton’s introduction is helpful as are his appendices on key terms, but as the publisher tells us, this version of The Blue-Cliff Record, despite its reputation for impenetrability, “presents only the original koans and poems, free of the commentaries that usually shroud them.” The goal is to give the reader “a direct and immediate experience of awakening,” allowing us to trust ourselves “rather than teachers for insights.” Obviously, that approach comes with a certain amount of risk that the novice may fail to be awakened, but it also makes for some adventurous reading.
Where previous translators of The Blue-Cliff Record might have rendered a Zen master’s name in Chinese, Hinton translates the name into English. So Hsiang Lin or Tan Hsia, for instance, become Incense-Forest and Cinnabar-Cloud Mountain. Using English versions of their names makes the speakers feel as though they are characters in a fairy tale or a parable. Moreover, each koan is accompanied by a “gatha,” a verse that slyly responds to the koan, although these poetic commentaries are often as head-scratching as the koan itself.
Koan 58, for example, is entitled “Visitation-Land’s Five Years Explain Clearly. It reads, in full:
“A monk asked Visitation-Land: “You said It isn’t hard to inhabit Tao’s Way. Simply stop picking and choosing. For people these days, isn’t that just a narrow-minded pitfall?”
“I was asked that five years ago,” replied Visitation-Land. “I’ve seen through it with utter clarity ever since, and I still can’t explain it clearly.”
And here’s the accompanying gatha:
Buddha’s elephant-call truth,
Buddha’s lion-roar teaching:
it’s all flavorless talk packing
throats full, silencing voices.
South, north, east and west—
crows simply fly, rabbits run.
In my reading, the key line is “Simply stop picking and choosing.” Don’t fuss over analyzing or naming “Way” (Hinton omits the definite article). Instead, simply be and do what comes naturally, like the crows and the rabbits. But of course I could be wildly off—I suppose that is the point.
While most of the koans use humor and irony to poke and prod at those of us who are unenlightened, occasionally they can be rather shocking. In number 63, a group of monks are “arguing over a kitten,” when Wellspring-South Mountain tells them if someone can explain “Way realized utterly,” he won’t chop the kitten in two. Alas, none of his fellow monks is up to the task, and the kitten is treated accordingly.
More typical is number 100: “A monk asked Open-Hand Ridge: “What is insight sharp as a sword that slices drifting feathers in two?” Open-Hand replies: “Each branch of coral raises up another moon.” My response: Wait…what?
As I read through Blue-Cliff Record, I felt both frustrated by my inability to figure out what was going on and freed from traditional ways of thinking about texts. Eventually, the koans and their elliptical commentary began to resemble the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry of the 1970s and 80s, where meaning was open and fragmented, deliberately opaque yet subject to a reader’s sudden and unexpected insights.
Appropriately for a book that insists on thinking outside the box, the observation that made the strongest impression on me came from “Chuang Tzu, the seminal Taoist sage,” which I read in Hinton’s definition of the key term “Loom-of-Origins.” Chuang Tzu writes: “The ten thousand things all emerge from a loom-of-origins, and they all vanish back into it.” That image of a universe of phenomena appearing and disappearing back into a cosmic loom is strangely comforting in a world where the awful changes looming just around the corner feel like they could be permanent. In fact, as Hundred-Elder Mountain reminds us, what we perceive as reality is “a mere snap of the fingers, useless, empty.”
