”What's the Meaning of This?“

Robert Aitken Roshi on Blue Cliff Record Case 20: Lung-ya's "The Meaning of the Ancestor's Coming from the West"

The Story

Lung-ya asked Ts'ui-wei, "What is the meaning of the Ancestor's coming from the West?"

Ts'ui-wei said, "Pass me that chin-rest." Lung-ya passed him the chin-rest, and Ts'ui-wei hit him with it.

Lung-ya said, "You hit me and that's all right, but essentially there's no meaning in the Ancestor's coming from the West."

He then went to Lin-chi and asked, "What is the meaning of the Ancestor's coming from the West?"

Lin-chi said, "Pass me that cushion." Lung-ya passed him the cushion, and Lin-chi hit him with it.

Lung-ya said, "You hit me and that's all right, but essentially there's no meaning in the Ancestor's coming from the West."¹

Terminology

In the question, "What is the meaning of the Ancestor's coming from the West?" the reference is to Bodhidharma, the First Ancestor. What message did he bring? What was his attitude of mind? What was his true essence? What is the essence of our teaching? Or, what is essential nature itself? These may be understood as the implications of the question.

Personae

Lung-ya Chü-tun (Ryuge Koton, 835-923) was an heir of Tung-shan Liang-chieh (Tozan Ryokai, 807-869), who is venerated as the founder of the Ts'ao-tung (Soto) school of Zen. Ts'ui-wei Wu-hsüeh (Suibi Mugaku, n.d.) was a grandson in the dharma of Shih-t'ou Hsi-ch'ien, an earlier ancestor in Ts'ao-tung school. Lin-chi I-hsüan (Rinzai Gigen, d. 867) is venerated as the founder of the Lin-chi (Rinzai) school.

Visual Aides

The chin-rest is a thin, narrow board with a half-moon cut in the top. You rest your chin in that half-moon cut as you sit there in zazen. You brace the other end on the pad in front of you, and you are thus held steady for your long hours of zazen. It becomes a kind of badge of office for the master and is one of the accoutrements adorning his inner room, usually inscribed with appropriate calligraphy. The cushion is of course the zafu, round and firm, for zazen comfort. Several would be there in the room for the use of visitors.

Comment

Lung-ya became a widely popular teacher in his time, but he is remembered in our koan study only with this case, a story from his days of pilgrimage, repeated in the Book of Serenity. He studied with Ts'ui-wei and with Te-shan, grandfather in the dharma of Yün-men and Hsüan-sha, and visited with a number of other teachers before finally settling down with Tung-shan. Here is an account of another series of his encounters from the Transmission of the Lamp:

Lung-ya said to Ts'ui-wei, "Your student has been here for more than a month. Every day the Master enters the hall to speak but we have not received a bit of instruction about the dharma."

Ts'ui-wei said, "Well?"

So Lung-ya went to study with Te-shan. One day he said, "From afar, I've heard of Te-shan's one phrase of the buddhadharma, but up to now I haven't heard it."

Te-shan said, "Well?"

So Lung-ya went to study with Tung-shan, and asked him a similar question.

Tung-shan said, "Are you accusing me of something?"

Awakening on his own to the meaning conveyed by his teachers, Lung-ya settled on Mt. Tung and sought instruction from Tung-shan along with the other monks.

Lung-ya is consistent, steady on the course of masters who went before, back to the Buddha himself, who did not expound upon the dharma at all, whose actions did not convey a thing. "Not a bit of instruction." "Not a single phrase of the buddhadharma." What is Bodhidharma's meaning? Why did he come from the West? "If he had had any meaning, he could not have saved even himself," as Lin-chi himself once said.

"Isn't that the intention?" Ts'ui-wei and Te-shan are asking in effect, temporizing with their prompt, "Well?" Pressing him. Tung-shan pushes hard. "Are you accusing me of something?" In his comment on this case, Yuan-wu quotes Shih-men, who lived a generation or so later: "Lung-ya is all right when there's no one to press him, but when he's pressed by a patch-robed fellow, he loses one eye."

All in accord. An enlightened school of fish, turning in morphic resonance this way and that, a realized pack of wolves, ganging up on their prey. The mind of the old worthies was not confined to their skulls—it is the very mind we realize on Lung-ya's path. The stars and nebulae move swiftly in accord on their course. The old astrologers were right, until they set up their horoscopes.

"Up to now I haven't heard it." This is the joke the Buddha set up. There is no definite dharma. The Tathagata has no particular characteristics, as the Diamond Sutra assures us. Is this nihilism? "Are you accusing me of something?"

There is another point, which Lung-ya himself made clear when he began his own teaching:

Only when you regard the teachings of the ancestors and the buddhas as you would a newly-made enemy of your house are you qualified to be a student.²

The editors of Zen Dust offer a cogent comment on this pronouncement by Lung-ya:

The meaning is, of course, that if a student closely familiarizes himself with words or verbal teachings, he will become attached to them and never attain the direct realization of the truth of which they are but the shadow. Since hatred toward an enemy of long standing tends to diminish, the simile "newly-made enemy" is used to indicate the extreme hostility the student should feel toward words. He should shun them as perils to his path.³

Or she to her path, of course. Zen Dust predates gender-neutral composition.

Lung-ya was no dummy. He knew very well what the two like-minded old teachers from different lineages had in mind with their responses. "Pass me that chin-rest." "Pass me that cushion." But he shunned them as perils to his path. Hakuin Ekaku agrees, even to the wording of Lung-ya's caution:

Your attitude toward the verbal teachings of the buddhas and ancestors must be as hostile as that toward a deadly enemy.⁴

I am reminded a bit of Thoreau, who wrote in Walden:

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.

Lung-ya's encounters with Ts'ui-wei and Lin-chi have prompted comments by our betters in the centuries since his time down to our own. It seems that Rinzai teachers today declare the old fellow didn't have a glimmer. Soto teachers rate him at the other end of the scale. So I have heard. Fortunately there isn't any scale. In any case, the dialogue was intriguing from the first. The Book of Serenity version adds this bit to the end of the story:

When Lung-ya took up the role of teaching, a monk asked him, "When you asked those two masters about the Ancestor's meaning, did they clarify it or not?"

Lung-ya said, "They clarified it all right, but there is no meaning in the

Ancestor's coming from the West."

In his Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series, D.T. Suzuki devotes an entire chapter to the stock question about Bodhidharma, and it appears many times elsewhere in the literature. So there's no use, you might suppose, in kicking a dead horse. Yet students and teachers have been kicking away for 1,500 years or more, and the old metaphor twitches each time. If there can be an entire sutra made up just of buddha names, surely there could be a book of koans with commentaries with each case leading off with the question, "What is the meaning of the Ancestor's coming from the West?" Lung-ya, Ts'ui-wei, Lin-chi, Te-shan, Tung-shan, Yüeh-shan, the line-up would be endless, all run through with the same skewer. But to paraphrase Te-shan's caution: "If you affirm their responses you get thirty blows. If you deny them you get thirty blows." Te-shan sets the tone with the crack! of his staff, and Ts'ui-wei, Lin-chi, and so many others follow through.

It's all right to peek at the old intentions, however. Look again at Lin-chi's alternate response, "If he had had any meaning, he could not have saved even himself." How is that different from, "Pass me that zafu?" Zero in there and the point will be clear. When Lung-ya asked the same question of Tung-shan, "What is the meaning of the Ancestor's coming from the West?" Tung-shan said, "When the Tung river reverses it's flow then I'll tell you." Tung means "east." Tung-shan is "East Mountain," where he held forth. In the never-never time when the East Mountain gets up to dance and the East River runs uphill, then Bodhidharma's meaning can be explained.

"It's an old koan, known everywhere," Yüan-wu remarks in his commentary on this case, "yet still Lung-ya wants to put it to the test." There's life in the old nag yet. It is life with nothing sticking to it, to use one of Yamada Koun Roshi's favorite expressions. A life of no meaning is a life of ultimate poverty—meaningful in its absence of reason—disclosing all things. In his Bendowa, Dogen Kigen quotes Lung-ya in a passage that his disciple Koun Ejo later cited in his Zuimonki:

To study the Way, it is imperative that you know poverty before everything. Only after you study poverty and become poor can you become intimate with the Way. Ever since the time of the Buddha till today we have neither seen nor heard of any true student of the way in possession of wealth.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, and in possessions as well. Muso Soseki in his mild way, makes the same point:

First the outer gate
then the inner gate
under the high roof the low roof
Deep within
there is no argument
to be heard
Each of you be sure
to find the deepest truth
within yourself
and say "Maitreya
Buddha of the future
no more, thank you!"⁵

I know what you have in mind with your question. I understand about passing the chin-rest and the cushion. I know what you mean by whacking me. Thank you, but no thank you. Muso Soseki leaves hostility and expedient means behind and rests in equanimity: upeksa, the fourth of the Noble Abodes—which was Lung-ya's essential position. The translators of Kosho Uchiyama's commentary on the Bendowa quote Lung-ya in a poem that might have been Muso's direct inspiration. Here is one of Lung-ya’s verses, cited by Dogen in his Bendowa:

Eating nuts from trees,
wearing clothes made of grass,
mind is like the moon,
no mind and no boundary.
If someone asked where I am living,
green water and blue mountains are my home.⁶

The way of upeksa is the way of contentment, as Nelson Foster makes clear in his essay, "Is There No Limit? On Cultivating Contentment."⁷ Challenging a society which builds technology upon technology, greed upon greed, power upon power, Foster cites a range of Eastern and Western poets and philosophers who walked the perennial path of spiritual and material self-reliance. Here is his translation of one of Ryokan's many upeksa verses:

My whole life, never troubling to get ahead, I've just ambled along, leaving things to the stars. In my sack I've got three measures of rice,
by the hearth, one load of firewood.
Why ask about enlightenment and delusion?
What truck have I with fame and fortune?
Here in my hut I tilt my ear to the night rain
and stretch out my two legs just as I please.⁸

How does this work in our world of airline scheduling and computer programming? Two of my long-time friends are home-schooling their three children while supporting themselves at carpentry and nursing, living in a house they built themselves. They find support from friends who practice their own form of swaraj, or self-reliance.

Everybody draws the line in a personal way, but for Lung-ya, Ryokan, Traherne, Thoreau, and a host of other blessedly poor, the act of drawing the line is a discipline. Foster cites the Amish farmer David Klein, who uses a chain saw and remarks, "The Amish are not necessarily against technology. We have simply chosen not to be controlled by it." If as Nan-ch'üan advised Chao-chao, "Ordinary mind is the Way," then we must step back to be in touch with what is ordinary. Foster points out:

A sense of boundedness in inherent to contentment, but we live in a time when the illusion of limitlessness is widespread. The expansion of our scientific and technological powers, alienation from the elemental realities entailed in getting a living from the land and water, the dismemberment of families and communities—these and other factors have so deeply undercut a public understanding of limits that we who see through the lie of unlimited progress have no choice but to find our contentment within limits we find ourselves through reflection on personal experience, scientific discoveries, and the cultural record.

Not to mention religion. Foster remarks, "Any undertaking to put the brakes on the juggernaut of ‘progress’ obviously must be religious, if not in the literal sense then certainly in the figurative, devoted, determined and consistent." He makes it clear that he is not confusing contentment with complacency, pointing out that Thoreau chose a prison cell on occasion rather than compromise with a government that was waging a war of ruthless expansion upon neighboring Mexico. And above all, the contented life is one in which you and I can take pleasure as Ryokan did, in playing ball with the village children through the long, spring day. This is the path of Lung-ya, free of all conventions, metaphysical and material, in pursuit of the ordinary, perennial Tao.

Footnotes

¹ The translation of this story is from a draft I prepared under the guidance of the late Yamada Koun Roshi. Those subsequent translations which are not cited with notes are my own, with a check against other versions.

² Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Zen Dust: The History of the Koan and Koan Study in Rinzai (Lin-chi) Zen (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1966), p. 256.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid., p. 46.

⁵ Muso Soseki, Sun at Midnight: Poems and Sermons, translated by W.S. Merwin and Soiku Shigematsu (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), p. 70.

⁶ Kosho Uchiyama, The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa with Commentary, translated by Shohaku Okumura and Taigen Daniel Leighton (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 1997), p. 209.

⁷ Wild Duck Review: Necessary Mischief & News, Vol. VI, Winter, 2000.

⁸ Cf. Great Fool: Zen Master Ryokan, Poems, Letters, and Other Writings, translated with essays by Ryuichi Abé and Peter Haskel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), p. 196.

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