The Zen Experience Part 24

_ This story can be interpreted many ways. John Wu says, "Obviously he was using the hoe as a pointer to the great function of teaching and transmitting the lamp of Ch'an. . . . [This was] a symbolic way of saying that in a mysterious manner the charge was now in his hands."7 However, as Freud once remarked concerning the celebrated phallic symbolism of his stogie, "Sometimes, madam, it's just a cigar," and one suspects that in this little slapstick episode, the hoe might possibly be just a hoe.

Another exchange between Huang-po and Lin-chi may have more dialectical significance. According to the story:

_One day Huang-po ordered all the monks of the temple to work in the tea garden. He himself was the last to arrive. Lin-chi greeted him, but stood there with his hands resting on the hoe.

"Are you tired?" asked Huang-po

"I just started working; how can you say that I am tired?"

Huang-po immediately lifted his stick and struck Lin-chi, who then seized the stick, and with a push, made his master fall to the ground.

Huang-po called the supervisor to help him up. After doing so, the supervisor asked, "Master, how can you let such a madman insult you like that?" Huang-po picked up the stick and struck the supervisor.

Lin-chi, digging the ground by himself, made this remark: "Let all other places use cremation; here I will bury you alive._"8_

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Of Lin-chi's final quip, which tends to take the edge off a really first-rate absurdist anecdote, John Wu makes the following observation, "This was a tremendous utterance, the first authentic roaring, as it were, of a young lion. It was tantamount to declaring that his old conventional self was now dead and buried, with only the True Self living in him; that this death may and should take place long before one's physical decease; that it is when this death has taken place that one becomes one's True Self which, being unborn, cannot die. From that time on, there could no longer be any doubt in Huang-po's mind that his disciple was thoroughly enlightened, destined to carry on and brighten the torch of Ch'an."9 Whether this is true or not, it does seem clear that Lin-chi's p.r.o.nounced personality appealed to old Huang-po, who loved to match wits with him as he came and went around the monastery.

He even allowed the young master liberties he denied others. For example, Lin-chi once showed up during the middle of a summer meditation retreat, something strictly forbidden. He then decided to leave before it was over, something equally unprecedented:

_One day after half the summer session had already pa.s.sed, Lin-chi went up the mountain to visit his master Huang-po whom he found reading a sutra. Lin-chi said to him:

"I thought you were the perfect man, but here you are apparently a dull old monk, swallowing black beans [Chinese characters]."

Lin-chi stayed only a few days and then bid farewell to Huang-po, who said:

"You came here after the summer session had started, and now you are leaving before the summer session is over."

"I came here simply to visit you, Master!"

Without ado, Huang-po struck him and chased him away. After having walked a few li, Lin-chi began to doubt his enlightenment in Ch'an, so he returned to Huang-po for the rest of the summer.10

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Some time after Lin-chi received the seal of enlightenment from Huang- po, he decided to go his own way and departed for the province of Hopei, where he became the priest of a small temple on the banks of a river. This little temple was called "Overlooking the Ford," or _lin- chi_ in Chinese, and it was from this locale that he took his name.

After he was there for a time, however, some local fighting broke out, forcing him to abandon his pastoral riverbank location. (This disturbance may well have been connected with the disruptions of the 845 persecution of Buddhism.) But even when in the middle of a war he seems to have always been a man of Ch'an. There is an episode that strongly resembles the eighteenth-century essayist Dr. Samuel Johnson's kicking a stone to refute Berkeley's proposition that matter is nonexistent:

_One day the Master entered an army camp to attend a feast. At the gate he saw a staff officer. Pointing to an open-air pillar, he asked: "Is this secular or sacred?"

The officer had no reply.

Striking the pillar, the Master said: "Even if you could speak, this is still only a wooden post." Then he went in.11

_

Fortunately, Ch'an was not a sect that required a lot of paraphernalia, and Lin-chi merely moved into the nearby town, where the grand marshal donated his house for a temple. He even hung up a plaque with the name "Lin-chi," just to make the master feel at home. But things may have heated up too much, for Lin-chi later traveled south to the prefecture of Ho, where the governor, Counselor w.a.n.g, honored him as a master.

There is a telling conversation between the two that reveals much about the teaching of Ch'an at the time. Apparently the Ch'anists had completely abandoned even any pretense of traditional Buddhism--again a fortuitous development, considering traditional Buddhism's imminent destruction.

_One day the Counselor w.a.n.g visited the Master. When he met the Master in front of the Monks' Hall, he asked: "Do the monks of this monastery read the sutras?"

"No, they don't read sutras," said the Master.

"Then do they learn meditation?" asked the Counselor.

"No, they don't learn meditation," answered the Master.

"If they neither read sutras nor learn meditation, what in the world are they doing?" asked the Counselor.

"All I do is make them become buddhas and patriarchs," said the Master.12

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Lin-chi eventually traveled on, finally settling at the Hsing-hua temple in Taming prefecture, where he took up his final residence. It was here that a record of his sermons was transcribed by a "humble heir" named Ts'un-chiang. The result was _The Record of Lin-chi_, one of the purest exercises in the dialectics of the nondialectical understanding. But, as Heinrich Dumoulin observed, "Zen has never existed in pure experience only, without admixture of theoretical teachings or methodical practice, as it has sometimes been idealized.

It could not exist in that fas.h.i.+on, for mysticism, like all other human experience, is dependent on the actual conditions of human life."13 Indeed, Lin-chi was one of the first to develop what might be called a dialectic of irrationality. He loved categories and a.n.a.lysis in the service of nonconceptual inquiry, and what he created were guides to the uncharted seas of the intuitive mind.

Lin-chi is best known for his use of the shout. He shared the concern of Huang-po and Ma-tsu with the problem of wordless transmission and to their repertory of beatings and silences he added the yell, another way to affirm insights that cannot be reasoned. We may speculate that the shout was rather like a watered-down version of the beating, requiring less effort but still able to startle at a critical instant.14 He seems to have been particularly fond of cla.s.sifying things into groups of four, and one of his most famous cla.s.sifications was of the shout itself. He once demonstrated the shout to a hapless monk as follows:

_The Master asked a monk: "Sometimes a shout is like the jeweled sword of a spirit King [i.e., extremely hard and durable]; sometimes a shout is like the golden-haired lion crouching on the ground [i.e., strong, taut, and powerful]; sometimes a shout is like a weed-tipped fis.h.i.+ng pole [i.e., probing and attracting the unwary]; and sometimes a shout doesn't function as a shout. How do you understand this?"

As the monk fumbled for an answer, Lin-chi gave a shout.15

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His philosophy of the shout as a device for cutting off sequential reasoning was thus demonstrated by example. But the question those who relate this story never resolve is: Which of the four shouts was the shout he used on the student? [John Wu in _The Golden Age of Zen _speculates that this shout was of the first category, since it was meant to "cut off" the monk's sequential thought, but that seems a rather simplistic mixing of the metaphorical with the concrete.16)

Lin-chi also was not averse to the use of the stick in the pursuit of reality, as the following example ill.u.s.trates. The story also shows that the use of the stick was meaningful only if it was unexpected.

_Once the Master addressed the a.s.sembly.

"Listen, all of you! He who wants to learn Dharma must never worry about the loss of his own life. When I was with Master Huang-po I asked three times for the real meaning of Buddhism, and three times I was struck as if tall reeds whipped me in the wind. I want those blows again, but who can give them to me now?"

A monk came forth from the crowd, answering: "I can give them to you!"

Master Lin-chi picked up a stick and handed it to him. When the monk tried to grab it, the Master struck him instead.17

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There also is a story indicating that Lin-chi believed that when the shout failed to work, the stick might be required.