by Sarah Messer
Written on Captiva Island, Florida, as the dawn rays of the sun broke the horizon. April 4, 2013, parinirvana of that consummate magician Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
I.
Lineage
face-to-face with a portrait of Linji
Between black sky and black earth, inside the summer wind, a crow. “If you pass through this gate,” says a sutra, “you’re an arhat emerging from the dust,” a monk whose small enlightenment has forsaken the Three Poisons of lust, anger, and indifference.
The indifferent crow lifts its body in air and glides like a concubine’s dropped fan. Fifteen hundred years ago in China, two sisters stole the Emperor’s heart with their cold, crow-black hair, and Lady Ban became a palace serving maid, a white silk fan abandoned on a shelf. Five hundred years later a poet remembered it:
She holds the broom respectfully as the golden halls open at first light.
Taking the rounded palace fan, she paces here and there with folded hands.
Her white jade face cannot match the sensual colors of cold crow,
And still she tends the Zhaoyang Palace in the play of spotted sunlight.
The palace of rejected concubines. Like Ikkyū’s mother, removed to Long Gate Palace when politics changed.
The Chronology of the Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea gives this account:
Ikkyū was twenty six. One summer night he heard a crow and had understanding. He immediately brought his insight to Kasō, who said, “That is the realm of an arhat, not a master.” Ikkyū said, “I only like arhats. I detest masters.” So Kasō said, “You are a true master.”
It was the night of the 30th of June 1420. Kasō wanted a gatha to record it, so Ikkyū wrote:
Enlightenment
Ten years ago I couldn’t stop thinking, feeling,
Just anger, just rage, until this moment.
A crow laughs, the dust clears, I hold the arhat’s fruit.
Spotted sunlight in the Zhaoyang Palace, a pale face chanting.
In his youth, Linji lived as such a pure monk, in complete accordance with the Vinaya, Buddha’s monastic rule, that only Huangbo’s stick could smack him loose.
Two hundred fifty years later in Linji’s lineage arose the great monk Yuanwu, so assiduous in his practice that he was called Diligence. His story goes like this:
Diligence’s teacher addressed a lay visitor, saying “When you were young, perhaps you read the love poem by Emperor Wu? The last two lines are very close to the meaning of why Bodhidharma came from the west. They read,
Oh, oh, these small bits of jade mean nothing.
I only want to hear the sounds of my lover.”
Just then Diligence came in, heard this, and making a doubtful face, asked, “Has he mastered it?”
The teacher replied, “He has only attained the sound.”
“Since he knows the sound, then why can’t he see the dao?”
His teacher yelled an old kōan question-and-response, “What is the meaning of why Bodhidharma came from the west? The cypress tree in front of the garden!”
Diligence was instantly enlightened. Bounding out of the room, he saw a cock fly to the top of the railing, beat its wings and crow loudly. He laughed and said, “Isn’t this the sound of ‘I only want to hear the sounds of my lover’?” Then he wrote a gatha expressing his enlightenment and presented it to his teacher. It said,
The fūryū affair of her youth
Can only be known by the beauty herself.
His teacher said to him, “Today your sounds are joined with those of all the Buddhas.”
poem #125
Praising the Monk Linji
All along Dao’s work: just monastic rules.
Huangbo’s stick meets head . . . . . . great unknowing.
Transmission, clear and true, Diligence’s bulls-eye.
Chanting that fūryū love poem until it’s completely broken open.
Where do Linji’s heart teachings lie? Is it in the Three Mysteries and Three Essentials that everyone called his true dharma eye? But he never explained what those were.
As Linji was dying, he gathered monks in the assembly hall, saying, “After I am extinguished, don’t extinguish my true dharma eye.”
Sansheng burst out, “How would I dare extinguish your true dharma eye?”
Linji said, “Afterwards, if people ask you, what will you say?”
Sansheng just shouted.
Linji said, “Who’d have known that my true dharma eye would come to extinction right here in front of this blind donkey.”
He finished speaking. Then, sitting upright, he died.
And a master adds, “The Blind Donkey Sansheng is a true son of Linji.”
Once Ikkyū lived in a shack he called “Hut of the Blind Donkey.” Later he named himself “Dream Boudoir,” saying:
If you are thirsty in the dream, you dream of water. If you are cold in it, you dream of a fur coat. To dream of the boudoir—that’s my nature. I’ve lately taken the name “Dream Boudoir” and set it on a plaque above my studio. I’m just a crazy old scoundrel, advertising what I like.
poem #495
Face-to-face with a Portrait of Linji
Who in Linji’s lineage dwells as true transmission?
Three mysteries, three essentials, a blind donkey.
This old monk Dream Boudoir, a moon inside the boudoir.
Night after night, fūryū, right here in front of this sodden drunk.
“Pine window, the moon reflects my idleness,” writes a Tang poet. And another adds:
In the evening I sit beneath the old green pine.
At night I sleep inside the bamboo pavilion.
A thousand years before, the King of Chu climbed Cloud Dream terrace, where he met the goddess of Shaman Mountain. She said to him, “I wish to serve at your pillow and sleeping mat.” The next morning she became the mist of the high peaks and disappeared. Since then, their night together has been called “cloud dreams and idle feelings.”
One day while Linji was planting pines, Huangbo asked him, “What are you doing, planting all these trees deep in the mountains?”
Linji said, “For one, this offering will improve the environment around our monastery’s Mountain Gate. For another, this offering will persist and impress future generations.” Having spoken, he took his mattock and hit the ground three times.
Huangbo said, “Even so, I’ve already beaten you some thirty times.”
Linji again took his mattock and hit the ground three times, making a “shu shu” sound. Huangbo said, “Now that my lineage has reached you, it will flourish greatly in the world.”
poem #151
Pine Window
a name for my studio
Thatched cottages and bamboo pavilions—no one can stop this flourishing.
Linji comes planting, and it’s not empty work.
Here on my pillow, I’m ashamed of my idle dreams.
Night comes, I rise startled: wind from the latrine.
Buddha enumerated five heinous crimes: to kill mother, father, a monastic, to shed a Buddha’s blood, to split the community. Anyone committing such crimes creates the karma to be born in the Avici hell, the eighth of the eight hot hells, called in Chinese “no-space hell.”
Linji said:
Mind is born, and every sort of dharma is born.
Mind is extinguished, and every sort of dharma is extinguished.
When one mind is unborn, ten-thousand dharmas are without fault.
In this world and beyond this world, there is no buddha, no dharma, nor is anything present, nor was anything lost. Names and phrases are not of themselves names and phrases. It’s only you in the present, radiant and bright, perceiving, understanding, and illuminating, who attach all names and phrases.
Great virtuous ones, it is just by creating the five no-space karmas that you attain emancipation.
How are these five crimes liberation? A student asked Master Wuzu, “How are things in the lineage after Lin
ji?” and he replied “Five crimes and hearing thunder.” People took this to mean that if you commit one of the five crimes, you’ll hear thunder, because lighting’s about to strike your head. But by “five crimes” Wuzu meant the shouts and beatings, the overturning of monks, appropriate and inappropriate, Linji’s wild acts of liberation.
The Vimalakirti Sutra says, “When the bodhisattva practices the five no-space crimes without lust or hatred, he enters the various hells without the filth of sin.” To kill, to destroy without lust or hatred, to love beings with perfect kindness, beyond crimes and beyond no-crimes, this is liberation.
poem #340
The Precept Against Praising Oneself and Destroying Others
“Five crimes and hearing thunder,” Linji’s tricks of the trade.
His great love and great compassion are so very kind.
The sword that gives life, the knife that kills.
If you’re planning to defile someone, your mouth will fill with blood.
The Record of Linji states:
When Linji was first in Huangbo’s assembly, his conduct was simple and pure. The head monk thus praised him, saying, “Though just a lad, he’s different from the others.”
And then he became the great master Linji. Such masters are “a sword so long that it leans against the sky,” says an ancient text, “stern and awesome, in full majesty.” And it adds: “If someone rides a tiger’s head, he must have a sword in his hand.”
The Record of Linji continues:
A monk asked, “What about ‘take away the environment, not take away the person’?”
Linji said:
The king’s orders already pervade the realm.
The general settles the dust beyond the borders.
Ikkyū dreamed he met a skeleton in a field. He asked himself:
So what moment is not a dream? What person won’t be a skeleton? We operate as skeletons wrapped in five-colored skin, so there is the sexual desire of male and female. When breath is cut off and the skin bursts open, there is no sexual desire.
An old saying: “Buddha-nature shows its magnificence, but sentient beings who dwell in appearances have difficulty seeing it.”
poem # 615
Praising Myself
My long sword glows as it leans against heaven,
My skeleton displays its magnificence—
Such singular fame this pure general.
But at my core, fūryū and love of sex.
Two stories. The first is about the monk who heard a woman singing from the pavilion, and this was enough.
One day he happened to be walking through the streets, and he stopped to adjust his legging straps in front of a wine pavilion. He heard someone upstairs singing, “Since you are heartless already, I too will stop.”
But the Chinese word “heartless” can also be heard as “mindless,” meaning Zen-emptiness. As in, since you are already mindless, I too will stop.
Suddenly he was greatly enlightened, and because of that he was called “Pavilion.”
The name Ikkyū also means “Once Stopped.”
The second story is about the Zen teacher Ciming, who was hard to find. He didn’t show up for dharma talks and skipped his private audiences with the monks. One desperate student followed him as he left the monastery. Ciming was going to his lover’s house—the student saw them cooking together in the kitchen, and blushed.
poem #259
Idle Meditation Defiles the Gaudy, Braggart Student
The gold-robed elders’ life-long desire
Is to gather the assembly, practice Zen, and give lectures from the dais.
What are the strategies of Pavilion Monk and Ciming?
The face-paint of a lovely, fūryū beauty.
The Buddha held up a silent flower, and among the whole assembly only Kasyapa smiled. Thus he became the first patriarch of Zen. Perhaps he went next to southern China, a thousand years before Bodhidharma, settling on Chicken Foot Mountain. There he will practice meditation for millions and billions of years, until the next Buddha is born.
Yang Guifei, consort of the Tang Emperor, was one of the Four Beauties of ancient China—the Emperor loved her beyond all else, hiring seven hundred laborers to sew fabric for her gowns. Years of spring love-making, and then disaster, rebellion rending all China. His soldiers blamed it on her dalliance in politics and demanded her death. The Emperor had an impossible choice. She was strangled at Mawei Mountain. After that, they saw each other only in dreams, where they renewed their vow to be born together as husband and wife in the three lives, past, present, and future.
The ancient sage Zhuangzi knew the unturning pivot at the center of all activity. He said, “When ‘this’ and ‘that’ do not find their mate, it’s called the pivot of the dao. When the pivot finally finds its central point, it can respond endlessly. Its right is a single endlessness, and its wrong is a single endlessness.”
The Twenty-Second Patriarch of Zen said it like this:
The mind revolves, following the ten thousand realms,
Its power hidden in the pivot-point.
Follow the flow until you recognize its true nature.
Then you are without both happiness and distress.
Yet Linji’s Zen practices all happiness and all distress, together for the three lives.
poem # 260
Correct Meditation Reveals the Long-Practicing Student
The power hidden in a wheel’s pivot-point:
Both Linji’s true transmission, and schemes for fame and wealth.
One pillow, spring wind, dawn at Chicken Foot Mountain.
Three lives, night wine, autumn at Mawei.
From an old Chinese cautionary tale: don’t straighten your hat when you’re standing under a pear tree, people will think you’re stealing fruit. A Song poet writes:
Brothel and wineshop, the idle lay Buddhist,
How could a pear tree keep him from straightening his hat?
Meanwhile, the Pavilion Monk writes of the match-maker’s red thread that ties one to the beloved:
Night lodging: flower city and wine pavilion.
Once I’d heard the song and flute, sadness seemed left behind.
A sharp knife pulls and snaps the red thread.
If you’re without a heart or mind, then I’ll just stop.
Love’s longing, the depth of passion, is held just for a moment in cloud and rain.
poem #144
Ode to the Brothel
Beautiful woman, cloud and rain, love’s deep river.
Old Zen Pavilion Monk, up in the pavilion singing.
I have such refined passion for hugging and kissing.
My mind doesn’t say: the world is a fire, give up your body.
The Chinese master Xutang, who began the lineage of Daitoku-ji, had three turning phrases meant to jolt the mind from ignorance into awakening.
As a youth, Master Dengzhou was always looking for the right phrase, but he never found it. “Speak, speak,” said the head monk. Dengzhou couldn’t respond. When he finally offered a few words, the monk said they were all wrong.
Dengzhou asked, “Will you please say it for me, then?”
The monk replied, “What I say would be my own understanding. How would that be of benefit to you?”
Dengzhou returned to the dormitory. He went through all the phrases he had collected, but there wasn’t a single word with which he could reply to the monk. He sighed to himself saying, “If you paint a picture of a cake, it can’t ease your hunger.” So he burned all his books and said, “In this lifetime I will never realize the Buddha-dharma.” Then, weeping, he bade farewell to his teacher and left.
Linji’s monks were always looking for the right understanding, but they never found it. Addressing the monks, he said:
If you have ceaseless thoughts, and your mind never rests, this is climbing up the tree of non-enlightenment. You’ll be born in one of the six realms, with fur on your body and horns on your head.
; When not a single thought is born, this is climbing up the tree of Buddha’s enlightenment. Then dharma’s a pleasure and Zen a delight. If you think of clothing, a thousand silk garments appear. If you think of food, you’ll be sated by a feast of a hundred flavors.
Enlightenment dwells nowhere. Therefore there is no one who attains it.
poem #25
The Three Turning Phrases of the Monk Xutang (poem one)
Your eyes are not yet opened,
so how could you make
pants for Xutang?
When you’re freezing and hungry, paintings of cakes won’t satisfy.
The eyes you are born with see like a blind man.
At night in the cold hall: think of clothing,
And a thousand silk garments will miraculously appear.
Buddha gave everyone a gift that has no value and no price. A Chinese master wrote:
The spirit radiance shines of itself,
Its full manifestation true and constant.
It cannot be captured by words and letters.