Painting by Xiang YeYoung

An old woman took care of a monk in a monastery for 20 years. The old woman always sent a young beautiful girl with food to the monk. One day the old woman told the girl to try and seduce the monk. “How do you feel?” the old woman asked. The monk said, “The feeling is like driftwood lying on a cold rock, and so cold, like three winters back to back.” The old woman said, “I wasted my 20 years taking care of an ignorant man.” They kicked out the monk and burned the monastery.

Translation by Xiang YeYoung and Siyi Evon

Painting by Xiang YeYoung

Master Huizhong (? -775)

Huizhong was titled as Nanyang Master of the State. From Zhejiang province, his family name was Ran. He studied with the Sixth Zen Patriarch Huineng (743-843). His monastery was located in Baiya Mountain, Henan province. He was given the Great Awakened Master title by the Tang emperors Xiaozong and Taizong.

Awakening and Confusion

Zen Master Huizhong asked the imperial official: “What does Buddha mean?” The official answered: “Buddha means awakening.” Huizhong said: “Was Buddha ever confused?” The official replied: “He wasn’t.” Huizhong said: “If Buddha wasn’t ever confused, why does he need to be awakened?”

Translation by Xiang YeYoung and Siyi Evon

By Grandmaster B.F. YeYoung

Buddhism went to China about the time of the birth of Jesus, and several hundred years after the death of the Buddha. Prior to Buddhism’s arrival, the ancient Chinese thoughts had focused on the cultivation of Qi, submission to Heaven and Earth, and worshipping Spirits and Ghosts for more than two thousand years. While the original Indian Buddhism was sinified by the Chinese culture, Buddhism also ramified and transmuted the Chinese culture at the same time. China became the main country to host Buddhism in the world. Chan Buddhism was a product of the cultural ramifications. The formation and establishment of Chan Buddhism in the middle of the Tang dynasty (618-907) completed the sinification of Buddhism, which was the crucial reason for Chan Buddhism migrating again to Japan (ramified as Zen Buddhism) to seek for the new territory a couple hundred years later.

Chan/Zen Buddhism is regarded as one of the best spiritual cultivations in the world today, but the essential cultural characteristics in the Chan/Zen Buddhism are not well recognized. One may see Chan as the Chinese cultural practice, and Zen as the Japanese religious practice. The general view is that Chan/Zen Buddhism is typically Japanese, and some believe that the Chan/Zen Buddhism has a philosophically dialectic nature. The modern Western cultural stock of Zen intellectual verbiage has been built since T. D. Suzuki’s Zen introduction to the West in 1951.

Next to the Sitting Meditation, koan is the most important structure of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Koan often consists of a story, dialogue, question, and/or statement. Koan’s meaning is often ambiguous and indefinite, and cannot be understood by rational thinking, but may be accessible through intuition as many Westerners suggest. Joseph Campbell once articulated the parallel understandings of the images of the Buddha and Jesus beautifully: “The Christ idea and the Buddha idea are perfectly equivalent mythological symbols. Two ways of saying the same thing: that a transcendent energy consciousness informs the whole world and informs you.” Such an axiom is both beautifully and misleadingly paralleled. From the Chinese Buddhist viewpoint, the idea of being a Buddha is all but the pliant or skillful “worldly way,” whereas the idea of Jesus is the focus of the rational and concrete faith. The ”worldly way” is individualistic and anarchic, whereas the faith in Christ is collective, orderly, and assertive. It is the common sense that a Buddhist wishes to become the Buddha one day, a Christian will not and cannot wish to become Jesus in any case. If the “transcendent energy consciousness” were God, the parallels would be that the Buddhist tries to “be” God, whereas the Christian tries to “know” God. The cultural and religious discrepancies are quite clear.

All classical koan were compiled in Chinese, which were heavily colored by the Chinese thinking and culture. The key to understanding enlightenment through the riddle-like Koan is to be and to do, not to know and to think. One may find that the Chan practice has very little to do with the abstract dialectics or religious rituals. As the famed English Blofeld explains: “There is no possible way of dealing with your question in words, but the Way is all around you and within you, for you to experience by direct perception.”

The Chan Master Zhaozhou’s renowned phrase of “go have some tea” becomes the ultimate answer to enlightenment in the Chan history. There is no thinking and analyzing, or rationality and reasoning, thus there is no logical conclusion. The bottom line is to be and to do, to practice, so why not go have some tea!

Master Zhaozhou (778-897)

Zhaozhou Congshen was born in Shandong province. He became a Buddhist monk when he was a kid. Zhaozhou studied with Master Nanquan Puyuan (743-843). His family name was Hao, and Congshen was his Buddhist ordained name. His monastery was located in Zhaozhou, Hebei province therefore he was also known as Master Zhaozhou. His teaching was known as Zhaozhou style.

Go Have Some Tea

Painting by Xiang YeYoung

The Zen Master Zhaozhou (778-897 AD) asked a visitor: “Have you been here before?” The new visitor replied, “Yes I have.” The Zen Master said: “Go have some tea.” The Zen Master asked another visitor, and he answered: “No, I’ve never been here before,” and the Zen Master told him: “Go have some tea.” The Zen Master’s student asked: “Why did you tell the new visitor and the old visitor all to go have some tea?” The Zen Master said to his student: “Go have some tea.”

Translation by Xiang YeYoung and Siyi Evon

Go Wash Your Bowl

Painting by Xiang YeYoung

The new student asked the Zen Master, “I just got here, I want to learn the Dharma, will you direct me?” The Zen Master asked the new student “have you eaten yet?” The new student said that he had eaten. The Zen Master said, “Ok then, go wash your bowl.” The student suddenly realized what Dharma is.

Translation by Xiang YeYoung and Li Evon

The Enlightened Monk Goes to Hell First

Painting by Xiang YeYoung

A government official asked the Zen Master, “Will you go to hell too?” The Zen Master replied, “I’m the first one who’ll go there.” The official said “But you’re an enlightened monk, why would you go to hell?” The Zen Master said, “If I don’t go there, who’ll teach you?”

Translation by Xiang YeYoung and Siyi Evon

Do Pine Nuts Have Buddha Nature?

Painting by Xiang YeYoung

Someone asked, “Do pine nuts have Buddha nature?” The Zen Master answered yes. “So when will they become Buddhas?”  The Zen Master answered when the emptiness drops on the ground. “When will the emptiness drop on the ground?”  The Zen Master said when the pine nuts become Buddhas.

Translation by Xiang YeYoung and Siyi Evon

This book is called the Decline of the West, written by the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spenglar (1880-1936). I picked up this book almost 20 years ago when I lived in San Francisco. I was drawn by the title and wondering: everything is so great what is declining? In the last few weeks, I started reading it again.

Spenglar proposed two destiny ideas for the first time: the Apollonian of the classical world and Faustian of the modern world in the West. Apollo is variously recognized as a god of light and the sun, truth and prophecy, archery, medicine, healing and plague, music, poetry, and arts etc. Whereas Faust, a highly successful scholar, is unsatisfied, and makes a deal with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Apollonian man conceived of his soul as “the cosmos or well ordered aggregate of all near and completely viewable things.” There was no place in his universe for will, and there was no place for inward conflict and development of personality. According to Spenglar, Apollonian man has no soul but “rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day” like the perfect marble statue under the shadow of brutal catastrophe threatening from the outside. On the other hand, Faustian man sees himself as a force endlessly combating obstacles in the infinite space. Conflict is the essence of existence. Personal life has no meaning without it. Says Spenglar: “Here is heralded the color of Rembrandt and the instrumentation of Beethoven—here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian soul… Hamlet, Faust, are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures.”

This is something that attracts my attention—it’s the infinite space—what Spenglar expresses as the infinite space is an inner space. So he’s saying that the modern people have an infinite inner space, and the feature of the inner space is the endless conflict, the struggle within humans. Because of this struggle humans started to see things differently, and with different depths and meanings. According to Spenglar, the classical world didn’t recognize that. So the classical world lived in the harmony but the problem with it was that it was like a statue with no real life. Whereas the modern world lives in the everlasting struggle—internal struggles—he uses the lines from The Easter scene of Faust I to illustrate how our modern heroic people infinitely felt: “A longing pure and not to be described/ drove me to wander over woods and fields/ and in a mist of hot abundant tears/ I felt a world arise and live for me.”

Famous lines, the idea is about modern people’s inner struggle and inner search. When you really read those lines, you see that everything is about individualism, very poetic, but at the same time, it is all about separation and isolation, It’s a delusion, if you really read it: “in a midst of hot abundant tears/ I felt a world arise and live for me.” The world is always there—it never rises for you or for anybody else—the truth is the world does not concern you. You try it out. You get sick—you can’t go out for a year—you see if anybody or anything is going to care about that, I mean really care about it, not to mention if you die. You think the world is going to care about that? Or you are really going to think because you have this passion, so the world is going to become more vivid for you? of course not, it does not concern you, nor has much to do with you.

This is the ultimate problem with the later model of Western culture. Basically it’s self-indulgence. It’s an egotistic drive of delusion. How many times in your life you have this type of experience; you are sitting there, looking at this plant, and all of a sudden the sun drops in from the window, you see all the different shades of light and the shadows on the plant. Because everything is fine with you now, you have no problem with your wife or husband or children or job, and you are looking at that and you know its 7 o’clock in the evening and you say it’s so beautiful, it’s so peaceful, this world is so great. Two weeks later, you had a bad day, bad day at work, big fight with your wife, husband, whoever, and you sit in the same spot and you look at the plant in the exactly or almost exactly same light, and you are going to say: this is dreadful, depressing, horrible, now this world is over.

When you get those two completely different perceptions from the same environment and same moment, it only tells you that it’s all about you. The plant does not care whichever the way it may be—it is you who impose your inner self whatever that is whether a delusion or a reality—you impose it to the plant, and thus you live in a delusion by your imposing. That’s the essential problem with the Faustian cultural model. You may say that we are in the 21st century and the Faustian modern world was over 1000 years ago, it is too far from us. But it’s really not too far; it’s still within us. We have developed all the great Wonders during the last 100 years; we think we’re so advanced from all the old worlds, which we are actually not. We still live in the same way, we still think the same way. (to be continued)