Mu: The Ungraspable
Photo by Tomas Anunziata
Zen training can prepare us to move skillfully through times of apparent isolation and disconnection that we may encounter in our day to day. This talk is a deep dive into one aspect of training that addresses just this—koan study—in which the teacher presents a case and asks a question. Answering requires entering into and vowing to stay with the question and the world it entails, as ungraspable as it is. Being fully immersed, we see clearly. Disconnection is not an option.
Zuisei suggests that we stay with the questions, in our training and in our lives, with love and care. In fact, lovingly may be the only way to do this utterly. This talk focuses on Zen Master Dogen’s Case 114, Zhaozhou’s Dog (Does a dog have Buddha Nature?).
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Sometime in the tenth century, in what was known as Song Dynasty China, a monk asked Master Zhaozhou Congshen, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature?” and Zhaozhou responded, “Mu.”
The best known koan in Zen, Mu, is called The Gateless Gate, the Iron Ball of Doubt, a simple dialogue that has been confounding Zen students for over a thousand years. In the Gateless Gate or Wu-Men Kuan, the first of the formal koan collections that students work with, Mu is the opening koan, and it ironically has the longest commentary. Ironic because by its nature, it gives you nothing to hold onto, nothing to chew on, nothing to turn in your mind, which is exactly the point. No amount of commentaries, explanations, examples, will help you to understand Mu. The only way to see Mu is to be Mu with your whole body and mind. How to do that is exactly what you’re learning as you work on it. You’re learning to embody a question, a moment of experience, a doubt. You’re learning to pass through a gate that has no boundaries, which means, in the beginning, that you can’t even tell where it is.
So the first work on Mu is like dowsing. First you’re trying to figure out where to look, what the question is. You walk around, rod in hand, trying to sense the slightest tremor under you, something that will tell you, “Look here!” Mu has no flavor, no shape, no frame on which to hang an intellectual discourse, but, because of the kind of question that it is, because of what it is drawing out of you, when you see the nature of Mu, it will change your whole life. Koan is the Japanese for “public record” and it refers to a public law or principle of reality, which means, it goes beyond one person’s private opinion. A koan is a pointer to reality.
There’s a story in the koan collections about a fisherman who, after going out to sea for days on end without catching anything, got lucky and brought in a big load one early morning. Quickly he grabbed a piece of charcoal and marked a big arrow on the side of his boat. When he got back home, his wife asked him what the arrow was for. “To mark the spot,” the fisherman said. “Fish are jumping there. I want to be able to find it again.”
When students ask whether there is a right or wrong answer to a koan, the answer is yes and no. It’s possible that different people will present a koan differently, but there is an underlying principle that a teacher is looking for to make sure that the student understands, that they really see, that they see according to what our tradition teaches. Shugen Roshi used to tell me that there were times in his training when he saw a koan very deeply, very powerfully, and it turned out, when he presented it to his teacher, that the answer was not “correct.” He had seen something true, but it was not what the koan was pointing to according to the way it had been handed down. A koan is drawing and expressing an aspect of reality, and in that way, it’s not subjective and it’s certainly not personal. “I feel that” is not an effective way to start your presentation of a koan. It’s not about how you feel. It doesn’t exclude how you feel, but it doesn’t center around it either.
Koans began to be recorded around the 7th century in Tang Dynasty China, the golden age of Zen monasteries. They were thriving and there were teachers popping up right and left. Zen was in its heyday. Teachers began writing down famous exchanges between teachers and students or teachers and teachers, and using them with their own students to help them cultivate insight. There must have been hundreds of these exchanges, but a dialogue didn’t become a koan until a teacher recorded and commented on it. Koans became a way of testing a student’s or another teacher’s understanding.
During the Song Dynasty which followed the Tang, the practice of huatou, focusing on a single phrase or word of the koan, was developed. Please take note here, huatou are essentially the essence of the koan and what they’re doing is helping you to get rid of all the debris surrounding a question. Let’s say you’re in a shipwreck. After the initial mayhem you find yourself floating in the ocean and a few hundred feet from you, you see a life raft. Surrounding it is all this debris from the wreck, all this flotsam and jetsam that you must get through in order to get to the raft. To do this, first you have to distinguish the raft from the debris, then you have to swim past everything that is not the raft, in order to save your life. That’s exactly how a koan works. It gets rid of the flotsam and jetsam of your mind.
Koans have their dark side too. A koan is not working when the answers are standardized and a student only has to memorize them, which happened in China, happened in Japan, and happened here in the West. I ask you this, you say this, I approve you, and therefore the lineage can continue.
Daido Roshi shared with the monks at Zen Mountain Monastery that when he was doing koan training, someone published a book of all the answers to the traditional koans. Later, at the monastery, he discovered a tape recorder that someone had planted in the dokusan room. It didn’t take long to see through this because the moment he asked a student a testing question, the whole thing collapsed. What is telling is the mind of the student in this case. Instead of being free: I want to be right. I want to be approved, even if that means I stay my very own deluded self. It becomes about power, not about liberation, about enhancing the self, not seeing through its nature. But, if you do want to be free, then the gateless gate that a koan presents you with is an excellent entry point.
So, Mu:
A monk asks Zhazhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?
Since the fifth century, when a sutra called the Nirvana Sutra was introduced into China, the accepted teaching in Zen has been that all things have buddha nature. Sentient beings have the potential for awakening. Sometimes this is called the womb of awakening, so every one of us has the potential to give birth to buddhahood. But, Zen specifically also says that all things have buddha nature: tiles, walls, pebbles, valleys and streams, all manifest this awakened nature, thusness. The monk asking Zhaozhou must have known this, all things have buddha nature, then why does he ask if a dog also has it? Some part of him is not sure. Some part of him wonders, Are there any instances where buddha nature is not present? If you’re a grungy street dog, or a grungy street monk, are you excluded from this bright, luminous awareness? Can you do something that will ban you from buddhahood? This is not a hypothetical question.
How many times have you told yourself, Enlightenment is not for me? I want to not suffer so much, sure, but buddhahood…. Yeah, no? Too abstract, too distant, too unattainable—it’s none of those things. It’s not abstract, it’s not distant, and it’s most definitely attainable. Why? Because it is none other than our original nature. It’s not something that comes from the outside. No one can give you buddha nature. No one can take it away, not even yourself.
Maybe the monk is thinking all or some of these things. The koan doesn’t say this, but we have to enter his mind: Why is he asking this question? What is the question behind the question? What does he want to know? Good on him that he asks, that he wants to know and Zhazhou, contrary to every expectation, says, “Mu” (no or not or nothingness). The question we’re asked to sit with is, “What is Mu?” Notice, the question is not “Why did Zhaozhou say Mu?” We’re asked to enter that not directly. We’re asked to become it, and then, express what it is. Where is Mu? What is it? When did it come to be?”
Mu is the first koan because it’s the koan that teaches us to sit with nothingness. One of my favorite koans starts:
Sitting in a room in absolute silence;
Mind source unmoved, filled like still water.
In order to be Mu, you have to be silence first. You have to be stillness first. You have to let the debris settle, otherwise you’ll get tangled in it.
In the 300 Koan Shobogenzo, the koan is longer and has both yes and no answers:
A monk asked Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have buddha nature?”
Zhaozhou said, “Yes.”
The monk said, “If so, how does it get into its skin bag?”
Zhaozhou said, “It intentionally offends.”
Another monk asked, “Does a dog have buddha nature?’
Zhaozhou said, “No.”
The monk said, “All sentient beings have buddha nature. How come a dog doesn’t have buddha nature?”
Zhaozhou said, “Because it has karmic consciousness.”
Zhaozhou is responding to each of the monks. He’s meeting them where they are, answering the question behind the question. He may know the monks intimately. He may be living with them, eating with them, studying, playing frisbee with them as we did when I was at the monastery. He knows their hang ups, he knows their doubts. That’s what he’s addressing. In the sutras it says that the Buddha always responded to a questioner according to their capacity. He could see where they were, where they were coming from, and he met them there. That’s why it doesn’t work for the answers to be standardized, and no, I’m not contradicting myself. Earlier I said it’s not personal. It’s not, but you can’t ignore the person either. Do you understand?
There is a Celtic fairy tale of a young woman who, on a stormy night, takes shelter in the house of strangers. In the way of all good tales, there is something unusual going on in this house, and it is that there is a corpse laid out in the middle of the front room. When the family of the dead man takes the woman in, they say they will give her shelter under one condition, that she sit up all night to watch over the body. The woman agrees, promising that she won’t take her eyes off the corpse, no matter what. Hours pass, and darkness deepens, and the woman looks unrelentingly at the dead man as the storm rages around them. Then, just before dawn, the man opens his eyes, sits up, and stares at the young woman, who stares back. Without saying a word, the man flies out the window, and without stopping to think, the woman grabs on and goes with him, hanging on for dear life.
The man crosses the quaking bog and goes through the burning forest. He enters the cave of terror and climbs the hill of glass, where he drops from the top into the Dead Sea. Because the young woman had promised to fasten her heart onto this unknown, she follows him steadily. She had vowed to not look away, to not let herself get swayed, no matter what else appeared before her. At the end of this incredible night, the dead man and the woman return to the house, where they began. She learns that by her unmovable vow, she has released the man from a spell. He can now reveal his true face, which is the face of unconditional, limitless love. In that moment the young woman knows there is nothing missing anywhere in the world.
This is Mu. This is the task of Mu, to lovingly watch over this difficult question, all through the long night and this wild, wild journey. It’s the task of loving this impossible question, this ungraspable question, which is exactly, exactly as ungraspable as you.
Explore further
01 : 01 : The Three Hundred Koans: Case 114, Zhaozhou’s Dog by Zen Master Dogen, with commentary by John Daido Loori Roshi
03 : Gateless Gate, Case 36: Meeting A Person Of The Way with Zuisei Goddard