BAD HAIR DAY
The following is koan number 79 from book
two of Master Dogen's Shinji Shobogenzo as translated by Gudo Nishijima and
edited by Mike Leutchford and Jeremy Pearson. The book is now available from
Windbell Publications (www.windbell.com)
or order from Amazon here.
Windbell's version is in one volume, by the way. "Book two" refers to
Master Dogen's own divisions within the work. And no, if you order it I do not get a cut. I need to talk to them
about that...
A monk asked Master Sekiso, "When all houses close their
doors, how do we behave ourselves?"
Master Sekiso said, "What about the situation in the Zazen
Hall?"
Six months passed before the monk could reply. Then he said,
"There is no one who will accept him."
Master Sekiso said, "Your reply is very nice. But you have
only said eighty or ninety percent."
Hearing this the monk prostrated himself before Master Sekiso
and begged him to say something. But Master Sekiso refused.
Then the monk grabbed hold of Master Sekiso, made the Master
leave his private room and forced him to sit outside. Then he said, "If
the Master won't say anything, I will have to strike him."
Master Sekiso said, "I have found the words." The monk
prostrated himself many times without stopping.
Master Sekiso said, "There is no one who is even aware of
him." When he heard these words, the monk experienced a reflection of the
Truth.
This is such a good koan I hate to even say
anything about it. But I'm going to go ahead and ruin the whole thing for you
anyway. I'll start by paraphrasing Nishijima's comments. (By the way, don't
read this like the master has all the answers, and the monk's just a dweeb.
They find the answer together. They are "enlightening" each other.)
"When all houses close their doors"
refers to a situation where the external world seems to be hostile to us. When
we're having a "bad hair day" (see photo -- that's what's on the back
of my credit card!) and there ain't nothing going right.
When the monk asks about that, the master
asks him about the state in the Zazen Hall, or, to put it more succinctly, the
state when doing zazen. See, the great thing about zazen is it doesn't matter
at all how things are going. Zazen remains the same. If zazen were one of those
types of meditation where you're trying to achieve some state of bliss or
trance out on your alpha brain waves then zazen on a bad hair day might be
considered worse than zazen on a good hair day. But zazen isn't like that.
Whatever it is is just what it is. If you can stay reasonably still for the time
period you've allotted yourself you've succeeded.
It takes the monk six months, but he finally
gets a sense of what the master's been telling him and says that no one will
accept him. By "him" the monk is referring to himself in the third
person as Buddhist monks sometimes do. "Accept" means "accept as
a student." In other words, no one can teach him. He is alone in the
universe.
The master says this is OK, but it doesn't go
far enough. When the monk asks the master to say something, the master refuses.
He wants the monk to find the answer for himself. That way it would be far more
meaningful.
But the monk gets all pissed off and
threatens the master. So the master answers saying that no one is even aware of
him. This time "him" means both the master and the monk.
It also means you and me.
The master's answer is even more severe than
the monk's. Not only are we alone in the universe, no one else even knows we're
here.
That's where Nishijima wisely finishes his
commentary. But I, not being so wise, will continue.
Others may be able to get a sense of what we
think and feel. But no one else can ever be "aware" of you in the
truest sense. Only you can know what you really think, feel and experience. In
fact, even that last statement could be called into question. I'll leave that
aside for now. But if you want to go into it ask yourself who else could
possible be aware of you.
What does it mean to be totally alone in the
universe? To most of us this is a pretty frightening thing. You can imagine
some very melodramatic person suddenly shouting in despair, "I'm totally
alone in the universe!" while ripping his shirt and beating the ground
with his fists. I used to do this kind of thing a lot. I can recall a few times
in my childhood when I suddenly noticed how alone I really was and literally
started screaming and shouting about it. Alas, to no avail. Everyone just
thought I was being a problematic child... (What I didn't know then was that I
was far from being alone in my alone-ness)
Interestingly this koan is placed in Dogen's
work just one koan after another story which seems to be saying precisely the
opposite thing. That one ends with the words, "A lone naked body in the
ten thousand phenomena is just the ten thousand phenomena." "Ten
thousand" is an old fashioned Chinese way of saying "a whole big
bunch" or "everything." I hate it when "zen dudes"
from western countries start rattling on about "the ten thousand
things" as if they're characters out of the old Kung Fu TV series. Nishijima
rephrases this line in his commentary, "the lone naked body is not only in the world of phenomena, but is the world of phenomena itself" (italics added).
We are alone in the universe because the
total universe is us.
Mind blower, dude.
So what's this got to do with the poor monk
who's having a bad hair day (or bad scalp day since his head was probably
shaven)? Everything. And it's got everything to do with you when things aren't
going right for you. Or when things are going just perfectly, for that matter.
When things don't go the way we want them to,
we start to feel at odds with everything. We start to invent impossible
hypothetical situations. If only this or that condition were met, we think,
everything would be fine. If only she loved me as much as I love her. If only I
had enough money. If only my job didn't suck so bad. And on and on and on. When
things are going perfect we develop this terrible anxiety about when it's going
to end and things'll get sucky again. Same problem. We can't enjoy life when
things are going bad and we can't even enjoy it when everything is humming
along just fine.
But to a Buddhist, the whole world is myself.
I am that sucky job. I am the girl who doesn't love me as much as I love her. I
am the pair of "vegetarian"
Doc Martens I special ordered by mail which pinch my feet so bad I can't wear
them for more than 10 minutes and yet cost over a hundred and fifty
non-returnable bucks. And this isn't just a way of thinking about things, a
philosophical speculation. After a few years of practice this becomes the only
possible way of looking at the world that makes any sense at all. You are
forced to accept it whether you like it or not. And I, for one, did not like it
one teeny little bit when I first noticed it.
When you see things this way it's hard to
stay very angry. You find you cannot blame anyone for what's wrong in your
life. Who are you gonna blame or get angry at? You could get angry at yourself.
But you've already seen that "self" is an illusion. So what's the point?
Might as well enjoy your bad hair day, then...
You can't control your circumstances. But how
you respond to them is totally up to you. And once you learn to respond better
an interesting thing happens. The world starts to behave exactly as you want it to. Is it just that you no longer
expect it to behave in any way other than it is? Maybe. And maybe not.
Honestly, I'm not sure.
The outside world is not even aware of you.
There is no point at all in trying to force your will upon circumstances. The
universe couldn't give a rat's ass about what you want it to be. And yet, that
universe which doesn't even give a rat's ass about you is you!
There's the magic. That's where things become
so beautiful it hurts to even try to comprehend them. You are completely part
of this nasty old, beautiful old world. Not just part, even, you are the whole
sheebang. Just like a bubble floating on a river, getting pulled this way and
that by the currents, rising and falling, eventually to end with a pop after
which none of the other bubbles will ever know it was even there. Is that
bubble separate from the river or is it just one aspect of the river which we
arbitrarily give the name "bubble" to?
How do you live your life when you see things
that way? Do you rail with anger that no one will ever know your true feelings?
That nobody really cares?
Or do you see things as they are and float
along enjoying doing what needs to be done until you can't do anything at all
anymore?