Shuzan and a StaffFrom a talk given by Roshi Eve Myonen Marko on October 18, 2011
Master Shuzan held up his staff, and showing it to the assembled disciples, said, “You monks, if you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. If you call it not-a-staff, you negate the fact. Tell me, you monks, what do you call it?”
Mumon’s poem reads:
Holding up a staff,
He is carrying out the orders to kill and to revive.
Where committing and negating are interfusing,
Buddhas and Patriarchs have to beg for their lives.[1]
Sometimes I feel that I lose my faith. In what? In my ability to see life as it is, to pierce through things and get to the essence. That loss of faith used to happen more frequently in the past; now, on occasion, it still appears. Our retreats at Auschwitz-Birkenau test that faith. As one retreat participant and long-time practitioner put it during this last retreat, it’s a fucker. You think your practice is vast, that you have confidence in the dharma and your own understanding of impermanence and emptiness—and then you go there and witness the power of delusion and ignorance. The Nazis believed their delusions about reality to such an extent that they ignored mothers’ and children’s cries and yelled at them to go to the gas chamber. It’s hard for me to stand in that place for 5 days without questioning my own basic sanity, my own confidence in basic goodness.
When I got home I heard about a young woman, very dear to me, who was injuring herself. This is quite different, and in another way it’s the same, and once again I asked myself, how is it that she believes her delusions so much? Or as Byron Katie puts it, how can you believe your own thoughts so much that you would harm someone, or even yourself?
We have no choice about what life gives us; we do have a choice of how to experience it. We have little choice about accidents, mishaps, and illnesses of all kinds. On Christmas Eve we heard that Bernie’s sister was dying. We had no control over that. We did have a choice about where we put our attention and how we respond, so we jumped in the car and drove down to visit her. Things happen, and there’s how we choose to experience them. My sense of Zen, my sense of life, is that there is nothing that is in principle good or bad, nothing to stay with or stay away from. The Buddha challenged us not to avoid suffering but to investigate it deeply. That’s the First Noble Truth, and the practice of that calls for clear seeing and a combination of both firmness and softness at the same time.
That’s why this koan is so important. How I see a staff is how I see myself.
If you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. You are attached to labels and concepts—this is this, this is that—and all the substance and permanence implied by that. In that case, you see yourself in the same way: I am solid, I am permanent, I exist within these contours and with these characteristics. Not only me, but others as well. If I see myself in such a static way, I’ll see others that way, too, as some cardboard figures easily seen through and manipulated. You don’t have to visit a concentration camp to see how that manifests. Earlier today I went to a car dealership to explore buying a car. There was a receptionist, a salesman, a bookkeeper and another sales associate. We spent some 90 minutes there, and during that time I could see how these people stepped forward from first being in the background, like uninteresting planets orbiting my own much more alive, fascinating sun, to beings in their own right, with their own stories and lives, their own mysterious textures.
And still the question remains: What do you call them? How are you with them?
Are you attached to calling it not-a-staff? That reeks of trying so hard not to get caught by words that you get caught by the effort, much like the monk who said about a pitcher that it cannot be called a wooden sandal.[2]
Or are you attached to Oneness? To Presence? To deconstructing it to show that all life is this staff, Oneness in constant flux and change? Even if you present that with no words, there is still danger. At our last retreat at Auschwitz many people rushed to escape the suffering of the place and talked quickly about finding God, the soul, and even Presence in the beautiful leaves that fell so softly as we walked there.
Holding up a staff,
He is carrying out the orders to kill and to revive.
Where committing and negating are interfusing,
Buddhas and Patriarchs have to beg for their lives.
They beg for their lives because there is nothing but their lives to stand on, just as I have only my life to stand on. I have my life to investigate, pay attention to, bear witness to. I can’t do that without dropping off my former conceptions. A real investigation has to occur openly and dynamically.
Staffs figure in a big way in the lives of monks and in koans. In the Blue Cliff Record’s The Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak Holds Up His Staff,[3] the commentary describes the following exchange:
The venerable Yen Yang met a monk on the road. He raised his staff and said, “What’s this?” The monk said, “I don’t know.” Yen Yang said, “You don’t even recognize a staff?” Again he took his staff and poked the ground saying, “Do you recognize this?” The monk said, “No, I don’t.” Yen Yang said, “You don’t even recognize a hole in the ground?” Again, he put his staff across his shoulder and said, “Do you understand?” The monk said, “I don’t understand.” Yen Yang said, “With my staff across my shoulder I pay no heed to people—I go straight into the myriad peaks.”
Where lay the answer? In recognizing a staff or a hole in the ground? In I don’t know? Or in going straight into the myriad peaks? Please don’t think that is a destination.
Even when doubt comes up, I feel no doubt in this vessel of awakening, in my life as a vessel of investigation. Feeling good or bad about myself or my life has nothing to do with it, it is a vessel of awakening no matter what. There is no reason to look anywhere else. With my staff across my shoulder I pay no heed to people—I go straight into the myriad peaks. How? By choicelessly paying attention. And what do I find? Maybe something so present and immediate that I can’t see it: the meaning of my life.
Peter Hershock, in Liberating Intimacy[4], wrote: The Buddhist understanding is that meaning consists of the middle way between subject and object—something that is given directly in conduct or the dramatic unfolding of our interrelatedness. … In short, meaning is the expression or evolution of appreciative attention—not something gotten, but offered.
Get his meaning?
[1] Shibayama, Zenkei. Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, transl. by Sumiko Kudo, Harper & Row, New York, 1974, p. 299.
[2] Ibid, p. 279.
[3] The Blue Cliff Record, trans. By Thomas and J. C. Cleary, Prajna Press, Boulder, 1978, p. 164.
[4] Hershock, Peter D. Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996.
Master Shuzan held up his staff, and showing it to the assembled disciples, said, “You monks, if you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. If you call it not-a-staff, you negate the fact. Tell me, you monks, what do you call it?”
Mumon’s poem reads:
Holding up a staff,
He is carrying out the orders to kill and to revive.
Where committing and negating are interfusing,
Buddhas and Patriarchs have to beg for their lives.[1]
Sometimes I feel that I lose my faith. In what? In my ability to see life as it is, to pierce through things and get to the essence. That loss of faith used to happen more frequently in the past; now, on occasion, it still appears. Our retreats at Auschwitz-Birkenau test that faith. As one retreat participant and long-time practitioner put it during this last retreat, it’s a fucker. You think your practice is vast, that you have confidence in the dharma and your own understanding of impermanence and emptiness—and then you go there and witness the power of delusion and ignorance. The Nazis believed their delusions about reality to such an extent that they ignored mothers’ and children’s cries and yelled at them to go to the gas chamber. It’s hard for me to stand in that place for 5 days without questioning my own basic sanity, my own confidence in basic goodness.
When I got home I heard about a young woman, very dear to me, who was injuring herself. This is quite different, and in another way it’s the same, and once again I asked myself, how is it that she believes her delusions so much? Or as Byron Katie puts it, how can you believe your own thoughts so much that you would harm someone, or even yourself?
We have no choice about what life gives us; we do have a choice of how to experience it. We have little choice about accidents, mishaps, and illnesses of all kinds. On Christmas Eve we heard that Bernie’s sister was dying. We had no control over that. We did have a choice about where we put our attention and how we respond, so we jumped in the car and drove down to visit her. Things happen, and there’s how we choose to experience them. My sense of Zen, my sense of life, is that there is nothing that is in principle good or bad, nothing to stay with or stay away from. The Buddha challenged us not to avoid suffering but to investigate it deeply. That’s the First Noble Truth, and the practice of that calls for clear seeing and a combination of both firmness and softness at the same time.
That’s why this koan is so important. How I see a staff is how I see myself.
If you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. You are attached to labels and concepts—this is this, this is that—and all the substance and permanence implied by that. In that case, you see yourself in the same way: I am solid, I am permanent, I exist within these contours and with these characteristics. Not only me, but others as well. If I see myself in such a static way, I’ll see others that way, too, as some cardboard figures easily seen through and manipulated. You don’t have to visit a concentration camp to see how that manifests. Earlier today I went to a car dealership to explore buying a car. There was a receptionist, a salesman, a bookkeeper and another sales associate. We spent some 90 minutes there, and during that time I could see how these people stepped forward from first being in the background, like uninteresting planets orbiting my own much more alive, fascinating sun, to beings in their own right, with their own stories and lives, their own mysterious textures.
And still the question remains: What do you call them? How are you with them?
Are you attached to calling it not-a-staff? That reeks of trying so hard not to get caught by words that you get caught by the effort, much like the monk who said about a pitcher that it cannot be called a wooden sandal.[2]
Or are you attached to Oneness? To Presence? To deconstructing it to show that all life is this staff, Oneness in constant flux and change? Even if you present that with no words, there is still danger. At our last retreat at Auschwitz many people rushed to escape the suffering of the place and talked quickly about finding God, the soul, and even Presence in the beautiful leaves that fell so softly as we walked there.
Holding up a staff,
He is carrying out the orders to kill and to revive.
Where committing and negating are interfusing,
Buddhas and Patriarchs have to beg for their lives.
They beg for their lives because there is nothing but their lives to stand on, just as I have only my life to stand on. I have my life to investigate, pay attention to, bear witness to. I can’t do that without dropping off my former conceptions. A real investigation has to occur openly and dynamically.
Staffs figure in a big way in the lives of monks and in koans. In the Blue Cliff Record’s The Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak Holds Up His Staff,[3] the commentary describes the following exchange:
The venerable Yen Yang met a monk on the road. He raised his staff and said, “What’s this?” The monk said, “I don’t know.” Yen Yang said, “You don’t even recognize a staff?” Again he took his staff and poked the ground saying, “Do you recognize this?” The monk said, “No, I don’t.” Yen Yang said, “You don’t even recognize a hole in the ground?” Again, he put his staff across his shoulder and said, “Do you understand?” The monk said, “I don’t understand.” Yen Yang said, “With my staff across my shoulder I pay no heed to people—I go straight into the myriad peaks.”
Where lay the answer? In recognizing a staff or a hole in the ground? In I don’t know? Or in going straight into the myriad peaks? Please don’t think that is a destination.
Even when doubt comes up, I feel no doubt in this vessel of awakening, in my life as a vessel of investigation. Feeling good or bad about myself or my life has nothing to do with it, it is a vessel of awakening no matter what. There is no reason to look anywhere else. With my staff across my shoulder I pay no heed to people—I go straight into the myriad peaks. How? By choicelessly paying attention. And what do I find? Maybe something so present and immediate that I can’t see it: the meaning of my life.
Peter Hershock, in Liberating Intimacy[4], wrote: The Buddhist understanding is that meaning consists of the middle way between subject and object—something that is given directly in conduct or the dramatic unfolding of our interrelatedness. … In short, meaning is the expression or evolution of appreciative attention—not something gotten, but offered.
Get his meaning?
[1] Shibayama, Zenkei. Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, transl. by Sumiko Kudo, Harper & Row, New York, 1974, p. 299.
[2] Ibid, p. 279.
[3] The Blue Cliff Record, trans. By Thomas and J. C. Cleary, Prajna Press, Boulder, 1978, p. 164.
[4] Hershock, Peter D. Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996.