A monk asked Hsiang Lin,
“What is the meaning of the Patriarch’s coming from the West?”Hsiang Lin said,
“Sitting for a long time becomes toilsome.”
(BCR Case 17)A monk asked Chao-chou,
“What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?”Chao-chou said,
“The oak tree in the courtyard.”
(GB Case 37)
Both of these koan begin with the phrase, “What is the meaning . . ?” Well, what is . . . meaning? You might say, “What is the implication of . . .?” which is literally, what is folded into this statement, this event? What action is implied here for me to take?
But in the koan, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?” the responses that are given seem to bear no relation to the question. Each one is a statement of fact that seems to belong to another context altogether: The oak tree in the courtyard?? Sitting for a long time becomes toilsome??
In our day to day lives, meaning is a very valuable—or rather, value-laden—topic. If I were the monk asking Hsiang Lin this question, it might be more likely that I am not asking at all about the Patriarch’s intentions. Rather, I might be coming from a place of despair, of dissatisfaction. Hsiang Lin’s response, that sitting for a long time becomes toilsome would then be just right. I might be completely satisfied with the answer, even grateful for his validation of my experience.
We don’t often consider the possible human context of the koan questions. Yet, the teachers in these stories must have had to deal with the human foibles of their students as well as their spiritual development. Well, I’ll leave that in the margin for now, as speculation.
In one way, meaning determines how we carry on, what we do with our lives, and what the character of those lives is. In another way, meaning is just what we make of our lived experience, ex post facto—not a pre-determined thing, but an explanation or exploration of the character of what we have done, what we have experienced. These explanations or explorations usually include justifications and excuses for acting as we have. They are intensely interpersonal and reflexively self-protective. The unsatisfactoriness of the endeavor to justify our behavior is universal. No matter how well we excuse ourselves, people understand that it’s a defensive move, the equivalent of saying, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hate me, please.” It is one of the reasons people come to a place of Zen practice. It is one of the reasons this koan exists. What happens when you inhibit the explaining or justifying impulse?
When I looked up meaningfulness, one dictionary says “the quality of having great value or significance.” But the American Heritage dictionary said (among other things) that meaningfulness was Showing or conveying meaning, especially without words. For example: A meaningful glance. Especially without words–now that’s something Zen students can get their teeth into. So again, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?
Both of the recorded responses seem to be dead ends: Sitting for a long time becomes toilsome; that oak tree right out there. But if these time-honored responses were each intended as the equivalent of a meaningful glance? Mu Deung Sunim, one of the Korean Zen teachers I sat with, had a standard response to such questions: what is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West? “you already understand.” As I write about this, I remember my frustration each time he said that. But it occurs to me now that it was his version of “oak tree,” “toilsome” or “sore knees.”
So, in trying to respond to, What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West? What might Mu Deung Sunim’s meaningful glance be? (You already understand.) And what could this possibly convey? The quality of knowing pointed to here is a deep intimacy with the fact in question, a fact that is not limited to its objectivity, its status as an object. Because no thing is simply an object. “Oak tree” has an object-quality, it can be pointed to. But it is also subjective—different for each of us. At each juncture, it belongs to the viewer—it is your own experience of that tree. Therefore it is never the same twice. It shifts slightly with each encounter, with the angle of sunlight, the humidity, the sound of birds, how tall you are, the fact that you were once scared by a snake under an oak tree, the breeze among the leaves. And these experiences are completely, irreducibly, uniquely yours and yours alone, before words. You are experiencing-the-oak-tree! and oak-tree-being-experienced, part and parcel of this world.
Meaning, the meaning of life, is such a perilous topic! Whenever someone inquires into Bodhidharma’s life, for some reason, my mind takes that as an inquiry into the value of mine, and it feels threatening, because if you ask about the meaning of my life, I think it must be because you perceive that there’s something missing. My life isn’t meaningful enough, or there is some quality that is lacking. See, there’s that defensiveness! The brain is ever-so-pesky that way.
In this case, my mind sets up a split: Bodhidharma’s life is so much more worthy than mine. He was important, brilliant, highly principled, and generous. He traveled a long and circuitous route through danger and hardship on the way from India to China to bring us the Buddha way. (Mind you, Bodhidharma himself would likely not permit any such comparative evaluation.)
Have I done anything that means a lot to others? Have I relieved suffering? Have I created something that inspires? Or that delights? What if I have just managed to mooch along day to day, dealing with or failing to deal with, what I had to? Why would anyone expect otherwise? Does that mean that my life is “meaningless”? That might be the question that these monks are really asking.
But as in the case of the tree in the garden, my experience is utterly unique, as is yours. No set of words can hold the reality of our experiences. When we are asked “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s long travels from the West,” we are really being asked “What is meaning?” And the answer? Well, you already understand.
As Christina Feldman1 wrote,
The meaningfulness is not in the object—the meaningfulness is in the seeing.
Her article is about bhavatanha, the craving to become, which I’m sure we’ve all encountered abundantly. It lies at the ground level of our natural defensiveness. As she put it,
It’s a desire to become the kind of person who is secure and safe; a person without blemish or imperfection; a person who never fails, who’s never criticized, who’s never judged.
Secure and safe, without blemish or imperfection? Oh no! this craving must be woven deep even into our pursuit of liberation. The phrase, pursuit of liberation, is the giveaway. Such craving is only craving—for a phantom state. To pursue liberation is a fundamental error. The proper response to that craving, aside from a shout, is to acknowledge thoroughly the pickle we are in, not worrying about what is completely outside of our control, or what we cannot change, because “all things pass quickly away.”
In other words, meaning is impossible to pin down, or at best, it’s agreed upon, but conditional. But meaningfulness always draws attention to some experience, some moment, just as it is, and it is more than that, actually. It always involves the subjectivity of the moment, which is you when you are simply presence—seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, without positing or defending a self.
To my great amusement, Lee said, “I don’t think Hsiang Lin needed a research project in epistemology to come up with Sitting for a long time is toilsome.” Just this plain experience, and our honesty in reporting it.
In our tradition of sesshin at the end of the day, the timekeeper goes outside, and standing at a distance, intones this message:
I beg to urge you everyone:
life and death is the great matter;
all things pass quickly away.
Each of you must be completely alert;
never neglectful, never indulgent.
And so I will leave these thoughts in your care, hoping they brought a little change, a slightly different angle on our usual ways of viewing the practice.
- Feldman, Christina. Doing, Being, and the Great In-Between. Tricycle Fall 2016, online.