I built a grass hut where there’s nothing of value.
After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.
When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.
Now it’s been lived in — covered by weeds.
Attributed to Shih-T’ou Hsi-ch’ien [Shitou Xiqian], 700-790. Translation and copyright by Taigen Dan Leighton, Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi, 1987)
This reading was taken from “Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage” written in eighth century China by Shih-T’ou Hsi-ch’ien. It is applicable to us here at Dharma Gate today as well. Together we have built sesshin, arranging our affairs, cleaning, making menus, and buying food for the dojo and our homes. We’ve set out-of-contact messages on phones and email. And here we are with nothing we can call sesshin, no product of use.
Doing something of value is always seductive – to help someone and the world, to make a living, to improve myself and my environment…none of that is relevant this week. You’ll have a chance later to do something of value, but not this week. This week we are not improving ourselves, not figuring out Zen. What we are doing is not-doing.
But now we can relax and enjoy the sensation of the lungs that fill and expel air. Now that we’re here, it’s time to give up intention, yet moment by moment let thoughts drop to the floor.
What’s left when turning off the power fueling the thought in your mind now? Eyes see, ears hear without reference to the present, past, or future. These words fill the air, fall away and demand nothing of you. Please, let them fall.
I built a grass hut where there’s nothing of value.
After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.
The hut of sesshin is built and there is nothing of value here. Isn’t that wonderful? Relax, enjoy a nap from thought by letting ideas of sesshin and non-sesshin slip to the floor. Let ideas of before and after, concentration and distraction fall too. No need to sweep concepts away, just pull the plug and enjoy the inspiration of your lungs.
There’s also no need to wait until I’m done talking – what I say is less important than the falling away of the number of minutes until kinhin. Hold nothing, as if there is no kinhin and no teisho. There is expiration of lungs.
That’s the beauty of this container we call sesshin. This day, the ritual holds us so that we can trust that allowing all to fall away won’t lead to our losing our jobs or homes. We won’t starve or forget to sleep. Let it go, let it go, let it go again without concern and without measuring progress.
Let the helium out of a balloon and we know the shell falls to the floor absent of all intrigue and appeal. Zazen is no different, except that the helium fills our thoughts again, and we let go of the neck of the balloon and it deflates yet again.
Often to our benefit, our minds are quick to fill in a story about all that we perceive. A friend told me of a time in the supermarket when she started to tell a woman with a dog, “You can’t imagine how much…” Before she got out another word, the woman concluded that my friend was going to criticize the woman for having a dog in the store. The full sentence turned out to be, “You can’t imagine how much I want to pet your dog.”
That’s how quickly our minds create the world we perceive, and we forget that it isn’t necessarily the world in which we live. Drop it now, whatever is in your mind. We drop it by recognizing that our eyes see, and our ears hear.
Writing this I somehow remembered a comedy skit by Bob and Ray that I heard decades ago. One of the two comedians, Ray, was a talk show host interviewing Bob, who posed as the president and recording secretary of the Slow Talkers of America. As host, Ray became increasingly agitated as airtime was taken in long pauses by Bob. One clip[i] of the routine went like this:
Slow talker: We…are here…in Los Angeles…attending…our annual
Host: Convention!
Slow talker: …Membership…meeting.
Host: Which is a convention!
Slow talker: All …200…
Host: Members!
Slow talker: and…50…
Host: Members!
Slow talker: Seven…
Host: Members!
Slow talker: members…are…in…attendance.
By the end of the bit, host Ray can’t stand it any longer and walks off the set. This is the nature of our minds – ready to pounce on the conclusion, averse to letting the Tao unfold at its own pace.
Drop it now, whatever is in your mind. We drop it by recognizing that our eyes see and our ears hear. Drop it now, knowing the nature of our minds and that thought balloons float again. It was the same for Shih-T’ou as he wrote in the next two lines of the sutra:
When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.
Now it’s been lived in — covered by weeds.
Weeds often show up in our literature to represent dull distractions and bedazzling concepts that pull our attention to worlds of our making. If it were a problem that weeds not only reappeared but covered the room, then surely Shih-T’ou would have despaired and stopped writing after these few lines. Or he could have gone to war against them, fostering a new set of weeds about the righteous battle against them and how failure is not an option.
Instead, he wrote on:
The person in the hut lives here calmly,
not stuck to inside, outside, or in between.
Places worldly people live, s/he doesn’t live.
Realms worldly people love, s/he doesn’t love.
Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.
In ten […feet square], an old one illumines forms and their nature.
We too can live here calmly when not stuck to either immaculate concentration, or muddled attention. Calmly, at rest, napping, yet Shih-T’ou still finds ways to illumine forms and their nature. We all know the difference between inattention and the receptivity that reveals the entire world.
Zen is replete with ways to point us to receptivity to just this without grasping for more than is already here. Each of the old worthies had their ways to express this, as in this verse for Gateless Barrier case 19:
Spring comes with flowers,
autumn with the moon,
summer with breeze, winter with snow.
When idle concerns don’t hang in your mind,
that is your best season.Aitken, Robert. The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan) (pp. 159-160). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Don’t try to figure out how to both avoid idle concerns hanging around and to simultaneously be at rest. You already know what you need to know. If your practice is breath, breathe; if shikantaza, broad receptivity. There is nothing to worry about or evaluate. Each turn toward practice is pulling the plug on idle concerns.
We are not alone in this endeavor; we sit with Zen students across the world and through time who hold and held these same questions. The Gateless Barrier, compiled by Wu-Men in the early 13th century China, has this exchange in case 24:
A monk asked the priest Feng-hsüeh, “Speech and silence are concerned with equality and differentiation. How can I transcend equality and differentiation?”
Feng-hsüeh said, I always think of Chiang-nan in March; partridges chirp among the many fragrant flowers.
Aitken, Robert. The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan) (p. 193). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Take the monk’s question as your own, and Feng- hsüeh as responding to you. Feng- hsüeh is puncturing a blinding preconception of the monk in his answer – how or when is that your preconception?
Coming back to “Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage,” and skipping ahead to the final stanza Shih-T’ou leaves no doubt – he finds vitality in the hut.
Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.
The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers, be familiar with their instruction,
bind grasses to build a hut, and don’t give up.
Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely.
Open your hands and walk, innocent.
Thousands of words, myriad interpretations,
are only to free you from obstructions.
If you want to know the undying person in the hut,
don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.
Shih-T’ou may tell us about his relaxing and enjoying a nap, but there is no question that this relaxation has room for binding grasses, building a hut, and not giving up. We share his words today, meeting him as an ancestor. Shih-T’ou was human and must have had his own days when he actively let go to relax – just as our lungs release and air is expired.
Myriad obstructions arise as the words of our ancestors, as our own pouncing and impatient thoughts, and as my words now. Shih-T’ou’s words are encouragement to release words and free us; to do so we release his words as well.
As we sit here, there is no Shih-T’ou, there is no hermitage, and there is a poem, there is a skin bag.
If you want to know the undying person in the hut,
don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.
How do you take the last line, “don’t separate from this skin bag here and now?” Is that skin bag the author of the poem, me as I speak of it, or you as you listen?
The last line could be the mission statement of sesshin – “don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.” Sesshin is concentration, and it isn’t striving to be a better Zen student through effortful concentration. It is breath, without an idea that practice is following the breath. It is hearing a symphony of sound without an idea of shikantaza.