Conversation with a Zen Master

...otherwise known as mental gymnastics.

Today I was part of a group of about 20-30 foreigners and Koreans who sat to listen to a Zen master give a talk at a temple.

He started his talk with something like, "Nothing exists. Do you see that tree? No you don't. If you turn around it is gone. If you approach it, it looks different. It doesn't exist. If I say to you, where is the tree, and you point, why are you pointing outside yourself? Nothing exists outside yourself."

"Do you understand?" Our wrinkled brows betrayed us.

"Is it raining? Does the rain exist?"

Then he points to me and raises his eyebrows expectantly.

"Yes," I say, quite sure it was pouring rain outside.

"Where is the rain?"

I point. "Out there."

"What do you mean out there? Why do you point?"

"Erm. Because it's raining out there."

"What is 'out there?'"

"Outside this room. Out THERE, out..." (out, out! damn spot!)

"There is no 'out there,' so how can you say that? It does not exist, just as the tree and the rain and the cloud do not exist. It is only raining inside yourself."

Eh? I could nearly hear the whirring of all the brains that didn't exist.

He continued on, occasionally coming back to me to clear things up for everyone. ;) He succeeded in confusing me and everyone else greatly, which I think is part of the job description for being a Zen Master. I actually felt like I didn't know anything, and wasn't even convinced that anything around me actually existed, even though I could see it in front of my face, and most of all decided that language just doesn't cut it sometimes, especially when you're trying to define your perception of reality to a Zen monk.

What I think he was getting at was that things only really exist because of how we perceive them. Everything depends on our perceptions, and therefore, he says, we are all completely deluded.

So I said, "So if everything we perceive is a delusion, then even that thought, what you just said, is a delusion."

"Yes."

"What? How can we function then? How can we exist and talk? How can we think about this when all our thinking and our thinking about our thinking is deluded? How can I understand this?"

And he said, "There, now you understand," which was, actually, news to me. Then he likened my mind to the mud and mire that give life to the lotus flower. At the moment, though, I'd say its a pretty big, flower-less, mucky mess. At the end of the talk, he said the search was to be deep within ourselves for something that is not a concept, not a delusion, something we cannot throw away or dismiss as a construct of our own mind. This I think I can understand.

Actually one of the trademarks of Zen is the "koan" or problems it gives to its followers to puzzle over for an eternity. For example, a student once asked his master, "Master before even a thought arises, does sin exist?" The master replied, "Mountain."

Or how about, "What was the appearance of your face before your ancestors were born?" Or maybe you've heard, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

The book, "Buddhism," by Huston Smith and Philip Novak offers us some help when trying to make sense of the mysteries of Zen:

Our impulse is to dismiss these puzzles as absurd, but the Zen practitioner is not permitted to do this. He or she is ordered to direct the full force of the mind upon them, sometimes locking logic on them, sometimes dropping them into the mind's deep interior to wait until an acceptable answer erupts. We in the West rely on reason so fully that we must remind ourselves that in Zen we are dealing with a perspective that is convinced that reason is limited and must be supplemented by another mode of knowing. ... It intends to upset the mind--unbalance it and eventually provoke revolt against the canons that imprison it.

So, I'd say my mind is still bouncing around inside its self-made jail of concepts and perceptions...and you?