A. Master: A piece of cake.
Student: How does it taste?
Master: Bitter.
Student: What happens when we eat it?
Master: All die.
Commentary:
How mysterious!
It tastes bitter and kills all.
Why do people struggle to eat it?
When all die, all illusions die.
When all illusions die, you are eternity itself.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. If you do want to eliminate your lust and have compassion, don’t struggle to do away with the former, but try to know what it is. How could you remove it without knowing what it is? To know it, trace your lust back to its root whenever you feel it. On reaching the root, you will realise not only that lust comes from the same root that compassion is from, but that the root is the very final goal you long to reach, when you will be compassion itself. Remember that everything is from the same root.
Don’t try to remove your lust,
since it is another face of your compassion.
Don’t be attached to compassion,
since it is another face of lust.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. Very simple. If you know what your mind is, you can be mindful all the time with no effort. Most people try to mindful only to fail because they strive to do what they don’t know. In other words, to be mindful is difficult since you don’t know what your mind is. Actually, most people don’t know how to start to be mindful when they try to be mindful because they don’t know their mind.
Anyway to be mindful, you must know what your mind is. How could you try to be mindful without knowing what your mind is? Try to find what your mind is and you will become mindful with no effort. What are you when your body is not you? Mind is the name of you when your body is not you, which is also referred to as true-self, true-nature, the nature, the truth, the Buddha in Buddhism and the God in Christianity. Whatever it is called, the name itself doesn’t matter. We should know what it is beyond the name.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. The East gate, the West gate, the South gate and the North gate.
Commentary:
Don’t be pulled around to the four gates in vain. His answer is so detailed as to make people confused.
If I were asked the question, I would say, “Take a close listen.”
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. You should know what attachment is and where it comes from before trying to remove it. It comes from your misunderstanding things. When you can’t see things as they are, you come to misunderstand them, or make illusions of things. Taking the illusions for real, we overestimate them just as we regard a piece of broken glass as a piece of diamond and a piece of rope as a snake, when we struggle to obtain or to run away from them by all means. In a word, attachment is our strong desire to possess or avoid something.
To eliminate our attachment we should be able to see things as they are, that is, see things as neutral, when our attachment will disappear of itself. However, we might hold it down for a time, but we are likely to fail to remove it permanently if we try to fight it off. We can persuade ourselves not to have attachment and hold it back for a time, in the way we give up a big sum of money beyond our reach, by fooling ourselves into saying to ourselves, “More money than is necessary for an ordinary life can ruin people, so I don’t like such big money.” However, the attachment can come out any time again when such big money seems to be within our reach because we still have the root of it.
Either focus on your question, or trace your attachment back to its root and you will feel it becoming weaker with time. On reaching the root of it, you will realise that its root is the very final goal you long to reach and that it is the same root from which your compassion stems, when your attachment turns into compassion of itself.
Not until we realise the fact that everything we value is neutral in itself: neither valuable nor worthless, can we root out our attachment.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. It is not because things don’t show themselves as they are, but our eyes and ears are veiled by illusions that have been accumulated since our birth.
I remember reading an article about implanting false memories. It said it is possible to manipulate and create false happy memories in mice during sleep, adding that they succeeded in creating false and happy memories in mice. The fact is that numerous information or knowledge has been implanted in us and the process is ongoing even at this moment; it will continue to our death and remain in us in the name of memory.
Memories become verbalised or are turned into languages for expression and conveyance, which makes languages essential to our life. Over time, we are so used to our languages that we can’t stop identifying words with our memories. A word always reminds us of a set memory associated with the word, which we are so accustomed to that we take words for reality. For example, a lady was so shocked to hear the terrible news that her daughter, studying abroad, had been killed by a car accident that she passed out and got sick in bed. A few days later, the news turned out to be wrong and she found that her daughter was in fact alive and could be around as usual soon. The lady was shocked and fainted because she took the words about her daughter for reality regardless of the truth. This is a good instance that shows how we mistake words for reality. In short, to identify words with reality is called ‘illusion,’ ‘form,’ or ‘boundary’ in Zen.
In our life, we not only get illusions implanted in ourselves but also implant them in others, and we often manipulate them in order that we may implant the ones that seem favourable to us. What counts here is that, when making our decisions, or choices, like whether a certain illusion is favourable to us or not, we depend on the illusions implanted in us. In a word, illusions create illusions, and we are so addicted to illusions that we cannot tell them apart from our reality, that is to say, we are trapped in the world of illusion. The purpose of Zen is to free people from the trap of illusion.
Of course, our life requires a lot of illusions and our education might mean to provide students with illusions that are thought to be necessary and useful in their future. Who dares to deny the fact that all the civilisations modern people enjoy rest on illusions? However, languages can be an obstacle in seeing things as they are, and conveying memories as they are, just as water gets in the way of a ship’s speeding up – though it is essential in the ship’s moving.
The purpose of Zen, it can be said, is to enable people to enjoy both the world of illusion and the world free of illusion at once.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. In fact it is beyond description and can’t be reached through words, but it is not separate from words and can’t be explained without words. When reading a text, or hearing a talk about it, you should take it as more than words.
It is called the truth, the mind, the true nature, the true self, or the Buddha in Buddhism. In Christianity, it is referred to as the truth, the spirit in you, the word, the lord, or God – as John 8:32 says, “Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
Everything, whether living or non-living, or whether saints or sentient beings, belongs to nothing but the truth. The truth is neither blue nor yellow, and has neither any frame nor any form. It is neither existing nor non-existent, and since it is boundless like the empty air, not only does it have no inside and no outside but also it can’t be measured. It is with us all the time, and we can’t escape it even for a moment.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. Master: (Kept silent)
Commentary:
Don’t say the master kept silent.
His answer sounds deafening like thunder.
If I heard the answer, I’d say, “Thank you for your kind answer.”
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. When masters advise you to stop thinking, to stop thinking has two kinds: before and after reaching the final goal. When they use it in the former sense, they usually mean not that you should stop thinking in your life, but that you should not try to find the answer to the Zen question through thinking, or knowledge, during the practice. Since the purpose of Zen practice is to free you from the web of illusions but thinking produces illusions, the more thinking you do, the more complicated you make it. That is why masters urge you to stop thinking.
However, the latter is to stop thinking in the truest sense that is possible, when you have reached the final goal, which means to think without being trapped in illusions. In a word, when they tell us to stop thinking, what they mean is not to stop thinking, but to think without being trapped in illusions.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
A. A koan is a sort of dialogue between a master and his students that is used to check whether they have reached the final goal. At the same time, it can be a good question you can practice with. It is just like a maths question in maths, in that a question can be used to test students on one hand and can be material to study on the other hand; so it can be referred to as a Zen question. If you understand perfectly the principle of a question, you can solve other questions easily. Koans might seem to be funny and even look like a joke. Sometimes they may seem to make no sense at all. However, once you have reached the final goal, you will understand how clever, correct and beautiful they are.
Some people think that each question has a single answer, and, memorising it, say they know the correct answer. The truth is that each koan has so many answers that we can’t say all the answers, even if we spend all our life saying the answers to a single question.
It is just like when five year old children are asked a maths question, “What is 3 + 2?” Not all, but most of them can provide only a single answer 5, because they have not mastered the four rules of arithmetic. However, most secondary school students know that though the answer to the question is 5, it can be said in countless other ways, such as 6 – 1, 1.5 + 3.5, 4 + 1, 4.8 + 0.2, 100 – 95 and so on. They also know that although each of the answers seemingly has a different form, all of them are perfectly correct answers.
If you expect to understand koans by reading books, it is natural for them to seem to make no sense at all. Trying to grasp them through reading is like trying to wash a mud-stained cloth with muddy water; it will make things more complicated, since koans are asked to check whether Zen students are freed from the illusions with which we are bound, but reading books is to create illusions. Only when you are freed from illusions can you understand them clearly.
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway.
Zen Fools 