Enter Zen from There | Book of Equanimity Case 81

When folks come to practice, they usually walk through the door with a long board on their shoulder. It’s a blinder. They look around and see self and other, good and bad, up and down, practice and non-practice.

So you offer some gentle encouragement. You take that board and move it to the other shoulder.

Oh. Wow!

Now you see this: no separation. Absolute intimacy. Infinite wonder. Nothing to grasp onto and no one to do the grasping.

And that’s a good start.

With time, however, there has to be integration. We have to take the board completely off our shoulder and learn to see how both perspectives work together.

Even when we move the board to the other shoulder and lose our conceptual grasp of what is present, something often remains. There is still a form of grasping. We see past and future, and those point toward some conceptual idea of what is present.

The problem is that when we carve things up this way, constantly ruminating about the past or becoming anxious about the future, there is no time for the present. We lose the present within those ideas.

There is a case about this. It is the eighty-first case of the Shōyōroku, called “Gensha Comes to the Province.”

It begins:

Attention!

Master Gensha arrived at Hōden Province and was received with many kinds of entertainment. The next day he asked Venerable Shōtō, “Where did all of yesterday’s festivities go?”

At this, Shōtō lifted a corner of his robe.

Gensha remarked, “There’s no relation between them at all.”

What a case.

All kinds of seemingly cryptic things are being pointed to. Yet if we approach the case from that place beyond labels and judgments, things become clear.

Gensha, the master referred to in the case, lived in China at the end of the ninth century. He was a disciple of Master Seppō.

Those who have been systematically looking at the koans will know Seppō because he and Gantō appear together in the case in which Tokusan carried his bowls. Seppō was left to wonder, “What is the last word? What is the last word?”

In this case, we are seeing him much later through one of his students, who is grappling with a similar concern and a similar question.

Gensha was a fisherman, and his father was a fisherman as well. They were out at sea together one day when they had an accident. His father fell out of the boat and into the sea. Gensha struggled for some time to save him.

He couldn’t.

After his father drowned, Gensha was lost for a while. He was left in remorse and despair. He eventually decided to become a monk and practice Zen, seeking some understanding of how such awful things happen and what the way of liberation might be.

He practiced alongside a group of novice monks, but he was considered quite elderly. He was actually only in his thirties at the time.

Perhaps his life experience helped him understand his practice and open himself to this great question of life and death.

He eventually studied under Seppō and experienced awakening quite unexpectedly. He was on a pilgrimage, walking along, when he stubbed his toe on a rock.

He cried out in pain.

Then the question arose within him:

“If everything is empty, where does this pain come from?”

Just then, he woke up. He recognized the direct intimacy of things.

Later, after he had become a teacher, Gensha was teaching a layman named Kyō. Kyō wanted to know how he could direct his energies toward the practice of Zen.

Gensha called out, “Kyō!”

Kyō answered, “Yes, Master?”

Gensha asked, “Do you hear the sound of the bubbling brook outside the window?”

“Yes, I do.”

Gensha said:

“Enter Zen from there.”

Enter Zen from there.

Sometime later, another student came to Gensha and said, “That was a marvelous teaching. But what if there had not been a bubbling brook outside the window?”

Gensha called out the student’s name.

The student answered, “Yes?”

Gensha said:

“Enter Zen from there.”

Wherever our lived experience is, even in puzzlement or doubt, enter Zen from there.

Having a hard time getting over the death of a loved one? Enter Zen from there.

Concerned about where your life is headed? Enter Zen from there.

This case is exemplary of that practice.

Master Gensha arrives at Hōden Province and is received with many kinds of entertainment. Aren’t we all?

There are things in our lives that are so pleasurable that we want to cling to them. There are also painful things that we want to push away as forcefully as we can.

The next day, Gensha goes to his student Shōtō and asks:

“Where did all of yesterday’s festivities go?”

We often ask ourselves a similar question.

How do I get rid of all this pain from my childhood? What do I do with the suffering I encountered at the hands of my mother, my father, or my husband? What about all these wounds and all this pain I am carrying?

These things seem always to be with us because the things we try most desperately to push away cling to us. We try to bury them somewhere in the depths of the past, only to recognize that they are always present.

Yet the things we want to cling to seem to elude us.

Even longing is a deep recognition that those things are not absent. They are always present.

We may reach a place in practice where we recognize that self and other, good and bad, are labels and judgments. We may be able to put them in the room. But we must also reckon with the way we position ourselves in time.

Past, future, and present are ways of carving things up from the position of the intellect, from conceptual understanding. The past and the future are always right here in the present.

When we drive, sometimes we look through the windshield. Sometimes we look into the rearview mirror. Sometimes we glance over our shoulder and look through the side window.

They are all there.

We relate to them differently, or apparently differently, yet they are all present in the same place.

So when Gensha asks, “Where did all of yesterday’s festivities go?” Shōtō lifts the corner of his robe.

What is he saying?

Here it is.

Zen is right here.

It is as close as the hem of your garment, perhaps even closer.

It is always right here.

That is a powerful answer. Yesterday is not somewhere else.

We have a notion that the past is immutable and that the future is uncertain. But when we leave behind our fixed ideas of past and future, we begin to recognize that everything is malleable.

We can step into all the events of our lives throughout space and time, right here and right now. A kind of alchemy emerges.

The past is not immutable.

Someone may do something awful and be sent to prison. They may sit there thinking, “This is a very bad thing. It will be on my record for the rest of my life.”

While in prison, perhaps that person deepens their practice and makes a difference in the lives of the people around them. They may eventually recognize that being sent to prison was, in another sense, a very good thing.

Both can be held at the same time.

The past can be changed.

The future is also right here in the present. If you spend your life longing after the future, then I promise you that you have a future of longing ahead of you.

But when you work to actualize your intentions right here in the present, the future you long for is already here.

Then we are left with something enigmatic.

We might think that Shōtō lifting the corner of his robe was an excellent response. We might expect Gensha to approve.

Yet Gensha says:

“There’s no relation between them at all.”

It sounds as though he shoots Shōtō down. It sounds as though he says, “That wasn’t the right response.”

But when we can truly practice in this way, when we have genuinely appreciated it, there is nothing to relate to and no one to do the relating.

Every idea, question, or cynical doubt dissolves into wonder.

There is no requirement for approval or disapproval, and no one standing apart to approve or disapprove. Relations of that kind disappear, and we are truly actualized by what is present.

We become the medicine.

We become Avalokiteśvara.

We become the compassion required in this moment to knit together the things that have been cleaved apart.

There is no longer anything standing in relation. There is no longer anything to regret and no one standing apart to do the regretting.

That is our practice.

This is a deep approval from Gensha, but only if we do not cling to that approval either.

The one who becomes puffed up eventually emerges, and we have to pass through the practice again.

This is a constant coming back. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It is like walking through a great cosmic sand trap while constantly raking behind yourself so that your footprints disappear. You do not leave something behind for another person to trip over, including the self that attaches so firmly to what has already happened.

When we are sitting and experiences from the past emerge, or when hopes for the future arise, all of these things are transformed by stepping radically into what is present.

Take a deep breath.

Take a deep look around.

Recognize that when we see “other,” we have created a fiction. Then step in and become the compassion required to hold together all that we have cast away or forsaken.

This is your life.

It is no dress rehearsal.

Step into this moment.

Burn yourself up in your practice.

Recognize your true face for yourself. See what it is that you have been missing.

It is never far away.