Shōyōroku Case 27: Hōgen Points to the Blind

Hōgen pointed to the bamboo blinds with his hand. At that moment, two monks who were there went over to the blinds together and rolled them up. Hōgen said, "One has gained, one has lost."

One of the difficult things in practice is that we have this constant search for meaning that arises. We’re always looking to ascribe some sense of purpose, some notion of theology or some teleological center, some reason why, into everything we encounter. And when it doesn’t present itself easily, well, then we have philosophy. And if you don’t like philosophy, then you can go consult your horoscope or the I Ching. We have all sorts of ways of trying to knit together what we encounter into something that makes sense to us.

There is a case about this in the Shōyōroku. It is the twenty-seventh case, “Hōgen Points to the Blind.” Some of you have heard of Master Hōgen. Hōgen is the Japanese name for Fayan Wenyi, and the Fayan school was one of what came to be called the Five Houses of Chan. There were these different schools, different ways of pointing to the moon, different styles that developed around particular teachers and their descendants. Some of you will know that the Rinzai school has this reputation for being kind of the shock-and-awe school, right? There is a lot of shouting, sometimes striking, these very forceful encounters designed to snap you out of this soliloquy of the small self, this thing that is constantly emerging and trying to knit together reality into some permanent sense of self. The Sōtō tradition, of which we are a part, tends to lean more toward silent illumination, although hopefully we’re a little more rousing than that most of the time. We’re kind of a blend, I think, between the two schools. But the idea here is that awakening isn’t something that has to be manufactured. It is already present. If you gently sweep away the dust, there it is. It has always been there. It is never far.

Hōgen is particularly interesting in this regard because he was actually suspicious of becoming too attached to the styles of the different Zen houses. He criticized this tendency toward sectarianism, where people inherit the language and methods of a particular teacher and then mistake the particular method for the thing itself. His tradition was also comfortable engaging the Buddhist teachings and was considerably influenced by Huayan thought, so there wasn’t this idea that Zen somehow had to prove itself by rejecting doctrine. The teachings and direct practice weren’t necessarily opposed to one another. As an independent lineage, the Fayan school didn’t remain distinct terribly long and was gradually absorbed into the larger Linji tradition during the Song. But Hōgen himself leaves us with this interesting concern about what happens when the style of practice becomes more important than actually seeing.

And in this case there is really nothing elaborate going on at all. Hōgen points to a blind. There are two monks acting as attendants who are present at the time, and they both walk over together and roll up the blind. You can imagine that it must have been a relatively substantial blind. I doubt it was like one of these things today where you walk over and pull a string and the blind shoots up. It was probably some kind of old screen that had to be rolled up and tied. But both monks go over and they roll up the blind, and Hōgen remarks, “One gains, one loses.”

And so we’re left to chew on that, right?

What is interesting is where your grasping mind immediately goes in this case. It doesn’t really go to the blind itself, although probably some of us are already wondering what kind of blind it was, how it worked, whether both monks were holding one end. But generally the mind goes immediately to the judgment. A Zen master has apparently judged two different students who seem to have performed precisely the same action, and he says that one gains and one loses.

So what could possibly have happened here? Maybe one of them walked into the situation with a preconceived idea of what the room was supposed to look like after the blind was raised. Maybe the one who gained walked into it in a state of wonder and the experience somehow opened him up or enlightened him. Maybe it has something to do with the blind itself. When it is hanging down it appears one way, and when it is rolled up it appears another way, but ultimately it is the same blind. Maybe there is something there about form and emptiness. Maybe there is something about the light coming into the room. And we can go around and around and around with this, right? What is going on? What is the importance of this blind? Which monk gained? Which monk lost? What did one of them understand that the other did not?

And this will go on for exactly as long as we give it time to go on.

If you turn on the television news and listen to commentators talk about some given subject, they will beat that horse long after it is dead. They can do it for hours. They can do it for days. And after a while it has very little to do with the living essence of whatever issue supposedly brought them together. It has much more to do with the conceptual finery that entrances them and then, in turn, entrances the people who are watching them. We become completely absorbed in the ideas surrounding the thing, and after a while we’re no longer active. We’re no longer engaged. We can only see the land of our judgments, our ideas and our labels.

We start working everything into categories. Justice and injustice. Affluence and poverty. Right and wrong. Self and other. This person is on this side and that person is on that side, and before long we have produced a very sophisticated conceptual representation of reality. We can talk about it endlessly.

And it is very seductive.

But what is the ground beneath all of this? Where do you find it?

If we approach that question with some sort of intellectual reductionism, then immediately we are going to go looking for a common denominator that stands somewhere beneath everything. Maybe we want to give it a doctrine. Maybe we want an idea. We can say, well, this is the Dharmakaya. This is the absolute basis of reality. There. We have named it.

But we’re missing it.

We’re missing it.

If we’re going to do this practice, we actually have to do this practice.

What is this practice about? This practice is about getting up in the morning and making your bed. It is about doing the dishes after you eat dinner. It is about making up with your spouse after you have an argument. You actually have to be present for these things. You have to experience these things directly, not some judgment about them, not some conceptual facsimile of what you think your life ought to be like. You have to actually experience your life itself.

If you’re rolling up the blind, you’re rolling up the blind. Can you feel it?

If you’re walking across the room, can you feel your feet coming into contact with the floor?

If you’re standing across from somebody whom you see as other, are you taking the time to recognize that there isn’t a distinction there except the one you have made?

The moment you make the distinction, then it becomes true.

One has gained.

One has lost.

But before that there is simply this boundless, infinite presence of this very moment.

Now, people hear something like that and they say, “Well, isn’t that just a way of saying that everything is perfect exactly the way it is?” And conceptually, I suppose we could construct some tautology like that. If this is what is present, then therefore this is good. We start doing the mathematics of mind again. We create another philosophy around it. Everything is perfect exactly as it is. Everything is Buddha. There is nothing to do.

But that is not what I mean.

Because if we actually step into this moment directly, if we truly step into it, then we discover that there is always a practice imperative.

When I’m talking, you’re listening. When I’m finished talking, we walk out of the room. But we walk out of the room with a particular sense of purpose, step by step. If the right foot moves forward, then the left foot has to come afterward. You don’t need a philosophy of walking. You walk.

And if we encounter hunger, then we have to feed it.

If we encounter self and other, then we have to step into that gap and recognize that those are constructed entities.

And that is going to make a requirement of us.

It is going to make a requirement to love.

This is where we have to be careful, because we can hear that and immediately begin constructing something around that too. Now I have told you that the right response is love, so maybe we can turn love into a formula. We can create a Buddhist moral system around it. When this happens, the proper Buddhist response is this. When that happens, the proper Buddhist response is that. We can create another beautiful conceptual structure and live in that instead.

And then we’ve lost it again.

All of this is borne on this vast ocean of wonder, absolute wonder. That is the essence of our practice. But there is always this willingness, this desire, to latch onto some idea of it and collapse it into a judgment. Even altruistically, we can formulaically come up with something that says, “This is the right way to engage,” and completely miss what is actually standing in front of us.

So take that challenge with you today as you walk around and experience things.

Look carefully.

Look carefully around you, and you begin to notice that everything is staring right back at you. You begin to see your own face reflected everywhere.

There is no problem outside.

If you encounter a problem, that is your problem.

And I don’t mean that in the psychological sense that people sometimes use it, where somebody behaves horribly and you say, “Well, if you have a problem with that, that’s your problem.” That isn’t what I mean. I mean there is nowhere outside of this life where you can place what you have encountered. Once it is here, once it is seen, it belongs to the field of practice.

If there is hunger in front of you, it is no longer somebody else’s hunger in quite the same way.

If there is suffering in front of you, you have encountered suffering.

If there is this great gulf of self and other standing in front of you, you have encountered that gulf.

Now what?

You can’t solve it by solving a riddle in your head.

That is the trap in this case. We can sit here all morning trying to decide which monk gained and which monk lost, and maybe eventually we can produce a very clever answer. But the blind still needs to be rolled up.

You have to actually step into the situation and engage it if you are going to set things right.

That is practice.

So practice with that.

Practice with that.

Look for the opportunities to do it. Not some grand opportunity later on when the universe finally hands you the great spiritual task for which you have been preparing. Look at what is already here. Make the bed. Wash the dish. Apologize. Listen to the person who is speaking. Feed hunger when you encounter it. Step into that artificial distance between yourself and the person standing in front of you.

Hōgen points to the blind.

Two monks roll it up.

One gains, one loses.

Where are you going to look?

I really sincerely appreciate all the time you afforded me to go down to Atlanta to spend time at Emory, and all of your generous support and your memberships that actually create the container that makes it possible for me to do some of this training. I’m very happy to be back, and I look forward to seeing all of you in dokusan this week. Please plan on being here at some point during the week in the mornings, or schedule some time with me online. I look forward to catching up. I feel like it’s been a long time.

Have a wonderful morning.

I’ll see you all first thing Monday morning for meditation!