The Monkey Face

 Year after year

  on the monkey’s face

    a monkey face.

This haiku from Bassho was sent to me to recently by a friend. It gave me such a giggle. Of course, I know I’m the monkey, I see my goofy face everyday. This morning I just laughed out loud about it while I was shaving.

This poem points directly to the heart of Zen, to my own heart, my own face, my own self. What a funny thing is my life. I don’t know how I got here, I don’t know where I’m going after this, and while I’m here I’m a constant witness to an unfathomably spectacular display of infinite spirit permeating through every atom of existence and non existence. It’s all my monkey face. Constantly changing and yet still uniquely, perfectly mine.

Dogen Zenji said, “to study the Buddha way is to study the self.” So I study the self, my self, my heart, my goofy monkey face that’s always changing and still mine, year after year.

I’m very attached to my face. But what am I really attached to? I can call it a face but it’s much more than that. It’s skin, eyes, nose, mouth, etc. I use it to communicate, to see, smell and taste the world. I twist it around in a million ways to try and manipulate the world around me through my expressions. I couldn’t survive without it. But no matter what I do with my face, I won’t live forever, I won’t always be happy even while I’m alive. I’m not always happy with this face but it’s the only one I’ve got.

Or is it? In Zen we talk about our Original Face. There’s a zen koan that asks, “Show me your Original Face before your parents were born.” How do we answer that question? What is this face?

With the Big Mind work developed by Genpo Roshi, we can look at this koan using the Apex triangle.

On the bottom right of the triangle, I see my regular physical face. This is the one I was born with. It’s temporary, impermanent, ever changing. The other day I saw a picture of my face when I was a baby and another when I was a teenager. Now I’m 56 and it looks quite a bit different. I put my picture into a software program that ages you and I’m telling you, you might not recognize me when I’m 86. This is the relative face.

On the left side of the triangle is my Original Face. This is my absolute face, the one that has never changed and never will change. It is unborn and undying and is the face I share with all sentient beings throughout space and time. It’s the one that is reflected back to me in everything I see and experience. It’s the undescribable face of spirit. It’s the face of oneness.

At the top of the triangle, the apex, is the True Face, the one which transcends and includes both my temporary, physical, relative face and my Original, Universal, Unborn Face.

When I realize that I am both, then my monkey face laughs at my monkey face. And my monkey face cries for my monkey face and all the monkey faces of the world, because I see we are all truly one monkey, both permanent and temporary, sharing our joys and sufferings as sentient beings in the mysterious and ungraspable reality of infinity.