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Life or Death

Posted July 22nd, 2009 by Greg Mayers
Life or Death ©
Copyright 2009 by Greg Mayers
 
“Dôgo[1] and Zengen came to a house to express condolences. Zengen tapped on the coffin and said, ‘Is this life or death?’ Dôgo said, ‘I don't say life, I don't say death.’ Zengen said, ‘Why don't you?’  Dôgo said, ‘I won't say, I won't say.’ On the way back Zengen said, ‘Master, please say it to me right away. If you don't, I shall hit you.’ Dôgo said, ‘If you want to hit me, you can hit me. But I will never say.’ Thereupon Zengen hit him.” [2]
 
In this story from Case 55 of the Blue Cliff Record (Hekiganroku), which is a collection of 100 koans compiled in China during the Song Dynasty, Dôgo and his student are paying their respects to a deceased relative of a local family. These koan stories show that students as well as Zen Masters rarely missed opportunities to lay open the most essential point in Zen: the primordial mind is spotless and thus all mental content is both misleading and not. “You are luckily alright by yourself,” says Master Dazhu, “…why do you want to put on fetters and go to prison?”[3]
 
There are two possible interpretations of Zengen’s question: “Is this life or death?” The first is that Zengen knew very well that the essential matter of Buddhism goes beyond all duality and thus one cannot say either alive or dead. He was testing his Master to see if Dôgo could unearth his deeper meaning buried in the question. He was playing a kind of Zen cat and mouse game with Dôgo at this solemn event honoring a dead neighbor. When Dôgo doesn’t to fall into the obvious trap, Zengen hits him indicating his dissatisfaction with the response. This is a rather superficial interpretation of the story.
 
The second interpretation is more serious and sincere. Zengen had been doing his spiritual work under Dôgo’s tutelage for many years and his practice had ripened to the point of a life or death matter. It is one of those synchronistic events that there is a funeral at the very same time, and as Dôgo and Zengen approach the coffin, it all comes together in a rush of spiritual crisis for Zengen. All sentient beings express Buddha nature. He walks up to the coffin and taps on it. What about this corpse? What about me when I am a corpse? What about me right now?
 
In the Russian monastery on Mount Athos there is a human skull with the following etched into it: “Look well, oh pilgrim, for I once was as you are and you shall be as I am.” This is the morbid thrust that pierced deeply into Zengen’s heart. It was vitally important to him to know the answer: Is this life or death? Zengen knew a corpse lay before him. He could smell it. The question was really turned back against him. Am I alive or dead? We can imagine him shaking with fright, on the verge of total collapse as he turns to his Master and puts the question to him.
 
Dôgo completely understands Zengen’s predicament. It is our predicament and it will not yield to facile assurances. Dôgo answers in the only compassionate way possible: “I won’t say.” He’s not ducking the question, he’s illuminating the reality, which can never be captured and bound in words. Dôgo is showing in the only way possible under the circumstances what Zengen so desperately seeks. Dôgo’s deepest realization is beyond life and death, so how can he say life or death? Even when Zengen beats him with a stick Dôgo won’t betray him with deceptive and divisive words that will send him down a worm hole and into a hall of mirrors.
 
Zen is now planted in the West, where these common predicaments are dealt with differently, but nonetheless profoundly. They are dealt within the context of the great monotheistic religious traditions. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke has this wonderful opening to his Duino Elegies:
 
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.[4]
 
Rilke’s angels are not the benign beings we Westerners learned about in religion classes. “Every Angel is terror,” he writes. Why? Angels represent life beyond our life, beyond any life we can calibrate. This is greater than what we’ve tamed and mislabel life. As Rilke puts it, if an angel “…were to suddenly take me into its heart, I would vanish into its stronger existence.”
 
Rilke comments on his poem in a letter he wrote thirteen years later, expressing our own deepest knowing that is badly out of focus: “Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated. We must try to achieve the greatest possible consciousness of our existence, which is at home in both these unlimited realms and inexhaustibly nourished by both. The true form of life extends through both regions…there is neither a this-world or an other-world, but only the great unity, in which the angels, those beings who surpass us, are at home.”[5]
 
Terror is our excitement turned against us, driving us into death and away from life. Our present existence is a compromise with death, to keep safe our semblance of control and power. We believe we fear death, but we are fooling ourselves and it takes years of careful attention to unmask our foolishness. The opposite is the truth. We fear life, caressing death as our consoling concubine. “And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry of a darkened sobbing,” Rilke writes. We fear “the greatest possible consciousness of our existence” while superficially claiming to desire it. We complain about dead ends, dead dreams, dead relationships, dead things – a deadened world - and secretly relish our complaining. No, we don’t fear death. We cultivate it with the unexamined certitude of a fundamentalist’s fervor, or with the refusal to accept anything that we cannot measure. Both strategies gut life of life, trying to absolve our predicament of its tensions. 
 
So we end up deflecting messages of life whenever they come at us. We ridicule our ancestors because the only tools available to them to express their wisdom for us were black and white instead of “living color.” We mock what won’t fit our rational prejudice as if we’ve earned an incontestable right to judge the past without bothering to understand it. We are an ornery people, daring not to let “consciousness of our existence” expand beyond the comforts of our compromise. Death is dependable. Life is indeterminate, ambiguous, slippery. It is life that terrifies us. Thus we read the strange rebuke from the two men in dazzling clothes to the frightened women at the empty tomb: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”[6] We live in a fool’s paradise.
 
Rilke writes: “We are not really at home in the interpreted world.” This is Zengen’s predicament and ours too, if we care to see it. Dôgo’s final response to Zengen’s urgent inquiry: “I will never say,” slips through the lattices of the interpreted world and plants itself right in the middle of our predicament leaving behind no word traces for us to use as escapes.
 
In the Christian tradition Rilke’s angel, the one who is life beyond our life, is a stand-in for the Risen Christ, who exceeds the “greatest possible consciousness of our condition.” The first reaction to the Resurrection wasn’t disbelief. It was terror, which lends such earthy human authenticity to the Gospel reports.[7] Disbelief is a disfigurement of terror, the closet where we hide it from ourselves. Rilke’s open honesty pierces our flimsy shield of disbelief and without a pause gets right to the heart of the matter. “Every Angel is terror!” You cannot see God and live!
 
We live between the descent from the cross and the empty tomb, enthralled by death, ambiguous about hope and frightened. “We are not really at home in the interpreted world.” Zengen, who knows nothing of Christianity, shaking with fright asks: “Is this life or death?” Dôgo doubles his response: “I won’t say, I won’t say!” to punctuate its importance. Rilke says: “Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated. We must try to achieve the greatest possible consciousness of our existence…” Christ says: “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full,”[8] and then He overcame death by death, for us.
 
In this life, the compromised one we fiercely and unconsciously defend, we are left with Dôgo’s silence and Christ’s empty tomb. What are we to make of it? In the following lines from Rilke, see the watermark of the Risen Christ when you read the word “beauty”:
“…For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us...”
 
Greg Mayers
Zen taught me everything I can do
Christianity taught me everything I can’t do

[1] Dôgo Enchi is a Chinese Zen Master (Chinese: Tao-wu Yuan chih) who lived from 769-853 CE. We know very little of him, except that he was the student of Yakusan Inge (Chinese: Yueh-shan Wei-yen 750-834 CE). 
[2] Case 55 from the Hekiganrokui: Dôgo's Condolence Visit.
[3] Master Dazhu, quoted in: Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom: Thomas Cleary, translator, Shambhala Pocket Classics, Boston 1995, p. 4.
[4] Rilke, Rainer Maria: Duino Elegies, First Elegy, Translated by A. S. Kline ã 2001 available online.
[5] Mitchell, Stephen: Meetings with the Archangel: HarperCollins, NY 1998, p. 141.
[6] Cf. Luke chapter 24 verse 5.
[7] Cf. Matthew chapter 28 verses 1-10; Mark chapter 16 verses 1-8; Luke chapter 24 verses 1-12 and 36-37.
[8] Cf. John chapter 10 verse 10.

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skull-full means

Posted July 23rd, 2009 by Kerry Dugan

Thank you for your teaching! Greg,

Case 55 pivoted for me on the "kulpas" "in between" the apparent repetition; I will not say.

...and Dogen's wood-and-ashes teaching on life and death. That wood doesn't become ashes. Life doesn't become death. Wood is in the state of being wood. Ash, in the state of being ash.

In light of that, the Mt. Athos skull-sign ("... I once was as you are and you shall be as I am.”)seems to set up, prime and intensify dichotomy as well. Another pointer might be Christ's, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?".

With Uyghu in the news recently I see that it was around Dogo's lifetime that the Nestorian Christians were building monasteries there in west China. Now there's a sect beset by quandries of duality. Is He human? or, Is He Divine?... Is there one Person of two natures?... Had they kept going, they might have run into Dogo.

I recall Lex Hixon recounting his climb of Mt. Athos, his prayer with every step,"O, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of The Living God, have Mercy on me, a sinner". Then, years later, Bernie Glassman Roshi doing a posthumous Zen ordination/ transmission ceremony for Lex. Such a dive straight through all sorts of dualities. The transmission ceremony, usually the most private of the Zen ceremonies, whereas, becoming a student, a whole sangha might participate; becoming a monk, only monks attend; ..., Roshi turned that syntax on it's head, giving transmission to a deceased person in front of several hundred people. Where does upaya begin? Where does it end?

'all for now,

Kerry

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Feedback

Posted July 26th, 2009 by Greg Mayers

With the kind feed back from many friends, I've updated the post...

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Greg Mayers
Zen taught me everything I can do.
Christianity taught me everything I can't do.