The monastery life is not all working and sitting quiet meditating on
the “_kō-an_.” There is something of intellectual life, in the form of
lecturing as has already been referred to. Anciently, however, there
was no regular “_sesshin_,” and all the lecturing or giving sermons
to the congregation was carried on the feast days, memorial days, or
on other auspicious occasions such as receiving visitors, honourably
discharging the officials, or completing given pieces of work. Every
available opportunity was thus used intellectually to enlighten earnest
seekers of the truth. These discourses, sermons, exhortations, and
short pithy remarks so characteristic of Zen are recorded in its
literature, the bulk of which indeed consists of nothing but these.
While claiming to be above letters, Zen is filled with them, almost
overfilled. Before giving some of such sermons, let me digress and say
a few words about the Chinese language as the vehicle of Zen philosophy.
To my mind, the Chinese language is pre-eminently adapted for Zen,
it is probably the best medium of expression for Zen as long as its
literary side alone is thought of. Being monosyllabic the language is
terse and vigorous, and a single word is made to convey so much meaning
in it. While vagueness of sense is perhaps an unavoidable shortcoming
accompanying those advantages, Zen knows how to avail itself of it, and
the very vagueness of the language becomes a most powerful weapon
in the hand of the master. He is far from wanting to be obscure and
misleading, but a well-chosen monosyllable grows when it falls from his
lips into a most pregnant word loaded with the whole system of Zen.
Ummon is regarded as the foremost adept in this direction. To show the
extreme laconism of his sayings, the following[7.42] are quoted:
When he was asked what was the sword of Ummon, he replied, “Hung!”
“What is the one straight passage to Ummon?” “Most intimate!”
“Which one of the Trikāya [Three Bodies of Buddha] is it that will
sermonise?” “To the point!”
“I understand this is said by all the old masters, that when you know
[the truth], all the karma-hindrances are empty from the beginning;
but if you do not, you have to pay all the debts back. I wonder if
the second patriarch knew this or not.” Replied the master, “Most
certainly!”
“What is the eye of the true Dharma?” “Everywhere!”
“When one commits patricide, or matricide, one goes to the Buddha to
confess the sin; when however one murders a Buddha or Patriarch, where
should one go for confession?” “Exposed!”
“What is the Tao [path, way, or truth]?” “Walk on!”
“How is it that without the parent’s consent one cannot be ordained?”
“How shallow!” “I cannot understand.” “How deep!”
“What kind of phrase is it that does not cast any shadow?” “Revealed!”
“How do you have an eye in a question[f154]?” “Blind.”
Just one monosyllable, and the difficulties are disposed of. The
Zen master has generally nothing to do with circumlocution; if any
one is a direct and plain speaker, he is the directest in hitting
the point and the plainest in expressing his thoughts without any
encumbering appendages. To these purposes, the Chinese language is
eminently suited. Brevity and forcefulness are its specific qualities,
for each single syllable is a word and sometimes even makes a complete
sentence. A string of a few nouns with no verbs or with no connectives
is often sufficient to express a complex thought. Chinese literature is
naturally full of trenchant epigrams and pregnant aphorisms. The words
are unwieldy and disconnected: when they are put together, they are
like so many pieces of rock with nothing cementing them to one another.
They do not present themselves as organic. Each link in the chain has
a separate independent existence. But as each syllable is pronounced,
the whole effect is irresistible. Chinese is a mystic language par
excellence.
As terseness and directness is the life of Zen, its literature is
full of idiomatic and colloquial expressions. The Chinese as you
all know, being such partisans to classic formalism, scholars and
philosophers did not know how to express themselves but in elegant
and highly polished style. And consequently all that is left to us
in ancient Chinese literature is this classicism, nothing of popular
and colloquial lore had come down to posterity. Whatever we have of
the latter from the T‘ang and the Sung dynasty is to be sought in the
writings of the Zen masters. It is an irony of fate that those who so
despised the use of letters as conveyor of truth and directly appealed
to the understanding of an intuitive faculty became the bearers and
transmitters of ancient popular idioms and expressions which were
thrown away by the classical writers as unworthy and vulgar from the
main body of literature. The reason however is plain. The Buddha
preached in the vernacular language of the people; so did Christ. The
Greek or Sanskrit (or even Pali) texts are all later elaboration when
the faith began to grow stale, and scholasticism had the chance to
assert itself. Then the living religion turned into an intellectual
system and had to be translated into a highly but artificially
polished and therefore more or less stilted formalism. This has been
what Zen most emphatically opposed from the very beginning, and the
consequence was naturally that the language it chose was that which
most appealed to the people in general, that is, to their hearts open
for a new living light. The Zen masters, whenever they could, avoided
the technical nomenclature of Buddhist philosophy, not only did they
discuss such subjects as appealed to a plain man, but they made use of
his everyday language which was the vehicle appreciated by the masses
and at the same time most expressive of the central ideas of Zen. Thus
Zen literature became a unique repository of ancient wisdom. In Japan,
too, when Hakuin modernised Zen, he utilised profusely slangy phrases,
colloquialisms, and even popular songs. This neological tendency of
Zen is inevitable, seeing that it is creative and refuses to express
itself in the worn-out lifeless language of scholars and stylists. As
the result even learned students of Chinese literature these days are
unable to understand the Zen writings, and their spiritual meanings
as well. Thus has Zen literature come to constitute a unique class of
literary work in China, standing all by itself outside the main bulk of
classical literature.
As I said elsewhere, Zen became truly the product of the Chinese mind
by thus creating a unique influence in the history of Chinese culture.
As long as Indian influence predominated, Zen could not be free from
the speculative abstraction of Buddhist philosophy, which meant that
Zen was not Zen in its specialised sense. Some scholars think that
there is no Zen in the so-called primitive Buddhism and that the
Buddha was not at all the author of Zen. But we must all remember
that such critics are entirely ignoring the fact that religion when
transplanted adapts itself to the genius of the people among whom it is
introduced, and that unless it does so it gradually dies out, proving
that there was no life-giving soul in that religion. Zen has claimed
from the beginning of its history in China that it is transmitting the
spirit and not the letter of the Buddha, by which we understand that
Zen, independent of traditional Buddhist philosophy including
its terminology and modes of thinking, wove out its own garment from
within just as the silkworm weaves its own cocoon. Therefore, the outer
garment of Zen is original, befitting itself wonderfully well, and
there are no patchings on it, nor any seams either: Zen is truly the
traditional celestial robe.