Nanquan Points At A Peony

[00:00:00] Speaker A: For more information on Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, please visit our website at www.ancientdragon.org. our teachings are offered to the community through the generosity of our supporters. To make a donation online, please visit our website. [00:00:16] Speaker B: I wanted to talk today about a koan. I haven't spoken about a koan for a while. This one is a story that's in both the Blue Cliff record as case 40 and. And then the Book of Serenity is case 91. The title is more or less Nanquan's Peony, or Nanquan Points at a Peony. So the case is that Officer Lu Geng said to Nanquan teaching Master Zhao was quite extraordinary. He was able to say, heaven and earth have the same root. Myriad things are one body. Isn't that incredible? And Nanquan pointed to a peony in the garden and said, people today see this flower isn't a dream. So can't explain exactly why I picked this koan. It's not one of the sexy koans that get a lot of attention, but it somehow caught my attention. Maybe it's because it's about. One of the people in dialogue is Dan Chuan, who was a giant of Zen masters. I think he was lived 8th and 9th centuries. Some cases that he's been involved in poor there. There are others he was a student of Sinner Mazu appears in a koan. Others, but he appears Kuan Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha. And Nanquan was the teacher or a teacher, Jiaozhou, one of the really greatest Zen teachers. And two of Nanquan's most famous koan stories include Xiao Zhou. One, maybe the most famous one is called Nanquan Kills the Cat, which we won't talk about much here, but involves. It's a koan about how discriminative thinking and feeling can unspool into discord and violence. Another great story of Nanchong Jiaozhou is the one Ordinary Mind is the Way, where Zhaozhou asks, well, what is the dao? And Nanquan says, ordinary mind is the dao. And they go back and forth and Xiao Zhou asks, well, when I do my practice, how will I know if I've reached the way? And Nanquan says, well, this isn't. This practice isn't about knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion and not knowing is blankness or dullness, which is kind of the great. One of the great tensions that we have in Zen practice, where we're always trying to figure things out, figure out what the practice is all about. Figure out koans. That's that sort of thing. So I think it's a way into this. Koan is provided by the two chief commentators on the koan in the Blue Cliff record and the Book of Serenity. One Song says in the Book of Serenity that Officer Lu Gung quotes these two lines as being wonderful. He hardly realized this indeed is talking about a dream. And in the Blue Cliff record, Wanwu says he's making a living in a ghost cave. A picture of a cake can't satisfy hunger. This is also haggling in the weeds. So both talking about the problem of getting caught up in discursive conceptual thought and thinking generally. In this case, Officer Lu Gung is quoting a treatise by Master Zhao, who is Song Zhao, who was a great translator and Buddhist thinker from 4th and 5th centuries. He was one of the four principal students of Kumarajiva who set up the Buddhist Treatise Translation Bureau, the Imperial Translation Bureau that came up with translations from Sanskrit into Chinese that are in some cases still in use today. And he was himself a brilliant man who had been awakened. And he wrote these two lines from the story that are Heaven, earth and I had the same root. We are all one body. That's from Sung Zhao's treatise. The fourth part that's called Nirvana has no name. But. So Officer Lu Gang is incredibly excited about this story. He's really taken by the metaphor. And I think that both Yuan Wu and Wan Song and Nan Chuan are unanimous in talking about how this is. Getting caught up in this story has led him to be in a dream, is locked in a dream. He's living in a ghost cave where he doesn't. He can't really see reality. He's just seeing the shadows of reality by being attached to these two lines from Sun Zhou. I mean, you can sort of catch his enthusiasm, right? He's, He's. He's really enthusiastic. Heaven, Earth and I share the same root. We're all one body. He's very excited. He's kind of going, oh, I've got it. I understand now. I understand emptiness, I understand awakening. I understand non duality. You can imagine him sort of look at the world going on, which is precisely what the commentators and Nantuan are criticizing him for. You know, there's nothing in here about his experience of vital experience of life. And what. How would we. What would. How would we manifest a deed? How would we. How would we escape delusion in this case? So I think there are a couple of problems. One is the obvious one that he's speaking in these abstractions, this abstract metaphor of everything, all things, one root, they're all one body. But he's seized on that as a way of perceiving the world, and he's focused on that. We do that when we seize on discursive thought or some metaphor or some image. There's a process where we caught up in discriminative mind, discriminating mind. Concepts, images, metaphors, they're all dualistic because they say, okay, there's this thing, there's. There are things. Each of them is a thing. There's this common root, there's me, there's this one body. Each of those is supposed. Is sort of in our mind, becomes a discrete, independent, abiding thing which Buddhism would say doesn't exist. So it's a little interesting that he would use this discriminative, discriminative thinking to get beyond the discrimination that is at the root of our delusion. But beyond that is the fact that when you have engage in dualistic thinking, that there's this and that, good or bad, right or wrong. When we say, there's this thing, there's a thing, I perceive this thing, I perceive this common root. There's a perceiver, there's a reflection back, there's I see this, I understand this. And that's intensified when we become really interested and are intensely focused on an image or. Or on something that we're observing. So in this case, this phrase, which is supposed to wake Lu Gong up from. From delusion, is really contributing to a greater sense of separation from the world. That the world is out there and he is here and he's understood it, he's grasped it, he's sort of missed the point that an awful lot of Buddhist teaching is insane or nonchalant. This isn't about understanding. This isn't about explaining. This isn't about describing the world. You don't understand emptiness by having some phase that you can rely on, some description about what's going on. So that's why Nantuan has said, well, Lugan, look at this peony. People these days see this peony as in a dream. See? So this is the experience. It's a little bit different, but it's. It's the same sort of mechanism that's going on that when we, you know, you can imagine why he picked the peony. I don't know where they are. They're either walking in the garden at the monastery, or I like to think that they're sitting in the abbot's room. Which would be where he has meetings with senior students and that would be where Lou Gung would meet with him. Because just to be clear, Lu Gung was a high government official, he was the inspector of Sichuan, he was on the Supreme Court, he was a famous poet, and he was a long term student of Nanquan's. There are a number of stories, koans and otherwise, from records involving Nanquan and Lu Gong's in there, including when he has an awakening experience. But so he's pointed to this peony, which is. Are people familiar with peonies? I mean, they're fairly large, brilliant, conspicuous, vibrant flowers. So he picked this flower that's just about the most bare kind of object that he could see and says, look, there's, there's not just the people today see this as a dream. He's saying, lugan, you're seeing this as a dream. And what's happened is, you know, what happens is that's the story of a great deal of our life. We sort of sleepwalk our way through life, caught up in thinking, plans, memories, worries, concerns. We feel like we're sort of back here behind this curtain thinking and feeling and judge from it. And that sense of separation contributes largely to the suffering we feel. I mean, that that sense of being behind that is, it's a delusion. But it also gives rise to the sense of vulnerability we have as this separate, isolated, standalone person faced by a world so that we're constantly seeking. We have this need that we're seeking to fulfill. We look for security and stability and significance and comfort and pleasure. And on the other hand, we're always worried about planning to avoid harm or loss of things. Loss of security, certainty, comfort, pleasure, all of those things. So that's what's happened with the flower. He points to the flower, this individual thing, look at that, look at that. And there's a that and there's a. [00:12:21] Speaker C: This. [00:12:23] Speaker B: Discriminative mind, discriminating mind that creates that, this and that. That underlies our deluded perception of the world, underlies our attachment, underlies our aversion. And the same sort of thing happens when somebody looks and intentionally looks at something in the same way. If they intentionally think, think about something, there's an attachment, we grasp that object which isn't an object. It's not an independent, separate, stable thing until we see it as that, as we experience it, that. And as we focus on that, we think about, you know, that's a peony, it's really beautiful, or it's a pink peony. I like white peonies. You know what? That peony really shouldn't be on the altar. Lilies ought to be on the altar. The peony ought to be over here. All of that focusing, focusing on the peony, that's. That kind of mind that's attached to an object is what Suzuki Roshi calls small mind, which is the perception of the world, small self. The self that the diluted attachment and aversion, as well as being attached to it and having, let's say, an emotional charge, a charge of interest is what solidifies it, makes it reifies this object, reifies the piano. This is not just out there. It's something I'm really perceiving now. The sense that it's really this thing I'm focused on, that rest of the world is settled into the background. So I think the reading this koan is different from a little bit. A little bit from the kind of reading that you get sometimes in popular Zen where they say, well, the point of this is, you know, we go through the world and we're. We're behind this gauzy haze of thoughts and feelings and plans and memories and so on. If you can just set those aside, then you can see the flower itself in all its glory. See this thing in itself. What is that? If I could just get rid of my thoughts and feelings and so on. How do I do that? I think a different reading is that it's not that we get caught up in thoughts and feelings and that prevents us from seeing the flower, the thoughts and feelings that create the flower. It's having seen the flower and being attached to the flower that all additional thoughts and feelings come up and solidify the sense of the flower. So that I'm lost in this world of me and the flower. I like it. I don't like it. This one. This is a bad one. It ought to be over there. It shouldn't be on the altar, that sort of thing. So the question is, will do? We do then. And I think the point is that, you know, we face the dilemma that man points out in ordinary mind is the way where he says, knowing is delusion. Knowing is conceptual understanding. Grasping at something conceptually is delusion because we've turned it into a thing that's separate from being from everything else. But not knowing is blankness. That's right. I mean, we cannot. First, we can't eliminate our thinking and feeling and thoughts. That's how we are made. We are going to think, we are going to feel. We're going to. Like in this life. And we have all sorts of conditioning of every sort from our past activities and from our education and from our upbringing. And there are evolutionary reasons as well that mean we're always going to be thinking, we're always going to be identifying things and we need that. I mean, it's not just that we can't stop it. I mean, we have to be able to identify things, but not things the way we think of them in order to live. If we couldn't identify things, we would have nothing but this flood of sensory, meaningless sensory experience. You'd be like a newborn baby that has all this sensory data coming in. But they having just had a new granddaughter, I've watched, you know, the eyes are just kind of going everywhere and they're just kind of. They can't even focus. They don't even recognize the fact that there's something to pay attention to. That's what we would be like without thinking. So what do we do about that? What do we do about that? Well, there's another koan or another story at any rate, discussion between Nan Chuan and Officer Leung where Officer Lung comes to him and says, just to tease him, says, you know, I've been raising a goose in a bottle and he's gotten too big and I've got to get him out without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle. How am I going to do that? And says, hey, Lu Gung. He goes, yes. He says he's out. So, you know, it's not a literal story, it's a ridiculous story. The metaphor is our awareness. Our awareness that can be caught up, wrapped up in thoughts and feelings and imagery, memories and plans. What do we do about that? We get our awareness out of the bottle, right? We open up our mind so that the thoughts and feelings are subsumed within this broader awareness. Chuckle Beck talks about that as creating a bigger container, right? So that we've got this broader open awareness and that thoughts and feelings and emotions arise and fall within that. So we don't need to get rid of them, we need to set them aside, give them their place and deal with them without being pushed around and dragged around by them. And Dogen talks about that, right? When he in Fukan Zazengi, when he talks about how to do zazen taking the we're non thinking, we have to let go of all the operations of mind. Thinking, feeling, judging, liking, disliking, thinking things are good or bad, get rid of the dualistic operations of mind. And then we wake up to our original face, which is traditional Term, it's talking about Buddha nature, the all encompassing complete world. I think that is all things taken as a whole. And Suzuki Roshi talks about that as big mind. He must. And he uses the phrase big mind other places, but there have to be like 45 references to big mind and Zen mind, beginner's mind. And he explains the. Well, small mind is the mind that's attached to something, it's related to something. But big mind is the mind which includes everything it opens up. It includes the awareness of you and your body, it includes your surroundings, it includes your thoughts and feelings. It includes small mind. He insists that the small mind is just a part of big mind. So that awareness, that open mind, which perceives everything as this, everything together as part of this whole, avoids this and is not grasping onto the dualistic discriminating thought or emotion is the way Zen has taught us to deal with thinking and non thinking and that open mind. You know, there's a, there's a new book that's just been published, a collection of dharma talks by Suzuki Roshi, a large part of which is about obeying the precepts. And Suzuki Roshi, in line with Dogen and 10 type folks, insists that obeying the precepts is really just acting out of big mind, that being intimately connected with all things and with all people is what gives rise, gives us the opportunity. We've stepped back from attachment, aversion and delusion. We've opened up to all things and all people. That's what gives us the opportunity to meet people from a spirit of generosity, friendliness and compassion. So I will urge you to sit on your cushion, let go of small mind, awaken to big mind and save all beings. So and so may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart support the awakening of all beings. I'm happy to hear any comments or questions you may have. Yozan. [00:21:54] Speaker D: This koan is really interesting in a number of ways. This con is so interesting in a number of ways and you know, it invites exactly the, the sort. Invites in me exactly the sort of tendencies that are being expressed by the government official. My question becomes, you know, so, so Dogen and, and Genzo Kon for example, seems to suggest that delusion and awakening don't impede one another. I don't know if that's a correct understanding, but that's what I've come to. So I hear this question, you know, this statement by the, the official and it's not untrue. Exactly. I mean there's, there's truth to that. And it's the kind of truth that we, you know, might read in the sutras and so on. But it is a problem in exactly the way you point out the question becomes, you know, and again, I'm sorry to bring all this other stuff into it, but for example, we have the, the four dharma Datus in, you know, in the Avatamsaka school, you know, where the dharmas don't impede one another and they don't impede, you know, particular, doesn't impede generality, wholeness, any of that kind of stuff. So my question is, and I. I come up against it all the time. Is it impo. Is it in fact possible to see the flower as not in a dream? In other words, in our experience, can we hold and fully take in and honor and witness all that stuff, particularity or, you know, when we, when we see the flower, are we automatically in the, in a. In a dream such that, you know, when we see wholeness, it's no longer possible not only to see the flower as if in a dream, but impossible to see the flower at all. Or can we see both? Maybe a way to put it. And I'm sorry, this is really confusing. So Dogen in the Fukan Zen Gi, as you pointed out, talks about letting go of all the operations of the mind. In Zazen, is there a way to be awake in. And how do. There is, but how do we express it? A way to be fully awake within the operations of the mind. In other words, to let awakening unfold in such a way that it's not hindered by delusion and it's not antagonistic to delusion. And I don't know if that's all clear. [00:24:29] Speaker B: Let's see. I think yes, there is a way. It's not. It's the experience of opening, stepping out of the grasping, thinking and emotions moment to moment, opening up to the, to the big mind to go through the world means there will be some experience of duality. I mean, we can't recognize it's a flower without having some conceptual understanding that there's something there. And we're almost certainly going to say that's a flower. But I don't think that that's what our tradition would say is the dream. The dream is really when we fix. Get caught up in the thinking and the feeling and. Yeah, so that we're no longer. We're focused on and caught up in this concept or this image or this thing that we're focused on. Which also means that we're caught up in and all of the. The thoughts surround that we have surrounding it. We've lost touch, lost contact with our surroundings, which is just the experience of word very loud. So that our practice is not to have the right understanding. It's to let go of this delusion, in this fixed confusion that there's some thing here that I'm looking at. It's a thing, a concrete thing, and let go and just come back to the experience right here, whatever that may be. I think. And I think that we can. It's always going to be a matter of balancing. I think that as we live, we become more sensitive to the fact that I'm grasping. I'm sort of. I'm not here fully here right now. I'm caught up in something and coming back. We can think without getting caught up in the content of the thinking. Anyway. We're aware of the content of the thinking, but we haven't seized on the content of thinking as if it was some real thing that we're attaching to. So, yeah, I think that it. It's possible. I think that, you know, I think we can have the experience of Big Mind. We do almost every time we sit down. I imagine we can speak from that experience. And I think that sometimes if we're in the midst of living with Big Mind, we can hear a phrase from a treatise, like treatise, and go, yeah, okay, right. But that's hearing the words as part of the moment. It's not that we've made that the moment, gotten caught up in the thinking and the imagery. And there's in fact, there's at least one koan of someone coming to awakening, hearing those two lines. And I think that you have to say, well, what's the difference in the two stories? And the one is that Lugong is kind of saying, I've got it work out. It's all about this. It's not that. Oh yeah, of course. This is what I've experienced in Zaza. It's okay, I'm looking out there and I'm going to perceive this same root in this one body that we all have. And at the same time, you know, as he's thinking this, he's. He's still thinking about him looking for this root. He's saying he's still here looking at all these other beings that he has a common root with or a common body with. So he's never that way. He caught up in thinking, caught up in the metaphor. He's never going to get beyond the metaphor. We get beyond the metaphors and we get to a more awakened experience of the world through Zaizen and learning to take that step back, take a step where there's just the world in our mind is more spacious. Some of the constriction of thoughts and feelings have loosened up a little bit. We've got more room to work with. That's what I think. You're letting me off easy. Okay. David. [00:28:43] Speaker E: Hi, Douglas. Thank you so much. Thank you for picking this story and talking about it. You had mentioned that you were going to. So I was. So I had the chance to look at it some. And thank you for saying the thing about intimacy and compassion, because that's what comes through for me in this story. Right. Because Lu Gung has read this verse, you know, like a poet, and he's so impressed with it, and he's kind of fallen in love with it. And he quotes it, heaven and earth have one root, the 10,000 things. Or heaven and earth have the same root, the 10,000 things have one body. And then he says, isn't that wonderful? Right? That's what he says. He doesn't say, I've got it. He says, oh, isn't that remarkable? [00:29:30] Speaker C: And. [00:29:30] Speaker E: And, you know, it's like Nanquan doesn't say, oh, you're wrong. Here's the right way, you know, And I see so much respect for the student position in these stories. He just points to a beautiful flower, you know, and says, well, people nowadays see this as if in a dream. And he doesn't do the work for Lu Gang, right? But Lu Gang, I guess, is being invited to experience a flower as a flower. And all the things that a flower might be, might represent. Represent, and might call me to do how I might be called to care for the flower, treasure the flower, be with the flower, you know, all. All of those things. So it just. It feels like a very tender, very tender and kind story to me. Kind of. These stories all, more and more seem like, what about the big emptiness? And the answer is the big compassion. That's why. [00:30:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think that we have to remember that the aim of our practice, the transformation perhaps, that we hope to undergo, is opening to the world and living more compassionately. It's not. It's not some sort of intellectual exercise, philosophical exercise, purely intellectual exercise, to get to some sort of transcendent truth. More. Okay, well, then I think we can do the four vows and have announcements. Being czar memberless, we vow to free them, Delusion. [00:31:17] Speaker C: Got to them, Thy are boundless. Ye bows unto them this way is unsurpassable, possible in house realize it, He. We vow to free them. Illusions are exhaustible. We vow to cut through them. Dharma gates are boundless. We vow to unto them those ways unsurpassable, to realize they must be.