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(I)




Hyakujo and the Fox




Main case:


Whenever Master Hyakujo delivered a sermon, an old man was always there listening with the monks. When they left, he left too. One day, however, he remained behind. The master asked him, “What man are you, standing in front of me?” The old man replied, “Indeed, I am not a man.


In the past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived on this mountain (as a Zen priest). On one occasion a monk asked me, ‘Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?’ I answered, ‘He does not.’


Because of this answer, I fell into the state of a fox for 500 lives. Now, I beg you, Master, please say a ‘turning word’ on my behalf and release me from the body of a fox.”


Then he asked, “Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” The master answered, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.”


Upon hearing this, the old man immediately became deeply enlightened. Making his bows, he said, “I have now been released from the body of the fox and will be behind the mountain. I dare to make a request of the Master. Please perform my funeral as you would for a deceased priest.”


The master had the Ino strike the anvil with a gavel and announce to the monks that after the meal there would be a funeral service for a deceased priest. The monks wondered, saying, “All are healthy. No one is sick in the infirmary.


What’s this all about?” After the meal, the master led the monks to the foot of a rock behind the mountain and with his staff poked out the dead body of a fox. He then performed the ceremony of cremation.


That evening the master ascended the rostrum in the hall and told the monks the whole story. Obaku thereupon asked, “The man of old missed the turning word and fell to the state of a fox for 500 lives. Suppose every time he answered he made no mistakes, what would happen then?”


The master said, “Just come nearer and I’ll tell you.” Obaku then went up to the master and slapped him. The master clapped his hands and, laughing aloud, said, “I thought the barbarian’s beard was red, but here is a barbarian with a red beard!”




MUMON’S COMMENTARY:


Not falling under the law of cause and effect—for what reason had he fallen into the state of a fox? The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured—for what reason has he been released from a fox’s body? If in regard to this you have the one eye, then you will understand that the former Hyakujo enjoyed 500 lives of grace as a fox.




THE VERSE:


Not falling, not obscuring,


Two faces, one die.


Not obscuring, not falling,


A thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes.




This is a famous koan and a controversial one at that. It deals with the Buddhist ideas of Karma and rebirth, the subtleties of language in awakening and also with supernatural elements in terms of the transformation of man into a fox and back, as well as with the matter of reincarnation.


Hyakujo (Pai-chang or Baizhang), 720-814, had a long life and was the student of the great master Baso. Obaku (Huangbo) was Hyakujo’s famous student, and Rinzai was Obaku’s remarkable student. Three generations of great masters.


The koan story is a mythic story, as the reference to Kashyapa Buddha shows. Kashyapa Buddha is the 6th legendary Buddha and our Shakyamuni Buddha is the 7th one. I need not repeat the koan story. The fox man was the master in the same monastery ages ago, and because of a wrong answer he became a fox and has lived 500 lives. What was the wrong answer?


‘Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?’ He had answered, ‘He does not.’


What is the right answer, ‘the turning word,’ that liberates him?


“Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” The present master answers, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.”


Both the answers can be said to be similar, as Mumon’s verse proclaims:


Not falling, not obscuring,


Two faces, one die.




Yamada Koun remarks, “As you know, a die (dice in the plural) has six faces and when you throw it, sometimes a one appears, sometimes a four, sometimes a six. Each time a different face may appear, but the die is at all times one and the same.


“Not obscuring, not falling, a thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes.” Sometimes the form of a fox appears, sometimes the form of a man, but the essential nature is always one.”


Shibayama remarks in the same vein, “You may say, “not ignoring causation,” yet if discriminating consciousness moves there and if you become attached to “not ignoring,” you are turned into a fox. You may say, “not falling into causation,” and if you do not become attached to it, you are released from the fox body. The essence of this koan can really be appreciated when one experiences the fact of no-mind. He then does not make such dualistic discriminations as “not falling” and “not ignoring,” or whether the one is good and the other not; falling and ignoring are both broken through and transcended.”


The traditional understanding of this koan is the nonduality of the two understandings of causality or karma. Karma is the central theme of the koan: how to be liberated from Karma and realize awakening. Liberation from your karma is to accept your allotted karma in freedom. When you are a fox, accept the life of the fox through and through. It is a great Yes to your life.




In 2 Corinthians (19-20) it is said that there was


no ‘yes and no’ in Jesus, but a Great Yes, a Great Amen. I wrote in another place, you affirm and accept your life condition, whatever the state and condition, totally and wholeheartedly. In Meister Eckhart’s terms, it is Gelassensein. The words of Iris Murdoch throw a great light on such acceptance:


“Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent what virtue is. The acceptance of death is an acceptance of own nothingness which is an automatic spur to our concern with what is not ourselves. The good man is humble…The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue and its unique value and the endless extent of its demand”


(Quoted in Pihlström, p. 64-5).




(II)




Karma in Buddhism is necessarily connected with reincarnation. Karma of cause and effect is not primarily confined to this present life; it extends to previous lives. The effects of past lives condition this present life. Karma and reincarnation have become problems to the so-called secular Buddhists. They transform Buddhism into a non-religious, rational way Karma And Awakening and throw away the ideas of rebirth and karma. Buddhism is a religion. Karma and rebirth have to be re-interpreted, but should not be interpreted away. Karma and Reincarnation point to the religious and transcendent dimension.


I summarized Richard Gombrich (What the Buddha Thought, p.28) on karma: The central teaching of the Buddha was Karma. The Jains taught the theory nof karma solely in terms of deeds and their material effect on the soul. It was a sort of materialism. The Vedic Brahmins taught karma in terms of religious rituals and sacrifice, and it was mechanical and did not have much to do with intention and ethics. The Buddha ethicized karma; which means that karma is essentially one’s intention and ethical responsibility. If one does an action with a good will and good intention, it is good karma and will lead to good results; and if one does it with a bad will and evil intention, it will lead to negative consequences. Thus karma gives freedom to the individual and makes one responsible for one’s own destiny.


If the effects of karma are not seen in the present life, they will come to fruition in the next life and the next. Thus, the theory of karma and rebirth go together. Gombrich remarks, “The Buddha’s version of the law of karma was entirely his own; but to accept it was the leap of faith he demanded of every follower” (Zen: Soundless Sound of One Hand).





(III)




Master Dogen in his early period had the same traditional understanding of the nonduality of the two understandings of causality: “Because causality necessarily means full cause (ennin) and complete effect (manga), there is no reason for a discussion concerning “falling into” or “not falling into,” “obscuring” or “not obscuring” [causality].” Later he recanted his former views and announced: “Those who say “one does not fall into cause and effect” deny causation, thereby falling into the lower realms. Those who say “one cannot ignore cause and effect” clearly identify with cause and effect. When people hear about identifying with cause and effect, they are freed from the lower realms. Do not doubt this. Many of our contemporaries who consider themselves students of Zen deny causation. How do we know? They confuse “not ignoring” with “not falling into.” Thus we know they deny cause and effect.”


Why did Dogen so drastically change his views? The reason may be the changing circumstances of his monastic environment: “An important implication of the fact that Dogen sought to cultivate a lay audience is that his emphasis on supernatural events at his monastery Eiheiji, which appears in his writings starting in the late 1240s and lasts until his death, was aimed at attracting lay followers. Dogen’s changing interpretation of the wild-fox koan, which has clear supernatural themes, can be seen in this light” (Wild Fox Koan, 2014).




(IV)




Cause and effect are not cosmic iron-clad law. Dogen is wrong to posit cause and effect as a rigid law and that this law is liberating. Shibayama is wrong again to posit karma as the absolute law: “In all ages and places there can be nothing on this earth that does not exist through the action of cause and effect. Every moment, every existence is causation itself.


Outside it there is neither I nor the world. This being the case, the man of real freedom would be the one who lives in peace in whatever circumstances cause and effect bring about. Whether the situation be favorable or adverse, he lives it as the absolute situation with his whole being—that is, he is causation itself.” If the enlightened man was causation itself, if he was totally identified with cause and effect, there would be no space for intentionality and no space for freedom; there would be only fatalism and determinism. It is good to remember in this context the so-called Serenity Prayer:


‘Lord, give me the courage to change the things that can be changed; the patience to accept the things that cannot be changed; and the wisdom to know the difference.’




Even the physical laws are not absolute. There is indeterminacy and unpredictability. The reality of non-locality disproves causal determinism. The reality of light is mysterious.


“Up until recent decades physicists assumed that unobserved particles were no different from observed particles. Each possessed definite or determinate properties that rendered them distinct from other particles, and from the rest of the world. But quantum entanglement embodies the realization that two particles originating from a common event timelessly interact as they fly away from each other. From a classical (pre-quantum) perspective this is puzzling, and some say revolutionary.


Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos propose that quantum entanglement “has more potential to change our conceptions of the ‘way things are’ than any previous discovery in the history of science”… Both quantum entanglement and sunyata mark that aspect of reality that is still innocent of what it might yet be. Still indeterminate, still quivering with possibility, and still lacking the ontological wherewithal to afford us secure intellectual footing in the cosmos” (Cf. David Grandy, Finding Light. In PEW 65/4, October 2015).


The psyche also lies beyond total determinism.


“...The law of cause and effect simply does not apply to matters of the soul or psyche. Cause and effect do not regulate the soul. Understood scientifically, causality means that the same cause always results in the same effect. Cause and effect rule the fields of physiology and physical medicine, for instance. We understand—and perhaps heal—a physical disease if we are able to describe its symptoms, know its prognosis and identify its causes. Jungian psychology assumes that the endless search for causes and the belief in our capacity to heal once we have identified these causes are nothing but a dead end...Jung insisted repeatedly on the autonomy of the soul. In other words, the soul is not “caused,” neither by nature, inheritance, nor by the environment and education. The soul is independent, autonomous and cannot—or only conditionally—be understood via the category of cause and effect. Therefore, we cannot predict human behaviour, neither that of individuals nor that of groups and societies...


Psyche is autonomous. Naturally, psychology cannot completely neglect causality, but must understand it as a symbolic image of relationship, of connection.” (Guggenbühl-Craig, From the Wrong Side, pp. 30-1, 54; also quoted in Zen: Soundless Sound of One Hand).




(V)




Forgiveness, particularly Christian forgiveness, frees one to a new and creative life, it does not imprison one in eternal causation. Of course, one may have to suffer the effects of the deed, but when one is forgiven, he/she is a new creation. Robert Spaemann has some insightful remarks: “Only the consciousness of forgiveness unlocks these situations, ‘so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.’ That is to say, it permits the person once again to make a creative destination of her acts without hindrance from the past. Repentance cannot achieve liberation on its own, for guilt is an objectively imprisoning complex of circumstances that cannot be overcome by the guilty subject unilaterally. The idea of such a complex is not itself a religious one, whether as interpreted by Anaximander, for whom everything ‘pays 110 the price for its injustice’ by passing from the scene, or in the Indian idea of Karma. Religion is involved in the belief that weeping is heard and sins are forgiven. The certainty of such forgiveness can only be mediated through a particular religious tradition. But the religious possibility, the possibility of forgiveness, is indispensable for persons as such, because it also makes it possible to keep continuity with oneself as a person over time. Forgiveness is the force that resists entropy. Religion is the hope that the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not have the last word on reality” (Persons, p.101).




(VI)




Now about the koan. Both the answers posit awakening to Emptiness as the ground of liberation and freedom from karma and rebirth. The first answer ‘does not fall into causation’ focuses on the dimension of Emptiness. When you awaken to Emptiness, you are freed from causation. The danger in this answer is that it can be taken in terms of Emptiness and form as dualistic, and then it is unfreedom. The second answer ‘the law of cause and effect cannot be obscured’ focuses on the effects of karma. Even when one is awakened, one can suffer the effects of karma. But when one is awakened, one moves freely in the realm of cause and effect. One is not under the iron-clad law of cause and effect.




There is a similar koan, ‘Save the ghost.’ The ghost is said to be perpetually hungry, unable to eat, perpetually wandering and suffering. You are the ghost caught in the samsaric wheel of wandering and suffering. Saving the ghost means awakening to Emptiness, your home-ground. This Awakening frees you from the chain of causation and karma. You then move freely in the realm of cause and effect, untouched and unbound by cause and effect. When the Buddha awakened under the Bodhi tree, he exclaimed, “All beings are Tathagata, endowed with wisdom and virtue; but they are labouring under ignorance.” In awakening you awaken to your Original Face before your parents were born.




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Now comes the second part of the koan. In many koans, the first part is sort of a thesis and the second part the antithesis. Hyakujo might have made up the story of the dead fox in order to teach his monks; or it might have been invented later. Whatever the case, Obaku by his behaviour negates the cause and effect rigidity and manifests freedom. He might be saying, ‘What are you talking, Master, about karma and no-karma. Throw all that theory and conceptualism into the garbage bin!’




To suppose that ‘every time he answered he made no mistakes, but answered rightly’ is to be caught in a rigid straitjacket, it is one more deterministic behaviour. Walt Whitman sang, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Master Joshu is such a free person.


“A monk said to Joshu, “You so often quote the words, ‘The real Way is not difficult. It only abhors choice and attachment.’ Isn’t that your point of attachment?” Joshu said, “A man asked me the same question once before, and five years later I have still found no justification for it!” (HR 58).


Hyakujo’s joyful remark, “I thought the barbarian’s beard was red, but here is a barbarian with a red beard!” is affirmation and approval of Obaku. He is saying that the redbearded Barbarian Bodhidharma has come back again as Obaku! Of course, Obaku would never have literally slapped his master. It is play and drama in joyous freedom.




Now, can you answer Mumon’s two questions:


‘Not falling under the law of cause and effect—for what reason had he fallen into the state of a fox? The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured—for what reason has he been released from a fox’s body?’ Mumon claims that ‘the former Hyakujo enjoyed 500 lives of grace as a fox.’ But in the verse he says ‘A thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes.’ Were the 500 lives of the former Hyakujo one continuous mistake? Is your whole life one mistake? Or are the mistakes of your life a blessing? Or is it a grace-filled life?




Bibliography


Ama Samy. (2015). Zen: Soundless Sound of One Hand.


Perumalmalai, Tamilnadu. Bodhizendo.


Gombrich, Richard. (2009). What the Buddha Thought.


Sheffield. Equinox.


Grandy, David. (October 2015). Finding Light. PEW 65/4


(Philosophy East And West). Hawai’i. University of Hawai’i


Press.


Guggenbűhl-Craig, Adolf. (1995). From the Wrong Side.


Woodstock, CN. Spring Publications.


Pihlström, Sami. (2005). Pragmatic Moral Realism. Amsterdam,


New York. Rodopi.


Shibayama, Zenkai. (2000). The Gateless Barrier. Boston.


Shambhala.


Spaemann, Robert. (Trans.). (2006). Persons. Oxford. Oxford


University Press.


Wild Fox Koan. (2014). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.


org/wiki/Wild_fox_koan


December, 2015. Ama Samy




Right and Wrong




When Bankei held his seclusion-weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend. During one of these gatherings a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled. Bankei ignored the case. Later the pupil was caught in a similar act, and again Bankei disregarded the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition asking for the dismissal of the thief, stating that otherwise they would leave in a body.


When Bankei had read the petition he called everyone before him.


“You are wise brothers,” he told them. “You know what is right and what is not right. You may go somewhere else to study if you wish, but this poor brother does not even know right from wrong. Who will teach him if I do not? I am going to keep him here even if all the rest of you leave.” A torrent of tears cleansed the face of the brother who had stolen. All desire to steal had vanished.