The Flatbed Sutra of Louie Wing
"Zen Master Hotetsu of Mount Mayu is using a fan. A monk comes up and says, "The nature of air is ever-present, and there is no place it does not reach. Why then does the Master use a fan?" The Master says, "You understand that the nature of air is ever-present, but you do not understand the truth that there is no place it does not reach." The monk says "What is the truth of there being no place it does not reach?" At this, the Master just continues to use the fan. The monk does prostrations."
The story of the Zen Master and his fan, concerning how one awakens to the ultimate, appears near the end of the Genjokoan (Actualization of the Fundamental Point), an important chapter in Eihei Dogen's book, the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), written in 1233. This is not my tradition, I know very little about Japanese Zen, and I'd have probably never come across it had it not been for Ted Biringer's book 'The Flatbed Sutra of Louie Wing' in which he offers a new translation and commentary.
And those few pages alone are reason enough to go out and buy the book. Biringer's comments, rather than burying Dogen's words, serve to make them sparkle. Biringer adds not only his own thoughts, but classic koans and stories directly relevant to the passage in hand, and so helps the reader tackle this, one of the most profound of Zen teachings. I don't pretend to understand or to have awakened to it myself, but with Biringer's guidance I was able to see how some of its teachings can have relevance.
When Dogen says "to realize the Buddha-dharma is to realize your self", Biringer adds not only his own thoughts, "Enlightenment, wisdom, Buddhahood, Zen, true-nature, etc. are provisional terms employed for directing you to the truth about yourself", but also an essential collection of insights picked out from the huge Zen archives. Biringer brings in Bodhidharma, Eno, Obaku, Rinzai, and Bassui before moving on to Dogen's next line: "to realize your self is to forget your self."
"To forget your self is to be actualised by the many things", and Biringer paints the picture of a skier, absorbed in his progress down a mountain, "swoosh, swoosh, chunk, swoosh, swoosh." No snow, no sounds, no thinking. The thrust of Biringer's book is just this. To awaken is to cease dualistic conceptualisation and to reside in one's own awareness, in the "vast, unnamable, fathomless void".
Biringer presents this message in the voice of Louie Wing, a fictional character of his own creation, whose 'Flatbed Sutra', delivered from the back of a truck, is based upon The Platform Sutra of the sixth Zen patriach, Huineng, but made a little more modern and, from my own limited experience of flicking through the Platform Sutra, considerably easier to read. Certainly I feel that, armed with Biringer's insightful adaptation, I'm now in a better position to take a closer look at the original.
Not that it's easy. Biringer, through the character of Louie Wing, talks at length about koan-introspection, the four prajnas of Buddahood, the five ranks, and by the end of this section my head was spinning and it was confirmed that this was far from being the path for me. There seem to be so many pitfalls, so many places where the practitioner can go wrong, and with the insistence that "until you actually experience this entry, often called kensho, you cannot grasp the truth of Zen" I hardly make the starting gate.
But that is unfair, it's a criticism not of Biringer's book but of the tradition in which it is written, to which I don't belong and have little karmic connection. If anything, thanks are owed to Biringer for opening up this path of Buddhism, for making Japanese Zen easier to understand and, through his skill with words, entirely absorbing. Biringer can not only hold together long threads of exposition, he does it with humour too, and rests it all upon a granite hard foundation of research and knowledge.
This is most evident, of course, in the first half of the book, containing the Flatbed Sutra, and in part two of the book, the commentaries on the Genjokoan and on 'Bodhidharma's Vast, Unnamable, Fathomless Void'. But Biringer's depth of insight and knowledge is also evident, of course, in the final section, in the 'Sayings and Doings of Louie Wing', a collection of teachings ideal for dipping in and out of, and from which there was much that I was able to learn, and much that I could apply to my own, albeit different, practice.
The book ends with the text of the Genjokoan, in Biringer's new translation, a very useful appendix of names, full notes for all the book's references, a glossary, a six page bibliography, and a full index. Biringer also maintains the Flatbed Sutra website in which he regularly posts passages from the book for discussion and which has a lively and devoted following. On a hot day, only you yourself can wave the fan, but it's good to have so many to choose from, and Biringer provides a very valuable new addition.
Links:
0 comments:
Post a Comment