I.
The
bare bones of the story of Bodhidharma, that strange, bearded, wide-eyed fellow
who brought the meditation school of Buddhism that we know as Zen to China, are
well known. He sailed from India to Canton and then proceeded to the court of
Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty, who asked the Patriarch how much merit he had
accumulated from sponsoring the building of temples, the copying of Buddhist scriptures,
and the ordination of monks. When Bodhidharma replied, "None," the emperor
didn't understand, so Bodhidharma went north, crossed the Yangtse River on a reed,
and spent nine years gazing at a wall at Shao-lin Monastery.
At the conclusion
of those nine years, the tradition relates, a Chinese monk named Shen-kuang (Hui-k'o)
became the second Patriarch in China. Yet he was not the first there to recognize
the Patriarch's mind. The first was not a person at all; he was a parrot.
After
Bodhidharma left Emperor Wu,
"(he) went to Nanking where he listened
to Dharma Master Shen Kuang
explain the Sutras. When Shen Kuang spoke, the
heavens rained
fragrant blossoms and a golden-petalled lotus rose from the
earth
for him to sit upon...
After listening to the Sutra, Bodhidharma
asked, "Dharma Master, what are you doing?"
"I am explaining
Sutras," Shen Kuang replied.
"Why are you explaining Sutras?"
"I am teaching people to end birth and death."
"Oh?"
said Bodhidharma, "Exactly how do you do that? In this
Sutra which you
explain, the words are black and the paper is white.
How does this teach people
to end birth and death?"
Dharma Master Shen Kuang had nothing to say.
How did he teach people to end birth and death? He fumed in silence. Then, even
though heavenly maidens rained down flowers and the earth gave forth golden lotuses,
Dharma Master Shen Kuang got angry...and used his heavy iron beads to level the
opposition. In response to Bodhidharma's question, he flushed with anger and raged
like a tidal wave smashing a mountain.
As he whipped out his beads, he snapped,
"You are slandering the Dharma!" and cracked Bodhidharma across the
mouth, knocking loose two teeth. Bodhidharma neither moved nor spoke. He hadn't
expected such a vicious reply...Bodhidharma did not let his teeth fall to the
ground.
Instead he swallowed them and disappeared down the road. Although
he had been battered and reviled,...those who leave left the home life have to
be patient. How much more so must a patriarch forbear.
Bodhidharma then met
a parrot imprisoned in a wicker cage. This bird was much more intelligent than
Dharma Master Shen Kuang. Recognizing Bodhidharma as the First Patriarch, the
bird said,
Mind from the West,
Mind from the West,
Teach me a way
To escape from this cage.
Although Bodhidharma had received no response
from people, this parrot recognized him. Hearing the bird's plea for help, Bodhidharma
whispered a secret expedient teaching to teach this bird how to end
suffering.
He said, To escape from the cage; To escape from the cage, Jut out both legs,
Close both eyes.
This is the way To escape from the cage!
The parrot listened
carefully and said, "All right! I understand," and stuck out his legs,
closed his eyes, and waited.
When the bird's owner came home from work, he
always played with his parrot. But this time when he looked in the cage he was
shocked... (and) was on the verge of tears. He couldn't have been more upset if
his own son had died. He pulled open the cage door and scooped up the bird, which
lay still and quiet in his hand. The body had not yet chilled. The owner looked
with disbelief at the little body. He peeked at it from the left and right; it
didn't even quiver. Slowly, he opened his and...PHLLRTTPHRTTPHLLRTT!! The bird
broke loose from his hand and flew away!
(Hua, The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma
Jewel Platform Sutra and Commentary, San Francisco: Sino-merican Buddhist Assoc.,
1971, pp. 2-4)
That is the story of how the parrot gained its freedom.
Soon
after Bodhidharma left Shen-kuang, however, Yama, King of the Dead, sent the ghost
of impermanence with a summons for Shen-kuang, who was quite surprised that he
too must die. Shen-kuang then asked whether indeed there really was anyone in
China who was not subject to Yama's summons. The reply came back: only the Indian
monk whose teeth Shen-kuang had knocked out. Shen-kuang then asked for a temporary
reprieve from Yama so that he could chase after Bodhidharma and learn how to escape
death.
The path to the ending of birth and death is the enlightenment Bodhidharma
taught. According to one tradition, which will be explained more fully below,
Bodhidharma was so intransigent with Emperor Wu because he wanted to save him
from the cruel and untimely death which was impending as a result of the karma
which the emperor had created in a former life. Bodhidharma failed. Shen-kuang
followed Bodhidharma only after learning that he was the only one who could teach
him how to escape death. However, in yet another story, Bodhidharma finally got
so tired of being poisoned by jealous monks all the time--none of the attempts
were successful--that he voluntarily lay down and died. Yet, after his burial,
an official in a distant province saw him hurrying off to India holding a single
shoe in his hand. When the Patriarch's grave was subsequently opened, with the
exception of the other shoe, the coffin was empty.
What prescriptions did
Bodhidharma give for enlightenment (that is, for permanently transcending the
life-death cycle), or in more mythological terms, for permanently avoiding the
summons of King Yama? For the emperor, what Bodhidharma had in mind was getting
him to let go of all his merit, to see through his attachments to being emperor,
to being a great patron of the Buddhadharma, and instead to leave the home life
and devote his full time to making an end of his own personal cycle of death and
rebirth.
Shen-kuang had already left the home life, yet he too was caught
up in the enjoyment of the great merit which he had accumulated. Bodhidharma's
formula for him involved a huge lesson in humility: kneeling before Bodhidharma
for nine years as the Patriarch sat staring at the wall, totally ignoring him.
It was only when Shen-kuang demonstrated, by cutting off his arm, that the Dharma
was even more important to him than his body, that Bodhidharma consented to teach
him. Then, when Shen-kuang complained of the pain and asked Bodhidharma to quiet
his mind, Shen-kuang finally realized his independence from both his physical
bodily existence and his mental continuum and received the Mind Seal.
Yet
it was to the parrot that Bodhidharma gave the most specific instruction on how
to become free from this physical, bodily existence and its accompanying mortality,
and through this, how we ourselves can free ourselves from our own cages. When
he tells the parrot to lie down, close its eyes, and play dead, he is perhaps
telling human candidates for enlightenment to sit down in meditation and play
dead, to ignore the pleasure and pain of the body, and to become living dead people.
For only in imitating death, Bodhidharma counsels, will we gain our freedom from
physical mortality.
II.
In order to comprehend how physical mortality is
understood within the Buddhist tradition, we should probably first turn our attention
to the nature of life. The Buddhists tell us that life has three essential characteristics:
the presence of the life-faculty, of heat, and of consciousnesses. In terms of
the eight consciousnesses of Yogacara Buddhism, the life-faculty is not really
separate from the basic or storehouse consciousness, and heat is a characteristic
of the body when that consciousness is present. Yet the presence of the life-faculty
and heat alone give the impression of living death, for there is no animation,
no perceptual functioning, and no sense of an ego-individual.
Those other
qualities, which we normally associate with a living being, come from the third
characteristic, consciousness. The Yogacara system describes this as the first
seven consciousnesses, all of which develop out of the eighth or storehouse consciousness.
The seventh consciousness contains the sense of self or of ego-individuality with
which it defiles the first six consciousnesses. The sixth consciousness is a perceptual
and cognitive processing center, while the first five consciousnesses are the
perceptual awarenesses of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body.
Although with
the emanation of these consciousnesses there is a division into "departments",
they are all based upon mental discrimination. The eight consciousnesses are still
basically one. To use an analogy, let us think of a room with seven light bulbs.
You flick the light switch and seven distinct lights shine. Turn the switch to
"off" and the lights disappear. Yet there is just one electric current,
and its source is comparable to the storehouse consciousness, or, more fundamentally,
the enlightened mind.
Death is like the severing of wires or a break in the
switch so that the lights go out. Yet the electricity is unharmed. The generator
is still generating and the electricity flows wherever the circuit is not broken.
In other words, at death the first seven consciousnesses collapse back into the
eighth or storehouse consciousness, and the subsequent unitary, conglomerate consciousness
leaves the body to go in search of another body and gets reborn elsewhere. It
finds a new set of seven fully wired light bulbs waiting for the electricity to
be turned on and the switch flicked.
Death usually occurs from exhaustion
of the life force or because of a breakdown in the physical system of the body.
The desires and attachments of the central consciousness which cause it to be
reborn in the first place, and then to departmentalize into seven active consciousnesses
that deal with the external world, have not disappeared; they have merely been
frustrated temporarily. And the Buddhists tell us that it is the strongest of
those desires, the sexual, that leads to rebirth.
When the Sage dies, since
for him those desires and attachments no longer exist, there is no striving for
rebirth. And since those desires and attachments no longer exist, death can take
place at will because there is no longer any attachment to the body.
Any breaking
of the attachments to the body must begin by breaking the attachment to the commonly
held belief that the body is me, that I am my body. For that attachment to be
broken effectively, it is necessary to come into contact with a non-physical,
non-perceptual/cognitive level of consciousness. In terms of the Yogacara schema,
that means either the eighth or storehouse consciousness or its real basis, the
enlightened mind. Bodhidharma's technique, that of the living dead man, does not
refer to the collapse of consciousnesses into the storehouse consciousness and
its subsequent leave-taking of the body, for that would result in a dead dead
man and not a living one. Rather, the first step is the loss of interest in that
life which is associated with the gratifying of desires through the discrimination
of the senses and of the intellect (that is, of the first seven consciousnesses).
When one ceases to obey the perceptual and cognitive habits that are the real
vehicles of desire-gratification, then the basis for ordinary perceptual and cognitive
activity is destroyed and one enters samadhi. In other words, mental functioning
is totally stilled, yet awareness remains in a clear and heightened condition.
With the distraction of ordinary perceptual and cognitive activity removed, then
the deeper layers of consciousness, which are not dependent on the body, can be
apprehended. The venerable Ch'an Master Hsu Yun summed it up this way:
One
should lay down everything with which one's body is burdened, thus becoming exactly
like a dead man [italics added]. The outcome will be that sense-organs, sense-data,
and consciousness will vanish and that greed, anger, stupidity and love will be
eliminated
.When all concurrent causes heave been laid down, false thinking
will vanish with the non-arising of a single thought, the brightness of one's
own nature will appear in full (Luk, trans., Ch'an and Zen Teachings, Series One,
p. 20).
In the words of the story of Bodhidharma and the parrot, the parrot
is consciousness, the cage is the body, and perhaps the owner represents the beckonings
of the external world that we learn to imitate and identify with as the ego. By
playing dead, that is, by remaining completely indifferent to our situation and
to the demands of our bodies, we are freed from the bonds of coarse physical existence
and become free to come and to go as we wish. Thus the Bodhisattva Patriarch Bodhidharma,
though free to go, chose to remain for a certain period.
III.
At this point
one may object that it is all very well to prescribe as a method of spiritual
practice an imitation of death by which one becomes completely indifferent to
one's situation and to the demands of one's body, yet that type of prescription,
in itself, does little to inform us about why it is so unappealing to us and about
why it is so difficult to put into practice. In order to get more of an intellectual
handle on what is actually involved, let us now consider two diametrically opposed
ways in which death can be conceived in a non-ordinary way. They are death as
the death of change (that is, the escape from impermanence) and death as the death
of self.
The death of change, the Buddhists would say, is impossible to achieve,
and in seeking for it is where non-Buddhist religious systems go astray. Their
search is for the permanent, the real, the unchanging; they wish to die to this
world of flux to be reborn in the eternal. This cannot be, the Buddhists say,
and so the quest for this type of death is negatively assessed by them. It may
even be possible to claim that Buddhists see it as the basic factor which keeps
us from enlightenment. In that we seek security in sameness and in repetition,
we try to escape new and difficult situations and to construct and put ourselves
in situations in which the stress of the new and difficult can be avoided. We
fear change because we become attached to externals and identify withthem. When
those externals change, anxiety is produced. Situations are difficult and stressful
basically because they are abrasive to our view of ourselves, and often require
that that view be modified. The threats are also internal, coming from the emergence
into consciousness of repressed or other previously unconsciousness material.
The constantly changing web of relationships in the external environment triggers
the rise of thoughts like: "I am afraid of what people will think of me;
I am afraid of what will happen to me; I am afraid that my picture of myself will
no longer be tenable." We cling to and identify with the body because it
seems so permanent and changes so slowly compared with our thoughts, Yet all these
attempts to eliminate change spring from the attempt to establish and protect
the image of a more or less permanent self.
Ironically, an extreme example
of this type of self-protection is often found in that type of monastic withdrawal
from the world which is an attempt to allay threats to the self by withdrawal
from changing outer situations. Such external withdrawal can be paralleled internally
by suppression. That is, heightened or deadened states of consciousness can be
produced by temporary suppression of mental material. Such suppression was not
thought to lead to the type of samadhi which would be conducive to the Path. Therefore,
the Sixth Ch'an Patriarch Hui-neng commented:
If you merely do not think of
the hundred things and completely rid yourself of thought, as the last thought
ceases you die and undergo rebirth in another place. (Platform Sutra, op. cit.,
p, 195).
The danger of these sorts of practices is well illustrated by another
tale out of the Bodhidharma cycle that was referred to earlier. One traditional
account tells us that in denying that Emperor Wu had any merit Bodhidharma was
trying to save him from a cause planted in a past life when he too had been a
monk. He lived in the mountains, and every day, when he tried to meditate under
his favorite tree, a monkey would come, jump around in the tree, and shake the
branches to disturb him. Finally, after many days, in exasperation, he caught
the monkey, placed it in a small cave, and blocked the entrance with stones so
that he could have some peace and quiet. Although he fully intended to let the
monkey out after he had finished meditating, he forgot all about it until several
days later and then found that it had already died. The tale continues by informing
us that the monkey was reborn as a revolutionary bandit, who, some years after
Bodhidharma's visit to Emperor Wu, trapped the Emperor in a pagoda, where he starved
to death.
The way to the other type of death, the death of self, is just the
opposite of that toward the death of change. It leads in a different direction
from the quest to set up or to discover a self which is real, permanent, and unchanging.
If it is impossible to put a stop to the change which is so harmful to "self",
and if fear arises basically because change brings about changes in self which
are frightening because they are unknown, the only alternative, the Buddhists
suggest, is to go in exactly the opposite direction. One should not only admit
the frailty and impermanence of the self but do away with the notion altogether.
On the level of a single thought, this means that death in its negative sense
is holding onto a thought, either grabbing it or pushing it away, and, in either
case, refusing to let go of it. Death in this sense is treating our thinking as
real and important either because of identification with or rejection of our thoughts.
Thus the self is seen as a construct, a pattern of grasping thoughts and not letting
them go or come, of identifying with some and rejecting others. And it is this
type of "holding pattern" self that creates the field, the framework,
for the continuous activity of mental evaluation that we identify with life. The
evaluation is of praise and blame, of good and bad, and so forth. The evaluation,
the judgment, is important because it contributes to the self-myth of stabilization
toward permanence.
What this adds up to is that in order to avoid the fruitless
quest for the death of change and in order to allow the self to die, we should
neither fear our thoughts nor treat them as real, that is, as "supportive
of self" or "destructive to self". To quote the Sixth Patriarch
again, "No thought means to be without thought while in the midst of thought"
(Platform Sutra, op. cit., p. 194).
The process leading to the death of self
and, therefore, to enlightenment is the moment by moment imitation of death. Death
in this instance refers to a stopping of the ordinary, ongoing life processes
which are governed by the self's evaluative clinging to the thoughts: "This
is me, this is mine, this is not me, this is not mine." Thus we can reflect:
which of our perceptual and cognitive habits is not in the service of this constant
process of trying to stop the world, of trying to make the self permanent?