From Blue Cliff Record 55: Daowu’s “I Won’t Say”
One day Daowu, accompanied by his disciple Jianyuan went to visit a family in which a funeral was to take place, in order to express sympathy.
Blue Cliff Record 55
Jianyuan touched the coffin and said, “Tell me, please, is this life or is this death?”
Daowu said, “I don’t say life; I don’t say death.”
On February 5th, 2022 I put up an entry after learning earlier in the week that one of our teachers, a flawed but influential person, and a Buddhist by his own account, had passed. Since then we’ve learned, grown, shrank, grown again, changed, along with my own understanding of the past. I felt that entry also deserved to change.
Daowu won’t say life and won’t say death.
On death, life and self, from the Sayings of Buddha (Peter Pauper Press,1957):
Some say that the self endures after death, some say it perishes. Both are wrong…(pg. 10) … as the sun’s power through a burning-glass causes fire to appear, so through the cognizance born of sense and object, the mind originates and with it the ego, the thought of self…. The shoot springs from the seed; the seed is not the shoot; both are not one and the same, but successive phases in a continuous growth. (pg. 11)
….
Life is instantaneous and living is dying. Just as the chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests at one point; in the same way, the life of a living being lasts only for the period of one thought. (pg. 16)
Sayings of Buddha,
This old translation, presumably the words of Buddha, came into English through a winding path, according to the book’s introduction. Here’s the explanation: “The narrative of [Buddha’s] life has as its principal source the Sanskrit stories of the monk Asvaghosha, which were translated into Chinese in 420 A.D. and from Chinese into English by Samuel Beale in the Eighteenth Century. The present text is derived chiefly from The Gospel of Buddha, a compilation by Paul Carus from many source-books of Buddhist teachings, including Beale.” (Forward 1,2)
So here we have the words of a legendary teacher (Buddha), as recorded by another legendary poet and teacher (Asvaghosha), translated into the Chinese by an unnamed person–likely also a teacher, possibly someone like the Bodhidharma–and these texts are translated into English by another teacher and scholar, Beale. If you Google “the Sayings of Buddha,” interestingly enough, the author is listed simply as Buddha.
Who knows who said what with a history like that? And yet, the teachings of Buddha are found in many cultures and have been translated many times over. These teachings and philosophies form a kind of conversation between generations and cultures. So if you read Daowu’s words next to those of the Buddha, you can see how the one teacher has influenced the other.
And the Blue Cliff Record, which presumably records Daowu’s words and actions, is itself, a bedrock of Zen Buddhism. What about it? Another torturous history. Legendary teacher, Bodhidharma, is credited with bringing Chan Buddhism, the precursor or Zen, from India to China. Some trace his lineage to Buddha. Well and good. According to the Wikipedia page, the Blue Cliff Record is derived from lectures on Buddhism written by a monk, Yuanwu Keqin, an adherent of Chan Buddhism. He collected and wrote koans to instruct students during summer retreats between 1111 and 1117 in Hunan. Yuanwu used as his source another collection of koans collected by the poet Xuedou Chongxian . Their words together made up the Blue Cliff Record.
According to legend, Yuanwu’s successor, Dahui Zonggao, became convinced that the work led too many students astray, so he burned it, or rather, burned the blocks used to create copies and several copies.
So the Blue Cliff Record was seemingly lost or in pieces, until it was later reconstituted by Zhang Mingyuan. His actions were controversial: his child’s illness was interpreted as a bad omen, given his endeavor to revive the Blue Cliff Record (same Wikipedian entry). However, with some encouragement, he persisted.
Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto School of Zen, is credited with bringing the reconstituted Blue Cliff Record from China to Japan. (also Wikipedia, linked.)
We deal with sacred texts like we deal with memories: we return again and again to them, sometimes fighting them, sometimes lovingly treasuring them, sometimes erasing them, sometimes reconstituting them. For better or worse, sacred texts are the words of the past reaching into our present.
What to do with such ghosts?
