Tag Archives: koan

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enter the rhino

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We’re back with the rhinoceros-horn fan.  The fan in the picture is special; it is dyed peacock feathers and was my grandmother’s.  That’s the story anyway though I have serious doubts about the material.  The feathers are lush and I recall drawing the tip of the fan over my face, relishing the soft tingle.  In my grandmother’s hands, the fan was a material expression of her moods.  By turns, it would project coyness, affect joy, arrogantly dismiss, or capriciously summon.  The fan was special and she believed that by extension she was too.  I, as a child on the other hand, only worried about the butt-naked peacocks running around in the jungles.

One of the learned men in Yen Kuan’s presence, upon hearing Yen Kuan’s call for the rhino, said, “The rhino is still there.”

Hsueh Tou’s prodding is fascinating; he reminds us that the rhino is right there in the room.  The horn, cut away from the animal, is no less a rhino than the beast itself intact with horn.  But we are so very willing to cleave things off and pretend that cutting away generates a whole new thing, separate and unique to itself.  In fact, it’s this very willingness to cleave off things we deem as special that has resulted in the extinction of the Northern white rhino and the Western black rhino.  Soon I suspect we can add polar bears, frogs, sharks, seals, elephants, bears, lions and tigers – oh my!

It happens in relationships too.  I enshrine those parts of my relationships that I declare special.  By that I mean those parts that declare ME special.  Like my grandmother’s peacock fan, these disembodied chunks of interactions serve to draw people closer, hold them in some purgatory, or (and?) dismiss them with a flick of a wrist.  And it’s all enabled by a deeper delusion that these portions of my relationship have nothing to do with the flesh-and-blood, heart-and-soul sentient being in whose true presence they were born.

I wonder what would happen if the rhino entered the room.  What might happen if we were able to see the whole being, the entire gnarly, smelly, grumbly beast?  The whole body crevassed by skin, hair spiking out of pores, stinking of  life and death.  Would Yen Kuan look into the eye of the rhino and see the unreality of his fan?  If we bring the whole smelly mess of our lives into the room and look into its eyes, would we too see the uselessness of the bits and pieces we hacked off to prove our worthiness?

Roshi Enkyo said in dokusan that shikantaza is the most difficult practice.  I took away the understanding that it is an unrelenting awareness of the entirety of my life moment-by-moment, not just those moments on the cushion.  It is the whole rhino lumbering kinhin through the halls and rooms of my being, leaving behind it a trail of poop and pee.

Not a comfortable thought.  But it beats visions of all those butt-naked peacocks in the jungle.

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bring me the rhino virus

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Yen Kuan called to his attendant, “Bring me my rhinoceros fan.”

The attendant said, “The fan is broken.”

Yen Kuan said, “If the fan is broken, bring the rhinoceros back to me.”

The attendant had no reply.

I brought you back the rhinoceros from Rohatsu.  Interesting creature, isn’t he?  As you know, I’m a koan study drop-out however, lately, these little blithers keep creeping into my field of practice.  This one became quite the insistent bug during Rohatsu, likely riding in on the back of the other bug – the flu.

But first, let’s look at Yen Kuan and his fan.   In the various renditions of this koan, he sounds to varying degrees, insistent, petulant, dismissing.  Perhaps my experience was coloured by the air burbling up into my snot-filled nostrils because to me, he seemed to be testing his poor attendant as much as all the various practices of trying to sit Rohatsu with a cold and fever were testing mine.  Yen Kuan seems to be asking his attendant: Well?  What have you created that is refined and special out of all this practice with me?  Show me!  Bring it here!

I felt like that in dokusan.  What is your practice, Genju?   How is your practice going, Genju?  Questions like that get me focused on the cushion-life of practice.  That’s the jewel for most of us, I think.  The hours spent following the breath, letting thoughts come and go.  Butt to zafu is surely proof of our dedication to this path!  It certainly can be and it is so much more heightened in times like a sesshin when we are called upon to exert all that physical presence for hours and hours.  And I have.  Until this one where the chills, low-grade fever, sprained knee and other aches and pains brought me face-to-face to a very quiet phobia I’ve nursed all my life.

The attendant says the fan is broken.  What is he saying?  I’ve tried to shape a practice, master, but it hasn’t worked?  That thing you think is special just isn’t.  It doesn’t always work; it isn’t always of service to me or to the numberless creations I am trying to free.  I’m lost.  I don’t get it.  But Yen Kuan is merciless.  None of this backing out and running away, whining and whingeing about your problems!  Get back to the raw materials.  Bring me back the rhinoceros.   We’ll start over with the raw materials of your life.

The days were exhausting, not only because my system was struggling with several challenges but there was no way to replenish.  I watched hot oatmeal served into the Buddha bowl during oryoki congeal into a cool mass as we waited for the entire hall to be served and then bowed and chanted before eating.  It was vaguely manageable until I watched the hot polenta with cheese harden to a sticky mess that only reluctantly gave way to the edge of my spoon.  Then the fan broke.

I have no fear of dying.  In fact, my life has been so rich being filled with the gifts of so many beloved ones that should I drop right now on the next keystroke, I would be just fine with it.  Being ill, however, is altogether another issue.  Ill, alone, isolated from all that sustains me.  That’s a brokenness, the fear of which, I have never been able to bear in thought or action.  For years, I watched my grandmother – and now my mother – deteriorate in their health, dying neuron by neuron.  My father, over eight years, succumbed to one cancerous virus after another.  Ironically, in Burma all three lived in terror of contracting and dying from even a simple cold.  I was imbued with a psycho-genetic anxiety of getting sick and I thought I had overcome it with all my practice on the impermanence of life.  Yet, there I was, feeling broken and facing the choice of giving up or giving in.

In dokusan, Roshi Joan said, rest deeply.  Roshi Enkyo encouraged me to dive into the cold because I was the only one who could truly experience it completely.  To me, they were asking: what have you crafted from this life of practice that sustains you?  I struggled with the confusion of knowing this was not fatal, that nothing was permanent and wanting this fatiguing series of hacking coughs and snotty-sounding blowing of my nose to go away.  What was I missing in my practice that this situation had become so complicated in my mind?  I watched myself rise at 5 o’clock every morning.  Wash.  Dress.  Walk to the genkan and prepare to sound the han.  Despite the foggy thinking and the open door facing a brutal North wind, I managed to keep steady the pace and rhythm of the striker on the wood slab for the 15 minutes of gathering everyone into the zendo.  No two rounds were the same and the weak strikes, I realized, were like the brush strokes of the enso, irretrievably broken.

And suddenly, I realized my health insofar as I ever believed I had health, has always been broken.  Chicken pox, measles, colds, flu, fevers, sprains, and a myriad of arrows have struck this body.  Fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue have all cracked and fissured this panel I thought I was keeping whole and unblemished.  I didn’t have to worry that the fan might break; it already was broken.  Perhaps Yen Kuan’s attendant had this realization too.  It is the nature of fans to break.  (I think that rascal Yen Kuan knew this all along and was messing with our minds!)  

Yet, despite its brokenness, we have found some usefulness in it.  Or we might have begun again and again with the raw materials of our life to craft another and another.  And those too have broken because that is the nature of all things.  So I said to my fear-filled attendant, Bring me the rhino virus!  We will work with it, craft another practice of fearlessness from it!

But there’s more than just an individual process pointed to in this koan.  Yen Kuan says, Then bring me back the rhinoceros.  He didn’t say, Well, go out and get another beast and start over!  Asking his attendant to bring him back the rhinoceros might suggest they will work on it together.  Koans, after all, are relational; they point to what transpires in the space between you and me, all the roshis and their students, Yen Kuan and his attendant.  Between me and all the 10, 000-armed bodhisattvas who held and carried me through the week.

You can fit a nice-sized rhino in that space.

Later this week:  Another take on the rhino