Et le monde, loin d'être un obstacle, est la voie
par laquelle s’actualise son satori.
– Taisen Deshimaru
This weekend in Tennessee, I was obsessing about the financial situation of the temple (part of the abbot’s job description). After watching a particularly spectacular sunset from a bluff on the Cumberland Plateau, I decided to do a little bibliodiviination, or bibliomancy — you know, the ancient practice of asking a question and letting a book open up to a page at random to give you the answer.
When I got back to my desk, I picked up Taisen Deshimaru’s L’Autre Rive: Textes fondamentaux du Zen. (The Other Shore: Fundamental Zen Texts.) What would Deshimaru have to say, I wondered, about our dilemma? Maybe he could offer the sangha some sage advice about money problems from the other shore.
So I sat down in my corner, stuck in my thumb and pulled out a plum. On pages 96 and 97, in the middle of a commentary on the Hannya Shingyo, Deshimaru tells this story:
Un soir, un homme se rendit à l'église et fit une prière: “Mon Dieu, je vous en prie, faites que je trouve de l’argent!” Sur le chemin du retour, il vit briller à la lumière d’un réverbère une grosse bourse et exulta: “Une bourse pleine d’argent! J’ai trouvé une bourse pleine d’argent!”
Il voulut la ramasser, mais le chemin était gelé et la bourse prise dans les glaces.
“Il faut que je trouve une pierre pour briser la glace,” pensa-t-il. Mais quelqu’un arrivait derrière lui, et la bourse risquait de lui échapper. “Je vais plutôt uriner dessus, pensa-t-il, et la glace fondra.”
Ce qu’il fit aussitôt. Il saisit la bourse, la tira, tira encore, mais elle ne venait pas. Il ressentit par contre une grande douleur. Son regard était tourné vers le ciel, mais il n'aperçut ni ciel ni étoiles. Il réalisa alors qu’il venait de faire un rêve et que la douleur provenait des ses testicules, qu’il serrait encore. Seul le lit mouillé était bien réel.
One evening a man went to church and prayed: “God, I beg of you, please help me come into some money!” On the way home, he saw on the ground, shining in the light of a street lamp, a fat money bag, and he rejoiced: “A bag full of money! Praise the Lord! I’ve found a bag full of money!”
He bent down to pick it up, but the bag was frozen in the ice on the path.
"I just need to find a stone to break the ice," he thought. But then he heard someone coming up behind him, and the treasure seemed in danger of being lost. I'll piss on it instead, he thought, that will melt the ice!
Which he lost no time in proceeding to do. Then he seized the bulging bag and pulled it, and pulled again. But it was stuck and he was suddenly in a lot of pain. He looked up at the sky but he could see neither sky nor stars. Then he realized that it was all a dream and that the pain was in his testicles, which he was still savagely tugging. Only the wet bed was real.
Bibliodivination is hardly ever so on point.
We can hope and pray all we want, but this kind of desire only causes suffering and a certain amount of humiliation. Our imagination creates a mirage that is an unreal projection of what we think we want, what we think we need. We can tug all we want at the hallucination, the object of our desire, but that won’t magically bring it out of our fantasy into reality, it will only cause us pain because we think what we want is outside ourselves but it is really only the chimera of desire. So in the end we act on our delusion and unwittingly punish ourselves for not being able to control our circumstances.
Like children, we think we can piss on a cold and obstinate world that tempts us but won’t let us have what we want. Or we think we can outwit those who sneak up behind us to steal what we have not yet got. But it is all an illusion, a dream. The only reality is the damage we have done to ourselves in believing in the illusion, in acting on our delusion. Only the wet bed is real.
Deshimaru goes on to discuss the phrase tendo muso, which has to do with various illusions: “le rêve, les chimères, les mirages, les hallucinations.” The Hannya Shingyo, he says, distinguishes between four types of illusion.
The first error of perception is in relation to mujo (impermanence) and consists in believing in unchanging entities, and the perenniality of existence. This is an error, he says. Tout change sans cesse. All existences are bound for extinction. Nothing is static. Everything evolves and is transformed.
The second error has to do with happiness. This lure resides in our faith in the attractions of this world: love affairs, friendship, the joy we find in our work, vacations, and other entertainments and distractions. Fugitive joys, ephemeral happiness. This phenomenal world can give us only a pale reflection of true happiness, that which we can only find in the absolute dimension, beyond the pleasures of this world. (Sesshin, though, he says, lets us glimpse this journey in the world of that other dimension, the world of plenitude.)
The third error is the attachment of the ego…. and so on.
But here ends the message from the Other Shore on pages 96 and 97.
In the following pages, however, Deshimaru goes on to say that during zazen thought arises from ku, emptiness, the absolute. But in daily life thought arises from shiki, phenomena, the relative. The ego produces ignorance, and ignorance is the source of illusions. And everything is an illusion because our ignorance is endless. Illusions are born of desire, which give birth to all the sickness and suffering of body and spirit.
All this is enough to remind me of what I already know. That for all the joys and satisfactions of the phenomenal world — and they are many, and they include the joys and satisfactions of the responsibilities of running a dojo and being a Zen teacher — they are not the point. The point, in the end, is the practice; it is zazen itself where we encounter the plenitude of ku.
Constantly being preoccupied with daily affairs — even the affairs of the temple — can blind us to the true purpose of the practice. In the story of the dream I wondered at first why the man could not see the sky or the stars when he looked up. But now it is clear to me. Such an obsession can cause us to be unable to see either the sky (ku) or the stars (shiki). It is like pissing on the three treasures. It is like tugging at one’s testicles in a dream.
—Richard Collins
