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 under-
stand," 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 hand...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-American 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?