Chapter 24: Visit Into the Monastery
杏Apricot
“Apricot is the awakener, the awakening,” the fat monk said, holding up the sheet with the single character xìng--apricot--written on it. He dipped his brush in the fragrant newly-ground ink and dashed off another character in flowing grass script:
興Awaken
“Awakening (xìng). The apricot blossoms in the midst of winter, just when yang starts to grow; it is the first flower of the year, and of course rhymes with this one xìng: to enliven, bring to life, awaken.”
玄之又玄Mystery
We were sitting in the garden, the secret garden I had never noticed before our session in the lower chamber, the chamber with the dragon rug. It seemed that I was only able to access this garden when in a particular frame of mind, for some reason, for at other times it just seemed not to exist. I shook my head slowly. Mystery upon mystery!
Things had started to become peculiar around the monastery. Strange monks appeared, ones I had never seen before, ancient in many cases, others fresh-faced and bursting with life. They nodded to me, sometimes, while at others (and this was true especially of the ancient looking monks) totally ignored me.
Even the buildings seemed indefinably different: I no longer recognised them by their shape, but more by a feeling they evoked. In fact, I seemed to be guided more by feel than by any rational plan as I moved around that space. But if anything, as a mode of navigation it worked more reliably, almost as if I was an organic part of the functional whole and would be led where it was necessary to be.
So now, when the fat monk began speaking about flowers, I knew exactly what he meant. The ramifications of meaning in apricot blossom as awakener and as first flower of the yearset off matching responses deep within me, one could almost say as part of my soul. “Apricot” was not only a first awakening, it was the subtle watcher, persisting in hopelessness, enduring the stillness and the cold in order to bud and flower at the first sign of yang awakening, when the time was right.
“When the time is right,” said the fat monk, standing up and stretching, looking out over the little pond. “Perfectly put.”
I stared at him. Had I spoken aloud? I did not think so.
“People so often think enlightenment is there on demand, just waiting for them to get around to it, and when they have put in their little bit of meditation or fasting or whatever it will be there waiting for them. But a bit of thought …” he paused, then gestured around him. “I mean natural thought, thought informed by understanding nature and its rhythms and cycles, should tell them that it could not possibly work like that.”
Natural thought
He gestured in a circle. “Stillness in winter, everything gathered in Water. Springtime, growing in Wood. Summer, peak of activity in Fire. Autumn contraction and collection with Metal.”
He sat down again.
“Similarly,” he said, “there are times when you seem cut off from the spiritual consolations you may expect. You should know that this is when those benefits are being gathered. At other times, everything seems easy and we imagine it will always be this way. Gradually you learn the subtle sensing that can tell those rhythms. This is good, so you can actively use those times to make progress, while backing off into just quiet observing without fretting at the others.”
He turned back to his writing. A breeze above us shook the leaves of the tall bamboo that surrounded us.
“Hey, I’m running low on water,” he said, holding out the little green porcelain bowl he used for his calligraphy water. “Would you mind filling it?” He pointed to the trickle of water running down the rock face close by. It was an artificial stream, which seemed to be constructed so that the gentle almost subliminal sound of flowing water could be heard by those who sat in this spot.
I walked over, filled the bowl and handed it to him. He set it on the little writing table he had brought with him, dipped his brush in the water, then turning the brush side to side pressed it against the edge of the little bowl, squeezing out the excess liquid. Then he set the brush down, cocked his head and said, “Looking inward is one thing. But you can tune your outer senses to be more refined as well. It’s a matter of matching your inner stillness to subtle impressions from things around you. For example, look at the bamboo shadows on that blank wall, how they dance and play. Can you see?” As if in response to his question another breeze rattled the bamboo and the shadows, which I had not consciously noticed, sprang into movement.
“The wall is kept white exactly to enhance the interplay between yin and yang, black and white, stillness and movement with foreground and background,” he said. “This whole garden is an exercise in design, design to assist human refinement.”
I watched as the shadows danced. Just at the point where they no longer seemed outside and separate from me, he directed my attention to a small brown pot with an ancient plum growing out of it and said “Now have a look at that bonsai. See how twisting and sinewy that dark branch is? It is like an ancient dragon sleeping under the wintertime snow.”
He pointed upward, toward the back of the monastery where there loomed, impossibly, a high mountain peak with snow blowing from the summit. I stared, and knew I had walked its high passes in company with others, breathing the fine air, but when? and how?
The fat monk’s voice drew me back as he said, “Now imagine the same gnarled branch of this little plum covered with delicate springtime blossoms, old and new life mixed and vibrant.”
Just then a rather disheveled young monk wandered by, a stranger to me. “I was just thinking,” he said “of Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly.” His face changed then, as he kept moving past us. “But what if it was the butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou? It would have been terrifying!” With that, shaking his head, he walked out of the little grotto we were in and disappeared.
Confused, I looked at the fat monk. He raised an eyebrow and turning back to his writing, asked “Well, what do you think?”
I’d always been perplexed by that butterfly story. But what really shook me was that, just the night before, I had been reading the second chapter of Zhuangzi, the passage on the pipes of heaven, the pipes of earth, and the pipes of man. He describes the various hollows and orifices that make up the pipes of earth, so that you imagine the wind soughing through an opening like a nose, or like a mouth, or a cup, or a rut, and the different sounds they make, saying “they roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, wail; cry out yeee!or call out yuuu!”
"Gushing things, swishing (xiào) things, bawling (chì) things, sucking things, shouting (háo) things, wailing (háo) things, resounding (yāo) things, moaning (jiāo) things."
It had made me realise that I rarely stopped to listen to the huge variety of natural sounds around me.
“Why that funny look on your face?” the fat monk asked, with a grin.
“Strange he should mention Zhuangzi,” I said. “I was just reading the Making All Thing Equal chapter last night.”
“Ah,” he said. “The pipes of earth. Exquisite passage. Like a painting of what cannot be painted … I mean the wind ... using descriptions of sounds.”
I was surprised.
“Yes, I am warming to Zhuangzi,” he laughed. “But that passage feeds right in to what we were talking about before, except that it uses the ear, rather than the eye, to refine your senses. What do you hear now?”
I stopped and listened. The bamboo, again: the rustling of leaves, the creaking of their long slender stalks, the trickle of water passing over the rock, a temple bell in the distance.
“It doesn’t have to be in a specially designed area,” he said. “Whenever you can, you quiet your heart and listen to the birds in spring, say, or the buzzing of cicadas in summer. The chirping of crickets in autumn rain is particularly charming, and even the subtle fall of snowflakes in winter, if you really focus.”
He smiled then, a faraway look in his eyes. “Ah, the high halls of Wudang”
The sounds of all the world
After a moment the fat monk continued: “You know, even perception of rain sounds can be refined. When you hear the sound of rain on leaves, or the sound of rain in water, or the sound of rain from the eaves dropping into bamboo buckets, let that sound penetrate and feed your soul. The sound of wind in the pines, different to the sound of wind amongst autumn leaves, different to wind lapping waves in the pond.”
An older voice spoke up. “I was told that the Bodhisattva Guanyin came to enlightenment through listening to the sounds of the world.”
It was the abbot, who had entered the grotto from the side. He smiled and said, “In fact, Guanyin was originally Guānshìyīn (觀世音 ‘Listens to the sounds of the world’), an early translation of Avalokitasvara, the embodiment of compassion.”
Then he shrugged and said. “But what do we know? We’re only Daoists.”
He and the fat monk laughed.
I was still confused, and not ready to give up yet. “Ok, so those are the pipes of earth. And I get that the pipes of man are all the various man-made sounds. But what about the pipes of heaven? What’s that about? Is he talking about some cosmic ‘wind’ that blows? And what would it blow through, if it is going to make a sound?”
The fat monk looked at the abbot, and then replied, “Is the heart not an orifice? Where do your various thoughts and moods and emotions come from? Are they yours? Or are you simply something that is blown through?”
The abbot grinned. “Can a bamboo flute decide not to be played, when breath is blown through it?”
“I’m not a bamboo flute,” I said, feeling a bit insulted.
The boatman appears
A rough peasant’s voice burst in “Reminds me of that old story about Su Dongpo and the fart!”
It was the boatman. Nodding and laughing, the fat monk and the abbot said together: “Tell it! Tell it!”
So the boatman settled down and said “Even though Su Dongpo was a brilliant statesman, he knew lots about Buddhism, being friends with lots of monks and talking with them, and even meditating himself sometimes. He often wrote poetry with Buddhist themes, and one poem he ended with the two-line phrase describing how deep his meditation was:
八風吹不動 (Bā fēng chuībùdòng),
端坐紫金蓮 (Duān zuò zǐjīnlián).
The eight winds cannot move me,
Sitting straight on the golden lotus.”
The abbot and fat monk laughed, saying “go on, go on!”
The boatman continued, “Su Dongpo thought the whole thing was a great poem, so he sent it to his monk friend Foyin across the river. The next day it came back with Foyin’s comment on it. And you know what it said? Just the single word: fart.”
The boatman started chuckling. We waited. He kept chuckling, until we were all smiling, then laughing with him. He finally got himself under control and went on.
“Su Dongpo was shocked. He’d expected some words of praise from Foyin, and this is what he got?! The more he thought about it, the more angry he became, and finally told his servant to pack some lunch, he was off across the river to give that old bald pate a piece of his mind. So he made the trip -- ferried across by one of my relatives, I do believe -- and landing on the shore Su marched up to Foyin’s door. But the old guy was not at home. All there was, pinned to the door, was a note, and it said:
八風吹不動 (Bā fēng chuībùdòng)
一屁彈過江 (Yī pì tán guò jiāng!)
The eight winds cannot move me,
But a single fart catapults me across the river!”
With that all three of them collapsed in whoops of laughter, which I could not stop myself from joining.
“How did we get into all that?” the boatman asked. “I only stopped by looking for Cook. Anyone seen him?”
We shook our heads, and he disappeared through the bamboo grove.
夫吹萬不同。而使其自己也。咸其自取，怒者，其誰耶?
“That blowing is all different, causing each to be what it is.
Everyone should look within to see: who is it that does the sounding?”
Still chuckling, the fat monk turned back to his calligraphy and the abbot stared out over the tiled roofs of the halls that bordered the garden. After a while he looked at me and said, “Ok, so we were talking about the pipes of heaven and its orifices, which are all beings, with their moods and thoughts and actions, all responding variously to the heavenly wind which moves them.”
I said, “And we had established that the heart is an aperture through which that wind blows.”
“Yes,” he said, “And even more important is whether you can modify that aperture. Take the rough edges off, for example, or aim at a higher pitch or a more refined ‘sound’ from your being. If so, how do you do it?”
The fat monk looked up, holding his brush, and said, “In other words, perhaps ‘higher thought’ comes down to how you think, rather than what you think.”
“What’s interesting is that the more narrow the aperture, the more screechy the sound,” said the abbot. “The wider the aperture, the more the sound approaches the original ‘wind of heaven’ which is actually silent.”
“So …”
“So you want to open that aperture--the inner world of the heart--as broadly as possible.”
“But how?”
There was silence.
“Did you forget to tell him about turning the light around?” the abbot asked the fat monk with a mock frown.
“Hmm, I seem to remember the topic coming up once or twice,” the fat monk said with a grin.” He turned to me. “The terms 反照 (fǎn zhào) or 回光 (huí guāng) sound familiar?”
I was going red.
“Hey, we’re just kidding,” said the abbot, giving me a gentle shove. “But you have to stop this habit of automatically blurting out questions without thinking. We’re not candy machines, you know, where you just stick in the coin and get the good stuff. You’ve got to add some value here, too, you know.”
“To be fair,” said the fat monk, “turning the light around is the indispensable basis, but that --as I have said in the past-- is supplemented by reading, by contact with other travellers on the path, by going deeply into important questions …”
“And then deliberately dropping them!” interrupted the abbot.
“Yes … by sensing your body in a profound way, using your imagination to expand your own limitations, by deliberately linking yourself to the idea of something higher, and striving to be worthy in a non-obsessive way. The path is multi-faceted, and some guidance is crucial in the early stages, but like a new-born calf you should find your feet and make your way to the teat on your own as soon as you can.”
Terrified butterfly
The fat monk turned to me. “So what about that butterfly story then?” He said to the abbot in a stage whisper “Feng Po came by.”
“Who’s Feng Po?” I asked.
The fat monk frowned. “You saw him. Do you really need to ask? What did your own senses tell you?”
I took the rebuke in silence.
The abbot slapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “So … this butterfly story of Zhuangzi. What did Feng Po say that has you in such a twist?”
I didn’t feel that I was ‘in a twist’ but let that slide, since I was genuinely puzzled. I repeated the disheveled young monk’s remarks, and added “ … but I’ve always found the story a bit weird. Zhuang Zhou had just woken up. How could he still think he might be a butterfly? When I wake up from a dream I know what’s real and what’s not. And why would a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou be terrifying, as Feng Po said?”
The fat monk was packing up his paper, ink, brushes and inkstone. He looked at the abbot, who inclined his chin as if to say you handle this one.
“The Zhuangzi is illustrating a process, a switching, from 情 (qíng emotions or surface consciousness) to 性 (xìng, essence or true nature), from exterior to root, from guest to host,” the fat monk said. “You are correct that on waking you realise that you have been dreaming. But in the work of inner transformation, until that realisation is stabilized, you often slip back and forth. That’s what Zhuang Zhou meant when he asked Am I Zhuang Zhou? Or am I the butterfly? There must be a difference. Learning the difference, the difference in feeling between the real and the apparent, is a process of inner transformation.”
The abbot smiled. “It takes time to become centered, centered in the real. It’s what we call 歸根 (guī gēn) ‘returning to the root.’ But--and this does happen occasionally--if you only know how to happily flit around in superficial consciousness all the time and suddenly awaken to the real situation, the horror at the sight of your wasted life and the distance between what you should be and what you are can be devastating.”[1]
He paused, then gave a sad smile. ‘It does not have to be like that. Under proper guidance, one is exposed to the actual facts of the situation and prepared by gentle exposures to be able to handle the truth.” He turned and looked me full in the face. “That’s what we have been offering you, during all these years of visiting us. Here we hold the seeds, preserving a storehouse of nourishment for all those who have learned to find us. You can come back anytime, you know.”
With that he faded from view.
Opening my eyes, the rays of the setting sun shone filtered through red dust blowing off the western mesa. The late summer heat in my little house in the desert evaporated the sweat from my skin almost before it had cooled. I stood up from my cushion and stretched. Work was a late shift that night, but my inner sojourn with the monks had, as usual, left me light of heart and clear of head. I offered a brief gassho of thanks and prepared to face the world.
Tasting the wind
春風如酒，夏風如茗，秋風如煙，冬風如薑芥。
Chūn fēng rú jiǔ, xìa fēng rú míng, qiū fēng rú yān, dōng fēng rú jīang jìe.
“The spring wind is like wine; the summer wind is like tea; the autumn wind is like smoke; and the winter wind is like spicy ginger.”
幽夢影--張潮 (Yōu Mèng Yǐng, Qing dynasty) Traces of Faint Dreams, by Zhāng Cháo
[1]. In Western traditions this is often termed “the guardian of the threshold” and is why all genuine and intact spiritual traditions warn people away from random experimentation until a process of self-clarification has been gone through. Nowadays anything is available to anyone and the psycho-energetic casualties are mounting year by year.
