The Zen of yourself

Once on a crowded street in Japan, Buddhist monk Rinzai Roku was sporadically thrashing his arms around as though he wanted to slay someone with a sword. At first people on the street saw him but ignored. Eventually someone stopped to ask him the meaning of his actions. He answered that he was fighting a battle. “Against who?” the questioner asked. Roku said it was something his Guru Obaku had cautioned him about. And what was that? “Simple,” said Rinzai, “my Guru told me that if Lord Buddha himself was to prove an obstruction in my meditation, I was to slay him with my sword.” But where’s the sword? “There is no Buddha anywhere either,” answered Rinzai and carried on with his battle.

Roku, who died on January 10, 866 AD, is known as the founder of one of the main schools of Zen Buddhism. His teachings are filled with immense vitality and distinct kind of approach to Buddha nature. Awakening, for Rinzai, is a matter of uttermost urgency. He is ruthlessly iconoclastic when he asks his students to let go without further delay in exploring one’s Buddha mind.

When Rinzai was famous, governor O. Joji invited him to take the High Seat. The moment Rinzai occupied the seat, a monk came forward and asked: what is the essence of Buddhism? He answered: “One is on a lonely mountain peak with no track to come down, the other in the middle of a busy crossroad and cannot go forward or back. Who is further on, who lags behind? There is no place of rest in the three worlds, it is like a house on fire. The murderous demon of impermanence strikes in a single instant without choosing between high and low, old and young.”

The next day there were hundreds of monks with all sorts of questions. Buddhism is not a speculative system, it does not offer any position on the basis of which one could take a stand against other critiques of philosophical concepts. Therefore, when a monk asked about Zen and the Gateless Gate, Rinzai answered: “You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it, you cannot admire it, you cannot sense it. It is your true self. It has nowhere to hide. Fundamentally there is nothing to seek.”