“How great and wondrous are the clothes of enlightenment, Formless, yet embracing every treasure.
I vow to unfold the Buddha’s teaching,
That I may help all living things.”
This is a kesa verse. It is recited out loud or silently to oneself whenever the kesa is put on. What is a kesa? It is a robe, a monk’s robe, Buddha’s robe. For the confirmed lay Buddhist, the small piece of cheap cloth worn about the neck is a “token” kesa, an abbreviated form, symbolizing the robe.
The kesa connects us to 2500 years of Buddhas who have come before us, back to Shakyamuni and to the Buddhas that came before him. It connects us to all the Buddhas in this world and the symbolic Buddhas who teach us: Kanzeon Bosatsu, the Compassionate Buddha. Fugen Bosatsu, the Buddha of Love. Fudo-myo-o, the iron being who cannot be consumed by fire, only transformed. Monju Bosatsu, the Buddha of wisdom, who rides on the back of the beast of self. And, Amida Buddha, the Buddha of infinite light, the Cosmic Buddha.
The kesa connects us to all the Buddhas to come. The kesa is the symbol of the Bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings.
To don the kesa is to take on a great weight of responsibility. For the piece of cloth is at once the symbol of a wish, a dream, a hope, an aspiration, an affirmation, and—an admonition. The kesa represents a tradition, a lineage, a philosophy, a religion with a code of conduct, a commitment and, above all, faith.
That is, the faith that there is something to this Buddhist stuff. The faith that there is something to the promises of the awakened masters, that the breadcrumbs they left behind really do ultimately lead to enlightenment. It is the faith that 2500 years ago a great wordless experiential understanding transformed Siddhartha Gautama into Shakyamuni Buddha . . . the Awakened One.
And, to wear the kesa is to no longer be the “stealth” Buddha. You can be seen.
But with all of this, we must not forget that the great weight of the kesa is only form. Buddhism is form. And Buddha was not a Buddhist.
•••••
“The koan appears naturally in daily life.”
A koan is literally translated as a public statement of principle or a proclamation. Publicly proclaiming his ninety-five theses by nailing them to the door of the church in Wartburg, Martin Luther stated his koans and his solutions to them for the Holy Roman Church, and all the world to see and consider.
More familiar to us perhaps is the koan training of the Zen Buddhist Rinzai tradition; those pesky little questions asked by Zen masters of their trainees that act like electric shocks to the trainee’s ordinary mind processes. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Does Joshu’s dog have a Buddha nature? What was your original face before you were born? And, what about Christian koans? If God created everything and everything is a manifestation of God’s divine plan, does man have a free will, or not? That one is almost as difficult to solve as the one concerning Joshu’s dog.
In Soto Zen Buddhist tradition, it is genjokoan that is focused upon. “The spiritual puzzle appears naturally in daily life.” I was never altogether comfortable with this translation until a master provided the following definition of a koan: “Any spiritual problem or obstacle we believe separates us from the eternal.”
The spiritual puzzle is there before us at every moment of our lives. We are working on the puzzle and the puzzle is working on us. The master may choose to give us the same puzzle, but our solutions are individual. Your solution is not my solution. Each one of us must remove the problem or obstacle, which separates us from the eternal in our own unique way.
Yet this understanding of the koan was hard for me to accept. There was frustration, anger, disbelief, and a host of other negative feelings. The reason for these feelings was simple. Like so many others, I expected meditation to make my life easier, more peaceful, happier, lighter. It was not so. I was working at my koans, and instead of fewer koans, there were more koans! Flocks of koans, meteor showers of koans, the numbers grew and grew. Then I came across this classic Zen anecdote:
“The Sixth Ancestor Huineng came across two monks who were arguing about a banner flapping in the wind. One said, ‘The banner is moving.’ The other said, ‘The wind is moving.’ They went back and forth without coming to agreement. The Sixth Ancestor said, ‘It’s not that the wind is moving; it’s not that the banner moves; it’s your mind that is moving.’ The two monks were stunned.”
Slowly, it became clear. There were not more koans, I could just see more of them. My vision had broadened. A speck or two of dust had been wiped from the mirror. Suddenly, I had some measure of certainty, and I was at peace with the fact that the koans are always there, constantly, in great numbers. And I started to believe that there was a possibility that I might even present an acceptable solution to a few of them now and again.
The keystone of my practice slid with a clunk . . . into place.
If I have a master, a teacher above all teachers, that teacher is the person who provided me with this key. I have never met this teacher face to face. It was a very dear wish of mine that before she departed from this world, or I did, that we might have had the opportunity to meet. We did not. So be it. She had done her work. I thank her for it.
But the master is the instrument, not the source. At the time, I attributed this koan to the teacher who wrote the article of which it was a tiny part. I now know that the statement really came from her master whom she has never met. It is the Genjokoan, the everyday puzzle of Great Master Dogen. My belief is that he did not originate it, but that it is an eternal koan which flows through him from the masters who came before him and perhaps straight through from Shakyamuni Buddha himself, or even the Buddhas before him. Koan is simply the Zen version of the spiritual puzzle we humans all wrestle with if we are to awaken to our spiritual self.
As Alice in Wonderland expressed her koan:
“Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, ‘who in the world am I?’Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
- Zen Is Eternal Life by Reverend Master P.T.N.H. Jiyu Kennett, 3rd ed. rev. (Mt. Shasta California: Shasta Abbey Press, 1987) p. 118
- [1] ibid.
- [1] Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (Tuttle Publishing,1998).
- [1] The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel (1999).