Tricycle | Awake in the World

SO BUDDHA'S DHARMA TALK on Vulture Peak includes no words. He holds up a flower and twirls it. This is his talk, his demonstration of suchness. Only Mahakashyapa understands. As Aitken Roshi points out in his commentary to the koan, the original Chinese literally says "Mahakashyapa's face cracked." As we would say, he cracked a smile. Mahakashyapa was sitting there in meditation on Vulture Peak, listening to the great teacher, trying to be serious, as everyone was, as we all are in this very serious world of suffering and trouble, and he sees the flower, just that, a flower. So wonderful, so marvelous! So simple. No words, no explanations, no tragedies, no dramas, just a flower. How odd and funny! Mahakashyapa cracked up.

Life is so unlikely, so miraculous, so pathetic, so hilarious, so transcendent, and so unlike the way we think it is that you crack up when you see the absurdity of all our earnest efforts to push the river, plow the clouds, fix the unfixable, and understand the incomprehensible. A commentary to the koan says that Mahakashyapa and the Buddha smiled one smile: between them there was one smile. They had perfect accord, perfect harmony, perfect relationship, perfect trust. Essentially, there were not two of them. Probably if they had begun to discuss it, it wouldn't have been so perfect anymore. As soon as you come forth from this perfect center, problems begin. But once you experience things as they really are, free of your confusion about them even for just a moment, you don't forget about it. You have confidence that your life has a rightness and an integrity to it, despite your many mistakes and limitations. You don't have to be floored by your troubles. You can deal with the inevitable problems that arise, and you don't have to be so tripped up by your own blindness and confusion. "Only a buddha and a buddha" is all there ever is.

On what authority do we live our lives? We are always seeking legitimacy with our diplomas and licenses, our birth certificates and death certificates. We cede our authority as individuals to society's institutions—universities, churches, the state. But below the radar of all of this, we long for a deeper sense of authorization. This may be the fundamental bottom-line source of our unhappiness. We do not feel ourselves to be authors of our lives, and we need to be our own authors, our own authorities. We need to be authentic. We are willing to endure a lot of hardship, a lot of not getting what we want, in order to feel this sense of authority in our living. We can get a lot of honor and wealth and so on, but it won't mean much if we don't feel the depth of authority we desperately seek.

In this story we have an instance of the conferring of real authority, not by Buddha to Mahakashyapa, but between Buddha and Mahakashyapa—reality conferring authority on itself. Between them there is trust, the kind of trust that begins and ends with each of us recognizing the suchness of our existence and standing on that ground, coming out to meet another. So it's once again, as so many true things are, a paradox. Ultimate authority is non-authority. There isn't any authority that I possess or can get. There is just my life, and my willingness to see my life as it is, and to meet it, moment after moment. Unless I am willing to meet and be met, I have no authority at all.

The authority of suchness isn't something we can be given, or something we can have that someone else doesn't have. According to Mahayana tradition, the Buddha said when he was enlightened: How marvelous, everyone is enlightened! Everyone shares automatically in suchness. If it moves, it must be suchness. If it is, it is Buddha. So there's nothing special here, and nothing extra is needed. Buddha transmits the wonderful mind of nirvana to Mahakashyapa, but there's nothing to transmit. It's already transmitted. Life transmits life. Time transmits time. To think there's something extra to transmit, some secret understanding whispered to the initiated in the middle of the night, is to misunderstand and reduce what is transmitted. In Zen, people who receive dharma transmission know that there is nothing to transmit. In a way it's a joke, a kind of shell game; no wonder Mahakashyapa cracks up! Yet at the same time you have to transmit it. You have to hold up a flower. There really isn't a teacher and a student, and at the same time we have to have these relationships and all that goes with them. This is how we activate the One Great Causal Condition of compassion and love. And we must activate it; this is our human obligation, our role, our task, and our joy.

With formal dharma transmission comes a great responsibility. When in silence we twirl the flower in the Great Assembly, and someone smiles, and we smile back, we fulfill that responsibility. But as soon as we open our mouths and start doing things in the world, we for sure fall short of that responsibility. This is sad; I find it sad. Nevertheless, it is human to take up the responsibility. It is necessary. This is what we are all struggling with, what we are all working on.

Norman Fischer's last essay for this magazine was "Saved from Freezing" in the Spring 2005 issue. From 1995 to 2000 he was abbot of San Francisco Zen Center.

Images: Lotus 4, Lotus 7, Lotus 10, 2003, archival inks on rag paper. © Doris Mitsch, courtesy of Clampart, New York City