The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [36]
Japanese also has many names for beauty. One feels awaré while appreciating the ephemeral: say, the transient beauty of decay in the luminous green moss spreading over rotting trees, the mushrooms and toadstools rising from the rich soil, the patches of brilliant gold and red lichen. After a bird has flown, one may feel yoin, silent reverberations that remain. It’s this sensation that poet Wallace Stevens writes of in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” when he celebrates both “The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” One may also experience the poignant beauty known as yugen, described in this way by thirteenth-century author Kamo no Chômei (in An Account of My Hut, 1212): “It is like an autumn evening under a colorless expanse of silent sky. Somehow, as if for some reason that we should be able to recall, tears well uncontrollably.” Or: “When looking at autumn mountains through mist, the view may be indistinct yet have great depth. Although few autumn leaves may be visible through the mist, the view is alluring. The limitless vista created in imagination far surpasses anything one can see more clearly.” Solar energy lights our days and fuels the plants that prey animals eat before they’re eaten by predators. We eat the sunshine stored in those plants and animals, burning it for energy, which we spend to work, cook, make love, play music, pursue games. And so we’re connected to every other life-form on Earth in a skein of interrelated victories of fire, including rust. The universe is most likely littered with planets as rusty as our own. Are they florid with life? If so, how well, and how long, have their life-forms survived?
That question almost qualifies as a koan. Koans are capsules of thought, psychic knots that resist unraveling. In some Buddhist sects, students are assigned phrases or situations to meditate upon, to focus the mind and free it from the bear-trap of reason. For example:
“A man is sitting atop a hundred-foot pole. How does he get off it?”
“A wheel maker makes two wheels, each with fifty spokes. Suppose you cut out the hubs. Would there still be wheels?”
“On a windy day, two monks are arguing about a fluttering banner. The first says, “The banner is moving, not the wind.” The second says, “The wind is moving, not the banner.” Who is right?
“Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”
“What is the straight within the bent?”
“Pull a five-story pagoda out of a teapot.”
Inexhaustible, koans are intended for live practice between master and student, with illumination as a goal, not interpretation, because, as an old saying goes: “It’s easy to confuse the pointing finger with the moon.” As Zen teacher Norman Fischer explains: “This practice consists of living with and sitting with phrases, until they become very large and very strange, and reveal themselves to us. That is to say, through them we are revealed to ourselves.”
There’s no right answer to these puzzles designed to focus the mind, and I sometimes dwell on koans while waiting in the dark for first light. This morning, I’ve been thinking a little about mu, though I appreciate it’s not something understood by occasional thought. Mu, which translates inadequately as nothingness, often appears in Buddhist practice, and sometimes in this venerable koan: “What is mu?”
As I sit under a coliseum of stars, awaiting the dawn, mu is the everythingness of everything fed by and in time with the everythingness of everything else, except that its particles are too small to be captured in the net of words like “every” or “thing” or “net,” which, like life-forms and galaxies, are only temporary clumps of the stridently irrational mu, a mutable, ultimately manic, mute, munificent force that strings us together as it does the farthest stars. And I am only using the unwieldy symbol of “force” because we are the sort of beings who do, to communicate the shred of universe we homestead and can perceive, when of course there is no force, no we, no universe,