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What is alive? What is dead? Carry the "don't know" mind always.

And what do you presume to be alive that might be dead? Work, even good work, can become soulless; some friendships grow rote. And sometimes, wondrously, you might find that an old wound, a sorrow you have carried very carefully like a glass filled to the top with water, has no longer any life or interest in it and does not require you to keep a watchful balance anymore.

So, your life goes, getting up (Alive or dead?), drinking coffee (Alive or dead?), driving to work (Alive or dead?), watching a movie (Alive or dead?). You can also carry the teacher’s response, “I’m not saying! I’m not saying!” discovering what you lose when you do say, and the invitation in “I won’t say, I won’t say.”
Working in this way loosens the knots in the mind, and it also introduces a space so that you can start moving between anxieties and distractions and not struggle with them so much. Just staying with the questions, life grows calmer and more interesting. If this koan has chosen you, or called to you, it naturally belongs with certain other questions, deep questions, which then become yours. What happens to me when I die? What happens to me when those I love die? When someone has died are they alive in my mind or dead? In what way are they still alive and in what way not? And of those people who are still alive, are they really alive in my mind or are they dead?

Then there is a family of questions about not saying: Why is it sometimes better not to say? Is there a kind of saying that makes the world retreat from us? It is possible to start talking too soon at the end of a disturbing movie—to reassemble the world by analyzing the movie, or by talking about something else. A professor showed a classic movie to his class every week and left time for discussion afterward. One week’s film left the students in silence. When the lights came up and the discussion period began, half the class got up and left the room. The movie was still alive inside them, and they wanted to keep it that way.

Songyuan asked,
“Why can’t clear-eyed Bodhisattvas sever the red thread?”

The idea here is that a red theme runs through everyone’s life. This red thread is passion and sorrow—all the vulnerability and desire that link you to the world. The direction this thread takes in your life is only gradually observable over time. It is the color of blood, of fire, of sex, of intimacy. To connect, to help, to be of use in this world, you have to walk with people. You have to let them act upon you also, and you won’t remain unchanged. The interesting thing here is that the person who is attached to desire is the one who is a Bodhisattva, the Buddhist version of a saint who is seeking to help others. Your own desire, your own red thread, might be the source of your empathy for others. Songyuan, who made this koan, was explicit about this. Sometimes he said, “It’s the red thread between your legs.”

this more or less involuntary act of kindness seems to me deeper than a thought-out choice might be. He knew a lot about desire and love, and this decision came over him the way desire would. It was a red-thread moment and also a moment of simple fellow feeling. 

This is another thing about the red thread: if you help people, they will be unpredictable and do inconvenient and, possibly, dangerous things.

The more interesting point for me is the one about the red thread—that everyone has some sainthood possible, and that the unfolding of their goodness might sometimes be through their transgressions, through what is wild and imperfect in them. Issan seems never for an instant to have thought of his life or his death as a tragedy. The point of this koan might be found in truly living your life rather than living it perfectly or even respectably.

“You get what you deserve,” he replied, “whether you deserve it or not.”

 It is said in the koan schools that, if you awaken in the morning, you don’t mind dying that evening, your life has been worth it. You can see your place of belonging, how you have a home in the oak tree and your neighbor and the elk rubbing its velvety antlers on a gray fence post. In this razzle-dazzle, you might forget that you are also yourself, Sally or Bill. This koan seemed to remedy that tendency, by insisting on the mundane and particular. Counting, numbering, taxes, deductions, interest rates. The koan doesn’t allow you to be vague and enthusiastic the way spiritual expressions can sometimes be. It asks for embodiment and precision.

 And if you are interested in freedom, it might lie in this direction. You could go toward rather than away from the sign in your mind that says NO TRESPASSING.
And what does finding freedom mean? When you are objecting to the moment, you are treating the moment as a between, a faux moment, a mistake, not a real moment to be inhabited. If you see that your thoughts are the source of your pain, freedom begins. You have been a character in a novel and suddenly you stop following the script and step out of the novel. No extra effort is needed; you don’t need to write a better script. At the moment of his awakening Buddha said, “I have met the builder and broken the ridgepole. I shall not build that house again.”

TIME ORGANIZES ITSELF INTO JOURNEYS. The standard idea of how to fall into a profound change of heart involves seeking knowledge afar. Yet if wisdom comes out of nothing, the way the big bang, and hydrogen, and gravity, and space-time did, then it is possible that the standard idea is not true. Going on a journey depends on the assumption that something is lacking at home. It can seem so obvious that something is lacking now that most people never check. Yet such an idea could itself be a fiction. What if you did check and found that nothing was wrong? Then you might go on a journey just for fun. And children, before they are taught to go on their own long journey, might understand that whatever part of life they have is complete.

Everyone knows that some events are just bad and make you sad or angry, and some are good and make you glad. Yet what everyone knows might not be true. For example there might be a certain coercion to the attitude that weddings must be happy, funerals have to be sad. It could prevent you from meeting the moment you are in. What if events don’t have to be anything other than what they are? Children laugh at funerals, some tears shed by brides are from disappointment rather than joy. Being fired or losing someone dearly beloved could open an unexpectedly beautiful new life. You might be armored against an unpleasant event that turns out not to be. Instead of wrestling toward what you are convinced ought to be going on, it might be refreshing to approach events without armor, meeting their nakedness with your own nakedness. That might also be a kind approach, since it sets up no conflict in your own heart.

 Then the boy notices that thoughts and feelings are always rising and that they are not themselves disturbing: thoughts and feelings are things in the world as much as flowers and parasols, and he doesn’t have to either agree with them or quarrel with them. It’s easy not to pick and choose about his own reactions, about his picking and choosing.
Everyone knows that Buddhism is about nonattachment, and people might think that not picking and choosing is about having no preferences. Yet nonattachment might lead to warfare with the part of you that enjoys the world. In this case nonattachment would be just another tyrannical belief and itself a source of unhappiness. 

Perhaps the koan “There is nothing I dislike,” which at first might seem unattainable, isn’t actually too much of a stretch. 

In the Dhammapada, an ancient text, the Buddha observes how painful it is to live in the belief that you are a victim and observes, too, what it is like to live without such a belief. “ ‘He insulted me, he harmed me, he robbed me, he beat me’; if you think like this, you will suffer. ‘He insulted me, he harmed me, he robbed me, he beat me’; if you do not think like this, you will not suffer.”

The Buddha doesn’t say that nothing happened, that someone didn’t beat you, that no pain was caused. He is not encouraging you to pretend you are a robot, to go into denial, or to take up positive thinking. He just says that feeding the story of suffering makes you suffer. And he doesn’t say that not feeding the story of suffering will make you happy. His words are a koan; they take away the story about suffering. How happiness appears is your business.
This koan raises the idea that freedom might be freedom from your own stories about life and who you are and who you should be. When you first see that you suffer from your thoughts, you might want to get rid of the difficult, painful thoughts and put good ones in their place. This is not the koan approach. What might it be like if you got rid of the painful thoughts and didn’t put anything in their place? Then you might not be struggling to make the world fit your fiction. You wouldn’t suffer from bad art. 

When the Buddha made his discoveries, he said, “I have found the builder, and I will not build the house of pain again.” Without your fictions, life has a simplicity that is full of beauty.
There is nothing I dislike.

Koans unravel the world that we have thought up, and it is this unraveling that makes it possible for a different world to appear. In the unraveled, unmade world it is not necessary to make yourself small in order to survive. It’s fine if you forget the song that was given to you. You will remember it the next night,

Study and practice of the Five Ranks push us beyond the one-sided partiality of our little stories to realize the timeless immensity present in even the least of our experiences. When we awaken to that immensity, we live it in even the mundane moments of our lives. Unerringly pointing us beyond naïve individualism, the Five Ranks encourage us to take care of the world, and of each other.

The positions in this first cycle aren’t inherently progressive. However, it is possible to infer a progression, as follows: In the first mode, the contingent within the essential, we embark and realize emptiness. In the second mode, the essential within the contingent, we realize that whatever appears—sky, red flower, the cat like sun and shadow running—is no other than our true nature. In the third, arriving within the essential, we deepen our experience of emptiness and realize the subtle nature of words and language. In the fourth, approaching from the contingent, letting go of any preoccupation with hidden understandings, we step into the vivid life where each thing, person, and event is experienced as unique, even as it encodes the whole. There, up to our ears in conflict and passionate attachment, we awaken others and ourselves. Finally, in the fifth mode, arriving at concurrence, having forgotten all the previous stages, we live enlightenment—without remainder—as our daily activity.
This pilgrim’s progress unfolds in time, even as each step opens to eternity. When we walk the path, we are discovering, embodying, and learning how to express and convey the relation between the universe and ourselves.

The experience of intimacy is an encounter with the ancient mirror of our genuine nature. The mirror isn’t actually a mirror, limited in time and space, but is timeless, dimensionless reality in the guise of the warm river goose-bumped with rain, or the noisy plumbing in the old house. With respect to this ancient mirror, eyes and seeing are just the treetops and their twenty shades of rustling green. Whatever we encounter is our true nature. And this is so, not just generally in terms of humans and sentient beings, but also for stones, clouds, dust, and atoms.

The modes of the first cycle resemble St. Paul’s words from his Epistle to the Corinthians: “Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known” (I Corinthians, 13:12). The four phrases employed by St. Paul in this verse constitute four koans, which are well worth taking up alongside the five modes of the essential and the contingent. His words suggest a journey into intimacy with our essential and timeless nature, and resonate with Dongshan’s account. The lines “Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face-to-face” correspond closely to the first two modes as we have explored them here, as well as to the movement between them—being the movement from darkness to light

WHEN WE AWAKEN to this mode of the contingent within the essential, we die to our isolation from stars and earth into the radiant darkness of nothing at all, as it. Each thing is and all things are obliviously and helplessly us, as they have always been. Although this experience is personal, it isn’t just our matter—the cat, an earthworm, even a clump of wild oats is thus.
When we realize that the source of our being is no source at all, grief and pain are carried differently, if indeed it is proper to speak of “being carried” at all. Awakening to emptiness, we are released a little, or a lot, from the confining stories that close us down. Everything breathes a little deeper, and we find a measure of spaciousness and ease.

 So preoccupied with the sutra was he, and such an authority on it, that he earned the nickname “Diamond Zhou.” He was proud of his hard-earned knowledge, as experts sometimes are, and could be arrogant and overbearing. Whenever any talk arose regarding his area of expertise, his unvarying response was, “I know.” Others fell silent in his presence

The story of Deshan shows that we are dangerous when we think we have truth on our side. What we so arrogantly condemn in others is often at work in us in the form of our own doubt and uncertainty. We may try to quarantine our doubt, even as it is already at work undermining our carefully thought out positions. Being blind-sighted to our doubt sets us up for a disillusioning fall.
Finally being brought down from our high horse provides a path back into life, beyond the painful rigidity of our fixed views. When the tea lady’s question landed neatly within Deshan’s field of obsessive expertise and he was unable to respond, he was forced to confront the limits of his “knowledge.” In his moment of defeat, Deshan came face to face with a matter that he hadn’t resolved