The plum trees and pink magnolias are blooming in Oakland, and by chance, I just read the 54th case in the Book of Serenity again—perfect timing. I first read this book of 100 Zen stories about 15 years ago, and I’ve read it several times since, always finding something new, and always treasuring this particular case.
Yunyan and Daowu are two of my favorite old Chinese guys, and on this occasion, Yunyan asked Daowu what the bodhisattva of great compassion does with so many hands and eyes. Daowu answered that it’s like someone reaching back for the pillow at night, which Yunyan then said he understood. Daowu wanted to know the details of his understanding, and Yunyan explained that it’s like hands and eyes all over the body. Daowu agreed that he’s close, but there’s more: it’s like hands and eyes all through the body.
My first impression was that this story isn’t about compassion at all, but about how the brain works, and in fact, old Wansong, who’s commenting on all these cases, hardly mentions compassion. Instead he tells the story of the blind fortune teller who was asked how he made it to the market place on muddy paths without soiling his white shoes. He answered that there was an eye on the end of his staff, which brings to mind a phenomenon noted by people who study the brain:
It seems that when we’re using tools—a pencil, even—the brain models the sensory input to produce the impression that we feel the tool’s point of encounter with the object it’s being applied to, rather than just the sensations of our skin contacting the tool.
The brain has evolved to produce models of our bodies, the environment, and interaction between them, in ways that simplify an incredible complexity of sensory inputs and convert them into something more manageable, something we can describe to each other in the shorthand of language. It makes a model of the hand reaching for the pillow, and of the pillow’s shape and location in space, and remembers them even in darkness.
The old Indian and Chinese guys didn’t have all our current science available to them, but they had paid careful attention to their brains and passed along what they’d learned, using the language they had available. Since part of what they were trying to communicate was the way that language and its simplifications mislead us, they had to avoid creating new language that would seduce us into further linguistic misunderstanding. They taught by asking their students to examine their own sensory experience rather than grasping through intellect; by asking questions and hinting at answers.
Here’s Wansong trying to lead us through the “tangling vines”:
“It is like willow-grown banks and flower-grown walls on a warm day in a gentle breeze—where is the spring? What shape is it?”
“I wonder—throughout the body, all over the body, reaching back for a pillow—who is it? Inside the puppet stage there must be someone pulling the strings.”
These two quotes are juxtaposed in the same paragraph in Thomas Cleary’s translation, and suggest that the “someone pulling the strings” is in the same category as “spring”: both are concepts that allow us to talk about complex phenomena in simple ways, but neither one exists apart from the myriad sensations they summarize.
There is no spring apart from the blooming of flowers and warming of breezes, the turning of earth and shifting sunlight; and there is no puppeteer apart from the impacts of atoms and photons, the movement of waves and molecules.
That’s easy enough to say, but can you enjoy the shifting colors of light without thinking “flowers”? Can you reach for the pillow without feeling your self as the puppet-master? Can you live in a world without objects and edges?
(Don’t try this while operating heavy equipment.)
I Can’t Make Heads or Tails of This