Chapter 8 Japan 339it didn’t suit me. It was nothing more than a realization based on a particu-
lar state of mind. So I discarded it and returned to my previous state. I filled
my heart with death and practiced uncompromisingly. As I might have
known, it had all been a big delusion. And here I am now, treasuring this
bag of manure called Shosan. (Braverman 1994:36)
An attempt is sometimes made to capture the state of satori in a curious
English term: is-ness. That is, pure being; “a direct pointing to the soul of
man”—but not soul in any Western or Hindu sense, only seeing into one’s
nature, that pure, empty, inner core. The emphasis in the statement should be
on “direct,” unmediated by concepts, words, symbols, or images.
One of the most beloved attempts to visually rather than verbally express
the nature of Zen enlightenment is the ox-herding tale, which is a sequence of
10 drawings first conceived in China during the Song dynasty. An ox-herd boy
searches for his lost ox. The ox, a simple and common farmer’s companion,
symbolizes the boy’s own nature. In the first six images the boy holds the rope
and looks for his ox, spots footprints, catches sight of his ox, gets the rope
round his neck, and finally masters him. This much represents the seeker’s
effort through self-discipline and meditation to grasp his true nature. In the sev-
enth scene, the ox is now forgotten; “you are a man of no-Mind.” The eighth is
an empty circle; the boy and ox have both disappeared. The ninth is a scene of
pure nature, trees, streams, hills, with neither boy nor ox; and finally in the last
scene the boy has returned to the world, and we see him in a marketplace as an
old man carrying his few belongings on a pole, indistinguishable in appearance
from other persons still fully embedded in their lives, far from encounters with
satori. As Shosan comments on the tenth picture:
“Entering the Marketplace with Giving Hands” depicts a selfless person
with outstretched hands. For him, delusion and enlightenment, the igno-
rant and the saintly, are all the same. Whatever he does, nothing obstructs
him. Evil becomes good. Liquor stores and fish markets become places of
conversion to Buddhahood. (Braverman 1994:97)
Reality has now been grasped fully and it seems the boy is back to the
beginning, but not exactly. The Japanese term kono-mama means “this-ness”
and sono-mama means “that-ness.” Mama means something like “as it is-ness.”
Or, we might use a somewhat better English term for “is-ness”: “immediacy.”
There is nothing beyond, and one directly connects to the immediate reality of
trees, streams, fish markets, and other people.
Zen Buddhism’s Institutions
Somehow one doesn’t expect Zen’s anti-intellectual, antistructural, and
antirational philosophy to be embedded in a rigid hierarchy of monasteries, a
specific lineage of patriarchs, and highly regimented monastic culture. Yet that
is another of Zen’s strange contradictions: the contradiction between direct
unmediated experience and a high degree of institutionalization. During the