Zen Sand is a wonderful contribution to Chan and Zen literature in English. Actually there's no need to qualify it with the 'in English', because Zen Sand is the largest modern collection of capping phrases in any language, and it includes both the Chinese characters and the Japanese reading for each entry.
A capping phrase is a piece of original writing or a quote which is linked to a koan by a commentator or someone doing koan study. Wumen's verses in the Gateless Gate and Xuedou's interpolations in the Blue Cliff Record are examples of capping phrases in the old Chinese koan collections. The practice was transmitted to Japan, where it eventually became an integral part of Rinzai monastic practice. As part of the answer to each koan, the practitioner presents a comment that expresses the koan's meaning in a different way; in other words, the practitioner expresses his or her own realization of the koan through the choice of a capping phrase. Victor Hori calls these comments "expressions of Zen awakening in language" and notes Kenneth Kraft's characterization of them as "a cross between a koan and a footnote." The capping phrases in Zen Sand come from two modern Japanese phrasebooks used in Rinzai koan study; it's now assumed that most students in that system will choose their capping phrases from a collection like this rather than write their own.
The book contains over 500 pages of quotes from classical Chinese sources, lines of Japanese poetry, and some colloquial phrases from spoken Japanese. They range from the pithy--"A tiny gap a thousand miles wide", "Spread flowers on brocade"--to entire poems:
On the third day, she
goes down to the kitchen
And washes
her hands to make the stew.
She hasn't yet learned her mother-in-law's
taste in food
And asks her sister-in-law to check the flavor.
There are brisk judgments--"Awful! Awful!"--and aphorisms: "To take earth and turn it into gold may be easy, but to take gold and turn it into earth, that is difficult indeed." There are quotes from Confucian and Taoist texts and bits of koans: "Vast emptiness, nothing holy." "On South Mountain clouds rise, on North Mountain rain falls." "Not knowing is the most intimate."
Like koans, capping phrases are full of grandeur, deep feeling, earthiness, humor, strangeness, and a deceptive simplicity in turn, and these qualities come through in Zen Sand . Hori's translations are clear, vigorous, and reliable, if a little prosaic. In an undertaking like this, it's not just a matter of getting the grammar and vocabulary right, and Hori has an intimate understanding of the Mind behind the words. He also provides an extensive glossary that will be very helpful to anyone reading classical Chan and Zen texts.
Hori has a doctorate in philosophy and spent thirteen years in Japanese monasteries before returning to academic life in North America. He devotes almost 100 pages of Zen Sand to a thoughtful exposition of the Rinzai koan practice he experienced in Japan. It's a highly literary tradition; the practitioner is asked for capping phrases, discursive analyses, and verses which Hori calls deft play, intended as virtuoso demonstrations of a practitioner's eye. As he says, "Zen is free in language, not free from language."
Hori believes that koan study is above all a religious practice, and its goals are wisdom and compassion; far from being a withdrawal from the world, awakening is the breakthrough of a selfless self back into the world. In the process of answering a koan, one comes to experience the koan as the seeking mind itself. In this state of non-duality, one realizes in two senses: by making actual--becoming an instance of nonduality oneself--and by cognitively understanding the koan. The process of choosing a capping phrase serves to confirm, and often deepen, the practitioner's understanding.
From this perspective, koans aren't unintelligible or inherently paradoxical; they are the expression of a realization that will make sense to anyone who has experienced that realization for themselves. Koans and their capping phrases are a way of expressing the otherwise inexpressible. Hori points out that Chinese poetry, which is highly allusive and often speaks of something without mentioning it directly, is well-suited to this purpose. The language of capping phrases is metaphorical rather than philosophical; "the ten thousand things are one" becomes "one sword cuts into one piece," which is as vivid and startling as the thought it expresses.
In Western koan practice, the venerable saying that Zen doesn't depend on words and texts has been true for more than one reason. We have had to rely much more heavily on our direct experience of working with koans than on texts, which have been uneven and few. Teaching koans under these conditions has made me deeply sympathetic to a story Robert Creeley tells about reciting a poem in a class he was teaching; a student asked, "Is that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?" But this apparent handicap turns out, I think, to have been a great blessing. Whether through necessity or some more mysterious process by which the koan tradition seems to arrange its own transformation from time to time, new ways of working with koans have evolved and are making their own contribution to that tradition.
And so Zen Sand is a description of Japanese Rinzai practice but not necessarily a prescription for Western koan practice. One of the book's underlying stories is how the Japanese made a Chinese tradition their own, and you can see the same play among necessity, chance, and insight operating now as Westerners make the East Asian traditions our own. Hori mentions that Japanese monks sometimes mistook Chinese colloquialisms for technical Zen terminology, and here we are again: It's hard not to wonder about how much that's enigmatic in koan texts is simply a matter of idioms and allusions now lost to us. Zen Sand is part of a flowering of scholarship in the last few years that has dissolved the tension between practitioner and academic; it can help us better understand our inheritance and also demystify it, and that's a good thing. Demystification makes the real mystery that koans point to more apparent rather than less.
It's true, as Hori says, that English speakers haven't had the literary resources to do the kind of Japanese koan practice he describes, but that doesn't mean we're not working with capping phrases. Even when they aren't an overt part of the practice, people do have a natural impulse to bring them in. Koan practice pulls for creative participation, even without a collectively held literary tradition to draw upon. Perhaps this is because many practitioners discover for themselves that capping phrases are a natural way of responding to a koan, and that working with them can deepen practice. The great movement in Zen is from understanding to embodiment, a movement that happens over and over again. We first respond to a koan with language and physical expression, and from there move outward toward activity in the ordinary moments of the world. Responding to a koan with a capping phrase is one way this movement begins.
So what do some people in the West present as capping phrases these days? Quotes from koans, sutras, other capping phrases, and dharma talks; original phrases and pieces of original writing; bits of poems (Rilke's "for when the traveler returns/from the mountain-slopes into the valley,/he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead/some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue/gentian" ), songs (a joyful rendition of Patsy Cline's "I fall to pieces each time I see you again" springs to mind); mythological allusions ("Ereshkigal calls Inanna to the underworld", "The Holy Grail was never lost"); references to Western thought (depth psychologist James Hillman's "not the moon but the finger pointing at it"); bits of popular culture (the bumper sticker "How am I driving?", Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy); and so on.
Capping phrase practice may seem to happen on its own, but in the West we have good reason to encourage it. It has the power to reveal a Zen that is not bound to another time and a different place, a Zen that is native to us; we begin to recognize the ineffable in the images and metaphors of this time and place, arising out of our landscapes, our ancestral spirits, our poetries, our psyches, and our songs. Capping phrase practice has the power to help us see Zen everywhere, and isn't that, fundamentally, the point?
In the realm of seeing Zen everywhere, the tradition is evolving in another way, with the presentation of a moment in the practitioner's life as a capping phrase. The impulse behind commenting with a literary reference or a life experience seems to be the same: showing the meaning of a koan by giving another example of it. A woman says, "All these old monks arguing about 'this very mind is buddha,' and 'not mind, not buddha'--don't they know that when frost comes after weeks of warm weather, all the young buds in the garden die?" Sometimes the capping phrase is about how someone is suddenly the meaning of a koan: A man working with "Abiding nowhere, let the mind come forth" tells of how he opened his mouth to rebuke his teenage son and heard, to his astonishment, soft words come out. And sometimes the capping moment is when the particular opens out into the vastness, when a single blade of grass gleaming with dew at a woman's feet fills the universe. In each of these instances, people are reporting on how it is inside the state of consciousness to which a particular koan invites them.
Using life experiences as capping phrases is different from treating koans as psychotherapy. 'Koan' is beginning to appear in English as a word meaning 'life question'--My koan now is what my true work should be--but this is not what koans are. Life questions are, by their nature, personal, while part of the genius of koans is that they arise from beyond the bounds of the personal and invite us to step into the inconceivable. A koan doesn't care whether you decide to go back to graduate school or raise marmots in the basement, but it is interested in your realizing that the moment of asking the question is eternal, and that wondering what your life work is, is eternity itself. As this realization informs how you go about answering your life question, that is the movement into embodiment.
Koans and capping phrases allow people to sit together in the space they evoke. This has always happened privately in the interview room, but some of us are opening things out so that this shared experience can occur in public, in a koan seminar. A koan is presented and people comment on it, verbally and physically, sometimes with life experiences. People take risks and discover that receptivity can be as important as insight. A number of different expressions are juxtaposed, or build upon one another. People are moved and discomfited and curious; sometimes something important becomes blazingly clear because of what someone else says. A body of koan language and imagery that is held in common develops over time. In encouraging the chord as well as the single pure note, we find that realization can sometimes be a collaboration.
This is not the traditional koan dialogue that Hori describes as "a kind of military combat" in which "the opponents ... are depicted as being in competition; they are always making strategic moves against each other--probing, defending, feinting, attacking." According to him, capping phrases are often "the cheering and jeering of the bystander to the match." He argues that this martial quality comes from the conventions of Chinese literary games. Although many of us in the West trained this way, it seems to me that the ideas of dharma dialogue as combat and Zen training as bootcamp are on the wane here. A number of us are exploring other currents in the tradition that seem to hold more liveliness and a more generous sense of what the embodiment of awakening might be.
If literary games were one formative influence on koan dialogue, so was Taoist "pure conversation", which Hori only glances at. Chuang Tzu, for example, describes a kind of engagement that is closer to the spirit of playfulness and freedom in our koan seminars: "I came at him empty, wriggling and turning, not knowing anything about 'who' or 'what', now dipping and bending, now flowing in waves." When we work out of not knowing like this, people are curious about what others have to say--not to measure themselves or win a point but to enrich their understanding and contribute to an experience of shared practice, which is encouraging for everyone, including the teacher.
Another lively current in the tradition is the significance of the imagination. Hori shows how the use of poetic and metaphorical language can be a solution to the problem of expressing the inexpressible; it is also possible that this imaginative language is so much a part of the tradition because koans and imagination are inherently linked.
In meditation we can develop a sense of the universe as a vast act of imagination--the universe dreaming the universe--and of how this happens all around us, inside us, all the time. Koans reproduce this imagining-into-existence over and over again; they evoke a world and we enter it, so that we too become part of the imagining. Take another look at the poem about making stew. First there is the imagining of a world, conjured up with just a few details. As you move into the world, is there anything you recognize about the young woman's situation? I notice that it feels like how I come to a koan; every time it's both new and intimate. My imagining has joined the koan's; the koan now contains both this ancient kitchen and my experience of working with koans. A metaphorical link has been made. Then it starts to get bigger: every moment in life, really, is coming into the kitchen without being sure about what to do; life is always both new and intimate. But I don't experience this realization in discursive thoughts or explanatory words; I experience it as I experience this poem, as a world that is the world. And if I wanted to communicate this to you, I'd be much better off giving you the poem than saying what I just said. That's why we have koans and capping phrases.
Victor Hori has cooked a fine stew and served it up to us. May it nourish and sustain the imagining of the koan tradition in the West.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Hori, Victor Sogen. Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8248-2284-6 (cloth, 778 pages).
