Sound of the Bell: The Why Behind Things
Photo by Koko Htikeaung
Why do we do the things we do? What fuels our actions? Is there a deeper meaning for our actions beyond the quick answer that begins with “because”?
In this talk Zuisei speaks to a well-known koan in the Buddhist text, Gateless Gate (Gateless Barrier): “When the bell rings,” Master Yunmen asks, “why do you put on your robe?” This is the same as asking why do you make art, make love, make or do anything at all? And the answer, we’ll find, speaks not just to the why but also the what of things.
The Gateless Gate is a collection of koans compiled by Chinese Chan Master Wumen Huikai. Chan is the originating tradition of Zen Buddhism.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Gateless Gate, Case 16: Bell-Sound and Priest’s Robe
The Main Case
Yunmen said, “Look! This world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your priest’s robe at the sound of the bell?
The Commentary
In studying Zen and disciplining yourself, you must strictly avoid following sounds and clinging to forms. Even though you may be enlightened by hearing a sound, or have your mind clarified by seeing a form, this is just a matter of course. It is nothing to talk about, either.
If a Zen student is able to master sounds and forms, they can clearly see the reality of everything and they’re wonderfully free in everything they do. Though it may be so, you tell me, does the sound come to your ear, or does your ear go to the sound? Even if you’re able to transcend both sound and silence, how do you speak of that fact? If you listen with your ear, you cannot truly get it. When you hear with your eye, then you can really get it.
The Capping Verse
If you understand “it,” all things are One;
If you do not, they are different and separate.
If you do not understand “it,” all things are One.
If you do, they are different and separate.
Good evening. Let me first say a word on koans and their role, not just in our practice, but in our lives. My teacher calls koans a unique spiritual tool, and they are—they very much are.
I don’t believe anything comparable exists in other religious traditions. There’s nothing quite like a koan to strip you of the notion that you know something about yourself, about life, about other people, about the world. A koan takes away your conviction that you know something so simple as the nature of a table, for example, like this table next to me, the nature of candlelight, or of these words I’m speaking, of a thought.
Sit for a little while with a koan and you’ll realize you don’t actually have the faintest idea about what these things are. You don’t really know them from the inside.
Maybe that could be one working definition of a koan: a view of life, of things, from the inside. Now, if you sit quietly with a koan, if you work diligently, look closely, eventually you realize, not your idea of the table, but the tableness, the suchness of the table itself—which is no different than your heart Isn’t that amazing? A table is no different than your heart, a stick, the rain outside, this cushion I’m sitting on, you—no different than my heart, no more distant than this blood-pumping valve.
A koan wakes up the mind. It’s like a slap to the intellect. It’s like cutting a circle in the ice in the winter and jumping in. It wakes you up, it shakes you up.
Daido Roshi used to say that koans short-circuit the intellect. But I actually think that they jumpstart it. You’ve been coasting along, pushing the car down the road on neutral—thinking about this and that, talking to yourself, putting things in mental boxes, sticking on labels, marking what you like and don’t like, separating it into categories—when all of a sudden the battery gets a jolt of energy and… off you go, all pistons firing. All of a sudden, you’re in another realm. You realize you’re the car and there’s no stopping you.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the intellect—there isn’t. It’s just that it’s limited in its oomph, in its horse-power. And you don’t need to have read the first thing about Zen or about Buddhism to work on a koan. You don’t need to know the theory if you strip it down to its bare bones: a question. All you need is the desire to ask, the desire to see, the desire to live, not just halfway, but all in.
I’ve said this before but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it: a koan is not a riddle, it’s not a problem in need of a solution. It’s not a secret teaching, it’s not a carrot to get you to sit zazen. A koan is a mirror of your mind, and a lens into reality. Amazing, isn’t it, how a mirror works. But also problematic, because what you can see in a mirror is limited. The main thing a mirror shows you is yourself. But scrape off the coating and what you have is clear glass, and on the other side of that glass, the entire world. The entire world with everyone in it, including you.
A koan is like a mirror because it will show you when you’re caught in your own opinions, in your own ideas, your assumptions, your biases. It will show me too. I can see when someone is sitting with the answer to a koan, not the question. We do this in our lives too, we come to a problem already knowing how we’ll solve it. And so what happens is one of two things: it works or it doesn’t. But when we really come with the question, when we don’t know, every possibility is open. That difference between knowing and not knowing is self. Nothing but self that gets in the way of our seeing.
A koan is a lens because when you get very quiet, when you get very still, and very curious, you realize that on the other side of that mirror, is a whole world—a world where what you know and what you can name and therefore categorize and therefore bring close or push far, does not operate.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass Alice meets a speaking gnat. And this gnat, who’s the size of a chicken, asks her what kinds of insects she rejoices in, in her world. “Well, I don’t rejoice in insects,” Alice says. She explains she’s afraid of them, especially the large ones, but then she says, “But I can tell you their names.”
Oh, of course, they answer to their names, the Gnat says. “Well no, I haven’t known them to do that,” Alice says. “What’s the use of their having names, if they won’t answer to them?” “No use to them,” says Alice, “but it’s useful to the people who name them. If not, why do things have names at all?”
Indeed, if things do not answer to their names, what are those names for? And are they useful? How much?
“It is not a world,” a line from the Diamond Sutra says, “and therefore it is called the world.” Because it is not a world, we call it the world—a koan. What is it saying?
Names are useful to the people who name. But what is a mountain’s own name for itself? What is a bell’s sound to the bell? I’m not asking a silly question. I’m not asking a rhetorical question. I’m really asking “When the bell rings, why do you put on your robe?” Do you understand?
I was saying to one of you the other day, that in the transmission of the dharma, nothing goes from teacher to student. I didn’t receive anything from my teacher, you won’t get anything from me. What happens, as we meet and work on a koan, or shikantaza, or the breath, is that together we’re verifying if you’re seeing what all the many teachers and students before us have seen. My teacher did this for me, and his teacher did it for him, and on and on, going all the way back to the time of the Buddha. That is why it’s called the rightly transmitted dharma. B sees what A has seen, what Z has seen, what Y has seen. It can’t be any other way.
The answer to a koan isn’t multiple choice. Sometimes one of you will do this—you present, I say no, and you just try something else. It doesn’t work that way. If you see it, you see it; if you don’t, you don’t and you keep working on it. It’s not even an answer in the regular sense. It’s the expression of… you. A direct expression of you, of the world, of your heart.
You know, the problem of giving a talk like this is that afterward, everyone wants to do koans. That’s actually fine, I appreciate your enthusiasm. It’s a matter of readiness. Your mind has to be stable enough and focused enough and determined enough to not be discouraged by the confusion and disappointment and uncertainty and constant “rejection” that inevitably comes up when working on a koan. You can’t rush this process, and there’s no reward at the end. But trust that if I see the conditions are ripe for you, I will absolutely bring it up.
I wanted to speak on this koan today because it addresses the why and the how of our practice—of anything we take up, particularly over a period of time. And, it may not seem like it on the surface, but this koan speaks about motivation and it speaks about vow.
“The world is vast and wide,” Master Yunmen says. “Why do you put on your priest’s robe at the sound of the bell?” He’s referring to that moment during morning zazen when, at the end of the period of sitting, the case is rung for the chanting of the Verse of the Kesa, and monastics and jukai students take their robes, the robe of the Buddha, place it on their head, do the chant, then put it on. And so, this koan is asking, why? Why do that? Why sit zazen? Why do the job that you do? Eat a meal? Go for a walk?
Right now, there are a million things you could be doing. Why then, when seven o’clock came around, did you log into this zendo, lower your eyes, and look inside? Why do any of us choose to look at our minds so closely? Why feel our bodies so intimately? Because it’s uncomfortable sometimes, isn’t it? It’s boring—I don’t think so, but some people might. It’s hard—not as hard as living in confusion is—but hard.
And something we should be aware of, since we’re a our virtual sangha: because each of us is sitting at home, we can make things harder by making them easier, ironically. We can move whenever we want, turn off our camera and go have a snack, if we want. We can go watch part of a movie, go shopping, come back. I’m kidding, but also not.
You know I want us to have flexibility to come and go, to trust our own rhythm. But we should also know that something happens when we challenge ourselves. Something happens when we don’t move, when we don’t jump up, turn away at the first sign of discomfort, of restlessness. Those of you who’ve done sesshin in person know this.
What is that? What do we see when we don’t turn away? When we stay in one place for a while? What happens when we don’t decide in advance how far we can go? How much we can do? What happens when we truly, truly don’t know?
After I sent my last newsletter a couple of you pointed out that the title I love of that Ursula Le Guin story, “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” is actually from a poem by Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress.” And in it there’s that great couplet:
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow
My vegetable love. My vegetable practice—natural, patient, growing in its own time. And I said that this is the perfect encapsulation of the practice of forbearance. The practice of bearing a little discomfort now, so we can be completely free—now and later.
To forebear is to patiently carry, to patiently bear or endure what is difficult to endure. A mother has forbearance in the face of her teenager’s mood swings. A teacher has forbearance in the face of a student’s struggles. We calmly and patiently endure a little discomfort now—my aching legs, my restless mind—because we know it will set us free.
It’s vaster than empires because it is that large—it encompasses everything. Everything, everything—truly. But what’s the “it”?
If you understand “it,” all things are One;
If you do not, they are different and separate.
But doesn’t understanding get in the way? If you understand, all things are One, the capping verse says; if you don’t, they’re separate. But then the capping verse says:
If you do not understand “it”, all things are One.
If you do, they’re different and separate.
What is going on? Do I understand or not understand? Are things different or One? Yes, yes.
It is vaster than the entire universe—and more slow. It reaches everywhere, it is no different than me or you. It is different, since I’m me and you’re you. But where is that? How is that?
“If you listen with the ear, you cannot truly get it,” says the commentary. “When you hear with the eye, then you can really get it.” Hearing with the eye is hearing with the whole body. It’s seeing with the whole body. It’s seeing the sound of the bell, and hearing the form of the robe. Remember, this is not a riddle! Then how do you see like this? How do you hear like this? How do you take delight even in pain, as I said over sesshin? How’s that even possible? What state of mind does this require?
“To know what you cannot know, you have to see what you cannot see,” the writer Anna DeForest says. “You are in possession of a brain, a perceptual device which works hard by design to make sure you stay the same person you were yesterday. Most of all, it will show you what you have already seen, and tell you things that you believe already. In the common language you feed to it, your dominant hemisphere chatters endlessly, barely listening to itself. So, to learn to see, you learn to see beyond what the mind tries to show you, and to learn to speak, you learn to listen below the common language, to find instead, … the fresh particularity of difference.”
Do you see why we can’t be moving fast? Do you see why it takes time, and patience, and silence, and stillness? Like a boiling pot of water, you can’t turn off the flame every few minutes if you want it to get hot. You can’t keep moving the pot from one burner to another. You have to be steady and patient and calm. The heat has to build in its own time. And when it’s ready, when it hits 212 F there’s nothing you need to do—the water boils by itself.
When the bell rings, why do you put on your robe? Why do you take your seat, follow your breath, ask a question, take a teacher? If you are struggling with your zazen, If you’re not feeling it, this is the question to ask, why? Which is the same question as why do you make art, make love, make a child?
But, is “why” even the right question? Is “why” what Yunmen is asking here? Is that what he’s asking you, what he’s asking me? Why… because—no, just… no. Then what?
What do we know and how? What else might there be? How do you see what you cannot see?
Explore further
01 : The Gateless Gate
02 : How to Practice Zen Koans by John Tarrant
03 : Unstoppable with Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
Sound of the Bell: The Why Behind Things, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard on the Yunmen's Sound of the Bell, a koan of the Gateless Gate (Gateless Barrier). Audio podcast, transcript, and video available.