Rev. Chikyo Ewan Magie: The Hidden Lamp (class 4 of 6)

Rev. Chikyo Ewan Magie's Fall 2024 class on the Hidden Lamp (4 of 6).

Transcript

Well, good evening again, everyone. Welcome to Prairie Mountain Den Center.

This is our Fall 2024 class on The Hidden Lamp, Stories from 25 Centuries of

Awakened Women, published in 2013, edited by Florence Kaplow and Susan Moon.

During this fourth class, we will study and reflect on one of the more powerful

and shocking stories in all Koan literature titled, Oh, The Old Woman Burns Down the Hermitage.

And it comes with a modern commentary by Zinke Blanche Hartman on pages 101, 102, and 103.

And once again, we're in this realm of Koan encounter where we meet these characters

and watch them meet one another. And this koan exemplifies this.

We have several main characters, the old woman, the old monk,

and the young, beautiful girl from the village. But there's also ourselves,

right, and how we receive this koan.

And so, once again, Zen is a dialogic encounter, and this one especially so.

So, the koan is really deliberately shocking, a way to challenge our perceptions

of Buddhism, a koan practice,

human sexuality, human intimacy, and what is the nature of the relationship.

As Zenke illuminates in her modern commentary, the old woman burns down the

hermitage because the old monk refuses to accept his own feelings of desire.

His editor, Susan Moon, points out in her other books, Buddhism is not turning away.

And so from Zenke's perspective, the old monk turns away from his emotions when

he speaks his response to the young, beautiful girl.

Uh buddhist training

emphasizes honesty like sort of

radical acceptance of what is including our emotions of desire and aversion

uh and so uh also honesty in our body speech and mind so in our how we speak and how we act.

And in some ways, we can understand Zenke's perspective as we go along in the

talk tonight, why she sees the old monk as turning away.

But also, we might have room for other views on this koan.

But essentially, we are asked in our practice to be true and honest in perceiving our inner experience.

And when we turn away from emotions, whatever they may be, especially aversion or hatred or desire,

attraction, or even sort of neutral feelings, like maybe we feel when we look

at the wall or the ceiling,

or we simply just don't miss or we simply miss something and we don't have much emotion to speak of.

So noticing these things, just like noticing sensations in the body or thoughts

arising in the mind, our mind states, all of that is central to our practice, foundational.

So the koan here really pushes us to engage in more than denial and to not turn

away, as Susan Moon encourages us.

According to the koan, an old woman in China supported a monk for many years.

She built him a hermitage and provided him with food and clothing.

After 20 years, she wondered what he had attained and resolved to test him.

She summoned a beautiful girl from the village and sent her to the hermit with

instructions to embrace him and then ask him what he felt.

The girl harassed the monk and asked, how do you feel just now?

A withered tree on a cold boulder has no warmth in winter, replied the monk.

The girl returned to the old woman and told her what had happened.

What? The old woman said.

To think I've been supporting an imposter all these years.

She grabbed a stick, hurried to the hermitage, beat the monk,

shouting, get out of here. Then she burned the hermitage to the ground.

So, a very short, compressed story with lots in it.

In some ways, it is a curious koan because it asks us to see the view of the

old woman, the character who does a destructive act, beating the monk,

burning down the hermitage.

Rather than sympathize with the monk, the Buddhist practitioner,

the koan asks us to align against him, so to speak, to see with the old woman

that his practice appears hollow, a wasted effort.

Rather than be fiery, brought to passionate desire by the girl's caresses,

seemingly the monk is as frozen as nature in the winter, or in his supposed old age.

A withered tree on a cold boulder has no warmth in winter, is his reply.

Now there's echoes here of

a famous sonnet by Shakespeare Sonnet

73 Of that time of year thou mayest in me behold When yellow leaves or none

or few Do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruined choirs

where late the sweet birds sang.

It's really one of the great openings in English poetry and poetry in English.

That time of year thou mayest in me behold when yellow leaves or none or few

do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

bear ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

So many wonderful poems have emerged out of this. These are the first four lines of the sonnet.

Which, of course, is a 16-line form from the Renaissance.

And in relationship to the koan, the metaphor is similar.

The old bare tree in autumn with few or no leaves left, no lifeblood left,

as it weathers and withers into winter and death.

Now, ancient China was an exceptionally poetic culture, particularly during

the Great Hong Dynasty from roughly 606 to 958,

when even to serve in the government, a person had to pass rigorous exams in

poetry as well as civics.

Imagine something like this for modern America.

We can only imagine, I think. Long influenced by Taoism and its emphasis on

intimacy with nature, its rhythms and cycles,

Chan or Zen developed this poetic sensibility further with the Kaan tradition.

And this poem really relies on this descriptive language, just as Dogen later

will in 13th century Japan, where he writes in a particularly poetic passage,

this is, Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water.

The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide

and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dew drops on the grass or

even in one drop of water.

Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water.

You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky.

The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection,

however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dew drop and

realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

Here in this beautiful passage, Dogen's poetic images center on the moonlight in the water,

a calm abiding state of perfect clarity and insight rather than the barren emptiness

of the winter tree, as in the koan.

In some ways, we can see how the old monk attempts to express some of the cool

calmness when he replies to the beautiful village girl,

a withered tree on a cold boulder has no warmth in winter,

essentially pushing away the warmth of her caresses, saying,

in effect, I have nothing to respond with.

After all, Buddhist practice is purportedly to lead practitioners into calm,

clear states where a person might be unbothered by the flames of passion.

But Buddhist practice does not say that we extinguish all feeling.

Rather, we find ways to abide within it.

Therefore, at other times, we see Buddhist images of a monk sitting in flames

rather than one who declaims his wintry lack of all sensation.

And it is for this denial that the old woman flies into fury,

beating the monk, chasing him off, and burning down the hermitage she built for him,

and perhaps feeling betrayed that her 20 years of support had led seemingly

to denial and lack of insight.

This is the direction Zinke Blanche Hartman takes her commentary.

And from her perspective, she makes wonderful sense when she writes,

my teachers and my practice have never taught me not to enjoy life.

She goes on to say, the deeply seasoned teachers I've had the opportunity to

meet have all been supportive to people who are suffering, but they have also

been playful and light hearted.

And then she goes into talking about the Bodhisattva precepts to say,

I understand the precepts not as rules to follow, but more as something like,

be careful in this area of human life because there's lots of suffering there.

So pay attention to what you're doing.

Rather like a sign on a frozen pond saying danger, then ice,

rather than shame on you.

So the monk could have, Zenke goes on to say, responded to the young woman kindly,

saying something to her like, you're young and beautiful and very attractive,

but I'm a celibate monk, so I'm really sorry I can't accommodate you.

But responding in the way that he did, he wasn't being compassionate. it.

In this way, Zenke focuses her commentary on the young, beautiful village girl

and the monk and allows us to see the 16 Bodhisattva precepts as flexible rather than rigid rules,

guidelines for a sensitive life rather than demanding commandments we cannot

break without falling into error and sin,

her approach to the koan helps us understand directions for our own practice.

But what about the old woman and her response, beating the monk and burning down the hermitage?

Why is she so passionate?

Why, in fact, did she build the monk a hermitage and support him for 20 long years of human life,

and why in the end is she so full of anger and a sense of betrayal at the monk's

purported response to the young girl.

Perhaps she herself had feelings for the monk, right?

But maybe the two of them had shared a relationship of some kind earlier in their lives.

Maybe she is so angry because his reply A withered tree on a cold boulder Has

no warmth in winter Was really his response to her entreaties at some point,

Certainly her response has its own heat Just like the fire she ignites to burn down the hermitage,

Almost always in Buddhism and Zen Fire is symbolic of passion and or anger.

And her response is so strong that I'm actually surprised that Blanche didn't comment upon it.

Though in the book, there's only like little short periods of room,

I think, to fit all the comments and the koans in the book.

But when we reflect on the four foundations of mindfulness, we understand the

sequence that it progresses through, from sensations in the body to our perceptions

of emotion, like we said, aversion, attraction,

neutral feelings, and then, of course, the rising of thoughts in the mind, and then states of mind.

The Shakyamuni Buddha understood intimately the fundamental distorting power

of aversion, attraction, and ignorance, or hatred, desire, and delusion.

He understood how we need to pay mindful attention to how these arise and manifest,

as well as how they pass away,

particularly when we notice them through our mindful practice.

The Buddha also understood how quickly anger arises, like a flash full of heat and blinding light.

Truly, our practice must be cultivated deeply and persistently,

for these emotions arise in our human life.

They are forces, like the ancient Greeks understood, that take us over the way

Sappho describes eros taking over the mind and body of those consumed by passionate desire.

In this fragment from Sappho, she writes, it just makes my heart flutter within my breast.

You see, the moment I look at you, right then, for me to make any sound at all, won't work anymore.

My tongue has a breakdown, and a delicate, all of a sudden, fire rushes under my skin.

With my eyes, I see not a thing, and there is a roar my ears make.

Sweat pours down on me and a trembling

seizes all of me paler than grass

am i and little short of

death do i appear to myself this

great fragment uh in english translation from the great ancient poet sappho

uh from you know roughly 2600 years ago uh perhaps our old woman and our old

monk were themselves once seized like this by Eros,

unable to resist.

But for whatever reasons, whether personal or sociocultural,

they chose to become monk and patroness.

Perhaps only now the old passion wells up again, but this time as anger flashing

at a seeming betrayal, but perhaps for other reasons twisted by unfulfilled desire.

We don't know the koan's backstory. We just see the flashing hot anger burn

the hermitage down, beating the monk away.

I recently spoke with one mature, clear-eyed Zen practitioner who understood it this way.

It's not the old man the woman curses at. It's herself.

It is she who has wasted her life. wasted in investing in a relationship that

she is not willing to or is afraid to commit to.

She should have offered herself to the old man, an intimate of life and travails

with whom she has spent many years and experiences. They are already intimate.

Think how sweet and spiritual a physical union could have been.

Not this pretty young thing, a stranger, a pretty village girl.

Of course, he found no stirrings of feelings for this stranger,

distant from him in years.

He knows better, and in some ways this is honorable.

But the old woman and the old man might have deepened their already deep relationship

by adding physical closeness.

The hermitage is a metaphor for their relationship. The old woman doesn't burn

down the hermitage in anger at the old man, but in anger and acknowledgement of her own stupidity.

In fact, the relationship was burnt down before he rejected the young woman's

advances, long before when the old woman denigrated the relationship by denigrating herself.

This is a pretty strong interpretation, completely different from the direction

that Zenke Blanche Hartman went in,

but I thought it would be worthwhile to share it in the talk for its insight

and possible way of understanding the heat and passion at the center of this koan.

So this possible understanding helps us understand anger and its violent results,

the burning of a hermitage that was at once perhaps symbol of a relationship, a unity.

And this interpretation helps us understand the flame-like qualities of anger as human emotion.

For instance, the opening of Homer's epic, The Iliad, does the same.

Sing, muse, Homer writes, the anger of Peleus' son, Achilles,

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans,

hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes,

but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of birds,

and the will of Zeus thus was accomplished since that time when first there

stood in division of conflict, Atreus' son,

the lord of men, brilliant Achilles.

This first great theme of the first great work of Western literature is the

anger of powerful warlords who, feeling affronted,

can summon an army to sail across a sea and wage a foreign war for a decade,

costing thousands of lives on all sides and the destruction of the city of Troy.

Here in this koan, we see anger erupt with destructive personal impact,

while the Iliad, as an epic poem, demonstrates its catastrophic effects on entire societies,

multiple generations.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master who passed away in January of 2022,

knew the social, cultural impact of intergenerational anger.

Firsthand during his involvement in the Vietnam War.

His book, Lotus in a Sea of Fire, illustrates strategies to cool people on all sides of conflict.

His much later book, Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, universalizes these

techniques for the 21st century.

But like the insights of Zenke Blanche, it starts with being intimate and honest

with your actual feelings, something it seems both the old woman and old monk

may have failed to do at different points in their relationship.

When we reflect on our own anger and passion, we need to use our practice,

and honestly and fully and committedly as we can, to feel the heat of passion and anger.

Please take heart from studying

this koan and deepen your own committed practice

in your own one precious

human life move into honesty about emotions clear direct sharing in our human

and zen relations think honestly about our own emotional experiences and reflect

deeply and consider how to act and speak,

as we go along. Thank you.