Wumen Huikai

And then he spoke of a number of ailments he suffered, not just as an enlightened person, but as the fully awakened Buddha of our world cycle, as a consequence of those horribly selfish deeds he himself had done in a very distant pastime.

Long before Wu Men, Bai Chong, and the Fox Koan, the Buddha was making all of this crystal clear.

In the koan, Baichang has been given, by cause and effect itself, a chance to refine his older, less adequate, less subtle understanding of the Buddha's point.

Entire kalpas have passed since he first said the enlightened person is free of cause and effect.

Our whole life is cause and effect.

Eikenroshi told me that in Japan, karma, cause and effect, really means mysterious affinities, which makes it less mechanical and opens profundities, mysterious affinities.

With this koan, wumen helps us clarify the nature of our freedom, realized or unrealized, fox or human, if our life is cause and effect, where is our freedom? What is freedom? For the sake of a good story, Wu Men says Wang Po slapped his teacher, but Zen tradition says no, he actually mimed it.

Wang Po was the giant of a man, said to be some seven feet tall, and Bai Chang was a wizened old priest.

So it's an important koan, and there have been many commentaries written about it.

Wu Men, who was the Chinese Zen master who collected the Gateless Gate collection, in his commentary says this, not falling under the law of cause and effect, why should this prompt 500 lifetimes as a fox? Not evading the law of cause and effect, why should this prompt a return to human life? If you have the single eye of realization, you will appreciate how old Bai Zhang lived 500 lives as a fox as lives of grace.

Hmm.

The single eye of realization, that's what Dogen calls the true Dharma eye.

we can be paralyzed by such uncertainty and fear.

So it helps to have a Dharma sibling to call forth, like as Dongshan did for Shenshan, to call forth your clarity, your Dharma eye.

So Wu Men, in his commentary, is cautioning us not to see old Bai Jiang's 500 fox lives simply as karmic retribution, as punishment.

No, but simply as lives as a wild fox, in all its foxness.

very, very distant past lives.

I wonder, too, whether Wu Men, in The Gateless Barrier, in saying 500 fox lives, might not have been making sly reference to the Pali Jataka and its 500-plus past-life stories of the Buddha, many in animal form.

Zen ancestors like Wan Wu, Lin Chi in China, Dogen and Hakuin in Japan, all refer to Jataka so effortlessly, it's clear they held them in esteem.

So why not Wu Men? Because Jatakas in their teaching of karma, lifetimes, and the vow of the Bodhisattva are central to Buddhism, not add-ons, they have been told, carved, painted, performed, and written throughout Buddhist Asia for the last 2,500 years.

Two major strands, totaling 600 tales or so, still survive out of what was obviously a larger oral tradition.

One strand is the previously mentioned Pali Jataka, which is a text from around 400 Common Era of 547 tales, each organized by the number of verses in the tale, revealing its oral roots.

What are the Jatakas, but classical Buddhism's demonstration of this, showing the work it actually takes to go the route from self-centeredness, like all of us start with, to full and complete awakening for the benefit of all.

A verse in the Gateless Barrier makes this very plain.

When action accompanies stillness and stillness combines with action, then the duality of action and stillness no longer arises.

From Wu Men, born 1183, The Great Way.

The Great Way is right before our eyes, but it is still hard to see what is right before your eyes.

If you want to know the true substance of the Great Way, it is not apart from sound and form, words and speech.