Forgetting Who You Are and Making Use of Nothing, Part 2

Bring Me the Rhinoceros
by John Tarrant

(Page 2 of 2)

When this sage arrived at court, he turned out to be a genuine barbarian: red hair, blue eyes, dressed in rags. His name was Bodhidharma, which was not really a personal name, just some sort of title in Sanskrit. The clothes of the ministers were gorgeous, and in the red-and-gold audience room the visitor managed to seem nondescript, which was an achievement for a barbarian. He didn't have the air of one deprived or poor; the main contrast with the ministers was not in how he dressed. In a place where everyone wanted something, he did not. The ministers' rank was displayed by differences in insignia and dress; the sage made no claims about rank. He didn't either push himself forward into the emperor's notice or pull himself back into hiding. He stood quietly, and his presence affected the court until everyone fell silent. The emperor noticed that his own thoughts were becoming simple; he remembered the taste of vegetable soup.

"Even the most elegant palace," thought the emperor, "is also a burden." Then he stood up as if to approach the visitor's stillness. He wanted to find a road deeper into his own life, and asked,

"I have funded many monasteries; what merit have I earned?"

"No merit," said Bodhidharma.

With a jolt, the emperor thought, "Here is someone who knows! It's not about building things up. It's about undoing everything." He realized that he had fallen into being an emperor again and underestimated the sage and perhaps himself. He had not dared to ask a question important to his own life. The memory of a hillside and a battle rose up in him. He had had no language for what he had undergone, had had no one to stand beside him and say, "Yes, I see it too!" Now the emperor felt the man's presence as a kind of sympathy, which he longed to explore.

"What is the main point of this holy teaching?"

"Vast emptiness, nothing holy," said Bodhidharma.

Again the quiet voice that didn't ask to be heard. The emperor's senses became keen. It was as if the two men were sitting together on a bench in a temple garden with all the time in the world. He wanted to reach the other man's mind, or perhaps go deeper into his own mind. An odd thought came to him: "If I'm an emperor, how can I also be a person?" So he asked, "Who are you, standing in front of me?"

"I do not know," said Bodhidharma.

This statement stopped the emperor completely. He began to feel a delightful insubstantiality. The emperor's sadness over the shameful things he had done fell away, it fell into that emptiness. The emperor's worry over when more attacks would come from the north also disappeared. Inside himself he couldn't find an emperor.

He felt capable of many things but not quite yet; the words "I don't know, I don't know" stuck in his head like a line from a song. For a moment, he walked alone and was content. Around him, emptiness flowed in all directions. Then, as he looked about, the palace returned and the court officials started to whisper to each other. He was fascinated by how clear everything was. Someone else spoke, and Bodhidharma began to withdraw, as if he were himself a spell that had been lifted. If he had stayed, "I don't know" might have lost its power. In the court, only one person noted his going.

Later, the emperor raised this matter with his advisor, Duke Zhi. The advisor asked, "Your Majesty, do you know who that Indian sage was?"

"No, I don't," said the emperor, realizing how much emperors take for granted.

"That was Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, carrying the seal of the Buddha's heart and mind."

The emperor felt a sudden regret and said, "Send a messenger to call him back."

Duke Zhi told him, "Your Majesty, even if everyone in the kingdom went after him he wouldn't return."

"I met him but didn't meet him," said the emperor, and eventually those words were put on his grave. This was his way of expressing his own "I don't know."

Afterward the emperor noticed more about his own life. He noticed that when he didn't expect people to please him, he enjoyed seeing them. That seemed to be a clue. He found that he enjoyed building temples; it wasn't a matter of duty. Then he went further. The emperor gave himself up to temples as a slave, seeking inward freedom in an exterior narrowness, in forgetting how to be an emperor. At such times he felt full of love. He dug ditches and planted gardens. He wasn't an emperor or a murderer; the work took away his sense of himself. Like the Indian sage, he didn't know who he was and was free until he became himself again. The strategy was also an excellent fundraising device for the temples, since the game was that his ministers had to ransom him with huge gifts. And he enjoyed tormenting his ministers in this mild way. After he was ransomed he would live contentedly in the palace for a while until a feeling of suffocation and surfeit became once more unendurable, and he would give himself up to a temple and be a gardener once more.

Bodhidharma went away without carrying even one opinion about the emperor and sat for nine years in the mountains facing a cliff. "I don't know" continues to murmur, century after century. People wait and live inside questions; mistakes lead through doors. The idea that there is a wisdom that the universe just gives to you without reference to teachers or scriptures came from Bodhidharma to the reader of this page and is happening right now.

Working with the Koan

A man is madly in love one day and the next cares only to go fishing. A country goes to great lengths to make an alliance and within a year has changed sides. This is not just fickleness and greed. There is an insubstantiality to human reasons and motives and identity. You may make an expedition to meet people in loincloths as photographed by National Geographic but find that they have copies of the article with them, and have taken to wearing Nikes and T-shirts with pictures of hip-hop artists on them.

What we believe about ourselves does not stand up to examination, so there is always the problem of describing our own lives in a plausible way. The old teachers named this insubstantiality "emptiness." They thought that, contrary to the medieval idea that something cannot come out of nothing, everything we do comes out of nothing.

Occasionally, awakening from sleep you may wonder, "Where on earth am I?" Or, fleetingly, in a more disoriented awakening, the question becomes, "Who am I?" or even, "What am I?" These moments, when you open your eyes in the world as for the first time, like a newborn, can be delicious. With the uncertainty comes a feeling of freedom.

In the Zen tradition, you are asked about Bodhidharma's three answers: "No merit," "Vast emptiness," and "I do not know." One place to start is with the idea of no merit.

No merit. How much do you do for praise? How many things do you say just to make an impression on others? What are you really achieving when you try to make an impression? And how many accounts do you have to keep? If you didn't do things for merit and advancement, or if you didn't act with motives at all, what would life be like? At work? In bed? Alone in a room? Even alone in a room you can be consumed with wanting other people to see you in a good light. Can you imagine how things would be without that kind of wanting?

Vast emptiness, nothing holy. What is the mind like if it's not occupied with plans and schemes, and fears that the plans and schemes will fail? What if your unexamined beliefs were to fall away and you were to live without them, and also to live without the thought that you had given anything up?

I don't know. If you were to put aside what you know because of what other people told you, how much of what you know do you truly know for yourself? If you look for the origin of your thoughts, of your life, of your universe, can you find it? Can you find where this moment comes from or where it goes home to?

Driving home from a retreat in the redwoods, I come into the small town of Occidental and, seeing shops and houses, realize, "Oh, the twenty-first century." But because I have spent a week forgetting what to expect and indeed forgetting who I am, I wouldn't be shocked if it was any century.

Copyright © 2004 by John J. Tarrant. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

John Tarrant was born in Tasmania and worked in the antiquated copper smelters there, writing poetry after his shift. Later he was a fisherman on the Great Barrier Reef and a lobbyist for Aboriginal land rights before graduating from the Australian National University. A Zen teacher who has practiced Jungian psychotherapy for twenty years and studied koans for thirty, Tarrant now directs Pacific Zen Institute, a venture in meditation and the arts, as well as teaching culture change in organizations. He is the author of The Light Inside the Dark. He lives among the vineyards near Santa Rosa, California.