A while back
I posted a reflection on sex, using as a jumping-off point for the discussion
the well-known Zen koan about a widow who burns down a monk’s hut.1
The story, basically, goes like this:
A widow decided to support the practice
of a monk. So she set up for him a hut on her property where he could live and
do his holy work undisturbed. She
provided him food and supplied his needs for twenty years, at which point she
had an impulse to check the level of his realization: She instructed her beautiful serving girl to
linger a bit the next time she brought the monk his meal, to sit on his lap,
embrace him, and see what happened. The girl did as she was told. Seated on the
surprised monk’s lap with her arms around him, she asked provocatively,
according to the widow’s instructions, “What now?”
The monk replied, poetically:
An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter
Nowhere is there any warmth
On hearing the report of this, the
widow kicked the monk out of his hut and burned it down.
As one of my assertions in that
essay was that hardly anyone escapes or tests out of sexual desire, this koan
seemed a good way to frame my reflection:
the monk’s seeming claim to have gone beyond sex, and the widow’s
recognition that he was deluded for thinking so. But as
with many koan stories, this one can be turned around in one’s head over a long
period of time--maybe even a lifetime—often yielding things that might not have
at first been expected. Some readers of that piece provided other interesting
takes on the story.2
One reader in particular was
critical of the widow’s action. The
better response, he thought, would have been for the widow to avoid judging the
monk at all, in acknowledgement of the fact that one can’t really completely
know someone else’s inner reality. Did the
widow miss the fact that the ability to see one’s own sins is superior to the
ability to see angels, as the saying goes? It’s a
good point, and one can read the koan in a way that emphasizes that: The widow, more concerned with the sins of
others than her own, becomes a symbol of that classic way of missing the mark. And perhaps the suddenly homeless monk then understands
that the point of salvation wasn’t comfort or the esteem of his fellows. Maybe he rejoices in the hut-burning, with gratitude
toward his benefactor for inadvertently opening his eyes to that. And so forth.
That seems a reasonable way to read it.
But as the story did its work on me in the
ensuing months, I found my curiosity more and more directed toward the figure of
the widow, and the koan began to morph for me into a story that, while tangentially
about sex, was also about something else. To understand what that something else might
be, some reasonable speculation about the widow is required, based on the sparse
details the koan gives—because the details of every koan are sparse, which serves
to highlight the fact that every detail is usually very important.
Though no specific details of the widow’s circumstances
are given, a few assumptions can be made.
As she seems to have retained at least one servant and had the means to
support a monk, she likely shouldn’t be thought of as poor. We have no
indication of her age, but doing the math, she can’t have been terribly young at
the time of her hut-burning, even if she lost her husband at an early age. And since she’s willing to support a monk’s
practice, we can take her to be a pious person, at least someone who seeks merit
from supporting holy activity. Or
perhaps even a practitioner of the way herself--as would have been plausible
for a woman of means in the Chan Buddhist culture of the Tang dynasty from which this story comes. Maybe we can
imagine that she aspired to be a nun at some point but got married instead, and
that her support of the monk demonstrates her concern with ultimate things: that she’s someone who uses her wealth to contribute
to spiritual practice rather than spending it on frivolous things, perhaps with
gratitude for being able to make such a contribution.
But say that after a few years, she
begins to get little hint of something not quite right about the monk’s
direction. Maybe it’s something small, an odd vibe that she can’t really put
her finger on and that she wouldn’t have noticed if he didn’t live right in her
back yard like that. She puts it aside, wisely not trusting her own impressions, which
have proven unreliable in the past (She recalls that, as a girl, thought the sun stopped existing at night!),
and she puts her faith in the monk’s good aspiration and in the greater tradition
within which his practice fits.
Say that after some time though, the
impression doesn’t go away, and she can’t shake it. More evidence arises,
subtle but undeniable instances of repeated behaviors, and it gets to the point
where she must practice actively ignoring it in order to go on. So she dutifully practices active ignorance, by
the elements of her own spiritual maturity recognizing that no one is
completely holy, that everyone is a work in progress. She continues her grateful support.
But more time passes, and the
negative vibe continues to the point where ignoring it would be dishonest. What’s more, she sees fruits of the wrong
direction in the disciples of the monk who visit him in his hut: unkindness, not the ordinary kind, but something
systemic, a feeling that their practice sets them above supposedly ordinary
people less spiritual. At first she
thinks this may be a function of what usually happens to young zealots, but,
after a number of years, it doesn’t seem to go away. She’s troubled, but it’s not her place to
instruct others. She continues with her
devoted support.
Say she gives it a few more years, but
there’s no improvement, and it becomes impossible for her to ignore the genuine
damage that’s being done to the world beyond the hut. The non-kenotic energy
coming from the hermitage is having its effect in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
But it’s still another couple years before the impulse arises in her to actually
do something about it.
She then spends another few years
questioning that impulse. Maybe she just
doesn’t understand, she reasons. Perhaps
this is a wisdom beyond her ken, something she’ll get in time. But ultimately she must come to terms with the
realization that sustained, systemic unkindness can never be a sign of wisdom.
She struggles with whether she can
or should do anything about it. It’s not her place to correct a monk. And if
she did, the result would most likely be her humiliation. She may get flak from
institutional religion. She may suffer
ridicule not only from the authorities, but from friends and neighbors—how dare
this widow criticize someone of such status and in doing so cast aspersions on
the revered Chan lineage? And no one may
believe her anyway. After all, who is she compared to a person of spiritual
authority? She could very well end up
looking like a fool, and her efforts might have no effect anyway.
But ultimately it becomes clear that
the only honest thing she can do is to bear witness in any way she can, for the
sake of the monk and for all other beings, and without attachment to results,
because a good result doesn’t seem too likely.
It’s not a moment of glorious triumph, this realization, for it’s going
to mean taking on the identity of Scary Old Lady. But any other path is
dishonest. She sighs, and figures out a
way to manifest the monk’s wrong direction in a clear way by testing him. She
knows a radical act will be required, because if the guy is bought into his
delusion to the point of reciting spontaneous poetry about it, just telling him
will likely have no effect. She sends in
the pretty servant girl, trembling at what she knows will happen, the box of
matches already in hand.
Think of the widow’s process like
this and the image of the crazed old hag falls away. She becomes instead a
symbol of discernment. She didn’t come to the decision to torch the
hut lightly. It took twenty years,
and I think that period of time is a critically important detail--probably the
most important detail of the whole story. Discernment isn’t often easy or
quick. Even if it is, it bears spending some time doubting one’s motives and
resisting judgment of one’s brother in exactly the way one of my critics
suggested. And discernment doesn’t come
from a place of self-confidence. It’s
discovered by a process of the kind of questioning that doesn’t land one in a
place of total certainty, even as action becomes imperative. And it isn’t easy. One resists it like Jeremiah resisted his
prophetic calling. There’s no delight in
acting on it. But action, when required,
becomes inevitable, as the discernment becomes a kind of anointing to act. The consequences
aren’t fun or necessarily satisfying. They do nothing to build up one’s
self-esteem. But bearing witness to one’s discernment is ultimately about
radical honesty and compassion, and shirking that witness goes in the other
direction.
The widow becomes for me a great
symbol of the process of discernment and its consequences, and a model that
anyone might use to check himself or herself against whenever the impulse arises to speak the truth to
power. To see one’s own sins is indeed superior to seeing angels. But sometimes,
even when you understand that, you have
to burn down a house.
Notes
1. The original post is here: http://davensati54.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-pebble-in-myshoe.html
2. Another friend opined that perhaps the monk
indeed actually had transcended
sexual desire, but that in doing so, he’d missed the point, which may have been
the cause of the widow’s anger. That’s an interesting variant that I’m going to
be considering from now on.
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