The Gateless Gate
Case 38, A Cow Passes Through a Window

The Case

Wuzu Fayan said, "For example, it’s just like a great cow passing through a latticed window. Her head, horns, and four legs have passed through. Why is it that her tail can’t pass through?"

Wumen’s Commentary

If in regard to this you are able to turn yourself upside down, attain one single eye, and utter a turning word, you will be able to repay the four obligations above and help the living beings of the three realms below. If you are still unable to do this, reflect again on the tail; then you will be able to grasp it for the first time.

The Verse

What a strange and marvelous thing it is!

As many here know I’ve been working for the last while on history of Zen and how it has come to the west and particularly North America. I chose this case to lead off the middle section, the survey of our founding Zen teachers and the institutions that they’ve left to us. There are a couple of reasons for this. Master Hakuin who spent his life considering the koan way and who created the broad outlines of the koan curriculum we use within the Harada/Yasutani line thought there were eight particularly tough koans. He called them nanto, and this is one of them.

I think the establishment of the Zen way here in the west has been tough. And I think it is hard for each of us to make our way through the brambles and thorns of our own creation to find the Zen way. It’s all tough.

But that very toughness is itself the Zen way. And this evening I’d like to reflect on this cow and her tail as being near the heart of our practice. Wuzu Fayan, who gave us this case, also gives us two other cases in the Wumenkuan, case 35 "Who is the True Chien?" a particular favorite of mine, and 36 "Meeting Someone Attained in the Way."

Wuzu means "fifth ancestor," but this is not Hongren, the teacher of Huineng the sixth ancestor. This Wuzu was a seventh century master, perhaps most famous as the teacher of Yuanwu editor of the Blue Cliff Record, a central koan collection that each of us in this room who continue our koan study long enough will become quite intimate with.

Wuzu was thirty-five when he left home to become a monk. Rather old in his culture to do something like this. At first he studied the Consciousness-Only school, but was "troubled by the proposition that when a bodhisattva enters the Way, wisdom and principle are eclipsed, and though environment and mind are reportedly realized as fully united, no evidence can be offered to affirm the truth of this unity." (Andy Ferguson, Zen’s Chinese Heritage Wisdom, Boston, 2000. p. 413)

He asked a teacher about this who replied "If a person drinks water, he personally knows hot and cold." This I think is a very important point. It is the point of the Zen way. It is the point of real life. We gain from descriptions of things like water and recipes in cookbooks, and even the philosophical ruminations of the Consciousness-Only school. But, you know ultimately what counts: tasting for one’s self. And while this didn’t quite push old Wuzu over the edge, it did set him toppling.

He visited a number of teachers before meeting Baiyun Shouduan who gave him the critical push. When he met the master he started to ask a question, as you can tell from his concern with the philosophical issues of the Consciousness-Only school that he liked questions, when Baiyun shouted at him. Katz! And as in all the best old Zen stories, this awakened Baiyun. He tasted for himself whether the water was warm or cold.

Wuzu then wrote an appreciative verse:

Before the mountain spreads the plain.

Repeatedly, with folded hands, I asked the elders.

They sold to me so many times, and yet I purchased more,

Just to know that pine and bamboo bring forth the cloudless wind.

Zen is such an interesting discipline. At its heart is the ancient practice of sitting down and noticing. Our teachers sell us water as they sit beside the stream gushing forth. And Wuzu as is so for most of us spent years listening to the recipes, hearing about the water. Finally it was time to make a meal, to drink the water and find out personally whether it was cool or warm.

But sometimes sitting down and noticing just isn’t enough. Our minds are such complicated things, racing here and there, rarely if ever actually sitting still, actually just being that mirror we read about in some Zen stories. So, we have the koan way, the way of words. They are another way to take us to that silent space, that still point.

So much of koan study is simply taking words, particularly metaphors, and finding within ourselves the truth to which they point. Each koan is about the fundamental matter and speaks to something we already know but have forgotten. Koans invite us to our own original experience, beckoning us to remember, to taste for ourselves.

So, let’s consider the cow. For most of us as city folk the cow could be a fairly abstract thing. I recall in our brief sojourn in country life when Jan & I were taking a walk along the dirt road following along a hill side when we ran into a small herd of five cows and their watch goose. We were terrified. Cows are big. And geese are mean.

We ended up scrambling up a few feet from the road while the goose placed herself flaring her wings between us and a passage for the cows who passed quickly by with sidelong glances at us. That’s cows for me. Big things guarded by monsters with wings.

In the original of this case it’s a water buffalo. And that’s just TV or zoos for me. But, we’re talking about a metaphor. Perhaps one of those cows walking that road. Perhaps a water buffalo working in somewhere in Vietnam. But, really we’re talking about the big cow, the mother of all cows. The metaphor of the cow or ox or water buffalo is a pointing to who and what we really are. Here we get the same point as we find when we take up the koan Mu or No. Here the Dharmakaya, the whole glorious mess is revealed.

Of course there are other images here, as well. What is the window? Perhaps our awakening? Make sense? Our true nature passes through a gateway, past our clinging consciousness, past our ideas of good and ill, of high and low. We awaken. And then if we’re an ancient Chinese we write a poem. Perhaps most of us in this room would go for a beer or a late or a nice cup of herbal tea. Hurray! The goal is realized. Let’s celebrate.

Awakening. Liberation. Boundless.

But then there’s that tail. Everything passes through the window but the tail. What’s that about?

As I said I’ve been working on this book and particularly on the section on founding Zen teachers. I found myself dealing with various problems, not the least of which was how many of the sex scandals did I want to list. Turns out, there’s a quite lot of libido in the Zen world. Perhaps you’ve noticed. And in the not too distant past the lack of institutional structures, also meant not a lot of container.

Zen practitioners, whether masters or beginners, are all cut from the same cloth. We all have the possibility of being the cow passing through the window. And many of us do. Actually in the truest sense, all of us already have – from before the creation of the planets and stars. This is the boundless. This is the awakening.

And this is where we come to that tail.

Perhaps thinking of the Ox of the ten Ox herding Pictures can be a useful pointing. I think of that last picture with the fat guy entering town with a bag of gifts and "bliss bestowing hands." Here, I think we might have some hint about the tail. And the tail is very much the heart of this koan. The head, the horns, all four legs pass through. But the tail is left. The bag of gifts. Those bliss bestowing hands.

Aitken Roshi cites Dogen’s Genjokoan in this regard. "When the Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When the Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing." He goes on to explain what is missing in that most famous of Dogen’s words

"To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things. To be confirmed by the myriad things is to cast off the body and mind, self and others. No trace of realization remains and this no-trace continues endlessly." Get it?

Turns out the stuff of our awakening is us, you and me in all our messiness, bad temper, covetousness, run-away libido, all of it. Master Zenkai Shibayama tells us "this tail is nothing else than the formless form of Reality."

The truth of reality is that it rises in different ways at different moments. Most of our beginning koan work, how we take up a question like Mu or what is the sound of the single hand or before your parents were born, what is your original face? Are all about how we encounter the fundamental point, the cow passed through the window. And then we’re confronted with that tail and what it means. After awakening we’re confronted with our anger or grasping and what it means.

But here this evening, let’s look at it whatever it is as the gate, as the window as our opportunity for awakening.

Looking into your own heart and mind, what is it that is holding you back? What keeps you from being open? You don’t have to dig very far to know. Something presents, then just look below that. It isn’t very meta; it isn’t very far away from what you do over and over and over again.

Now take that, that tail of the cow, and make that your koan.

What is this? Is this the tail?

Why am I this? Why is this the tail?

Is this really me? Am I the tail?

Push, push, push. Keep looking. Keep asking is it this? Is it this? Here’s the water. Tell me, is it cool or warm? Here’s the tail. Can you wiggle it?

And let me tell you, own this fully, and the tail will wag the cow. You will jump through as easily as the cow’s ancestor jumped the moon.

Get it?

Perhaps there are some questions.