Towards EU Zen

Et F.A.S sommemøde i Stockholm med Jeff Shore

Tim Pallis

QUESTION (T Pallis): All the problems you are talking about here, are they essentially the same problem as Hisamatsu's "fundamental koan"? The first part of it says: "Whatever you do is of no avail!" It will not do to practice! There is a lot of things that will not do! It seems almost impossible to do anything about it. You said that it is easier to come up, to ascend, to lose your ego. I think it is very difficult. To come down is definitely very difficult too. If one put it in such a way that there is neither coming up nor coming down, because that seems to be a dualistic way of thinking, could that impossibility be the same as the negative or apophatic approach of both Christianity and Advaita Vedanta?

QUESTION (T Pallis): When I was in Kyoto, I was training at

Daitoku-ji with Sohaku Kobori. There were many women there - just as many as men. We had a woman as jikijitsu at a certain period. One day I told one of the female participants, that I had once met Sri Ramchandra, who was an Indian bhakti master, a very lovable bhakti teacher of a North Indian tradition. His position as a guru was very important, because he transmitted some kind of energy (pranahuti) when a devotee was sitting in front of him. I liked this practice very much.

When I told the girl about it, she said, that it was one of the things she needed very much. She could not find in zen the kind of bhakti approach

where you are receiving something. She thought that zen practice was too masculine, a way of trying too hard, working so hard on it. There ought to be a touch of bhakti in it! Would that be relevant to you?

QUESTION (T Pallis): I have a question to that! Are there really any cultural or sex differences in the dharma?

QUESTION (T Pallis): Do you think that women have a more

devotional approach? I have the feeling that Christianity is more

like a bhakti path, more devotional, I would say.

QUESTION (T Pallis):

I would like to ask you, if you at the time you were trying to find a living teacher had any idea, that in the Greek Orthodox tradition there might among the hesyachast be some teachers who were close to your own tradition? Reading Philokalia one meets a beautiful teaching, that is very similar to the mystical tradition in the Roman Catholic Church.

QUESTION (T Pallis): There are many things I would like to ask you about, but first of all about Hisamatsu's fundamental koan: Right now, if nothing will do, what do you do? You explained about the two different parts of the koan. But when you are practicing and repeating it in your mind as a phrase, how can you ever express the second part of it, I mean if you have not yet

awakened?

I can see that the koan itself is non-dualistic, but in actual practice, having the mind that there's an awakening to come, makes it a dualistic practice and that is not so good. And if you come to the point in practice where there is no question anymore, how can you think: What do you do? So, there is a certain dilemma of working with that koan. I wonder if it will ever be possible to overcome that. One thing is to practice zazen and be on that

koan, but another thing is to work on it in daily life. How do you do that?

QUESTION (Tim Pallis): Yes, but how will you ever get to the

"What do you do?" if the ego has not yet been broken through - if

you have not yet died there right on the spot? Your practice is

dualistic if you still have the idea of the great death. How

then can you ever express "What do you do?"

QUESTION (Tim Pallis): So you have to die to the question of:

"Nothing will do" - "Nothing awails". It is going to kill you.

QUESTION (Tim Pallis): But the "falling out of the bottom" seems

to have happened to a very few people. In Hisamatsu's case it has

clearly happened, but it may never happened.

QUESTION (Tim Pallis) If it happens so seldom, isn't it a serious

problem that you are pondering that possibility in your mind that

you could die the great death?