GUTEI’S ONE FINGER
Susan Ji-on Postal
Empty Hand Zendo
June 12, 2004

Since the early days of Zen, the teacher traditionally offers a teisho to the students who have gathered for an intensive period of practice.  A teisho isn’t exactly a lecture or a talk, but a more direct and immediate expression. It has been my intent over these years to embed teisho within what we call a Dharma Talk.  Some of what happens in such a talk might be explanatory, or may involve some study of Buddhist principles and teachings, but somewhere embedded in that is, I hope, something with the liveliness of teisho.  Teisho was described to me, I think by Maezumi Roshi, as "the sending out of sparks."  It’s not coming from the head, from intellectual understanding; it’s coming from this heart—not meaning emotional heart, but essence—and it’s sending out sparks  which hopefully will cause an ignition - a setting on fire of your aspiration, or the triggering your deepening insight and clarity.  It’s about the sending forth and the receiving of something that isn’t in the realm of conceptual explanation and understanding at all.

So if it happens that you are listening here, and you have no idea what’s being talked about, that’s fine.  Just absorb, let it penetrate without trying to figure out and get caught in your internal commentary.  Further, this is not a one-way process. This is a shower of mutual sparks.  Believe me, having sat in this seat now for many years, where you are in your body/mind, your receptivity right now, makes a huge difference in terms of what comes forth.  It’s a response, even though you may be silent and I may be talking.  

Also, since some of you are new to retreats, I want to say that in using traditional texts, such as koans, as teaching stories, which is customary for teisho,  we should always see these as parables, as poetic representations of our situation, not just as some historical thing that happened once to so-and-so.  Maybe they happened and maybe they didn’t, and a lot of this may just be legendary.  But they all are about our practice, even the most dramatic stories.  As Aitken Roshi reminds us in his commentary on this case, legends and fairy tales can be graphic. Remember "Jack and the Beanstalk?  "I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!"  And we read that to our children!  And it’s gruesome, and yet somehow we get this vivid picture of the hugeness and strength of this giant. So in that spirit of parable, we’re going to sit this morning with Case Three from the Mumonkan, the Gateless Gate: Gutei’s One Finger.  

The Case:  Whatever he was asked about Zen, Master Gutei simply stuck up one finger.  He had a boy attendant whom a visitor asked, "What kind of teaching does your master give?"  The boy held up one finger too.  Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife.  As the boy ran away screaming with pain, Gutei called to him.  When the boy turned his head, Gutei stuck up one finger. The boy was suddenly enlightened.  When Gutei was about to die, he said to the assembled monks, "I received this one-finger Zen from Tenryu; I’ve used it all my life, but I have not exhausted it."  Having said this, he entered nirvana.

Mumon’s Commentary:  The enlightenment of Gutei and the boy have nothing to do with the tip of a finger.  If you realize this, Tenryu, Gutei, the boy, and you yourself are all run through with one skewer. (Yamada pp.25-26)

There are three parts here: Gutei’s teaching, this one-finger teaching, is one; second, the boy’s imitation of his teacher, and the consequences of that; and third, although not much is said about it, his comment when he was about to die.  So those are the three areas we’ll look at.  But mostly at the first two, because there are two wonderful enlightenment stories here.  Two stories which vividly illuminate principles in the relationship between Master and disciple, between teacher and student, principles which apply as much to us in 21st Century America as they did in 9th Century China.

So what was Gutei’s teaching, this raising of a finger?  Pointing directly to what is real, beyond conceptions, beyond judgments, pointing to suchness, to one body, with one finger.  Shibayama, in his commentary, says, "Is there anybody who doesn’t have a finger?  Is there anybody who doesn’t have Buddha Nature, or Truth?" (p,44)  So, Gutei’s teaching was the teaching of "just this," and he happened to use the expression of one finger, but it’s everything; it’s whole universe, in this one finger.  

Gutei’s story is very interesting, how he came to be awakened by his teacher’s one-finger Zen, and how he was able to let it serve as his own fresh expression.  He lived in China, in the Ninth Century, about the same time as Rinzai.  I think he was a second cousin in the Dharma to Lin-chi, or Rinzai.  When he was a monk in training, he went and lived alone in the mountains, concentrating on zazen as his main practice. Apparently he also had a strong mantra or dharani practice. He was known as "Gutei," in fact, because this word was part of his mantra which others heard constantly on his lips. We can guess that this combination of silent sitting and devotional chanting served as a strong foundation. He was, to use a frequently-used phrase, a monk who practiced in all earnestness.  He tried very hard; his efforts were strong, steady, and deeply committed.

One day a visitor came to visit him in his hermitage, a nun.  It was customary in those days, if you came visiting, to take off your big straw traveling hat and exchange greetings.  There was also a custom of circumambulating a monk or a master.  So this nun comes in—her name translates as "True World"—she doesn’t take her hat off, doesn’t say a word to introduce herself, she just starts walking around Gutei, who is sitting in zazen.  She walks around three times, and then she says, "If you can say a word of Zen, I’ll take off my hat."  Well, we can see there is someone with confidence here.  This nun is testing, probing. Gutei couldn’t speak; he was mute, dumbfounded.  She did it a second time, and a second time he didn’t speak, and finally she started to leave. As it was getting late, he said, "Well, it’s getting dark; why don’t you stay the night, I can find a place for you here."  And she said, "If you say a word of Zen, I’ll stay."  And for the third time, he couldn’t say anything, so she left.  Gutei was deeply ashamed, his confidence crumbled; he was so embarrassed and so disappointed in himself. He began to see that he really didn’t have a word of Zen to say, because his eye was not opened, his heart was not open, he didn’t get it, he hadn’t realized what is true.  He had sincerely been sitting zazen and repeating this mantra, probably for years, all for nothing.  We can guess that there grew in him, as Shibayama suggests, a state of extremity. Tortured by his failure, he was determined to give up his solitary practice and leave his hermitage.  He packed up his things and decided to stay the night and in the morning search for a teacher who could help. That night, he fell asleep in great despair and was blessed with a dream.  A local deity came in the dream and said, "Don’t leave; your teacher will arrive shortly."

Some versions say the next day, some say ten days later, an old master, Tenryu, came knocking at door of his hermitage.  Gutei told him all about the nun’s visit and how profoundly embarrassed and discouraged he was. Then Gutei pleaded, "What is the fundamental word of Zen?  Tell me!" and Tenryu, what did he do?  Held up one finger.  And the dark despair was split open, Gutei completely got it, whole Universe was expressed in this raising-finger-gesture of his teacher.

It seems important to emphasize here that there must have been a readiness in Gutei to see the one finger, to hear the one-finger teaching of Tenryu.  There was a ripeness.  He was struggling and suffering, and also had seen the depths of his own inadequacy, and was ready for the cracking.  Otherwise some teacher holding up a finger would do nothing.  So it had very much to do with his situation, his struggle, intensified as it was by the provocative visit of this traveling hat-wearing nun.  

Zen teachings sometimes describe this kind of interchange between Master and disciple as like that of a mother hen and a chick.  Apparently the mother hen can hear the chick pecking from the inside of the egg, and then she’ll peck back.  But she doesn’t peck until she hears, because if she pecks prematurely, she’ll kill the chick. Tenryu heard Gutei’s  readiness, his ripeness, in the expression of his question, "What is the fundamental word of Zen?" and he was able to respond wholeheartedly.  The teacher-student relationship is like this. Something, a request, has to be from the inside first; I hope you can understand that.  We do a disservice to students if we try prodding prematurely and trying to help them open up when there isn’t the readiness, because then it’s nothing, or it’s halfway.  And if it’s a halfway and half-cooked insight, then people get really attached to it, so it ends up causing more trouble.  So it has to be a call and response, at the right moment, this "pecking and chicking," as it’s called in Zen.  This is a perfect example of that, with Tenryu and Gutei, complete readiness, complete response. So that’s Gutei’s story, and it’s not so different from our story.  We need to be embarrassed by the equivalent of nuns with "chutzpah" who ask us to say a word.  We need to rub up against our lack of clarity before we are motivated and ripened.  

Continuing with the story of this Koan, we come to part two.  Gutei has become a teacher. Apparently he never gave talks at all, he only stuck up one finger, with great power. His attendant, this boy in the story, was a young lay disciple, he wasn’t yet ordained, was studying the sutras and serving his teacher. When people came and asked, "Oh, what does your teacher have to say about the Dharma?" he held up his finger, but he held it up kind of casually because he himself didn’t have the whole-body experience of awakening.  The boy’s finger didn’t represent true reality, it was a copy of his teacher’s gesture, not his own. . Commentaries say that the boy’s imitation was dead, it was like a corpse, this finger of the boy, it didn’t have life.  So clearly the first obvious lesson here is about the dangers of imitation. This is our lesson too. I can’t tell you how many people come in and say something they’ve read in a sutra or some phrase of Zen, and it immediately strikes me as not coming completely from their experience. It is not fully alive, but something "adopted" or borrowed.  We often do that, particularly at the beginning, because we’re trying to understand the Dharma, so we’ve got these Dharma phrases in our minds, and we quite naturally pull them out as if they are our own answer.  To imitate and borrow is just creating more obstacles for ourselves.  It’s carrying around something that’s dead and it isn’t giving room for our own live expression. Zen study is not like graduate school, where you learn the vocabulary of your chosen field and then wield the terms with expertise. Response to a teacher’s question about your practice must be fresh, alive, honest, and completely yours.  Dead phrases must be cut off, sometimes sharply. The pain of that kind of rejection of your answer is a powerful gift, a wake-up call, for seeing your sticking places.

But that’s not the whole lesson, about imitation. Let’s look further.  The boy was screaming, he was probably bleeding, he was terrified, he was running, and something happened: the Master called to him,  "Attendant!"  And he turned, the boy turned back, and then Gutei once again held up that wonderful finger, that full of life, complete, gesture. The boy, although very young, got the whole thing: he got what had been wrong with his imitation, and he also saw the finger probably for the first time as representing one body, whole universe, whatever words we want to use.  So it’s my view that this calling of Gutei to the boy while he was in agony is pivotal in our being nourished by this case.  I’m not satisfied by the commentaries that say it’s only about imitation, learning not to copy or mimic.  It seems to me that this support from the teacher of the boy when he was in extreme suffering is what made possible the boy’s enlightenment.  It could have happened that he just ran screaming away, never to be seen again.  All could have been lost, had Gutei not called him, and had the boy not been such a fine attendant that he turned to his teacher.  And that call and response, in an extreme situation, perhaps is not so common, but it does happen, and it’s life-giving.  And again, like the hen and chick, there was a call and a response, and in this story, before the call and the response there was a cutting, so there was some kind of probe or demand by the teacher.  Often it’s a shout, like the famous  "You country bumpkin!"  Do you remember Bodhidharma’s words as he shouted at  Eka standing there in the snow:
    "The highest subtle way of Buddha cannot be attained without an immeasurably
    long training and almost unbearable effort. It can never be achieved by puny
    virtue, shallow wisdom, faint inspiration, or self conceit!" (Yamada, p. 210)
 
That’s a kind of cutting.  It’s more common to have records of teachers cutting verbally.  But here it talks about a knife. So the teacher did something, and the boy was suffering, deeply suffering.  And then the teacher did something else: he called right in the middle of suffering.  The Buddha tells us a lot about suffering: that it’s from our place of suffering that we can begin to awaken.  So it seems to me most appropriate that it’s in the middle of profound pain that something most precious happens.  

It’s so tricky, this student/teacher thing, and yet so vital for all of us.  I know for myself, having been in both roles, that true connection is easily missed.  Maybe, figuratively speaking, the egg rolls away and the student doesn’t hear the teacher "pecking" due to distraction or lack of attention. Maybe, as could have happened in this story, the wounded disciple just keeps on running, never looking back. Maybe a teacher, for his own reasons, chooses to play "hardball," demanding a great sacrifice of the student. If there is no response or support of the student as he/she makes the effort to obey, it is as if the ball goes over the fence and they no longer have a game, much less a relationship. Please understand, there may well be good will on both sides; no wish to cause harm. I know there have been times when I’ve failed to support a student who was suffering. It’s really tricky; I don’t always know when to reach out.  If someone doesn’t come, are they really in trouble?  It’s their choice not to come for practice.  I’m not going to call people up and say, "Why weren’t you at zazen?"  I’ll never do that; that’s harmful to people.  People have to come to sit with us because they want to come.  But sometimes people have really been in darkness and I didn’t pick it up, and I didn’t reach out. Deep regret there.  So it happens like this, because we’re human, the teacher doesn’t always respond and support in the middle of suffering. Please understand that this kind of dramatic confrontation, or this missing of each other, didn’t happen only in ancient China. Not so; it happens right now, and we can learn tremendously by looking at this old, ancient, teaching of one-finger Zen.

Teachers and students: what is happening in that interaction, what is this "pecking and chicking?"  What do teachers listen for, before they dare respond?  Fundamentally, a teacher is there to help students see themselves: where they are stuck and blocked by clinging and aversion, and, most importantly, to help them see their own aspiration, their own maturing ripeness, their readiness to open up.  Our teachers, in some sense, can give us nothing.  And yet, there is this call and response, so that’s not nothing, it’s life-giving.  

This kind of exchange isn’t about a teacher advising you what to do, what to study; that’s a little separate.  This is about some inner exchange from the heart, it’s about those sparks.  And our Zen tradition is run through with wonderful stories about just this: about cutting, about calling, and most beautifully, as in Gutei’s case, about never exhausting one-finger Zen.  He never exhausted it, because it wasn’t his, it wasn’t Gutei’s idiosyncratic personality being made visible.  It was the whole universe being expressed, how could it be exhausted?  This vital living connection demonstrated in this koan isn’t about sharing philosophical discussion of Buddhist thought, isn’t about delving into psychological analysis of behavior, but is truly about being skewered through together with the sharp inexhaustible blade of "just this," whole body presence, whole universe fully manifest and set free.  

    


Sources:
Aitken, Robert    The Gateless Barrier, Northpoint Press, 1990 p. 31
Shibayama, Zenkei Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, New American Library, 1974
     pp. 45-46
Yamada, Koun   Gateless Gate, Zen Center of Los Angeles, 1979, pp.25-26,210