"You can recite all the sacred texts you want,
but if you do not act accordingly, how will you benefit?"
--The Dhammapada, Chapter 1


When we practice Dharma, we sometimes run across folks who have memorized all sorts of texts, or who quote Dogen or Nagarjuna every third sentence, and meanwhile their kids have been tugging at their arms asking to be fed for the last two hours.  And in this verse, the "if you do not act accordingly" part is also true of any insights we might gain from our practice.  For instance, tasting emptiness is pointless if we then walk around thinking we're somehow more special than other people, secretly expecting them to acknowledge us as such.  What is our purpose in tasting emptiness?  What is practice's function?  Emptiness is form, so how do we handle form?

Zen Master Joshu lived in China in the 8th and 9th centuries.  A great many teaching stories come down to us as exchanges between him and this or that monk.  One such story begins when a monk asks Joshu, "What is the teacher of Vairocana?" 

Vairocana shows up in some of the Mahayana sutras as one of five Transcendent Buddhas, and depictions often show him with his hands in the mudra of supreme wisdom.  Vairocana is basically a representation of the absolute, the essence of the universe, the dharmakaya.  So this monk is asking, From the standpoint of the realization of highest wisdom, what then?

The exchange continues:

Joshu said, "Have you brought a camel with you or not?" 

The monk replied, "I've brought one."

Joshu responds, "Then take him and feed him some grass."

Joshu is at once saying "let's not get caught up in philosophical or metaphysical speculation," as well as pointing to the inescapable fact that feeding this camel is the true moment-to-moment expression of dharmakaya and any realization of it.  There is no absolute apart from feeding a camel, washing dishes, or visiting our friend in the hospital. 

Doing a little practice and reading a lot of Dharma books and koan commentaries so we can then engage in heated metaphysical discussions -- generally the sole purpose of Dharma blogs, I think -- is at best like memorizing recipes and menus without ever cooking a meal.  So we compare recipes and maybe argue about how much tomato sauce a True Master Chef would use.  Or maybe just show off our menus to impress each other:  "check it out, dude, I've got yam fries as an appetizer!" 

But we still starve to death.  And no matter how many recipes we impart to the people we find ourselves at the kitchen table with, they leave us just as hungry as they’d been when they’d arrived.  The point is to cook -- to use our ingredients of prostrations and Zen meditation and chanting to cook the best meal we can cook for everyone and everything in our lives.  Without ever showing off our recipes and menus, it's possible to just quietly feed each other.  (And by the way, if we wait to really start cooking until someone can tell us exactly what our meal is going to taste like once it's finished, we'll die in our kitchens staring at the bell peppers.  Like it says elsewhere in the Dhammapada:  "The tongue tastes the soup."  And no one else's tongue, either.  Ever.) 

There was a monk named Wonhyo who lived in Korea in the 7th century.  Probably Korea's most famous monk ever, Wonhyo was apparently one hell of a Dharma cook.  I once heard P'arang say something along the lines of him being her favorite monk, so if you can imagine what P'arang's favorite monk would be like, you have a good sense of Wonhyo: super-wise and really wild-while-at-the-same-time-completely-in-love-with-the-precepts.  A sweethearted rock star folk hero. 

In a well-known episode, Wonhyo is traveling to China in search of a teacher with his friend Uisang, another giant of Korean Buddhism.  In those days, serious monks would sometimes journey to China in this way.  And of course by “journey” we're not talking about an 8 a.m. flight to Beijing.  We're talking about the sort of arduous pilgrimage that is in itself a form of hard practice:  walking through all types of weather through rivers and over mountains. 

Well, one night Wonhyo and Uisang camp under some trees along the way.  In the middle of the night, Wonhyo awakens with a terrible thirst.  You can imagine how exhausted they are, and they're probably pretty dehydrated and maybe even malnourished -- Camelback backpacks hadn't quite been invented yet.  So, still groggy and half-asleep, Wonhyo feels around in the dark for some water and he somehow finds a container of the most delicious water you could imagine.  Guzzles it down.  Falls back asleep, satiated and happy.

In the morning, when the sun wakes them, Wonhyo and Uisang are gathering their precious few possessions when Wonhyo notices a cracked-open human skull on the ground, a handful of insects competing for the remaining bits of flesh still stuck to it.  The moment he recognizes it as the "cup" he'd drank from just a few hours earlier, his body lurches forth violently.  As the vomit escapes him, he realizes for himself what the Buddha and subsequent teachers had been saying for centuries:  "Mind makes everything!  Last night, my mind made a refreshing glass of water, so I drank, ah!  This morning, my mind has made a disgusting, putrid skull, so I'm puking!  My mind makes good and bad, birth and death, all opposites, everything!"

With this realization, Wonhyo decides he no longer needs to go to China, and heads back home (Uisang continues alone, by the way, and later pretty much introduces the Flower Garland Sutra to Korea).  After this, Wonhyo becomes known throughout Korea as a great and wise monk whose realization of the truth is unsurpassed.  The teacher of Vairocana, you might say.

So Wonhyo is enlightened.

The End.

Right?

*Story adapted from Dropping Ashes on the Buddha:  The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn, ed. Stephen Mitchell.  New York:  Grove Press, 1976.