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Zhaozhou taught, “The Greatest Way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose. As soon as you hear this, you think, ‘That’s picking and choosing,’ or ‘That’s clarity.’ But I don’t identify with clarity. Can you live this way?”
A student asked, “If you don’t identify with clarity, what do you live by?” “Again, I don’t know,” responded Zhou.
“If you don’t know, why do you say that you don’t identify with clarity?” “Just asking the question is enough,” replied Zhou. “Make your bow and step back.”

—The Blue Cliff Record, Case 2

As I write, we are finishing up Pacific Zen’s Great Summer Sesshin in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Morning fog rolls up from the Pajaro Valley, sometimes engulfing our zendo, but each day around noon the fog burns off and the bright sunshine comes out, filtering through the coastal redwoods. Over the week our meditations have followed a similar natural rhythm of mist turning to clear sunshine.

“We are all like fledgling birds,” one teacher said, “Each time we come to retreat, we grow a few more feathers until finally we can fly.”

Daily, whole koans or their bits have been flying gracefully across the empty sky in which we sit. A few that appeared this week:

The physical body decays. What is the pure and everlasting body? Mountain flowers open like brocade; mountain torrents are deep as indigo.

Our Mind is nothing other than mountains, rivers and great earth, the sun, moon and stars.

I spent some time with Zhaozhou’s “Greatest Way” (above), one of the most important koans in The Blue Cliff Record. In that koan, the character Way, or Tao 道(J. dō), is a foundational notion in Chan–Zen. But the character often translated great, 至 (J. shi), in common usage means to arrive, reach, attain. So one possible translation of the above term is “The Way Arrived,” or “The Way that is attained.”

If the life we already have is both arrived and attained, whole and complete in itself, then this life with all its many avenues and ditches is the greatest way. If somehow we learn to identify less with either endarkenment (picking and choosing) or enlightenment (clarity), then perhaps we can walk this greatest way, this vast empty sky, with just a bit more ease. As traveling companions, this pure and everlasting body will always be with us. It forever lives in the valley fog and coastal redwoods.

—Jon Joseph

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Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community