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A monk asked Zhaozhou, “‘The Ultimate Path is not difficult—just avoid picking and choosing.’ Isn’t this a cliché for people of these times?” Zhou replied, “Once someone asked me, and I really couldn’t explain for five years.”

—The Blue Cliff Record Case 58

Yuanwu, the commentator of The Blue Cliff Record, speaks to the extraordinary difficulty of working with this koan; likening it to a mosquito trying to bite an iron ox, or attempting to climb a silver mountain, or breaking through an iron wall. We all know the feeling of deep frustration, bordering on insanity, in confronting the impossible over and over again with no satisfying result.

A couple of months ago, I found myself in a state of intense despair with some personal struggles. While watching TV with my wife—was it The Lincoln Lawyer, Lioness, or Succession?—tears suddenly welled up in my eyes. I asked myself, “Why do you keep banging your head against the wall?” In that moment, an unexpected answer rose from within me: “Because you can’t give up on Mu.”

The response was startling and strange. It came from a deep, foundational place inside me. I haven’t worked on Mu as a koan in decades, though I often sit with its English translation, “No.” Yet, in that moment it was an original statement, familiar to me, and one from the very beginning of my Zen practice, more than fifty years ago.

Something shifted in that inner dialogue, though I cannot fully explain how. The problems that once seemed insurmountable pretty much vanished. The iron ox, the silver mountain, and the iron wall no longer appeared as obstacles but rather as absurd partners in an intimate game.

The “Ultimate Path” koan appears four times in The Blue Cliff Record, with Zhaozhou offering a different response each time. In one case, he warns, “As soon as you hear these words, you think this is picking and choosing, or clarity. This old monk does not dwell in clarity.” When a monk asks, “What do you dwell in, then?” Zhou replies, “I don’t know,” and tells the monk that simply asking the question is enough.

How inconceivable that just trying to bite the iron ox would be enough. That standing on the top of a hundred foot pole, that holding onto a branch with our teeth would all be the full expression of our Buddha nature. Perhaps the Ultimate Path is not somewhere else, in some sense-making, light-filled universe. Maybe in some absurd way, it is right here. Asking the question may be enough.

—Jon Joseph

Snow–Globe Vesuvius

I live on the flank of Vesuvius, in Pompeii.
Each day the sky fills with leaflets,
smokelets, prayers to  powers
aglitter whether storming or still
(the old ones mica, the new ones who cares what).

Everyone knows there’s more than one
kind of consciousness. Everyone knows
that in the snow-globe of Vesuvius,
the “snow” is really ash–
each time the volcano buries the town.

Would you meet me in a world like that?
If not there, where?

—Chase Twichell, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been

COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community