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“Wuzu said, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? The cypress tree in the garden!”
At these words Yuanwu was suddenly enlightened. He went outside the cottage and saw a rooster fly to the top of a railing, beat his wings and crow loudly. He said to himself, “Isn’t this the sound?” Full of gratitude, he took incense back to Wuzu’s room. He told of his discovery and said,
“The golden duck vanishes into the golden brocade, with a country song the drunk comes home from the woods; only the young beauty knows about her love affair.”
Wuzu said, “I share your joy.”

—Ferguson, Entangling Vines Case 98, Notes

Unfathomable, inexhaustible, its source mysterious—joy often sustains me in my practice. But is joy the only point? I’m not so sure of that.

I was probably in a foul mood when I recently reviewed Kosho Uchiyama Roshi’s How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment. I was struck by how little joy he seemed to be expressing in his life at the small temple Antaiji in Kyoto. When a student asked the Roshi what he did for fun, he was “totally taken by surprise” at the question. The Roshi offered that he takes three shots of whiskey at night to keep his feet warm, but “at the same time, I do not live my life to have fun.”

Fun, of course, is not the same as joy and gratitude. Uchiyama was the author of some twenty books and a respected Soto master who generously worked with Westerners for decades before his death in 1998. And in the book, toward the end, he does devote a few paragraphs of commentary on Eihei Dogen’s exhortation:

How fortunate we are to have been born as human beings to be given the opportunity to prepare meals for the Three Treasures. Our attitude should truly be one of joy and gratefulness.

My querulous mind began bringing up contrasting images of practice from our own zendo. At our Pacific Zen sesshin, when the Roshi’s dokusan room is near, loud laughter often spills into the quiet zendo during the one-on-one interviews. Our daily sutra dedications are infused with warmth. ”What I like about you guys,” one new member told me recently, “is you laugh a lot.”

May you have joy and be welcome
May you have joy on the roads
Let wisdom go to every corner of the house
Let people have joy in each other’s joy

(Tarrant and Sutherland)

But that does not make Uchiyama’s reserved way wrong.

It is the expression of his life, his culture, and his karma. As a young monk, Uchiyama suffered terribly, living in a poor, broken down temple in post-war Japan. After the war, people were starving. An article of his in Lion’s Roar magazine, translated as “Laughter Through the Tears,” speaks of his difficult early days. Those days seemed to have many more tears than laughter.

Isn’t that also the sound?

—Jon Joseph

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