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Elder Ting asks LInji a question. Linji comes off his seat and shoves the old man. Elder stands frozen, and a monk standing nearby asks, “Elder Ting, why don’t you bow?” He bows.

A traveling nun stopped by Juzhi’s temple. She walked around him three times while he was sitting, and said, “If you can say a word that satisfies me, I will take off my hat and stay.” He could not, so she left.

Acts of creativity and spontaneity have long been greatly valued by Chan–Zen masters in countless encounters over many many centuries. The universe is too large to say these qualities are required for awakening–afterall, clouds also drift in the sky with a creative ease and Mocha the dog often barks with noisy spontaneity. But moving before thought in our own floating world somehow makes us more porous to the light that shines through all things. A touch of life less scripted, before attaching to names like good or evil, enlightened or deluded, nice clouds and bad dog, somehow affirms the freshness we already know surrounds us.

The dream world can offer us access to the space where the universe is still fluid. When in the dream world, as a friend recently suggested, we aren’t given an option to check ourselves; we experience ourselves just as we are.

Dokusan (J. honorable going alone), where we meet a teacher one-on-one, can be a chance to enter the life of a koan without checking ourselves. A remembrance of dream–dokusans past came to me recently.

In a dream from several months ago, I was sitting with a few others in the dokusan line at the SanUn Zendo, in Kamakura, waiting to see Koun Yamada, something I had done hundreds of times. A woman before me rang the bell and went in. I moved up to the front, and asked myself, “What answer should I give?’ As I asked the question, I opened my arms out wide and felt a deep sense of emptiness and light spread out in front of me. Then I thought, “No, don’t give that answer. Go, and when you get there, you will know.”

In the second dream, which I remember vividly from a couple of years ago, a group of about forty of us were sitting in a large dining hall, kind of like the one in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft. We were in sesshin, silently eating, and I kind of furtively looked left and right and thought, “If I told them how very simple it is, they would never believe me.” Then, to the left, Taizan Maezumi, whose sesshin I joined as a young man, walked perpendicular to the dining room and went down a short hall to his dokusan room. I was scheduled to go to see him and thought, “What should I say?” Answering myself, I realized I didn’t have to say anything. That just the going is the answer.

—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