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Once a student of Dongshan was asked, “What does your teacher teach?” The student replied, “He teaches in three ways: the dark way, the bird path and the open hand.” In the last weeks, we have been using koans that seem to arise from the dark way. First, we sat with Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu, then with the stone woman giving birth in the middle of the night. This week we will sit with Yunmen’s Midnight:

You come and go by daylight, you make people out by daylight. But suddenly it’s midnight and there’s no sun, no moon, no lamp. If it’s a place you’ve been to, then of course it might be possible, but if it’s a place you’ve never been, how will you get hold of something?

As Yunmen says, mostly we travel, make our way through life in the sunlight of a bright day. We know where we are going, we see our goal off in the distance, and we make our way. And then, it is almost inevitable, it’s midnight and the light, the clarity of our goal disappears, and we find ourselves in the dark, unable to see our own hand in front of our face. This can happen in any area of our lives: relationships, job, life plans. We knew where we were going, what we were doing, and now, we don’t know.

Yunmen asks, “How will you get hold of something?” We might say, “How do I navigate?”

—David Parks