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Shishuang asked,

How do you step from the top of a hundred-foot pole?

Another eminent teacher of the past (Changsha) said,

You’ve entered the Way and are perched on a hundred-foot pole, but it’s not yet real. Take a step from the top of the pole and your whole body manifests in every direction.

Wumen’s Verse

You blinded the eye in your forehead
and clung to the mark on the scale.
Throw away your body and lay down your life,
and the blind will lead the blind.

****

As with last week’s koan about Shoushan and when he “got it,” with this week’s koan involving Shishuang and the hundred-foot pole, I find myself interested in Shishuang’s own experience with that pole.

There are questions: What is the hundred-foot pole and how did I get up there?

I’ve been interested in noticing different ways of leaving the top of the pole: The koan invites us to “take a step,” and I wonder about leaping or slipping or being pushed.

Perhaps, by accident, like Wiley Coyote while chasing the Roadrunner, you suddenly find yourself standing in midair and just hanging there—until you think about it and then down you go.

Then there’s Changsha’s comment that “Entering the way results in standing on the top of a hundred-foot pole.” That’s a good thing? Again, I wonder, what is this hundred-foot pole?

And there’s part of Wumen’s comment on the koan that caught my attention, “clinging to the mark on the scale,” which also resonates with our previous koan about “getting it.”

So what’s your experience of being on top of a hundred-foot pole?
How did you get off?
Are you off?

—David Weinstein

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David Weinstein Roshi, Director of Rockridge Meditation Community