Watching the Head of Speech

7.4 Watching the Head of Speech

Case one of The Gateless Barrier, Zhaozhou's dog: a monk asked Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature. Zhaozhou said wú.

For a thousand years and more, countless practitioners have investigated upon this single word wú. But what exactly does "investigating the word wú" investigate? To turn the word wú over and over in thought—does the dog have buddha-nature or not? what does wú mean?—one could think along that line for thirty years and it would have nothing whatever to do with watching the huatou. What this chapter must make clear is exactly that: how this gate truly opens.

The Huatou: The Head of Speech

The first step is to peel the word "huatou" away from "that phrase."

The huatou is the head of speech—the verge before speech rises, the moment before a single thought arises. What watching the huatou watches is not the phrase already formed; it is turning the light back: the mind's light by nature runs one way, outward, reaching after objects, and watching the huatou turns that one beam around, back upon the source that can give rise to this speech, that can lift up this thought.

So Zhaozhou's wú is not there to be understood; it is there to be used up. The Chan gate divides the dead word from the live word: what falls into meaning, available to be construed, is the dead word; only what is stripped of meaning, leaving the mind no road to walk, is the live word. The word wú has been stripped of its sense; on it the mind finds nothing to reach for, nothing it can think—and the mind, having nowhere left to go, can only turn its head and see who it is that, even at the place where every road runs out, is still raising this wú. And for just this reason the phrase watched is interchangeable: Zhaozhou's wú will do; "the myriad dharmas return to one—to what does the one return?" will do; "who is dragging this corpse?" will do—the gates differ, but what they open onto is one. The crux was never in the phrase watched; it is in the backward turn of reflection. The phrase is only a gate; and a gate is a gate just in that it lets one pass through and does not let one stay.

Dahui Zonggao—the great master of huatou Chan—says it most directly in his own words: "Turning the light back [upon its source] is the buddhas' medicine." And again: "After all, what is this?—just look right here." What is watched is not the far end of the huatou; it is "right here"—the present source that can raise this phrase, that can raise this doubt.

The Sensation of Doubt: The Red-Hot Iron Ball You Can Neither Swallow Nor Spit Out

And this one turn of reflection—by what can it sustain itself, fuse into one piece, and at last burst open? By the sensation of doubt.

The sensation of doubt is not an intellectual reservation—not "I doubt whether this sentence is right." It is the whole-bodied urgency of "this that can think, can doubt, can raise the huatou—after all, who is it?"—a single pressing force that allows no looking aside. The Gateless Barrier paints it most vividly:

Rouse a ball of doubt through your whole body, investigate this word wú, raise it day and night … like swallowing a red-hot iron ball you can neither spit out nor get down … Long and long, ripened through, and of itself inner and outer are beaten into one piece.

One ball of doubt through the whole body, like a red-hot iron ball swallowed and not to be spat out—walking, it is there; sitting, it is there; eating and dressing, it is there. Dahui says: "A thousand doubts, ten thousand doubts, are only one doubt. When the doubt is broken upon the huatou, the thousand and ten thousand doubts break all at once." Doubt upon doubt comes down, at the root, to one doubt—who, after all, is the one that originates thought; and when this one doubt bursts open, all doubts break at once.

Gaofeng Yuanmiao, a Chan master of the Yuan period, raised the inner skeleton of this ball of doubt into "the three essentials": the first, a great root of faith; the second, a great resolve of zeal; the third, a great sensation of doubt. And he said: "Doubt has faith for its substance, and awakening has doubt for its function." The doubt is no rootless wavering—its ground is the great faith that here there must be an original face to be seen; and awakening is exactly the matter of this ball of doubt bursting open. Gaofeng tells of his own breaking-place: pressed to the last extremity by his master's question "who is dragging this corpse?", one day it suddenly shattered —

After all, it turns out to be this very fellow.

So it was this all along—just this. Reflected upon to the very bottom, what is seen is no other thing: precisely that which has all along been originating thought, raising the phrase, dragging this body about—the original face. The reader will recognize this structure: the Śūraṅgama's turning the hearing back to hear its own nature—not following sound outward, but rotating the hearing-nature to illumine itself. Watching the huatou is the same turning-around; only the manner of pressing differs.

Concentration and Wisdom Fused in a Single Thought

Now the concentration-face of watching the huatou can be spoken of.

The sensation of doubt formed into a mass, raised day and night, admitting no glance aside—this single-pointed gathering is the face of concentration. It takes no outer object as its support (the doubt-mass is not an object; it is a pressing force that drives the mind back to its source), yet in concentration it yields nothing to the abiding upon a single object; it is not an "abiding in some place" but a "having no place to abide, and the mind gathering of itself." And the bursting of the doubt-mass, the seeing of the source that originates thought—this is the face of wisdom.

And so Huineng's eight characters find here their most thorough redemption: the gathering of doubt is concentration, the bursting of doubt into a seeing of the source is wisdom—two faces of one and the same reflexive event, with no before and after to be assigned between them. The non-duality of concentration and wisdom in watching the huatou is not a non-duality in principle; it is a non-duality smelted out of a single ball of doubt. "Inner and outer are beaten into one piece"—the mind that watches and the source that is watched, inner and outer, subject and object, dissolve into not-two at the moment of the bursting.

Two Floodgates

Watching the huatou, too, has two floodgates of its own setting, against two misreadings.

The first guards against dead concentration. Dahui says: "When deluded thoughts arise, do not use the mind to dam them up. To stop motion and return to stopping—the stopping grows the more agitated. Just at the very place of motion-and-stopping, watch the huatou." Not pressing the deluded thoughts down—the more you press, the more they stir; but turning the light around right at the alternation of motion and stopping. The reader met this principle in Part Two: to force concentration upon an agitated mind is the wrong time. The concentration of watching the huatou does not lie in pressing thought into stillness—and exactly because it is not tied to stillness, it can be raised without break through walking, standing, sitting, and lying. Dahui handed this work to a whole court of literati officials, teaching them to watch the huatou amid official business, right in the topsy-turvy of daily affairs. Concentration is not a thing that exists only on the cushion.

The second guards against seeking awakening. Dahui says again: "Just watch the word wú. Pay no heed to whether you awaken or not, whether you penetrate or not." The moment the mind harbors "I mean to awaken by this," another outward-reaching object has been set up—the very thought of seeking awakening runs exactly counter to the direction of turning the light back upon the source. Watch without expecting what the watching might gain; and just because it expects no gain, the reflection is able to stay pure.

Two Gates, One Room

Set these two chapters side by side. Silent illumination is the simultaneous co-presence of reflection—within a single sitting, letting silence and illumination stand present together. Watching the huatou is the doubt-fusion of reflection—pressing reflection into a single ball of doubt, pressing until the partition of subject and object dissolves in the bursting. One approach is still, the other fierce; what each reflects upon is the same source that originates thought. Two gates, opening onto one and the same room; this book sets them side by side, not ranked.

Bodhidharma named it, Huineng rewrote it, Hongzhi sat it, Dahui doubted it—four reconstructions, and the spine lacks only its last vertebra: what, after all, is the one same thing the four have been reconstructing?

The next chapter, the close: Concentration and Wisdom, Not Two.