Rinzai differs from Soto Zen in that the former places emphasis on the use of koans: riddles designed by the roshi to befuddle the mind of the seeker and cultivate clear sight beyond ideas and dualism. The practice demands real effort and energy in working on these riddles to experience the poverty of intellectual understanding in ultimately unravelling them.
These koans take the form of interrogative exchanges in the encounters with zen teachers called “dharma combat” with challenges such as:
- What was your face before your mother was born?
- How do you manifest a butterfly without wings?
- How do you manifest a sailboat without wind?
The goal is direct and full experience of the real: the unadorned, raw experience of the moment without intellectualization; no allusions, illusions or the delusions we often mistake for real knowing. Coupled with zazen ( sitting meditation) and kin hin ( walking meditation), the practice is a tripartite teaching framework for revelation, spiritual discovery, or so-called “enlightenment.”
Many assume that Koan practice is unique to the Rinzai Zen tradition, but it is not. Western Christianity of the first century saw sects of spiritual seekers that focused primarily on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The “Thomas Christians,” those following in the school of the Apostle Thomas, practiced a process that placed less emphasis on belief, and more on the “Knowledge of the Heart”. Adepts of Thomas Christianity facilitated the direct experience of the “Father” through an intuitive and immediate understanding accomplished by much the same process as the Koan Practice of Rinzai Zen masters.
A source document for this practice is the apocryphal “Gospel of Thomas,” one of the principal texts of the Nag Hammadi Library ( scrolls discovered concealed in earthenware jars in the desert at Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt in 1945). While the Library consists of over fifty texts in thirty codices, this Gospel is notable in that it is completely made up of a series of Logia (or sayings) without reference to stories of the birth or death of Jesus, the mythic detailing of events or the miracles described in the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Focusing on any one of these logia serves the same purpose as the koan practice of Rinzai Zen. To show the parallels, here is an especially challenging logion:
“The disciples said to Jesus: Tell us how our end shall be.
Jesus said: Have you then discovered the beginning, that you seek after the end?
For where the beginning is, there shall the end be.
Blessed is he who shall stand in the beginning,
and he shall know the end and shall not taste of death.”
Have you discovered the beginning?
Meditation on the Logia of the Gospel of Thomas is a wonderful practice, one made richer through a dharma combat relationship with a teacher. The entire Nag Hammadi Library offers a plethora of texts that offer the same kind of rich stimulus material for spiritual paradigm shifts. Other extraordinary texts serving a similar purpose are The Hymn of the Pearl and Thunder Perfect Mind.
I strongly recommend the texts and the practice.
© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Visit the Library: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html
The Harried Mystic 
I’ve been teaching some basic physics to my one student and we got into the realms of the Black Hole(which defies the efforts of physicists to understand). She’s a young Chinese girl sent to England to be educated because she was falling behind at school at home and she’s got very little confidence because she’s constantly been told she’s stupid. She isn’t and she has a very enquiring mind; hence going into a subject well beyond my capacity to teach. Last night there was a programme on BBC Tv (Horizon) about Black Holes and I had an insight about endings and beginnings after I had watched this. I had an image of the space time continuum, pulled as Einstein suggested like a cloth with a heavy weight bending it, and as the weight of a Black hole caused it to bend deeply, I saw that as the singularity at the centre of the Black Hole pulled space-time almost the breaking point, the matter and light that was vanishing into the depths of the Black Hole, it emerged on the other side of Space time as a rapidly expanding explosion- the Big Bang.
I have a copy of the Gospel of Thomas which I bought ages back and never managed to read. Might do so today!
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I appreciate your reflection on “black holes” as emblematic of endings from which new beginnings arise. In fact, a recent theory in cosmology holds that the notion of a “Big Bang,” that ushered our universe into being, mischaracterizes what more correctly was an unimaginable outpouring of energy from the equivalent of the mother of all “white holes” ( a mathematical curiosity that has been a part of cosmological dialogue for some time).
While there is no physical evidence for “white holes,” they certainly are a heady conceptualization that holds great meaning as we abstract the notion for theological dialogue.
So, for my morning’s meditation I am asking myself, given your provocative image of the white hole as an end that is also a beginning, and returning once again to the Logion from the Gospel of Thomas:
How can I “stand” at the event horizon of the “white hole” of Self, and “knowing the end, not taste death?”
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Is it a measure of my ego that I am disappointed that my “insight” was not, as it turned out, an entirely original one, but one cosmologists have been playing around with for a while?
It also makes me think of the Ouroboros…..
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What I really liked about your insight was the connection of black holes to spiritual endings and beginnings. That was fresh and was the stuff of a very useful meditation for me today. Thank you.
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I’m glad.
I think I was silly to feel disappointed, because really, it was rather a remarkable thought for someone who stopped studying physics when she was 13, and apart from a keen interest in sci fi, hasn’t touched it since. I “saw” the image of universes imploding and exploding into and out of each other on either side of the fabric of space/time and it made so much sense.
And like death, the experience of beyond in the black hole is unknown till you experience it.
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