Mushotoku Mind: The Heart of the Heart Sutra

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Introduction

Mushotoku Bodaisatta:

The Practice of Radical Negation

Taisen Deshimaru describes his first meeting with his master, Kodo Sawaki, as a shattering experience. He says the master’s room was overflowing with books, sutras, and other works, yet when he asked him if he could borrow some, he was told that such stuff is useless and his desire to read these works was a childish whim. That, says Deshimaru, was his first satori.

The written word has a checkered past in the history of Zen, which offers mind-to-mind transmission of wisdom without scripture and without words. Still, it is difficult to imagine Zen without its literature. Poems, koans, anecdotes, autobiographies, commentaries, sutras, all play a role in the transmission of Zen from the fifth century to the present. These written records, however, can always be only fingers pointing at the moon of zazen.

As an academic, I was fortunate to find myself in the New Orleans Zen Temple. As a reader, I had always been drawn to the cleverness of stories about Rinzai masters, and to the challenge of koans. But this attraction was superficial and intellectual. I was, after all, a professor of English who spent his days in the realm of difficult ideas, poetic expression, and clever manipulations of language. The last thing I needed in the dojo was to break my head every morning, noon, and night against a curriculum of koans.

As a Soto sangha in the tradition of Dogen Zenji, the New Orleans Zen Temple asked something else of me: simply to empty my preconceptions and to live in the here and now, doing what needed to be done, with a mushotoku attitude, with no thought of personal profit or gain. I began to sit every morning at the dojo, gradually improving my posture and breathing, gradually learning the instruments for ceremony and chanting, and gradually memorizing the Hannya Shingyo.

My master, Robert Livingston Roshi, taught in the purist tradition of the Deshimaru-Sawaki lineage. He had no patience for clever Zen students. He was not impressed by brilliant questions during mondo. He was not impressed by what books we had read. In his dojo we practiced shikantaza, so my tendencies to want to be clever and to intellectualize were soundly chastened. Robert was more interested in our ability to come to the dojo every day and to do zazen. If we could garden, cook, or put up dry wall, all the better. These were not talents that being clever helped much with.

During rest periods at a sesshin in late September 2001, I recall reading parts of Deshimaru’s commentary on the Hannya Shingyo in a French copy from the temple library. My imperfect knowledge of French did not seem to hinder my understanding, which was due to the daily practice of zazen (gyoji) under a master for whom zazen was the heart of Zen. During sesshin the reading of relevant texts was allowed but not encouraged. Like Kodo Sawaki, Robert had read the books but felt that such stuff was (almost) useless. No fundamental understanding of Zen practice could come from reading alone. In fact, reading could sometimes delay one’s progress. As I tell my students, don’t bring your reading to zazen; bring your zazen to your reading. In other words, let zazen illuminate the texts, not the other way around. If you bring the preconceptions born of your reading onto your zafu, you will always be disappointed by what actually happens during zazen.

Zazen itself is the best teacher. Zazen, however, as most of Robert’s students understood, was not limited to shikantaza: zazen was Zen practice, and Zen practice included concentration in everything we did during the practice, from bowing and chanting to cooking food and cleaning toilets. Chanting the Hannya Shingyo every morning after zazen was for us the physical embodiment of the concepts of shiki and ku (phenomena and emptiness), each inward breath and outward breath expressing the truth that shiki and ku are not different even though they are not the same, that one becomes the other in the ritual and biological enactment of the fundamental principle of the cosmos: mujo. So when Robert Livingston gave me the text of his master’s commentary on the Hannya Shingyo to edit for publication, I understood that this too was Zen practice; this too was samu; this too was zazen.

Interpretations of the Heart Sutra abound, from Xuanzang’s in the T’ang dynasty to Red Pine’s The Heart Sutra: Translation and Commentary (2005). Deshimaru’s unique contribution to the wealth of commentaries on the Hannya Shingyo is the central place he gives to two concepts: ku and mushotoku, especially the latter, which I call "the heart of the Heart Sutra." His absolute insistence on these two concepts as the bedrock-abyss grounding of all ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology is the refrain that resounds again and again in his commentary. Dogen Zenji, of course, asserted in the twelfth century that mushotoku was the key to hishiryo consciousness, and Kodo Sawaki asserted early in the twentieth century that zazen is good for nothing.Deshimaru concludes that bodhisattva mushotoku is to be found above all in the ku consciousness of zazen practice undertaken without expectation or anticipation, although it can also be manifested in chanting or copying the Hannya Shingyo with the same attitude, without expectation or anticipation. He demonstrates indeed that this thesis is developed succinctly in the sutra itself, especially in its concluding mantra. If zazen is the physical embodiment of ku, then chanting the Hannya Shingyo is the physical vocalization of ku, and writing it is the physical inscription of ku.

Deshimaru’s mushotoku refrain is a clear bell signaling what he felt was needed in our particularly rational and materialistic Western milieu, and especially what was needed in the peculiarly intellectual climate of French culture. Arriving in France in 1967 as a wandering monastic, an ambassador of Zen sans portfolio, Deshimaru founded his now formidable sangha in what he called the ideal landing-place for him after the death of Kodo Sawaki in 1965.

Thinkers and artists had long come to Paris to explore le Néant and its progeny. This would include figures throughout the twentieth century, from Tristan Tzara and E.M. Cioran to Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett, as well as Americans like Henry Miller, John Cage, and Jim Morrison. In his book on Beckett and Miller, the literary critic Ihab Hassan dubbed their work, each very different in its way, the language of silence, in which nothingness and plenitude echo one another, an evolving and fundamental paradox, circulating, alternating, resonating, and vibrating. The music of ku resonated with Deshimaru’s Parisian students and disciples in an intellectual climate conditioned by postwar existentialism and roiling with a number of ideas taking shape in the 1960s and ‘70s, including pragmatism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction.

The cross-fertilization between Deshimaru’s Zen teaching and the Paris intellectual scene abuzz with postmodernist constructivism will be ripe for future scholars to investigate. The parallels between these schools of thought and Zen include their view of language and culture as arbitrary systems of signs, and their view of personality, society, and religion (including Buddhism itself) as constructs that have little or nothing to do with reality. As constructs, these phenomena are therefore capable of being deconstructed whether with the sledgehammer of Derrida’s différance or the invisibly thin scalpel of Deshimaru’s ku. Showing his acquaintance with the Western philosophical tradition, Deshimaru uses a Kantian term to define ku as existence without noumenon. Elsewhere he mentions meeting the psychoanalytical existentialist and father of hermeneutics Karl Jaspers and the intriguing intersection of their thought. Here, though, is not the place for such an investigation.

It may well be that Deshimaru was simply trying to speak the language of his listeners, the intellectuals of his French sangha, on their own ground, just as Avalokiteshvara in the Heart Sutra tries to address the concerns of the sour intellectual Shariputra. In any case, Deshimaru could hold his own in such conversations. Eventually, he grew from being one of the expatriate tribe of freelance thinkers and artists who came to Paris on an unorthodox path to becoming an authority in his field, embraced and certified by such conservative credentialing committees as, in Deshimaru’s case, the Sotoshu of Japanese Zen which named him Kaikyokosan, or head of Japanese Soto Zen for all of Europe.

Deshimaru, a Zen master, nevertheless belongs in this company of philosophically attuned thinkers and artists for whom emptiness functions as the ground of their song, not of despair but of encouragement. Their art, their philosophical speculations, and his Zen practice, are each a unique approach to what Deshimaru called the heart of Zen practice but which is really the heart of any profound life practice: mushotoku mind.

Mushotoku mind is the core of Deshimaru’s Zen. Throughout his commentary on the Hannya Shingyo, which is essentially a philosophical investigation on the futility of philosophical investigation, Deshimaru returns to this chorus: the way of the Buddha, the way of the bodhisattva, the way of Zen, the way of zazen, and the way of the sutras (especially the sutra of sutras, the Hannya Shingyo) is the key psychic posture or attitude: mushotoku mind. This is the attitude in which any practice, art, or pursuit can thrive, but it is the key above all to the practice of zazen, the practice of giving, generosity, or charity (fuse), the practice of patience (ninnku), and so on. Each worthwhile practice, religious or secular (and in Deshimaru’s view there is no separation between the two), is undertaken for one purpose and for one purpose only, for one gain and one gain only, for one profit and one profit only: that is the purpose of no purpose, the gain of no gain, the profit of no profit.

This purpose of no purpose is one of the most difficult ideas for Westerners to understand. It is perhaps most difficult of all for Americans, for whom the profit motive (caricatured in its ugliest appearance as greed) is king. Yet we know that our most cherished values are based on mushotoku mind when it comes to love. When it appears as agape (Greek) or caritas (Latin), love forms the basis of the Christian ideal of selflessness, altruism, compassion, self-sacrifice, charity. We value the unselfish love of family or country that is based not on what we can get from the relationship but on what we can give. We know, too, that these virtues are not accomplished directly through our will but indirectly through dropping our expectations. This sort of love, mushotoku love, is a natural, spontaneous, automatic response, having nothing to do with whether a potential mate is good for our prospects of perpetuating our presence in the gene pool, or whether our children will support us in the future, or whether our country will make us rich or free. Those are the proper responses to the realms of business and politics, profit and gain, proper motives for worldly ambition, but these motives disappear when we understand that the world and its gains, its games, its structures, and its constructed values are ku, empty, just like our mushotoku mind.

It has been remarked before that the Hannya Shingyo is as much a work of literature as it is a religious text. In the West the distinction is too often drawn as a rigid boundary between the private, fictional, and subjective texts of literature, whose primary virtues are those of aesthetics and the reflection of social and psychological realities; and the public, nonfiction, and objective texts of other forms of cultural significance, such as history, philosophy, and religion, whose primary virtues are supposed to be based on their adherence to truth.

As a poem of ideas, the Hannya Shingyo has few rivals in the European tradition. There are exceptions, like Alexander Pope’s famously argumentative poetic essays which are famously out of fashion. His Essay on Manis still great poetry, however distasteful or dated its ideas.

The poem of dialogue, or colloquy, like those of Arthur Clough in the Victorian era, also has a long tradition borrowing on the philosophical dialogues of Plato. But even though the Hannya Shingyo is sometimes called a conversation or dialogue between Avalokiteshvara (bodhisattva of compassion) and Shariputra (representative of intellectual wisdom), it is not really a dialogue at all. It is a lecture, a sermon, a monologue; the silver-tongued Shariputra is, for once, left speechless. In this way it is more like the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, in which the speaker hogs the stage and the voiceless interlocutor, while important to the drama of the interaction, has nothing much to say and is allowed to say nothing at all.

But more than any of these, the Hannya Shingyo resembles Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, a teaching on impermanence that features the wisdom that the speaker (Wordsworth) is able to impart to his disciple (his sister Dorothy).The two works share several characteristics: 1) they are apostrophes: monologues spoken by the more experienced or enlightened speaker to the