Me and you and a dog named Mu

Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism

By William Wray

Published by Chartwell Books

Available at Asia Books, Bt550

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The Nation

A book that should have been a desk calendar, "Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism" leaves me coldly unenlightened. Frankly, I think Zen might be a scam. Not Buddhism, just Zen. And especially Zen koans.

I've been reading about koans for nearly 40 years and come at them from various angles, from the deepest depths of earnestness and the greatest expanses of open-mindedness. Alan Watts and DT Suzuki are like old friends. Meditation, I found, certainly works. The moments of clarity it produces are miraculous. But Zen koans still seem like someone's idea of a joke.

Perhaps they are. The first time I visited Wat Pho I was passing a boy of about 12 when suddenly there was a great splash of water on the ground next to him. We both looked around and saw a very ancient monk who'd just hurled a water balloon at the lad. All three of us laughed. I'm still giggling.

There is much to be said for the shock of a well-turned phrase that comes out of the blue and makes you gulp air for a moment, flabbergasted - or laugh out loud. Or the insanity of a new invention that makes people say, "Why didn't I think of that?" Surprise is a revelation in itself, regardless of the objective behind it.

It's understood that koans are not riddles. You can't turn them over and over like a Rubik's Cube, wrestling with the component bits, and expect life's truth to eventually snap into place. "They are expressions of awakening," offers one definition that I've seen, just as mystifying as the koans themselves.

They are exercises for the mind, says another, "patterns, like blueprints" that enable you "to hold entire universes of thought in mind all at once", and in no way do they have to interrupt your everyday consciousness.

They are, to be somewhat more understandable, tripwires on the path of consciousness. Long before you get back up again and dust yourself off, you're supposed to have seen a bright light. But do they work? Plenty of Zen practitioners say they do, and here's a book with one fresh koan for every day of the year, so you can have a try and see if 2008 will be your Nirvana Year.

William Wray - the philosophy lecturer, not the Mad magazine cartoonist - has sampled all the sounds of one hand clapping and trees falling in forests and selected 365 anecdotes, tales and verses, each of which promises insight by doing a strange dance with logic. The pages have floral prints on them; I'm not sure why, other than possibly making the book a prettier Christmas gift.

There are many selections I hadn't come across before, and several classics, too. A troubled monk asks Joshu, the Chinese Zen master from Joshu (!), whether a passing dog has Buddha-nature. Joshu shouts, "Mu!" I still don't get it (even substituting the Thai ma for "mu") and, at risk of sounding like an unsalvageable savage, I still can't get my head around the Sixth Patriarch's famous question, "What is your original face before you were born?"

"How can we escape the cold and heat?" a monk asks Tozan in a tale very topical today. "When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through."

Ahhh.

Apart from these eminently revisitable sayings, there is lots of mundane stuff, like this Buddhist basic: "For people, life is a succession of graspings and attachments and then, because of it, they assume the illusion of pain and suffering."

What I do like about the book is the haiku, whose pages seem like little oases in the dry sands of pointless prose. "The sea darkens; the voices of the wild ducks are faintly white". "A brushwood gate, and for a lock - this snail". And my all-time favourite: "Eaten by a cat! Perhaps the cricket's widow is bewailing that".

Surely this is at least better than another book being touted on the mystic airwaves, "Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality", in which Brad Warner expresses his feelings about reincarnation - he wants to come back "as a pair of Lucy Liu's panties".

Technically, for his part, Wray doesn't get off to a terrific start in his introduction, in the distinction he makes between the Soto and Rinzai schools of Zen. The former, he says, "concentrates on sitting meditation (za-zen) whereas Rinzai makes use of za-zen in conjunction with meditation problems (koans)". This is a common misunderstanding: Soto very much embraces koans as well; it just doesn't think they're crucial.

But let's not get into the divisiveness that split Zen apart in the first place. Its twin schools show no sign of descending into a Shi'ite-Sunni rivalry, but you have to wonder how followers of the spirit end up on opposite sides of a fence that the Buddha never even noticed.

It's just as mystifying to see Buddhist monks on a hunger strike in front of the Thai Parliament, trying to have their religion consecrated as the national faith. Thank God there is politics to explain some things.