Thoughts and a question about "No reliance on words and letters"

[Hoseki]

Hi folks,

I was thinking about this line, no reliance on words and letters, and I had a few thoughts and I'm hoping to get some feedback. I can see three ways that statement can work without seeing words and letters as kind of inferior or superfluous to our practice. Sort of like how we need two legs to work. I only need one to stand but if I want to go anywhere I need both to work together.

1. No reliance doesn't mean no use. This probably hinges on the translation but in English I get the sense that words and letters are not enough. E.g. someone can quote innumerable sutras but is cruel and has little concern for suffering they cause others.
2. I think it could have been a political statement trying to emphasize the importance of lineage. If you were in Tang China and trying to get support for your sect this kind of line could rule out a group of people from picking up the sutras an creating their own version of Buddhism and thus denying or at least competing for patronage.
3. Words and letters aren't meant to be taken as dogmatic truth or as just a description. It might be a description but its effect it has on the listeners thoughts, feelings and actions are the most important aspect. Something like, if you didn't want to evoke some kind of change or action why speak at all? Another way to look at it would be the precepts. Following the precepts as written is good but if following them to the letter leads to great suffering than don't do that.

I'm wondering if this makes sense to everyone. I'm also curious about the use the phrase in the past. If anyone can point me in the direction of where it was used and in what context I would appreciate it.

My apologies for the length. I don't think it could have been avoided here.

gassho,

Hoseki
sattoday/lah

[Jundo]

Hi Hoseki,

The story derives from the legendary scene of the first Zen transmission ...

Once, when the World-Honored One in ancient times was upon Vulture Peak, he held up a flower before the assembly of monks. At this all were silent. The Venerable Kashyapa alone broke into a smile. The World-Honored One said, “I have the all-pervading Eye of the True Dharma, the Secret Heart of Incomparable Nirvana, the True Aspect of Formless Form. It does not rely on letters and is transmitted outside the sutras. I now hand it on to Mahakashyapa.”

There is some Truth undivided beyond nouns, pronouns, verbs and all the rest of human grammar which cut and divide the Wholeness into separate things. No me or you, this or that, good and bad, table or chair, mountain or star, birth and death and all the rest. It is ineffable. Some truths cannot be understood through normal divisive language and the relationships of contrast, opposites, divisions and "yes/no" that they create.

We can also look and experience a thing ... a flower, a cup of tea, and many other aspects of life ... without need for verbal filters.

Many sects of Buddhism were said to be lost in books and philosophizing, and could not realize this Wholeness that presents the True meaning and life of the words beyond mere theory and thinking about separate things.

Even so, the Sutras are said to convey Truth to those who don't get lost in the words and tangled philosophy, and instead can realize the true Wisdom when the Sutra is understood with Light and Untangled mind. So, many Zen folks said that there was a time to study Sutras, but also a time to burn them (figuratively) and to know the Wholeness that shines through the words. It is something like knowing the Illumination and Boundlessness of the open sky that sweeps through all the complexity and conflict of this earth.

Master Dogen, however, had a somewhat different relationship to words: He found the Wholeness and Silence in well spoken words, and even in the greatest noise of this world, to a Buddha Ear, our ear when tuned to hear. Prof. Heine writes here ...

The Zen emphasis on a "special transmission outside the scriptures/without reliance on words and letters" (kyoge* betsuden/furyu* monji), supposedly originated by Bodhidharma, probably came into prominence as the dominant mode of Zen discourse [not until the age of Ma-tsu and the Hung-chou school in the eighth and ninth centuries], although the saying itself was not actually formulated until [even later]. This motto, which has come to be seen as definitive of the koan tradition, is found in its earliest extant form in a text from 1108, and is attributed retrospectively to the first patriarch. The motto, however, did not indicate an outright rejection of sutra literature, for in the same passage according to some versions it is said that monks who are stubbornly silent are like "dumb sheep" who show an attachment to the words and letters of nonattachment precisely in disdaining words and letters. Rather, the motto "signified a return to [Zen's] vital essence, which cannot be replaced by any texts....a new time spirit, in which man as an individual had been assigned the central focus, together with a general appreciation for the spoken word." ...

... The koan as a technique for spiritual attainment with "no reliance on words and letters" is deeply rooted in the basic Buddhist approach to silence on unedifying queries, and can be understood as a Chinese way of perfecting that method of contextualizing the relation between speech and silence. According to the original Pali passage, the Buddha's silence or refusal to answer his disciple Malunkyaputta's queries about eternity, infinity, the identity of body and soul, and the afterlife of the Tathagata, is not based on stubbornness, ignorance, or arbitrary reticence. Rather, the silence has a profoundly diagnostic and therapeutic quality in that the Buddha carefully analyzes the questions into sets of dilemmas and quadrilemmas to point out to his disciple the unsatisfactory nature of each alternative. He makes clear that any response whether affirmation (yes), negation (no), or some combination (both yes and no, or neither yes nor no) falls short of an adequate reply. The Buddha's aim is twofold: to expose and root out the psychological cause of the questioning process, that is, the longing or greed for one-sided, partial views (Skt. drsti*) that haunts the inquirer; and to reveal the deficiency of any and every metaphysical assertion and negation in describing the basis of human existence.

... For Dogen [however], the key to understanding the efficacy of ... dialogues is to see Zen masters as alchemists who turn the raw material of ordinary words, the enriched possibilities of which usually remain unrecognized, into magically alive, metaphorical and metonymic manifestations of enlightened awareness. It is in this sense that the creative expressions of Zen sayings develop rich textures of verbal communication that support the injunction to "not rely on words and letters." ... Dogen writes in the following waka [poem] which subverts the conventional meaning of its title, "No reliance on words and letters" (furyu* monji) by stressing continuous discourse rather than silence: "Not limited/By language/[Dharma] is ceaselessly expressed;/So, too, the way of letters/Can display but not exhaust it." ...

https://zendogen.es/textos-zen-pdf/Dogen-and-the-Koan-Tradition-A-Tale-of-Two-Shobogenzo-Texts_Steven-Heine.pdf

So, I don't think that the meaning is just that words "are not enough" because somebody may still act cruelly or the like, or just as something to make the Zen sect stand out politically.

It is that there is Silence in all words, Stillness in the greatest chaos.

Gassho, J
stlah

[Hoseki]

Hi Hoseki,

The story derives from the legendary scene of the first Zen transmission ...



There is some Truth undivided beyond nouns, pronouns, verbs and all the rest of human grammar which cut and divide the Wholeness into separate things. No me or you, this or that, good and bad, table or chair, mountain or star, birth and death and all the rest. It is ineffable. Some truths cannot be understood through normal divisive language and the relationships of contrast, opposites, divisions and "yes/no" that they create.

We can also look and experience a thing ... a flower, a cup of tea, and many other aspects of life ... without need to verbal filters.

Many sects of Buddhism were said to be lost in books and philosophizing, and could not realize this Wholeness that presents the True meaning and life of the words beyond mere theory and thinking about separate things.

That said, the Sutras are said to convey Truth to those who don't get lost in the words and tangled philosophy, and instead can realize the true Wisdom when the Sutra is understood with Light and Untangled mind. So, many Zen folks said that there was a time to study Sutras, but also a time to burn them (figuratively) and to know the Wholeness that shines through the words. It is something like knowing the Illumination and Boundlessness of the open sky that sweeps through all the complexity and conflict of this earth.

Master Dogen, however, had a somewhat different relationship to words: He found the Wholeness and Silence in well spoken words, and even in the greatest noise of this world, to a Buddha Ear, our ear when tuned to hear. Prof. Heine writes here ...



So, I don't think that the meaning is just that words "are not enough" because somebody may still act cruelly or the like, or just as something to make the Zen sect stand out politically.

It is that there is Silence in all words, Stillness in the greatest chaos.

Gassho, J
stlah

Ah! Thanks Jundo!

The contrast between the Indian and Chinese is interesting. Emptiness in a negative sense where we deconstructing views and things are not real because they are empty vs emptiness in the positive sense of reconstructing views because everything is empty and real (in a conventional sense.) Does that make sense?

Gassho,
Hoseki
sattoday/lah

[Jundo]

Ah! Thanks Jundo!

The contrast between the Indian and Chinese is interesting. Emptiness in a negative sense where we deconstructing views and things are not real because they are empty vs emptiness in the positive sense of reconstructing views because everything is empty and real (in a conventional sense.) Does that make sense?

Gassho,
Hoseki
sattoday/lah

Hi Hos,

It is a bit of both.

South Asian Buddhism such as Theravada had more of a sense of deconstructing the personal "self" by realizing that it is a composite of temporary aspects, parts and functions, thereby to become detached from the desires and clinging of the little self which cause us Dukkha (suffering) when disappointed.

Mahayana Buddha, and especially much of Tendai, all Hua-yan and Zen, had more of a sense that, in seeing through the apparent separate self-existence of all individual things, beings and moments of time (not only our personal "self," but seeing through the selfness of all phenomena), we reveal something like a flowing Wholeness which sweeps in, and is in other guise, all the apparent things, divisions (and frictions among them) of this world. Buddhists tend to emphasize that this Wholeness is not another "thing" so much as an ongoing flow, dance, process that is so vibrant and ever changing that it is not something that can be nailed to a wall. I often compare this to an intangible "dance" that cannot be pinned down as a solid object, but is the movement and dancing itself. Thus the activity is not a "thing" let alone a "thing apart" from the dancers (i.e., us).

https://forum.treeleaf.org/forum/treeleaf/the-beginner-s-place/buddha-basics/2949-buddha-basics-part-xvii-%E2%80%94-the-dance-of-emptiness

This dance is constantly manifesting as all the separate things, beings and moments of time of the world.

The dance is never separate from us, some outside truth we are to realize, because it --IS-- us and all things in most intimate sense, dancers dancing ... thus the dance. Our Zazen lets us feel the dance being danced, allows the dance to dance, tosses our "little self" with its sense of separation into the dance, and lets us realize our nature as the Dance dancing in our little spot.

In this way, the separation and separate identities of all things are, in once sense, dreamlike and untrue, for there is only the Wholeness. But at this point, enlightenment is not done, for we don't simply lose the sense of separation and individuality in the dance. We rediscover that the dance is all the separate and individual things. The Dance is the separate dancers, the separate dancers are the Dance come alive. So, the separate things, beings and moments ... although still dreamlike images in a sense, created largely between our ears in the brain machine which creates a model of the world which divides, assigns names and separate identities ... is ALSO reinvigorated and illuminated, with each separate thing-being-moment now shown like its own shining jewel on a great net. In fact, each shining jewel is, and fully embodies, the WHOLE of the WHOLENESS, as if the entire Dance is contained in each one. Thus the famous saying, "Mountains are mountains (to the ordinary, ignorant mind) ... then mountains are not mountains ... then mountains are mountains again." Then, in such awareness, we are to live in this complicated world of separation with insight and care. Most of the Koans are about this in some way.

Thus, we might say that we are deconstructing and newly constructing at once (even though it has been so always, and all that gets newly built is our understanding and experience of this.)

Because the "mountains are not mountains" part is something free of separate identities (as represented by all the names and other words), we say it is "beyond words." Because the ineffable quality of each thing, being and moment embodying the Wholeness (its "suchness") is also subtle to experience and express, we say that such insight is also "beyond words." But Master Dogen pointed out that, to the wise, even words are shining jewels of Wholeness to an ear attuned to such Truth.

Then, we are still not done, because our job is to dance the Dance ... continuously, moment by moment, with grace, gentleness, balance and caring. If we dance with grace, it is a more beautiful dance ... if we dance with violence or neglect, it can be an ugly dance ... but in truth the Dance is always the Whole Dance.

Something like that.

Gassho, J
stlah

[Shui_Di]

Hi Hoseki,

I do believe that words is important, but words is like a two edge sword. It can cut delusion but also can be the delusion itself if we just attach to it literally.

Just like Huineng Zenji said that Sutras are like a finger pointing to the moon, but not the moon itself.
Even though actually in Reality (with big R), the finger and moon is not separable too.

It is just like the sound of one clapping hand. If we think the sound of clapping hand is only produce by two hands, it is the condition for the person who thinks that wisdom only can be understood through words.

The sound of one clapping hand means our hand clapping the whole reality, not only between two hands. It is one hand clapping the universe's hands. The sound of this clapping is beyond any sound yet it is in any sound. So the reality is beyond words but also in any words.


Gassho, Mujo
Sat

[Houzan]

A painted rice cake will also fill your belly

Gassho, Hōzan
satlah

[Bion]

I can see three ways that statement can work without seeing words and letters as kind of inferior or superfluous to our practice.

The idea, allegedly, when Bodhidharma started teaching in China was that he needed to point the stubborn and misguided practitioners he found there to what's behind the sutras they were clinging to and were misinterpreting, and help them to realize that when one embodies the teachings, when one expresses them through body, speech and mind, one can find absolutely different ways of expressing and teaching them, which need not rely upon written texts. So, eventually, the notion developed of the "separate transmission outside of the teachings, not relying upon words and letters", somewhere around the 8th - 9th century and Zen masters were said to be transmitting Shakyamuni Buddha's mind, not just his verbal teachings... In his chapter Bukkyo, or Teachings of the Buddhas, in the Shobogenzo, master Dogen's ideas on this topic are expressed, and he argues that sutras and Zen masters convey the same teachings, and the activities of a Zen master are the living enactment of the sutras, they are sutras in movement!
In that sense, I believe it makes a whole lot of sense. If someone practices, exists in accordance with the dharma, the dharma expresses itself through them. The words and letters of the sutras were meant to be acted out, not venerated and debated to exhaustion. Everything, beginning with the basics, like the eightfold path, for example, was meant to be developed by oneself, lived out, and not used as dogma.

Just adding my two cents here.

Gassho
sat lah

[Seikan]

Just like Huineng Zenji said that Sutras are like a finger pointing to the moon, but not the moon itself.
Even though actually in Reality (with big R), the finger and moon is not separable too.

Agreed. I also immediately thought of the "finger pointing to the moon" analogy when reading the above thread. We should certainly attend to and value the finger for it helps to point the way. On the other hand, there is little need to dwell on the color, shape, crookedness, etc. of the finger itself (unless, perhaps, it is so crooked as to be pointing in the wrong direction! ).

May your Sutra study be un-crooked and always point you squarely at the moon.

Gassho,
Seikan

sat/lah

[Jundo]

Agreed. I also immediately thought of the "finger pointing to the moon" analogy when reading the above thread. We should certainly attend to and value the finger for it helps to point the way. On the other hand, there is little need to dwell on the color, shape, crookedness, etc. of the finger itself (unless, perhaps, it is so crooked as to be pointing in the wrong direction! ).

May your Sutra study be un-crooked and always point you squarely at the moon.

Gassho,
Seikan

sat/lah

Master Dogen might have said that, to the wise who see, the moon is also pointing at the finger and, better said, is shining in and as every fingertip.

Sutras are also words on paper, but not only words on paper. Sutras are all phenomena, and all phenomena are preaching Sutras. However, if one tries to limit words to their small meaning, then even great teachings stand in the way of understanding. It is something like saying that the moon glints in the metal of a great surgeon's knife, but in the hands of someone without skill, it is just a rusty blade.

The sutras are the entire world of the ten directions. There is no moment or place that is not sutras. The sutras are written in letters of the supreme principle and of the secular principles. The sutras are written in letters of heavenly beings, human beings, animals, fighting spirits, one hundred grasses, or ten thousand trees. This being so, what is long, short, square, and round, as well as what is blue, yellow, red, and white, arrayed densely in the entire world of the ten directions, are no other than letters of the sutras and the surface of the sutras. Regard them as the instruments of the great way, and as the sutras of the buddha house. These sutras spread throughout all time and circulate in all lands. These sutras open the gate of teaching for people without neglecting anyone on the entire earth. ... Realizing the way upon seeing peach blossoms, hearing a stone striking bamboo, and seeing the morning star are nothing but sutras nourishing teachers. Sometimes there is a skin bag or a fist that attains the eye and attains a sutra. Sometimes there is a wooden dipper or a lacquer bucket that attains a sutra and attains the eye. ... You receive sutras and expound sutras by means of mountains, rivers, and earth, or by means of the sun, the moon, and stars. Likewise, you hold sutras and transmit sutras with the self before the Empty Eon, or with body and mind before the original face. You actualize such sutras by cracking open particles. You bring forth such sutras by cracking open the world of phenomena ... Even a broken wooden dipper and a barrel with no bottom are ancient sutras of buddha ancestors. There are few buddha ancestors who understand the number of scrolls and the contents of such sutras. To say that buddha sutras are not buddha dharma is not to observe the occasions when buddha ancestors used sutras, not to study the occasions when buddha ancestors emerged from sutras, and not to know the degree of intimacy between buddha ancestors and buddha sutras. ...

[And yet Dogen said amid that]: Nevertheless, all types of coarse, [false teachers] have said for a couple of hundred years, “Don’t keep the phrases of ancestral teachers in mind. Furthermore, don’t take a long look at or use the teachings of sutras. Instead, just keep your body and mind like a decayed tree or dead ash. Be like a broken wooden dipper or a barrel with no bottom.” Those who speak in this way are a band of those outside the way, of heavenly demons. They take up theories that should not be taken up. Because of such people, the buddha ancestors’ dharma has vainly become a dharma of crazy confusion. What a pity! How sad! ... As they have not understood the paths of right and wrong, when they are asked questions they raise a whisk without knowing its meaning. Or, upon guiding students, they take up Linji’s “Four Understandings” and “Four Illuminations,” Yunmen’s “Three Phrases,” Dongshan’s “Three Roads” and “Five Ranks,” and so on, as the standards of studying the way.

[Shobogenzo-Bukkyo]

It is not words or formuli. The Sutras must be lived, are life and all things in it living, brought to life in life as living words.

Gassho, J
stlah