Who Hears?: A Zen Buddhist Perspective

Abstract

Western psychologists and neurologists have attempted to use their concepts to explain East Asian religions for more than seventy-five years. Carl Jung (1875-1961) wrote a long foreword to Richard Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower back in 1931, which gave many readers in Europe and the Americas their first glimpse of philosophical Daoism.1 A generation later, Erich Fromm's conversations with D. T. Suzuki were recorded in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.2 In our own time, the Dalai Lama's collaborative work with neuroscientists and psychologists has received widespread attention,3 while academia has given James H. Austin's Zen and the Brain hearty approval.4 The process of mutual understanding between Western scientists and teachers of East Asian religion is still incomplete, however, and in earlier times it had barely begun. I remember my amusement back in the 1970s, watching a video of monks trailing streams of wires attached to biofeedback instruments while they were walking formally and solemnly. Even in those early days it was apparent to me that for all their academic credentials, the scholars had started with an ignorance of the subject of their study. They were successful in measuring something in the brain relating to a samadhi condition, but while the monks may have grounded themselves more or less in a settled practice, who is to measure their appreciation of the mejiro chirping in the camellia bush just outside? Great masters of Zen, Zhaozhou, and Deshan and their successors did not talk about being settled, any more than neuroanataomists discuss the importance of the alphabet. The chirping of the mejiro might have reminded the monks of a case, a case that would lie in a dimension even further from the world of wires and dials. Who is the master of hearing that sound?3 This was the gist of a question by Bassui Tokusho Zenji a question that became a public case, one koan among many other koans that have not been studied by science. It is time for such a study. My directory of Chinese koans holds more than 5,500 neatly framed traditional stories set forth to guide the student.6 The modern Zen teacher is conversant with some 550 of these koans, a number that is sufficient if ... if .... There are several caveats. If the teacher treats koans as historical artifacts, then the stories are no