Forest City Zen Group

Dizang’s “Not Knowing is Most Intimate”

Kuden Paul Boyle

Forest City Zen Group

There is a famous exchange between Fayan and Luohan Guichen, the abbot of Dizang monastery which was recorded in The Transmission of the Lamp and goes like this:1

Guichen asked, “Where are you going?”
Fayan replied, “On an ongoing pilgrimage.”
Guichen said, “Why do you go on pilgrimage?”
Fayan replied, “I don’t know.”
Guichen said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
At these words Fayan instantly experienced enlightenment.

This exchange also appears in Dogen’s collection of 300 koans (case 171) called the Shinjin Shobogenzo2 as well as in the koan collection called the Book of Serenity, Case 20.3

This koan is counter-intuitive in the way it uses the terms knowing and intimate. In our everyday lives, we normally associate “knowing” with “intimacy”. For example, when you say you know someone very well, it means you have achieved a certain level of intimacy. Maybe they have disclosed some confidential information about their lives to you. Similarly, when speaking of inanimate objects or situations, we can say something like, “he has intimate knowledge of that piece of software”, or “she has intimate knowledge of the conversation between Joe and Tom”. All of these examples associate the term intimate with knowing something really well or in detail. However, the koan associates “not knowing” with being most intimate. What’s going on here?

I am going to approach this koan in the following way: 1) Trying to identify the foundational Buddhist teaching(s) being explicated, and 2) asking, how is this teaching inviting us to practise. In addition, I’ll substitute the phrase “practising zazen” for “pilgrimage” to make it closer to our experience. So, the dialog would read,

“What are you doing?”
“Practising zazen.”
“Why do you practise zazen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not knowing is most intimate.”

The commentary in the Book of Serenity contains a couple of quotes which can help us get started in our investigation. The first quote,

Nanquan said, “The Way is not in knowing or in not knowing. Knowing is false consciousness, not knowing is indifference.”

The second quote,

Old Master Cizhou said, “In walking, in sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises, look into it, and you’ll see not seeing – and then put it to one side.”

I read Nanquan’s words as meaning: the way of practice is not found in intellectually or conceptually knowing something, nor is the way of practice found in keeping oneself ignorant either. Nanquan refers to “knowing” as “false consciousness”. It well established in Zen and in Buddhism in general that conceptualizations are seen as “adding something extra” to the moment of experience and that confusing our conceptualization of something as being the something without our conceptualization is delusion. So, “knowing” something through our conceptualization of it is a false consciousness or a delusion.

The other pole setup by Nanquan is that the way of practice is not found in “not knowing” either. “Not knowing” in this context simply means ignorance. So, being ignorant doesn’t help us in our practising the way either. This is a danger in Zen. Sometimes teachers tell their students to not read something. For example, one priest I know went to study in Japan. At the monastery he told that he could not have any books. Similarly, one of the guidelines for sesshin (a meditation retreat) is to refrain from reading during sesshin. This is because we want practitioners to have an unmediated experience of sesshin – without interposing conceptual overlays on the experience. However, this is not meant to be a blanket prohibition against studying Buddhist teachings. It is simply a recognition that conceptual learning has its time and place, and it is not a substitute for zazen practice.

This speaks to one level of interpretation of this koan – to keep an open mind. The question the koan answers is how to keep an open mind? The answer is: don’t go into a situation with expectations or thinking you know something about the situation you are entering. We don’t want to have our direct experience coloured or prejudiced by something we think we know about what we are about to experience (notice, I said “about to experience” – this is future focused thinking). In Zen, we recognize that perception is coloured by our mental formations, and our habitualized ways of conceptualizing. We recognize that these can be powerful forces in mediating how we experience our experience. So, if we want to experience something directly without adding something extra, we practise “not knowing”.

This is a very concrete approach we can practise in our everyday lives. Rather than creating a declarative narrative or story, try holding open a question. So much of our anxiety or stress comes from developing expectation or a narrative about a situation before it actually happens. Having a question we may not be able to answer can be helpful in practising “don’t know mind”. These questions can also have a bodhisattva focus. For example, “What is most beneficial?” or “What would be the compassionate response?”. We don’t need to think up an answer to these questions. The questions themselves orient the mind towards practice. We make ourselves more receptive to enacting a wholesome response to the situation at hand.

A more subtle level of understanding comes down to seeing this “not knowing” through the lens of the 12 links of dependent origination. As a brief reminder, the 12 links of dependent origination is a teaching which shows how sensory input can evolve into a state of suffering. Contact of the senses is a condition for sensation, and sensation is a condition for craving, craving is a condition for clinging, and clinging is a condition for the birth of a state of suffering. So, as you can see, there are quite a few steps between the first sensory input and some moment of suffering. The important thing here is that we through careful practice of zazen, we become aware of these intervening steps.

As an example, when I was at Tassajara, we were served a soup during an oryoki meal which I had never seen or had before. I had no idea how it was going to taste. I put a spoonful in my mouth. Instantly, there was the sensation of flavour or taste. I didn’t know what taste it was, just that there was taste. Then, there was awareness of this taste being evaluated as “good”. Then, then there was the awareness of “I want more”. This gets to the second quote I mentioned at the beginning of the talk from commentary from the Book of Serenity,

Old Master Cizhou said, “In walking, in sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises, look into it, and you’ll see not seeing – and then put it to one side.”

In the moment before the thought “I want more” arose, I “looked into it” and could see the experience of tasting arise. It was seeing not seeing, or tasting not tasting. That is to say, that the direct experience of taste had nothing to do with my conceptualization of tasting something, or something as good or bad. This wasn’t a conscious effort on my part, it was just was an experience which arose because of how I was practising. Then the experience was gone – I put that experience aside rather than trying cling to it or replicate it. That brief experience was enough.

What Old Master Cizhou is saying is mirrored by what Bankei said several hundred years later when he was describing what he called the “the unborn mind”.Bankei’s realization is sometimes paraphrased as “Unborn mind is Buddha mind”. Bankei wrote,

The Unborn manifests itself in the thought, “I want to see” or “I want to hear” not being born … The reason I say it's in the “Unborn” that you see and hear in this way is because the mind doesn't give “birth” to any thought or inclination to see or hear.4

Dizang’s “not knowing is most intimate” is pointing to unborn mind. All of the conceptualizing, ruminating, intellectual scrutinizing cannot get you there. These are all “born” or fabricated or contrived states of mind. In fact, the more you think you “know” (conceptually) the farther away you are from experiencing the direct unfabricated experience. The “seeing not seeing” or the knowing of not knowing is the closest (i.e. most intimate) we can come to experiencing reality as it is. We can never experience beyond what our sense bring to us, but we can get beyond our compulsive conceptualizing about our experience. As far as I can tell, only a regular zazen practice can ripen us enough to make room for the not knowing intimacy with the unborn.

How does this teaching inviting us to practise? This is really the most important question. Just hearing a Dharma talk or reading some book but not practising doesn’t really do anything. I think this teaching really is an invitation to sit zazen. Fayan’s response, “I don’t know” is a guide to the attitude with which we practise Zen. We are deeply conditioned to seeing our activity in terms of the “I, me, and mine”. “I am doing something!”. Or, “What can I get from this?” Every time we think, “I am doing something!”, we are reinforcing a notion of self. As Dogen puts it in Genjo Koan,

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.5

This quote from Genjo Koan is about taking the I, me, and mine out of the centre of our existence, and making room to be aware of what is happening in and around us. This is one of the paradoxes of Zen practice. My teacher has spoken about this in terms of Zen practice being a matter of “will and willingness”. On one hand, taking up Zen practice and making time to sit zazen is definitely an act of self will. At the same time, we must also be willing to let practice happen to us without clinging to some idea of an outcome.

Fayan’s response of “I don’t know” can be taken to mean: To sit zazen earnestly, without knowing or having some idea of what sitting zazen will do for you. It is often said that you don’t sit zazen, but rather zazen sits zazen through your body. This saying is an attempt to orient our sitting away from selfish or self-centred motivations for sitting. Sitting for self-centred reasons encourages the fabricated knowing mind. At the same time, I have to say that if you are new to practice and are doing for some idea of self-improvement, that’s really OK too. I’ll just say, allow your reason for sitting to change and evolve. Sit with an attitude of “don’t know mind”. Just sit and let zazen unfold through your body. Thank-you.

1 Zen’s Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings, by Andy Ferguson, Wisdom Publications, 2000, p. 316.

2 The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Three Hundred Koans, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and John Daido Loori, Shambhala Publications, 2005, p. 229.

3 Book of Serenity: One Hundred Zen Dialogues, translated by Thomas Cleary, Lindisfarne Press, 1990, p. 86.

4 The Unborn: Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, Norman Waddell, North Point Press, New York, 1984, 2000, page 88

5 Translation by Robert Aitken and Kaz Tanahashi, Moon in a Dewdrop, North Point Press, New York, 1985, page 69  

Copyright Kuden Paul Boyle, 2023