Tung-shan’s Neither Hot Nor Cold
Kuden Paul Boyle
Forest City Zen Group
Tung-shan is credited with being one of the founders of Soto Zen. After his death The Record of Tung-shan was compiled which includes excerpts from lectures and exchanges with monks. One of the exchanges1 reads,
A monk asked, “How does one escape hot and cold?”
“Why not go to where it is neither hot nor cold?”, said the Master.
“What sort of place is neither hot nor cold?”, asked the monk.
“When it’s cold, you freeze to death; when it’s hot, you swelter to death.”
I’ve always liked this exchange. It appears in Dogen’s collection of 300 koans called the Shinji Shobogenzo (Case 171) as well in the Blue Cliff Record, Case 43. Thomas and J. C. Cleary translated this exchange in their translation2 of the Blue Cliff Record as,
A monk asked Tung Shan, “When cold and heat come, how can we avoid them?”
Shan said, “Why don’t you go to the place where there is no cold or heat?”
The monk said, “What is the place where there is no cold or heat?”
Tung Shan said, “When it’s cold, the cold kills you; when it’s hot, the heat kills you.”
The exchange itself seems rather straightforward to me. However, I find what’s written about this exchange in the Blue Cliff Record to be impenetrable and unhelpful. So, I’ve decided to give a talk on the exchange as it appears in The Record of Tung-shan rather than trying to talk about the Case in the Blue Cliff Record. My understanding of this exchanges comes from using two perspectives: 1) Adhering to foundational Buddhist teachings, 2) Posing the question, “How is this teaching inviting us to practise?”
The first thing to say about this exchange is that it is not about the temperature or the weather. The other initial impression I have is that “place” can be a stand in for “practice”. The question, “How does one escape hot and cold?” is really asking about how liberate oneself from a reactive, samsaric existence. Our own versions of this question underlies why we start to practise Zen. This monk, like most of us, started practice for self-centred reasons. We wanted to, in some way, to improve our lives. Our desire motivates us to practise, and simultaneously it is our desire which is the at the root of our suffering. This is one of the first paradoxes of Zen practice we face. How can we use our desire without being used by our desire?
Tung-shan responds directly, “Why not go to the place where it is neither hot nor cold?”. He is suggesting to the monk to get off the wheel of samsara. You can find similar presentations of Zen practice by other Zen teachers. For example, Dogen in Genjokoan describes practice as “The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one”. In the Hsin-Hsin Ming, it is written, “The erring mind begets tranquility and confusion, but mind awakened transcends both.” The commonality of all these passages is the recognition that human beings tend to setup dualities. We dance between the poles our duality without finding liberation. Zen practice is the practice of stepping off or out of our self-inflicted dualities. Tung-shan answers with a question, in my opinion, because practice is always a choice. We have to decide for ourselves, yes, I will do this. So, Tung-shan is inviting the monk, here is a way of practice, will you do it?
The monk asks a follow up question, “What sort of place is neither hot nor cold?”. We might see ourselves asking a similar question. Many people when they begin to practise Zen want to know, “What is it like to be enlightened?”. They may have read enlightenment stories or have some narrative what being enlightened would be like. When someone has a lot ideas about Zen practice or enlightenment, the more difficult it is for them because their own expectations and ideas get in the way. It is a teacher’s responsibility, in my opinion, to steer the student away from such speculations – “Sweep the floor!”, “Wash your bowls!”, “Sit more, talk less”. By clearing out such speculations, it can make the Zen practitioner more available to receive the results of practice. At the same time, such questions can reflect a student’s aspiration to delve more deeply into practice. Getting back to the dialog with Tung-shan, we can interpret the monk’s follow-up question to mean, “what kind of practice is free of samsaric attachments?” A more liberal interpretation could be, something, “How can I practise in such a way that is free from samsaric attachments?”.
Tung-shan gives a direct answer, “When it’s cold, you freeze to death; when it’s hot, you swelter to death.”. This is such a succinct and richly layered response to the monk’s question. The first point to make is that stepping off the wheel of samsara doesn’t exempt or remove us from our immediate circumstances. The second point to investigate is what is this “you” being referred to in the exchange. We will take each of these in turn.
The first point reminds me of a sutta called “The Dart” in the Samyutta Nikaya, book 36, the Vedanasamyutta.3 In this sutta, the Buddha discusses how uninstructed people and instructed disciples experience sensation (vedana). When an uninstructed person experiences a physically painful sensation, the person actually experiences two sensations, one physical and one mental.
This corresponds to my early experiences in sesshins. I would experience knee pain, and the would generate a panicky, narrative or commentary. I noticed that the more intense the narrative was, the more intense my discomfort and suffering. I had no conscious control over this narrative. At one point, I was intellectually aware that my narrative about knee pain was different from the knee pain itself, but that intellectual knowledge was not sufficient to turn off the narrative. This was an example of what the Buddha was talking about: two levels of vedana, the physical and the mental.
The Buddha goes on to state, that someone who has been instructed and practising experiences only one sensation, the actual physical vedana. Such a person harbors no aversion toward it. Since there is no aversion, the underlying tendency toward aversion does not lie behind it. So, getting back to Tung-shan, when it’s cold, for the Zen practitioner there is just the direct experience of cold. When it’s hot, there is just the direct experience of hot.
This last sentence of the monk’s exchange with Tung-shan points to practising with the 12 links of dependent origination. Whether we know it or not, this is what we do when we are sitting zazen – we are practising with dependent origination. As I have mentioned in other talks, the point of studying (both intellectually and through direct experience) the 12 links of dependent origination is to investigate how sensory input evolves into a state of suffering, and what are the weakest links in this chain which can be used to interrupt this process.
The moment of “contact” (the meeting of inner and out sense gates with the corresponding sense consciousness) is a condition for sensation to arise. In turn, sensation is a condition for craving to arise. If we can abide in sensation without it evolving to craving, then the rest of the links toward suffering will not manifest. So, when we have an unpleasant sensation arise during zazen, for example, we don’t try to change it or avoid it. We don’t “move”.
When we are able to abide in just sensation, our experience and conceptualization does not evolve into subject-object dualism. There is no suffering and there is no “you” which is suffering. This is why Tung-shan says, “When it’s cold, you freeze to death; when it’s hot, you swelter to death.” The “you” which suffers dies. Actually, I would say that the “you” which suffers doesn’t get born in the first place. How we experience unpleasant sensations, what our relationship is to our immediate experience determines whether or not there is a self to experience suffering.
Tung-shan’s response reinforces the truth that there is no blissful alternative to our everyday lives to which we can escape. Realization and enlightenment do not exempt us from physically unpleasant realities being human. You might remember in the Heart Sutra where it says,
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form
Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form
As the Sutra also says, this is true for sensation, so we can also say,
Sensation is emptiness, emptiness is sensation
Sensation is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than sensation.
The Heart Sutra is saying that the sensation you are experiencing right now is nothing other than the emptiness of that sensation. There is no special sensation which leads to emptiness nor are some sensations empty and others not empty. Emptiness is not a quality embedded in or hidden by sensations. Dogen reinforces this view in his commentary on the Heart Sutra (Maka Hannya Haramitsu) when he writes,
To unfold and manifest this essential truth, [the Heart Sutra] states that “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Form is nothing but form; emptiness is nothing but emptiness—one hundred blades of grass, ten thousand things.
“Form is nothing but form” is Dogen’s terse expression for what I mentioned above. Similarly, “emptiness is nothing but emptiness” emphasizes that the designation “emptiness” does not refer to an attribute. Strictly speaking, the term “emptiness” is shorthand for lack of inherent existence. Dogen’s reference to blades of grass and ten thousand things means this applies to all phenomena.
How does this exchange of Tung-shan with the monk invite us to practise? I think Tung-shan’s invitation is the invitation to practise wholeheartedly, meeting fully the present moment. We don’t try to escape or imagine some place we would rather be. I’m mostly thinking of this in terms of zazen practice. In turn, zazen practice gives us the basis for applying Buddha’s teaching in our lives off of the cushion. Tung-shan’s practice invitation is an invitation to not turn away from the present moment. This corresponds the Soto Zen practice ethos of engaging any activity wholeheartedly, being fully present. When we are engaged in some activity with our entire being, there is no creation of the “I”, the “me”, or the “mine”. This doesn’t mean we won’t experience pain or other sensations of discomfort. However, we won’t be making it worse by “adding something extra” – the concept of a self, a self which suffers.
We can do this in our zazen practice, especially when some part of our body starts hurting. Just be 100% with the sensation. I’ve already talked about this in a talk titled, What Can We Learn from Painful Zazen. You can read it on the FCZG website. To start bringing Tung-shan’s practice into our everyday life, we can start with simple tasks. One of the first things I started doing in this practice was shaving my face. Feeling the warm water, the shaving cream lathering, feeling the blade being pulled over my skin. Another thing I did early on was something I had read in an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, The Miracle of Mindfulness. I think I got this excerpt from the Utne Reader. In this excerpt, he talked about being present when washing the dishes. I photocopied it and taped it to the door of my refrigerator. For years, every time I moved, that little photocopy moved with me and ended up on the refrigerator door. In fact, back then, I liked the idea of what I had called, “kitchen sink Zen” – using everyday activities as spiritual practice. It is worth quoting this bit from The Miracle of Mindfulness at length:
While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.
[…]
If while washing the dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes”. What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future – and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.4
We start with these little well defined activities and change them into spiritual practice activities. As we gain experience, we can start to extend this practice attitude into more and more everyday activities. Dogen reminds us in Genjokoan, “Enlightenment does not divide us.” We don’t have our stinky mundane lives and then an “enlightened” part of our lives. Everything in our everyday activities can be enlightened activity. Then, we start becoming fully alive. We are living in our vivid awareness of the present moment. There is nothing else, the entire universe of our experience is included. “When it’s cold, the cold kills you; when it’s hot, the heat kills you.” Thank-you.
1. The Record of Tung-shan, translated by William F. Powell, University of Hawaii Press, 1986, p. 49, exchange number 74.
2. The Blue Cliff Record, translated by Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary, Shambhala, 1992, p. 258
3. Bodhi, Bhikkhu The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya, Volume II, 2000, pp. 1263-1265, SN36.6(6) “The Dart”, Wisdom Publications, Boston, MA
4. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh, Beacon Press, Boston, 1975, pp. 3-5.
Copyright, Kuden Paul Boyle, 2023