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\/ Photo by BotheredByBees<\/a> \/<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n
Tipping Over a Vase<\/strong><\/p>\n Master Hyakujo decided to found a new monastery, but he had the difficult task of selecting from among his disciples the right person to be the new monastery\u2019s abbot. Then he came upon a solution.<\/p>\n Hyakujo called all his disciples together and told them that the person who best answered his question would be named the new abbot. Hyakujo filled a vase with water and set it on the ground before the assembled monks. \u201cWho can tell me what this is without naming it?\u201d he challenged.<\/p>\n The senior disciple stepped forward and answered accurately, \u201cNo one can call it a wooden shoe.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Isan, the lowly cook, stepped forward and knocked the vase over with his foot, and walked out of the room.<\/p>\n Master Hyakujo smiled and declared, \u201cMy senior disciple has been bested.\u201d Isan the cook was named the new abbot.<\/em><\/p>\n ==<\/p>\n What just happened in this story?<\/p>\n One way to understand the meaning of this story is that the water represents Truth or the Dharma. The vase is the vessel that holds that truth, it is the teaching, it is the tradition.<\/p>\n That truth cannot be told, however. Sure, you can use simple words like \u201cTruth\u201d or \u201cReality,\u201d or you can fill books with complex philosophical explanations. But ultimately those are all words and don\u2019t truly convey what the Truth is. The \u201cwater\u201d cannot be named. That is why Master Hyakujo gave this challenge to his disciples.<\/p>\n The lead disciple, clearly a cunning man, sees this as a test of his mental dexterity. If he cannot name the water-filled vessel, he will say what it is not, thus suggesting it by negation. But he has only negated one object in a world of infinite objects. A person can spend a lifetime listing all the things something is not, and never come to the point where only the unnamed thing remains. The lead disciple is trapped on the endless road of the intellect.<\/p>\n But the cook, Isan, understood the situation simply and clearly. He tipped the vase over, emptying the vessel and revealing the water. The truth cannot be told, it can only be shown.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, the truth cannot be held, it cannot be contained, it can only be poured out. The vase itself, the spiritual tradition, is empty and only has meaning as a vessel to transport the truth. By tipping over the vessel, he is suggesting that we must not worship the tradition itself. Religion, philosophy, spiritual tradition \u2014 these are not an end to themselves; they should be respected for their function as a delivery vehicle, but nothing more.<\/p>\n These are the insights that mark one for spiritual authority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I thought I\u2019d feature a koan, rather than a poem, today. This is something I posted on the blog a about five years back, and it\u2019s been in my mind this morning. A koan today, poetry later in the week. \u2014 Koans are riddle-like sayings or short tales used in Zen practice to startle the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[591,2115,1438,592],"class_list":["post-5883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","tag-koan","tag-the-gateless-gate","tag-vase","tag-zen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5884,"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5883\/revisions\/5884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}