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Shambhala Sun
You'll find this article on page 96 of the magazine.
About a Poem: Henry Shukman on Hakuin Ekaku's "The Monkey is Reaching" THE MONKEY IS REACHING
The monkey is reaching For the moon in the water. Until death overtakes him He’ll never give up. If he’d let go the branch and Disappear in the deep pool, The whole world would shine With dazzling pureness. This
seems to me a very rich poem. It’s clearly personal as well as
general—I doubt anyone could write this who was not capable of seeing
himself or herself as just this very monkey, searching desperately,
tenaciously for a peace and joy that are obstructed by nothing but the
searching itself. What a conundrum that monkey is in! He’s desperate to
find some relief, longing for a happiness he senses must be possible,
yet he’s unable to stop grasping the imagined safety of the bough of the
tree, and unable to keep from longing for and seeking that elusive
happiness.
It reminds me of a Daoist teaching I once heard. The large fish
can be brought in by an angler on the finest line for one reason only:
the fish wants to avoid pain. If it would only lean into the pain, it
would snap the line in a moment, and be free. So we too find it hard to
stop seeking the pleasure we mistake for happiness. Getting what we
want, not getting what we want— which is more helpful as a goad to the
path? And how is the blessed moment of liberation going to arrive? Not
through our own efforts, apparently. Yet we must continue our efforts. Master Hakuin, a great reformer and reviver of koan training, knew
all about effort on the Way. He went through years of desperate
striving in the course of his own training, longing to have his moments
of awakening acknowledged by masters, who were kind and wise enough to
withhold the blessing he craved. He famously contracted a severe case of
“Zen Sickness”—attachment to the emptiness his meditation had brought
him to—and meditated for painfully extended periods in the hope of
curing himself of it. Then finally one day, after feeling himself trapped under ten
thousand feet of ice, he was suddenly attacked by a mad old woman
wielding a broomstick. She pounced on him for some unknown, imagined
offence, and beat him roundly and soundly, leaving him not just battered
and bruised, but utterly shocked—shocked to the core of his being,
shocked with a shock that filled the universe— and miraculously
awakened, liberated. The grip on the bough had given way. He had found
at last the single, wide world shining with dazzling pureness, and no
one left to hold on.
A Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage, Henry Shukman teaches at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe. He grew up in Oxford, England, and came to New Mexico in 1991 to write Savage Pilgrims, a memoir about searching for D. H. Lawrence’s past. Shukman has published seven books; his latest novel, The Lost City, was a New York Times editors’ choice.
PAINTING: Hakuin Ekaku: Monkey Catching the Moon, Ink on Paper. From the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria collection.
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