What is the Color of Grass?

 A friend of mine recently asked me what a post on this blog had to do with schizoaffective. The honest answer was, "Not much." What I am trying to present here on this blog is the full panoply of my thinking and feeling so that I am not reduced merely to being a man with a diagnosis, and to show some of the rich possibilities of a schizoaffective life. In two weeks, I will again address mental health directly. On April 22 I will post on "Mental Illness and the Myth of Violence" and in early May I will post on how happy I have been lately, to counter the stereotype that we with diagnoses are all miserable. This post today has little to do with schizoaffective, at least on the surface, and a lot to do with esoteric matters concerning Soto Zen. However, it addresses interesting issues about the relation of language to conception, perception, truth, and so on. So I assume it will be of interest to some of you. I recently wrote it for a Zen group I am a part of. It is a reflection on and off of talk 4.2 in Eihei Dogen's Shobogenzo Zuimonki. Dogen gave this talk to a group of monks in about 1235 in Kyoto, Japan. A PDF of a book containing a translation of the talk is available here. The translation is by Shohaku Okumura. I do make mention of a second translation in my essay, by Reiho Masunaga, entitled A Primer of Soto Zen. In the text of the essay, I give you enough information so that you do not need to consult these translations if you don't feel like it.         —"Jay Paul"

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 In talk 4.2 of Zuimonki, Dogen recounts a story where a page boy’s response to a question is elevated to that of a priest’s by the National Teacher. Later, someone questions the Master’s interpretation of this event. In both instances, Dogen upsets conventional monastic hierarchies to unsettle conceptual assumptions. Dogen is more concerned with the monks seeing with a clear and fresh mind than he is with social niceties.     

Before we get there, I need to distinguish between the two truths. Relative truth in Zen refers to our common sense, conventional, and conceptual sense of how the world is put together. These concepts help us to find food, clothing, shelter, and companionship. We absolutely need them.

However, we become delusional when we try to apply these rough and ready, functional concepts to our understanding of Absolute Reality. The Absolute can only be seen through perception, yet we are almost always distracted from our perceptions, which are always occurring, by our conceptions. We pass over the always already perceptual on the way to the conceptual. What does this perceptual show? To put it into words is to conceptualize it. But the best I can do is say that it reveals a seamless whole of which every "thing," which is not independent and is insubstantial, is a part, including human selves. 

To sum up, the relative is common sensical and conceptual and, while deluded, functional. The Absolute is perceptual and tied to our seeing the seamless whole our conceptions cut up into "things" that have no Absolute existence. "Enlightenment" or "awakening," I have been told, occurs when the conceptual drops away and we see the whole through perception. Now that we have this distinction clear, we can return to Dogen's talk.

      

The talk begins with The National Teacher, a man obviously of renown, asking a priest about the color of grass south of the city. The priest answers in a conventionally truthful manner by saying “yellow.” What was the National Teacher looking for in an answer? I’m not sure. But he seems to then humiliate the priest by asking a low-ranking page boy the same question. He gives the same answer, obviously, because the grass was yellow—perhaps the conventional color assigned to grass in Medieval China, just as we in 21st century U.S. say grass is "green."

 

The National Teacher, in what I assume is sarcasm, claims that the page boy could instruct the emperor because his understanding is as profound as the priest’s. I take it that this was sarcasm because if the National Teacher had sent a page boy to instruct the emperor in ancient China the emperor may have beheaded him for the insult. Both the page boy’s and the priest’s answers were mired in common sense.

 

I wonder what the National Teacher was looking for from the priest. Should the priest have said something that, while absurd from a conventional perspective, nonetheless demonstrated his understanding that the grass is not a thing, is insubstantial, and therefore has no color? Should he have said something like, “When a pebble strikes bamboo, it makes a ‘ping’ sound”? Frankly, I don’t know. At first blush, I thought I did not know how to respond to such a question from the National Teacher. I thought my understanding of insubstantiality was not developed enough.

 

Then I stopped myself. Was I making an assumption about understanding—namely, that it occurs in neat stages, going cleanly and clearly from delusion, through diligent practice, to enlightenment? Surely, things aren’t this simple. Awakening doesn’t take place according to neat lines or neat grids. Maybe even the famous taming of the ox series, that purportedly represents the various stages leading up to and including enlightenment, is deluded in some ways. Yes, I suppose, in some ways, practice can become more refined and profound as time goes on. But we cannot lose the openness of our beginner’s mind. The beginner’s mind is free of preconceived notions about awakening, taming the ox, knowing the color of grass, and so on. 

 

I am now prepared to try to account for why the answer to the question was not “yellow.” I can do this because, now that I think about it, I sense that every moment is on a continuum between awakening and delusion. We are always somewhat awakened and somewhat deluded, although in some moments we are more awake than others. If this is true, I am surely qualified to discuss this question. I just need to rely on my direct experience.

 

So, “What is the color of the grass?” Conventionally, in contemporary U.S. culture, we say it is green. Based on a quick visual survey, I suppose this is true enough. But a close examination of a single blade of grass would reveal a number of colors, from green to yellow to even gray. The grass is a myriad of colors we ignore when calling it “green” or “yellow.” In my experience, we call grass “yellow” not because that exhausts the panoply of its true colors, but for the strategic and functional reason of noting that the grass is not “well.” “Yellow,” in this way, does not describe the grass; it signals that the lawn needs watering or fertilizing or other work. 

 

Perhaps by calling the grass “yellow” the National Teacher believes the priest failed to show an understanding of how concepts and language are strategies and functions rather than reflections of reality. Concepts exist in order to get things done. Yet we mistakenly come to think they describe reality. We call the grass “green” to say it does not need work; we call it “yellow” to say that it does need work. As another example, we use the word “door stop” when we want some weight to hold the door open, whether that be a formal object designed for the purpose or a brick or a book. The words “door stop” refer to function, not a specific thing.

 

Back to the grass example. Ultimately, the grass contains all colors and, simultaneously, none at all. It contains the brown and black of the soil, the blue of the water, the searing bright yellow of the sun, to name just a few. This is because the sun is as much a part of the grass as the green. The grass couldn’t exist without its photosynthesizing green, but it couldn’t exist without the sun, either —even though it is 93 million miles away. Similarly, the grass couldn’t exist without the brown of the soil. Or the people who tend to it in some way, even, possibly, by choosing to just leave it alone. In this way, the universe is in a blade of grass, and a blade of grass is the universe.

 

This last statement is, of course, absurd. Of course the universe is not in a blade of grass! The universe is huge. Does every single thing out there contain the universe? In a sense, the answer is “yes.” This seeming absurdity occurs because our conceptions run aground when trying to account for reality. Words such as “all,” “universe,” “grass,” “thing” and so on are not equipped for representing reality. They are, as I have pointed out, strategic and functional. In trying to deal with reality, I find I end up getting into bizarre wordplays and making outlandish statements.

 

I now see that I have written myself into a provisional understanding of why the National Teacher, apparently, was dissatisfied with the priest’s answer that the grass was yellow. In short, it displayed an inadequate understanding of the distinction between the two truths, one in which we conventionally refer to grass as yellow and the second which is beyond words, and this is demonstrated because when we try to put this understanding in words things get complicated and outlandish very quickly.

 

The National Teacher, instead of going into a long-winded conceptual explanation such as I have done in this essay, cuts to the chase by violating conventional hierarchies and asserting that the page boy’s answer was equal to the priest's. Where I, in my analysis above, have used concepts to undo concepts, the National Priest uses shock. Perhaps his sarcastic humiliation of the priest is intended to blast him, and perhaps others, out of conventional thinking. If this is so, the National Teacher is exhibiting a kind of tough love compassion.

 

At this point, I am about halfway through with my discussion of Dogen’s talk. Now, we turn to someone, I assume a monk, questioning the National Teacher. 

 

In the Masunaga translation, this monk criticizes the National Teacher by saying, “The attendant’s answer did not transcend common sense, but what was wrong with that? Just as did the boy, he named the true color of the grass. He is the one who is the true teacher.” I suspect what is going on here, again, has to do with the two truths. Common sense is relative truth. From this perspective, the attendant’s answer is 100% accurate, and relative truth in Zen is traditionally accorded the same importance as absolute truth. It is not subservient. So the priest’s answer is correct.

 

The monk is perhaps questioning the National Teacher’s not being clear about the context when he asked the priest the question about the grass. Was he asking from the perspective of relative truth or absolute? How the priest answered depended entirely on this contextual orientation. The priest spoke truth from a relative perspective. From an Absolute perspective, relative truth is delusion. The National Teacher did not signal to the priest which perspective was to be emphasized. 

 

Where do we stand right now? Is the grass yellow? Yes and no. Is the grass myriad colors? Yes and no. Is the sun and the soil inside a blade of grass? Yes and no. It all depends and is dependent. How are we to see this?

 

Dogen’s answer, in this particular passage, is to question. We need to question authority, our assumptions, our conceptions, and so on. However, we need to be careful about this questioning. We need to steer clear of what Masunaga translates as a “suspicious attitude” and what Okumura translates as “doubt.” I take it that Dogen counsels against a thoroughgoing and complete skepticism. Rebellion against the monastery will get us nowhere. We all have to trust something. Perhaps he is cautioning us to simply be aware of what we trust, and not just take it for granted. 

 

In this case, this trust is represented by the National Teacher and the ancients. Perhaps we could trust them with the openness of Beginner’s Mind, wide and free. In doing so, we would see what they say from the outside, as a constructed thing, as a mere strategy for getting us to snap out of it and wake up. From where I stand now, an awakened moment seems to stem from a strange dance, where Zen pointers are held lightly, not clung to, and used to get beyond even what they say. We need to remain a little settled and a little unsettled. Too much of any won’t work. 

 

Dogen does question conventional hierarchies in this talk. But it is clear from the totality of his writings that he hardly wants to get rid of them. He likes and values monastic hierarchies, rituals, and structures. I suspect he sees them as needed and useful, but not absolute and natural. They are a way things have been put together to help people wake up. To the extent that they don’t help with this for an individual, they are to be disregarded, but not destroyed. We need structure, even if it is constructed by humans, and not grounded in anything transcendental. We just need to learn to not be attached to it.

 

It all comes down to lightness. Dogen, it seems, encourages monks to wholeheartedly give themselves over to monastic practices; however, they should do so lightly. By this I mean giving it all you have without the strain that comes from grasping and holding on to this monastic way as the only way or the best way. From this grasping, we get pride and self-importance. The monastery is simply one way of life, not better or more advanced than others, that is organized around waking up.

 

This notion of way of life is key. In this, concepts do have a role to play. Dogen revised his Shobogenzo throughout his life, so he obviously thought the ideas and words in it were useful. But they can only help as pointers within the totality of a way of life. We don’t think Zen, we live it. And this living is what helps us to wake up. In the dailiness of washing the dishes, going for a walk, putting on our clothes and so on with present awareness, we live Zen. The conceptual pointers offered by Dogen and others are helpful, but are only one small part of this totality.

 

Living a Zen way of life is, of course, much easier amid the communal rigors and rituals of a monastery than in our life in contemporary America. Dogen moved his monastery from urbane Kyoto to the wilds of Echizen for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with politics and the politics of Buddhism and its sects, but one of those reasons was to reduce distractions. Once out in Echizen, Dogen ceased concerning himself with laypeople as much as he did in Kyoto. Did he decide that only monastics can wake up? I don’t know.

 

Personally, I have to believe that we lay people can wake, at least a little, even while living a in an urban setting. Certainly, practice is more than sitting on a cushion or chair in zazen for 30 minutes a day. It’s about engaging, fully, with the present moment without the grasping that comes from applying conceptual filters. We all do this to a certain extent in every moment. If not, we couldn’t survive. But we also apply the conceptual filters every moment. And if we didn’t do this, we couldn’t survive. Concepts are the tools that give us our food, clothing, shelter, and companionship. We need them.

 

So I come back, again, to lightness. It’s not a matter of getting rid of concepts. We need to call the grass “yellow” or “green” if the moment, from a relative perspective, calls for it. The trick is to make this call lightly, treating our assignment of colors as a mere passing appearance, and not indicative of some ossification. Again, we come to a kind of dance, a lightness, where the absolute is seen in the relative and the relative is seen in the absolute. The grass is simultaneously green and not green, or yellow and not yellow. 

 

What we make of reality in our concepts is a kind of truth, but it’s not all there is. We see the rest, ultimately, through engaging with the perceptions at the heart of our concepts, and the concepts at the boundaries of our perceptions, in the moment-by-moment presence of daily activities. This is why I think Dogen advocated jostling monastic hierarchies just a little in this talk—to keep things unsettled and awareness fresh.