Linji asks the monastery director, “Where have you been?”
The monastery director says, “I’ve been selling rice around the district.”
Linji asks, “Have you sold it all?”
The monastery director says, “Every bit of it.”
Linji draws a line on the ground with his stick. “Have you sold this?”
The monastery director shouts.
Linji hits him.
The head cook comes to Linji and Linji tells him the story.
The head cook says, “He didn’t understand.”
Linji says, “What about you?”
The head cook bows.
Linji hits him.

from Dogen’s koan Shobogenzo (True Dharma Eye)

             If a contemporary teacher asks us to compare and contrast the responses of cook and director, Linji should hit him as well. I presume that the line on the ground is the Chinese ‘One’. If you can’t feel it, the whole question goes past you.
            Hui Neng pounds rice in the back room of the kitchen, a barbarian child from the outlands. Both cook and director are little mirrors for Linji. But the teacher is asking who they are. The director sells rice hulls. The cook defers to Linji. But Linji offers us his guts, heart and brain. If we feel his, we find ours.
            Until you find the thoughtless power of Linji’s stick, you cannot understand his compassion. And it’s not about holding it.


            Since I was old enough to understand it, I’ve been concerned with the question of teaching. My father worried that I was a dilettante, but finally I was worried that I was a collector of teachers rather than a true student.
            How does the student become the teacher?
            It’s almost like Dogen talking about birth and death. The old saw puts birth and death on the same plane, so Dogen disassembles the formula. Death and birth are distinct phases.
            Teaching and study are distinct phases. Scholastic formulas can still contain great power. Techniques have validity because they commonly still represent living traditions. But the question is, who is vivifying these techniques and formulas? Is it the teacher? Or is it the student?

            This is the power of what we’re trying to do here. The modern key is aesthetics, precisely what the bureaucratization of education in the last forty years has inadvertently or intentionally done everything in its power to destroy. As my father used to say, we take a six year old child, with an avid desire to learn, and within six years we have succeeded through our ‘educational system’ in destroying that desire.
            No student should be sitting in the classroom who has no desire to learn.
            And what is that desire if not an ‘aesthetic’ response. For the true student, something is inherently attractive in the topic. The basis of true teaching is first of all aesthetic, even if the student’s desire is pragmatic. That is just one way of saying that the student’s desire is vocational. All teaching is intimate.

            And this brings us back to Linji’s stick.

            Much of the problem with Zen is that the texts that are now available to us are teacher’s texts. Zen monks commonly became temple priests as well as teachers. A Zen monastery is a teacher’s college. The teaching structure is or was primarily aimed at creating teachers. Texts that were once esoteric and largely hidden away in temple libraries are now common property. For a nominal sum, we take them off the shelves of our local bookstores. But many of these texts were written by teachers for teachers.
            Now, selling rice hulls or even the vague traces of old prostrations are standard fare in the marketplace.
            What does this have to do with teaching?

            Linji’s instructions are instructions for a teacher. He is not teaching knitting or carpentry or computer repair. But he is also teaching us how to be a student. The issue, obviously, is vocation. But the question is, how do we recognize vocation?
            And this is the line in the earth. What is our own ‘One’? What brings us back to our self? What holds value explicitly for us, as individuals?

            Aesthetics are the bridge because, ultimately, they show the universality of desire. But, at the same moment, in order to understand the work, we cannot avoid the individual, the vocation, the uniqueness of the personality inherent in every legitimate work of art.
            This is what lifts us out of the arena of rice hulls and prostrations.