Philosopher’s Disease

Huston Smith didn’t know he had it until he tried to explain a koan to a roshi.

The roshi at Myoshinji sodo monastery did not want spiritual sightseers, which he suspected I must be. He was training thirty monks fifteen hours a day to achieve a rarefied state of mind, and here was a Western religious tourist (he assumed) who would demand exceptions to be made in his case. In my initial interview, Goto Roshi in effect dismissed me by saying that everyone there practiced sitting in the lotus position, knowing full well that Westerners could not. As it happened, though, I could.

I had never practiced the lotus position for longer than half an hour, but at the monastery we sat for hours at a stretch (or not stretched). My legs were in physical agony. The physical pain slowly abated over two months—and was nothing compared with my mental agony when I began the study of koans.

Koans are Zen riddles that you do not solve so much as step through, as through Alice’s looking glass, into Mad Hatterish conundrums designed to stun rational sense and in its place induce wordless insight. Perfect, simply perfect, for driving a professor of philosophy insane. The most famous koan is, What is the sound of one hand clapping? (Don’t try hitting one hand in the air. Do, and you’ll hear the sound of one hand clapping—the roshi’s against the side of your head.) My koan concerned a monk who asked Joshu (a famous master in Tang-dynasty China), “Does a dog have a buddhanature?” Joshu’s answer seemed to imply no. The conundrum: since the Buddha said that even the grass has buddhanature, how can a dog not have it?

Every day I came up with another ingenious answer; every day the roshi frowned and shook his head no; every day the bell would ring and I would be told to come back tomorrow. I turned the koan upside down; I pulled it inside out; I unpacked each word and repacked its meaning. Finally I thought, I’ve got it. The key word was have. A dog does not have buddhannature, not the way I have a shirt or an ice-cream cone. Rather buddhanature has, or is, momentarily taking the shape of that dog. But the roshi did not even hear out my ingenious solution. Halfway through my explanation he roared at me, “You have the philosopher’s disease!” Then he softened a bit: “There’s nothing wrong with philosophy. I myself have a master’s degree in it from one of our better universities. Philosophy works only with reason, though, and there’s nothing wrong with reason, either. Your reasoning is fine, but your experience is limited. Enlarge your experience, and your philosophy will be different.” Ding-a-ling-a-ling sounded the little bell—signal that the interview was over. I had my impossible assignment: to think of how to think the way I do not think.

From Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, An Autobiography, by Huston Smith with Jeffery Paine. Published by HarperOne.

Excerpted from the November 2009 Issue of the Shambhala Sun

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