Gateless Gate, Case 8 Mumonkan

Gettan Osho said, “Keichu, the first wheelmaker, made a cart whose wheels had a hundred spokes. Now, suppose you took a cart and removed both the wheels and the axle. What would you have? -from Two Zen Classics by Katsuki Sekida

Alternatives to this concluding question are: “What would he make clear about the cart?” (Koun Yamada).

Or “What will it Be?” (Zenkei Shimbayama)

Mumon’s Comment:
If anyone can directly master this topic, his eye will be like a shooting star, his spirit like a flash of lightning.

Mumon’s Verse:
When the spiritual wheels turn,
Even the master fails to follow them.
They travel in all directions, above and below,
North, south, east, and west.

The immediate benefit we gain from this koan is that we now know the name of the guy who invented the wheel, Keichu. Thanks to Keichu, and thanks to the guy, maybe also Keichu, who first coined the word “cart.” Now whenever we look at a certain kind of wheeled vehicle, we are able to identify it as a cart. We have a practical need to discriminate between carts and other stuff. We have a practical need to discriminate in general, and language is our skilful means of doing that. But in this clarifying act of naming, in this essential human activity, lies a hidden cost, a loss, we might say, of beginner’s mind. Many koans, in one way or another, aim at undoing this loss. In this case, the issue of what is in a name is front and center.

Words are the common currency of human interchange. They’re so ubiquitous that, in general, they pour from us in a stream. We are only fitfully aware of words as words. But the degree to which we are unconscious of language as a mind-made medium is the degree we are held in its sway; once we know the name “cart”, we are spellbound to see as a cart. Once anything is named, it becomes some thing, an object, out there: solid, discrete, itself. A cart is itself, not a toaster oven, or a stagecoach, or even a wagon. Certainly not a horse. Such discriminations rescue us from being drowned in the chaotic ocean of sensory experience. Yet Lao Tzu wisely says, ”Once there are heroes [rescuers], already there is disharmony in the state.” We might add, “Once there are words, or once there are carts, already there is disharmony in the state of being.” There is separation, dualism. I’d add that there is a longing to overcome that separation, a longing which the everyday miracle of words helps or induces us to forget.

We are sitting in this room today because, at some level, we feel a longing for separation to end. Our original nature is always with us; we’re afloat in an undifferentiated ocean of being, that is, in turn, always calling out to its twin, our everyday mind. Only in moments when the din of everyday mind quiets, do we hear that call. Basho’s haiku beautifully expresses this:

Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto

Amid the bustle of the everyday—the creaking of the carts carrying goods throughout Kyoto city—Basho hears the call of the cuckoo, unscored notes from the wild world. Instantly he awakens to his longing for the absolute, for unconditioned Kyoto. Kyoto, the city of a thousand temples, has within in it a thousand structures erected in recognition of the longed-for Kyoto inside Kyoto. But we are own Kyoto’s.

Though it’s made of words, today’s koan, “Ketchu the Wheelmaker,” is a kind of cuckoo cry that invites us to inhabit the world before the first use of the word “cart,” before the first wheel, before the first humans, before the earth, before the Big Bang. It is the same world we live in but which lies concealed in the anesthetizing glory of language, in our verbal negotiations—both high and low. Because language is so effective, we tend to forget that the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. We forget the moon is and is not “the moon.”

But let’s go back and imagine when words were first being invented. In a book called Language and Myth, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirier calls these first words “ momentary deities.” At the outset, he thinks language and myth are the same. The world is a sensory blur, a bewildering cascade of photons and pheromones. Words seem to pluck things out of that flux: the sun, the moon, the path of moonlight on water, the first flowers of spring, spring itself. All deities. Cassirer explains how this birth of language changes the world:

Uttered sounds of language … confront man not as a creation of his own, but as … an objective reality … As soon as the tension and emotion of the moment has found its discharge in the word or the mythical image, a sort of turning point has occurred in human mentality; the inner excitement which was a mere subjective state has vanished and resolved in the objective form of myth or of speech.

Cassirer defines man as a symbol-making animal, and thus, for him, the birth of language, the ultimate symbol system, is a triumph: “a turning point.” Note he says that once the word, the momentary deity, comes into being, “the inner excitement which was a mere subjective state has vanished and resolved into the objective …”

“Mere subjectivity?” Hmmm. The excitement of subjectivity vanishes in the face of the great god of objectivity? But isn’t zazen all about the resourceful restoration of non-dual subjectivity, of intimacy with nameless, moment-by-moment being? In the world beyond objects, before words, prior to momentary—and then permanent—deities, what we have is emptiness, non-separation. In Samadhi, the world is “not two,”
which is where the koan would like to deposit us.

Gettan Osho said, “Keichu, the first wheelmaker, made a cart whose wheels had a hundred spokes. Now, suppose you took a cart and removed both the wheels and the axle. What would you have? The commentary by Katsuke Sekida in Two Zen Classics says the wheels are like the body and the axle is like the brain. The koan is thus asking what we are—apart from our body and mind. What ultimately are we?

Mumon’s Comment: If anyone can directly master this topic, his eye will be like a shooting star, his spirit like a flash of lightning.

In other words, if we let go of our labels, our objectifications, our cart-ography, we may be illuminated and illuminating. We will be delivered—flash—from mere objectivity into the primal joy of intimacy with all being. We see this moment dramatized in this haiku by Masaoka Shiki:

Lightning flash—
in the bottom of the basin,
water someone forgot to throw out

What could be more ordinary than used washwater, than a cart? Yet if we can let go of it as washwater, as a cart, as separate, the flash arises.

But if the flash arises, why then does Mumon’s verse say this?:
When the spiritual wheels turn,
Even the master fails to follow them.
They travel in all directions, above and below,
North, south, east, and west.

Why say that the master fails to follow the spinning spiritual wheel? To trick us. It’s no damn failure at all. If we let go of “cart” and of objectification, there is nothing to follow; we are the wheels. Think of the eminent Buddhist Tina Turner as she gyrating and belting out “the big wheel keeps on turning.” How to tell the dancer from the dance?”

In our culture, we suffer from a huge bias in favor of the objective. Of logocentrism. The Book of Genesis says, “In the beginning was the word and the word was God.” A Zen interpretation of this might be to say that the “world” came into being when we—aka God—began to conceive of it as a world, a world with a beginning. Once you have a beginning then you want to know who began it. Enter God. Language, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, often puts the cart of language and convention before the horse of being. Buddha and Buddha mind puts the horse of being before the mind-made cart.

Mumon’s verse ends, “The wheels travel in all directions, above and below,/ North, south, east and west.” The mind is free. All koans want to set us free. They all ask us in different ways to let go of our interpreted world, to wean ourselves from thralldom to grammar, meaning, the need for a new cart to replace last year’s model . Koans, even when they seem like enhanced interrogation techniques, are really Mother Marys, Avolokitesvaras who whisper to us to let go, let be.

Gettan Osho said, “Keichu, the first wheelmaker, made a cart whose wheels had a hundred spokes. Now, suppose you took a cart and removed both the wheel and the axle. What would you have?”

Suppose you consider a koan as a kind of cart, and you take away the word koan, and you take away the words of the koan; then let go of the words of this dharma talk; also take away me as the speaker and you as the listeners. What, my fellow lightning bolts, do we have then?