This Japanese use of pillar-standing transforms the familiar Western medieval austerity of Saint Simeon Stylites into a purposeful serf-discipline. It is no longer an austerity. All kinds of physical exercises in Japan, whether of the Zen cult, or the common practices of the peasant villages, undergo this kind of transformation. In many places of the world diving into freezing water and standing under mountain waterfalls, are standard austerities, sometimes to mortify the flesh, sometimes to obtain pity from the gods, sometimes to induce trance. The favorite Japanese cold-austerity was standing or sitting in an ice-cold waterfall before dawn, or dousing oneself three times during a winter night with icy water. But the object was to train one’s conscious self fill one no longer noticed the discomfort A devotee’s purpose was to train himself to continue his meditation without interruption. When neither the cold shock of the water nor the shivering of the body in the cold dawn registered in his consciousness he was ‘expert.’ There was no other reward.
Mental training had to be equally self-appropriated. A man might associate himself with a teacher, but the teacher could not ‘teach’ in the Occidental sense, because nothing a novice learned from any source outside himself was of any importance. The teacher might hold discussions with the novice, but he did not lead him gently into a new intellectual realm. The teacher was considered to be most helpful when he was most rude. If, without warning, the master broke the tea bowl the novice was raising to his lips, or tripped him, or struck his knuckles with a brass rod, the shock might galvanize him into sudden insight. It broke through his complacency. The monkish books are filled with incidents of this kind.
The most favored technique for inducing the novice’s desperate attempt ‘to know’ were the koan, literally ‘the problems.’ There are said to be seventeen hundred of these problems, and the anecdote books make nothing of a man’s devoting seven years to the solution of one of them. They are not meant to have rational solutions. One is ‘To conceive the clapping of one hand.’ Another is ‘To feel the yearning for one’s mother before one’s own conception.’ Others are, ‘Who is carrying one’s lifeless body?’ ‘Who is it who is walking toward me?’ ‘All things return into One; where does this last return?’ Such Zen problems as these were used in China before the twelfth or thirteenth century, and Japan adopted these techniques along with the cult. On the continent, however, they did not survive. In Japan they are a most important part of training in ‘expertness.’ Zen handbooks treat them with extreme seriousness. ‘Koan enshrine the dilemma of life.’ A man who is pondering one, they say, reaches an impasse like ‘a pursued rat that has run up a blind tunnel,’ he is like a man ‘with a ball of red-hot iron stuck in his throat,’ he is ‘a mosquito trying to bite a lump of iron.’ He is beside himself and redoubles his efforts. Finally the screen of his ‘observing self’ between his mind and his problem fails aside; with the swiftness of a flash of lightning the two – mind and problem – come to terms. He ‘knows.’
After these descriptions of bow-string-taut mental effort it is an anticlimax to search the incident books for great truths gained with all this expenditure. Nangaku, for instance, spent eight years on the problem, ‘Who is it who is walking toward me?’ At last he understood. His words were: ‘Even when one affirms that there is something here, one omits the whole.’ Nevertheless, there is a general pattern in the revelations. It is suggested in the lines of dialogue:
Novice: How shall I escape from the Wheel of Birth and Death?
Master: Who puts you under restraint? (i.e., binds you to this Wheel.)
What they learn, they say, is, in the famous Chinese phrase, that they ‘were looking for an ox when they were riding on one.’ They learn that ‘What is necessary is not the net and the trap but the fish or the animal these instruments were meant to catch.’ They learn, that is, in Occidental phraseology, that both horns of the dilemma are irrelevant. They learn that goals may be attained with present means if the eyes of the spirit are opened. Anything is possible, and with no help from anyone but oneself.
The significance of the koan does not lie in the truths these seekers after truth discover, which are the world-wide truths of the mystics. It lies in the way the Japanese conceive the search for truth.