What is the sound of one hand clapping?
I will give you the answer in this video and you will hate it.
Zen 禅 Buddhism came to Japan from China pretty early on, in the Nara Period.
But it wasn’t until the Kamakura Period that Zen exploded in popularity, and its shrapnel
struck the Old Buddhist schools in the religious authority.
Kamakura was a period of Buddhist revolution.
It was a time of fresh ideas, and 3 fresh schools of Buddhism popped up,
thinking they’re all that: Pure Land 浄土, Nichiren 日蓮, and Zen 禅.
They were young, new, and they wanted you.
The Old Buddhist schools like Tendai and Shingon couldn’t stand them.
This video is about Zen.
Two monks brought Zen to Japan.
Eisai 栄西 was the father of the Rinzai 臨済 sect of Zen in Japan.
And Dōgen 道元 was the father of the Sōtō 曹洞 sect.
Let’s talk about these guys first before we talk about their flavors of Zen.
Eisai was born to a well off family of Shinto priests, but instead of following in his family’s footsteps,
he hiked his own trail and ended up in a Buddhist temple.
What a rebel.
You can bet his Asian parents asked where they went wrong, and why he wasn’t like
his cousin who graduated Shinto priest school with a 4.0.
Eisai had ambitions.
Some kids wish to be astronauts when they grow up, some wish to be ninja pirates.
Eisai wished to be a major Buddhist leader.
There’s always a weird one.
He was a Tendai monk.
Tendai was the strongest school of Buddhism at the time, but it used to be stronger.
The religious creativity in the Old Buddhism schools had been dwindling,
while those Pure Land bastards were coming up with new ideas and crap.
Tendai was Facebook and Pure Land was TikTok, new and hot and filled with the latest thots.
In his quest to restore Tendai to its former glory, Eisai visited China twice.
Buddhism had come to Japan from China long ago,
so he figured updating to the latest version of Buddhism would surely help.
He was all hyped to learn new Tendai teachings.
However, he found out that the Chinese weren’t that into Tendai anymore.
They were all creaming their monk’s robes over this thing called Zen, or Chan 禪 in Chinese.
Zen was the main school of Buddhism in China.
Monks were talking about Zen in all the popular water bars across the country.
It seemed exciting and lively.
They did shouts in training and masters even slapped their students who fell asleep during meditation,
or just slapped them to stimulate the mind.
Apparently my dad was a Zen monk.
Eisai returned to Japan with a Rinzai Zen teaching license, a bunch of Zen books,
and a mission.
He built the first Zen temple in Japan, the Shōfukuji.
Then he went to his Tendai colleagues and discussed these exciting new ideas with them.
And after the Welcome Back party, they kicked him out of the capital.
“Another one fallen to the New Buddhism devil,” they thought.
Eisai stood back up, dusted off his pride, and said,
“Screw you guys, I’m going to the shogunate.”
The shogunate was a new military government that just won a war against the ruling Imperial
Court, and the Court was like, “Please don’t kill us” and the shogunate was all,
“Oh alright, I hope you learned your lesson. Sharing is caring.”
And so they shared ruling the country.
Eisai knocked on the shogunate doors.
At first they were like, “For the last time, we don’t want solar panels.”
But Eisai made his pitch for Rinzai Zen and was apparently mighty convincing because the
shogunate lent him their support.
Why? China was a trendsetter in religion, culture, and other s--t.
Hearing that this school of Buddhism was so popular in China, the shogunate leaders thought
they had better hop on this Zen train early and grab the first class seats.
Prestige and authority are valuable fuels for a new government.
Eisai went back to Kyoto, the capital, with barrels full of shogunate money and defiantly
laid on the ground his balls, which took the form of a temple.
He built the temple Kenninji 建仁寺.
At first he wanted to build it in the shape of a middle finger pointing at his old colleagues
who kicked him out of the capital, but figured that wouldn’t have been very Zen.
Besides, he didn’t hate the Old Buddhism schools.
He still called himself a Tendai monk, and just wanted to strengthen the Tendai school
by mixing some Zen into it, like how a little whiskey enhances a morning coffee.
When he first took this journey, he had no intention of starting a new branch of Buddhism in Japan.
Then along came Dōgen 道元, who started a new branch of Buddhism.
Eisai was the father of Rinzai Zen in Japan, and Dōgen fathered Sōtō Zen in Japan.
The delivery was tough.
Dōgen was born to a noble family.
His parents rudely died when he was young, so at the youthful age of 13 he entered Enryakuji,
the main Tendai temple.
He was a big religious nerd and dove into his studies, but he saw that the way the monks
around him behaved was nothing like the teachings in the scriptures.
They schemed with politicians and played political games, they even slept with young acolytes.
Dōgen was appalled.
He hated political games.
One day, he had enough and told the Tendai school,
“It’s not you, it’s me, and my new boyfriend” and he left to go study Zen with Eisai.
In 1223, he traveled to China and trained under a Sōtō Zen master.
He had a religious experience that his master informed him was a state of enlightenment.
“Cool,” he said, and returned to Japan.
Dōgen went even further than Eisai.
Eisai taught Zen alongside Old Buddhism.
But Dōgen said, “Old Buddhism can kiss my religious ass, and any other type of Buddhism,
they’re all useless.
You can only achieve enlightenment through Zen meditation.”
Of course, the Old Buddhists wanted to go nowhere near his ass,
but they did harass his ass en masse.
He tried to teach Sōtō Zen in Kyoto and they bullied him out of there.
He tried to teach near the outskirts of Kyoto, and they bullied him out of there.
Eventually he had to move to another province.
There, Dōgen was finally able to teach a Buddhism separated from politics.
So what the heck is Zen 禅?
It means meditation.
The historical Buddha reached enlightenment through meditation.
If it’s good enough for Buddha, then it’s good enough for your sorry buttcheeks.
This video is not really about Zen, it’s about how it started in Japan,
but we can talk Zen philosophy for a bit. Or try to.
Usually after discussing Zen for 5 minutes you start lubing up your body and wrestling
pigs because those are easier to grasp.
Zen is about experiencing enlightenment through meditation.
Everyone is born enlightened, they just don’t know it.
Zen training doesn’t help you reach enlightenment, it makes you aware of your existing enlightenment.
Humans tend to see the world as made up of different things.
We separate the world into different things.
There’s a tree, there’s a house, there’s a goddess.
We especially like to separate the world into opposites.
Good and evil, night and day, happiness and sadness, mind and body.
This is called dualistic thinking.
Things are either one or the other, they can’t be both.
It can’t be both day and night.
BAM. You just got hit by a Zen monk with a wooden plank.
That’s what you get for thinking with logic and reason.
They hated that crap.
Day and night are different, but also the same.
Day cannot exist without night. They are one.
They’re connected, dependent on each other, always affecting the other in a day-night cycle.
To separate them means you tend to focus on one at a time,
and risk missing the other in the process.
You must see them both as one to fully understand them.
But wait, that’s not enough.
In seeing them as one, now you’ve missed what makes them unique.
So you must see them as two.
But wait, we just said--
The answer, you dummy, is that you must see them as neither one nor two, then will you
fully understand the reality of day and night.
Now. Get ready, take my hand, and let me guide you to the climax.
Take a look at your palm.
It’s clearly a part of you and separate from the air, right?
But zoom in and it’s made of atoms.
Zoom in more and it’s made of quarks.
How can you tell the difference between a quark of you and a quark in an oxygen atom in the air?
When you breathe in, are the oxygen atoms in your lungs part of you or part of the air?
What about when they enter your bloodstream?
In the atomic world, where do you end and the rest of the world begins?
The universe is a sea of atoms that at times flow together and give the illusion of form.
All things are one with the sea, even you.
You are not separate. You don’t exist.
You are part of the sea.
You are the sea and you are yourself at the same time.
This understanding is called enlightenment.
Alright let me pull you back from the mushroom trip before the feds come.
So that’s what Zen is about. It’s hard to put into words.
Language and logic fail to convey the experience.
I guess that’s the point. Omg I’ve just been Zen’d.
The two sects of Zen in Japan at the time, Rinzai and Sōtō, had similar ideas.
The main difference was how they trained.
The Rinzai sect use kōans 公案 to help them become aware of their enlightenment.
Kōans are what make Zen sound deep to teenagers.
The most famous kōan is: What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Another one is: What is your face before your parents were born?
As you can see, kōans are insufferable.
They sound like words from a college student who just took Philosophy 101, or a stoner. Same thing.
Omg Zen’d again.
A kōan is a question, or a statement, or a story, or a conversation that at first makes
no logical sense, but when you meditate on it long enough,
you would realize that it makes no logical sense.
They said enlightenment was like the clouds parting and seeing the moon.
The moon was always there.
You were always enlightened, you just didn’t see it because your rational mind clouded reality.
It may sound good to be a logical person, but you interpret reality through the lens
of logical reasoning.
Kōans are supposed to show you the limits of rationality and even language, so you can
get rid of all of that and experience reality and the connectedness of all things.
As you read a kōan, you’ll reach a WTF moment where you go, “WTF?”
And that’s when your journey starts.
Go meditate on the WTF for a few months.
Clear your mind. Nothing exists but the WTF.
A Zen master would hit his student with a kōan and let him meditate on it.
The student had to give an answer that the master deemed acceptable.
It could take days, or months, or years.
Afterwards, the master would hit him with another kōan.
And that was Zen training.
The master would not tell him the answer, because that would be intellectual knowledge,
using language and rationality.
Useless, peh!
The student needed experiential knowledge, meaning he needed to experience it through meditation.
There are supposed to be 1700 kōans.
Now I don’t know if anyone actually counted, but who cares, does math even exist?
The Sōtō sect saw their Rinzai cousins pulling their nose hair out because of the riddles,
and were like, “That’s silly, innit?”
Kōans were a tiny part of the Sōtō curriculum.
Sōtō monks preferred sitting meditation.
They did the most meditation out of anyone.
They sat on their butts all day and did some actual work.
Sōtō meditation was supposed to be without purpose or thoughts or desires, just an empty mind.
Some of you are already experts.
This is a little different from Rinzai meditation, where you focus on a kōan to clear your mind of other thoughts.
Meditation was not just a method to realize enlightenment.
Dōgen said that meditation and enlightenment were the same.
Remember how they hated dualistic thinking?
The moment you sat down and meditated was the moment you started experiencing enlightenment.
Everyone is a buddha.
You meditate because that’s what buddhas do.
So you must meditate all the time.
Alright, so what is the sound of one hand clapping?
The Simpsons already answered this.
No answer? Lisa listen up.
Just kidding. No, that question is actually a misquote.
The actual quote is:
“Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”
It’s not asking what’s the sound of one hand clapping, but what’s the sound of a hand?
There’s no right answer, just ones that your master would accept.
So I thought long and hard about this.
I meditated one day, but found nothing.
I meditated a second day, and a third, but still nothing.
But after a week, in the middle of meditation, I finally turned on my computer and Googled the answers.
Let me know which one you like.
Then I’ll tell you why they’re not answers at all.
Once, a student answered by putting one hand forward.
And his master said, “Acceptable.”
The one hand belonged to the student, but it also represented all hands.
It was both itself and not itself.
The sound of one hand was the same as the sound of every other hand.
Another answer is that when you use two hands to clap, that reeks of dualism because you
treat the two hands as separate things.
Like how you treat night and day as separate things.
But they are actually the same. Night is the one hand.
The earth is the one hand. All things are the one hand.
So the sound of one hand is the same as the sound of two.
Another story tells of a student who answered like this.
He tries to name different sounds that may sound like a hand, like dripping water,
the sound of the wind, or the sound of bugs flying.
Each time, his master says “No.”
The student keeps naming sound after sound until after a year, he has exhausted all sounds.
And then he comes to a realization.
He tells his master, “I have exhausted all sounds, so I have reached the soundless sound.”
And that was acceptable.
Here’s a final answer. The sound of one hand is: “of one hand.”
Think about that.
Okay so these were acceptable answers, but they ain’t satisfying answers.
Zen aficionados say that you can’t just tell someone the answer like it’s math homework
and a bully has your underwear in pre-wedgie position.
No, a person must experience the answer.
That experience is the answer.
So those 4 answers we mentioned were actually wrong.
But wait, right and wrong are the same. Therefore they were right answers.
Alright, this was a weird video.
For more Buddhism history, check out these videos.
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