I Am Chipmunk, Hear Me Roar!

“To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.”
–Louis Pasteur

In Soto Zen, we sometimes practice sitting with koans–teaching stories or poems from ancient texts that are designed to circumvent our logical thinking and thereby help us understand something on a different level. The Book of Serenity is one of our most well-known collections of koans and has many provocative stories. Case 38 is titled “Rinzai’s True Person of No Rank,” and I have been thinking about this koan quite a bit during my time in Yellowstone.
Here is the case:

Introduction:
Taking a robber for your own child, taking a servant for the master:
Could a broken ladle of wood ever be your ancestor’s skull?
The saddle bone for a donkey could never be your father’s jawbone.
When bestowing land with a new branch temple, how would you discern the master?

Case:
Rinzai instructed his assembly and said,
“There is one true person of no rank, always coming out and going in through the gates of your face. Beginners who have not yet witnessed that, look! look!”
Then a monk came out and asked, “What is the one true person of no rank?”
Rinzai descended from the rostrum and grabbed him. The monk hesitated. Rinzai pushed him away and said, “The true person of no rank–what a shit-stick you are!”

I got started thinking about this koan as the result of a random moment at the beginning of my stay that challenged my ordinary thoughts about who I was. When Rob and I went to our HR orientation for work, we were brought to a room and fitted with our uniforms. Rob went first, and was issued three polo shirts, a hat, and a name tag. Then it was my turn. I was asked whether I wanted the men’s cut or women’s cut for my t-shirt, and also given a name tag. But wait a minute! What’s with the t-shirt? I think I’d actually look much better in a shirt with a collar, thank you very much. And how come Rob’s name tag has his last name and title on it, whereas my name tag just has my first name? It was then that I realized that no one actually cared if I’d look better with a collar, I was given the uniform that was appropriate to my rank. And my rank in this case required a t-shirt, an apron, and a hat. Who did I think I was? Dr. Nancy Easton doesn’t exist out here. This was really a point to ponder for a moment. And I have been pondering it ever since. Because for the most part, none of us knows much about anyone else’s previous life outside of here. And yet, we do know each other. How is that? What comes through when we strip away all of our history and external signifiers?

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of our Zen lineage in the United States, once addressed this issue with his students. When everyone began wearing robes in the zendo during an early practice period, he observed that although with the robes everyone looked the same, it was only then that he could see who each person really was. A kind person will still be a kind person, and a selfish person will remain a selfish person. Of course, even these qualities about people can change. There are no static qualities in anyone’s life. Moreover, you may have noticed that you have a tendency to act in a certain way with one person, but you don’t act that way with another person. Context is everything. We are each responding to the conditions around us all the time: the time of day, the particular person you are interacting with and whoever they might remind you of from your past, how well you slept last night, other distractions that may be interrupting you, and so on and so on. We are co-creating our world all the time at a level that is usually below our conscious awareness. Which means that there is room to change. If we don’t like the way we spoke to someone today, we can try to speak differently tomorrow.

But if we don’t like the way someone spoke to us, well that’s another matter. That is actually something that we can practice with. Like my mini-awakening to my feelings about being issued a t-shirt, it’s worth looking at what is going on internally when someone speaks to you in a way that you don’t like. Did their words or tone make you feel inferior? Stupid? Guilty? We can look at where those feelings came from in our earlier life, and whether we may still feel that way somewhere deep inside. But also, aside from taking their words personally, we could reflect on what might be going on for that person that has nothing to do with us. Are they stressed? Did something happen to make them feel uncomfortable and now they’re passing it along to us? There are so many possibilities on so many levels that it makes it difficult to keep up our inner narrative about who did what to whom. And so I often find myself trying to just let things go. If I don’t like what someone said to me, I might notice myself feeling it for a moment, but then moving on to the next moment and trying to start fresh. We always have the capacity to change, to turn things around. Zen practice certainly involves meditation, but it’s the way we bring our meditative mind to our life off of the cushion that really matters. That’s where the rubber hits the road.

I’ve just started reading a book on animal communication, entitled Eavesdropping on Animals by George Bumann, a Yellowstone naturalist and renowned expert in animal communication. It sounded so interesting, and I’ve been wanting to better understand the animals I’m encountering here and how to read their intentions. And I’m sure we’ll get there, but what I wasn’t expecting to find is that the first step to understanding animal communication is actually listening. Or more accurately, listening and observing their behavior. Being curious. Just like a Zen master, George Bumann provides the reader with instructions on how to let go of our own narrative and just pay attention to the sounds, sights, and smells around us. Only once we’ve been able to take in some outside information can we begin to make sense of it.

We spend so much time engaged in our own narrative about the world: “I’m right. They’re wrong. She’s too rigid. He’s too messy.” It’s sometimes hard to remember that we aren’t the center of the universe. Or rather, we are the center of the universe, but so is everyone else. Everyone else, even the tiny chipmunk standing up on the giant boulder, is the center of their own universe. Are they big? Are they small? It’s all completely relative and depends on context. So who is the true person of no rank? If you’re paying attention, he/she/they is there all the time, but if you think you’ve found him/her/them, you’ve missed the mark. We tell people who we are in a thousand different ways all day long, whether we want to or not. But who are you? And how do you discern the master?

“If you don’t understand the way right before you, how will you know the path as you walk?”
–Shitou Xiqian (Sekito Kisen), 700-791