There are countless ways in which we can feel inwardly divided or somehow alienated from our true self. Case 35 of the Mumonkan, or Gateless Gate koan collection addresses this matter with a pointed question about Seijo, the character in a traditional Chinese story who ends up living parallel lives. The koan asks, “Which one is the true Seijo?” Naturally, the answer is “Both… and neither.”
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Seijo Is Separated from Her Soul
Our Inward Dividedness and Sense of Alienation from Ourselves
Who Are You, Really?
Investigating the Ultimate Question with Courage
The Undying Person in the Grass Hut
Seijo Is Separated from Her Soul
Here is case 35 of the Mumonkan (this translation by Kōun Yamada Roshi):
Goso asked a monk. “Seijo and her soul are separated; which one is the true Seijo?”[i]
Goso is the teacher, and this question is his challenge to the monk.
The story behind this koan is an old Chinese legend from the Tang period, the story of a girl (jo) named Sei. Seijo and a young man named Ochu fell in love, but Seijo’s father, Chokan, arranged for her to marry someone else. Heartbroken, Ochu left town in a small boat. As he rowed away, he saw Seijo running after him along the riverbank, and the two ran off together. They married, had two children, and lived happily. Over time, however, Seijo began thinking about her father and how much he must miss her. She and Ochu decided to return home, ask forgiveness for leaving, and try to repair the relationship. When they arrived, Ochu went ahead to explain everything to Seijo’s father, but Chokan was incredulous. Seijo, he said, had never left. Since the day Ochu departed, she had been lying comatose in bed. Then the Seijo who had traveled with Ochu approached the comatose Seijo, and when the two met, they became one again.
That, then, is the folk legend behind this koan question: Which one is the true Seijo? We might say the true Seijo is the one who followed her bliss — the one who followed her love and, because of her circumstances, had to separate from her body to do so. Or perhaps the part of her that pursued her own desires was separated from her soul? Maybe that is why, even though she was living happily with Ochu in a foreign land, she felt divided and needed to return home—to return to her body.
Our Inward Dividedness and Sense of Alienation from Ourselves
What matters here is how this story calls to mind the ways we become alienated from ourselves and our lives. Sometimes the split is between mind and body. Sometimes it is between the heart—our sense of authenticity and love—and the defensiveness, anxiety, and habits that keep us feeling and acting as if we are separate and unsafe. Our sense of inward dividedness may be due to the apparent tension between our sincere aspiration to practice and our desire for worldly things: To experience, acquire, get involved, and stay busy.
Maybe our sense of separation shows up when we lose touch with our appreciation for silence and stillness. We may touch that stillness when we’re sitting zazen, on retreat, or out in nature. Then we return to ordinary activity driven by necessity, compulsion, hurry, anxiety, and habit. We may also experience insight into our own life and behavior but then fail to integrate or embody it. If you have been practicing for any length of time, you’ve probably had some kind of realization: “Oh, I don’t have to do that,” or “I could choose to be like this,” or “I could let this go.” As you experience the insight, there can be a feeling of relief — “Great! From now on, everything will be different.” But then, even though part of you knows better, you find yourself pulled back into the same patterns.
There are many other experiences of duality, tension, inner conflict, and alienation that arise in our lives. So, who are you, really? I think we tend to identify with whatever aspect of ourselves we judge to be better. We might think, “Well, I am the peaceful, wise one. The one who gets caught up in karma? I don’t know who that is.” We realize that the one who gets caught up is connected to us somehow, but more as a burden than as us. Alternatively, of course, you may identify with the one who gets caught in karma and therefore dwell on shame or frustration. And yet who is it who aspires to become more liberated?
Who Are You, Really?
When the Buddha explained the truth of anatta, or not-self, he said something I have always loved. In the Anattalakkhaṇasutta, he says that if something were truly self, we should be able to say, “May it be like this. May it not be like that.”[ii] And then whatever we have willed would come about! If the body were self, we should be able to say, “May it be comfortable, may it not be painful,” and it would be thus. If our thoughts were self, we should be able to say, “May my thoughts subside, may I not have those thoughts,” and immediately it would be so.
The same can be said to be true of our feelings, sensations, perceptions, will, consciousness, and all the other aspects of our being that we might identify with. Clearly, none of these things are completely under our control. None of them are fully graspable. Am I my body, thoughts, feelings, emotions, opinions, motivations, desires, preferences, personality, relationships, job, possessions, ability to reason, compassion, or my knowledge? Anything we can think of as “me” changes. All of it is ultimately ungraspable. In a sense these things are real, but when we look closely and try locate and define them, we find they have no fixed form.
Everything we usually identify as self or belonging to self we will eventually lose. This is why so many koans ask about our true nature: Who are you, really? Again and again, a teacher is essentially asking the student this question: Who are you? The teacher asks you to respond from who you truly are—not from what you think, or what you remember, or what you believe you should say. This is not easy. It is not straightforward. This is responding to the fundamental Zen question.
If someone thinks they have settled the matter of who they truly are without conscious spiritual practice, their answer is probably fairly superficial. Many people might say, “I know who I am,” and that is fine; it is not our job to prove that other people don’t know who they are. But often, when we look closely at self and others, we see a kind of defensiveness and rigidity around identity: “This is who I am. I don’t want it questioned. I don’t want it changed. I don’t want it challenged.”
It should not be easy to say who we really are. Part of practice is learning to tolerate and make our peace with the discomfort we experience when we admit we aren’t sure who we really are. The first thing we have to do is let go of the idea that we should know. Our culture tells us that once we’re adults—eighteen years old, maybe twenty-one, perhaps after we have had our twenties to mess around, but certainly by thirty-we should have ourselves figured out. We’re supposed to have it together, to be an adult. If we’re worthy of respect, we should be able to give a confident answer: “Yes, I know who I am.” We stake out our territory, stand up for ourselves, and try to avoid being humiliated.
Investigating the Ultimate Question with Courage
But we cannot become intimate with our true nature unless we explore not-knowing with great courage and curiosity. In those koans where the master says, “Give me an answer,” and the monk remains silent, it is not because the monk is stupid. Their silence is actually a sign of wisdom. The monk knows what not to reach for. They know they cannot simply parrot a teaching, try to be clever, or force some bold response. So, they remain silent because they do not yet know what or where to speak from.
Few of us would have the courage to investigate this question—to open ourselves to it—without the encouragement of the Dharma ancestors. Common sense and culture say, “Why are you asking yourself that? That’s ridiculous. You know who you are.” But the Dharma ancestors tell you to keep looking. They tell you that you can find yourself, that you can reunite the apparently divided parts of yourself.
Nothing is sweeter or more liberating than recognizing your true nature, and you have to investigate this for yourself. Listening to descriptions of what your true nature is like can only take you so far; you will not realize it that way. You have to wander the inner halls of your own body-mind, your own quandary—searching, inquiring, testing, and questioning.
However, the teachings can inspire us and help us avoid certain pitfalls or at least recognize when we have fallen into one. This is Mumon’s commentary on the koan:
If you realize the true one in this, you will understand that getting out of one shell and entering another is just like a traveler staying at an inn; if you have not realized it, don’t rush about wildly. When earth, water, fire, and wind are suddenly about to decompose, you will be like a crab which has fallen into boiling water and is struggling with its seven arms and eight legs. At that time, don’t say I didn’t warn you.[iii]
Mumon’s comments are a little grim, but shifting the emphasis away from the warning, we can hear the teaching: “If you realize the true one, you will understand that getting out of one shell and entering another is like a traveler staying at an inn.” What is always present through all your states and changes, through all your circumstances, responses, and experiences? What is it that gets out of one shell and enters another, so that Seijo lying comatose at home and Seijo running off to follow her dreams are both expressions of the same traveler? What animates them? What lives in both? Or through both?
Another way of asking this question about your true nature appears in a different koan: What is your face before your parents were born? That question strips everything away—your body, your personality, your circumstances. What is your face apart from all of that? And yet, as Dogen says, “it is never apart from this very place,”[iv] so you don’t find It elsewhere, either.
If you think you have found It, allow your conviction to be tested. It’s best to humbly allow any shallow understanding to be revealed, because it’s easy to stop partway—to find some solace in the Dharma, reach some level of self-acceptance, and lose your inspiration for practice. Certainly, one of the wonderful gifts of practice is that, after a while, we learn to accept and make peace with who we are and what our circumstances are. We stop struggling so much and judging ourselves so harshly, and that is lovely. But this is still not waking up from any hint of alienation from ourselves. Though we may have some sense of it, knowing our true nature is not an all-or-nothing matter. Glimpses and intuitions are valuable, and our faith can grow. But even once you have seen fairly clearly, that faith must still be deepened.
The Undying Person in the Grass Hut
Your true nature is not found anywhere else but in this manifestation, this being, this place; and yet it is not limited to this being. What is it? In his poem “Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage,” Chan master Shitou calls the ephemeral structure we have created as a “self” a “grass hut.” He says (this translation by Taigen Dan Leighton):
If you want to know the undying person in the hut,
Don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.[v]
My Dharma grandmother Roshi Kennett called it, “the Lord of the house.” These metaphors may summon up an idea that we have some kind of immortal soul that will survive our physical death, but this usually just a hope that the grass hut will endure forever and misses the undying person who cannot die because they have never been born. Alternatively, we may imagine the Lord of the house is some kind of holy inner conscience who often loses control over its minions, once again introducing a potential for division and alienation between a true self and the self that flagrantly disregards the one who knows better. Yet any self we can imagine is just an inn, and what we are looking to recognize is the traveler. Just remember that traveler cannot be grasped, and the one looking to recognize is also the traveler. In a moment of recognition, your divided soul becomes one and no part of you is not It. But you don’t get to carry this moment around with you… your job is to continually strengthen your faith in your true nature.
To close, here is the verse associated with this koan, by Mumon:
The clouds and the moon are the same;
valleys and mountains are different from each other.
All are blessed, ten thousand times blessed.
Is this one? Is this two?[vi]
In his commentary, Yamada explained that the clouds and the moon appear to be two different things, but they are actually the same. Valleys and mountains are relative to each other, and yet they are different.
I have written a poem in response:
Busyness and stillness, delusion and enlightenment—everything part of a single luminous whole.
Yet no one else inhabits this body-mind as I work my way through my daily to-do list.
Oh, the relief of the ugly duckling who realizes their swan nature and knows there was no other way they were supposed to be.
Still, a mystery. Still, a mystery.
Endnotes
[i] Yamada, Kōun. The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Kindle Edition.
[ii] Anattalakkhaṇasutta, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato. https://suttacentral.net/sn22.59/en/sujato
[iii] Yamada, Kōun. The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Kindle Edition
[iv] In Fukanzazengi: https://www.sotozen.com/eng/zazen/advice/fukanzanzeng.html
[v] Leighton, Taigen Dan (translator). Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2000
[vi] Yamada, Kōun. The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Kindle Edition
