Make a Gravestone for Me

This, this thingy, the moon that the finger points to, is no moon at all. But for the sake of simply saying something about it, we use lots of symbols that are the substitutes to that “moon.” As is the case for the finger, if one is looking at the moon, that’s already a missed mark, which leaves us with the single choice of seeing neither the finger nor the moon.

In the Koan for this post, a master called National Teacher Zhong is asked by the emperor of the day about what he would want as something to be given after the master’s death. Zhong tells the emperor that he wants a gravestone. The emperor sees this as a mundane kind of answer, and continues with a question as mundane as he could have thought the master’s question was. He asks the master how the gravestone should look like. Zhong keeps silent (unmoving) for a while and says “Do you understand?”

Here, obviously, the word gravestone is merely a symbol. And the question that comes up is, what the heck is this “gravestone” that the master really wanted?

Keep silent (ummoving) for a while. What do you see? What do you hear, smell, or touch? “Do you understand?” To understand, one has not only to observe it as an observer, but to observe it so keenly that they forget about the observing self that they’ve made up. Only then one IS the object and can “understand,” and hence see what the gravestone is.

You could do it now. Pick up one prominent bodily sensation and keep your attention on it. It doesn’t matter if attention doesn’t last. If you find the attention going to other objects, you could either attend to the previous object, or start anew with the object that the attention went to. Keep this for a while, and see where the feeler of these sensations are, and most importantly, what that feeler is. When you know this from the bottom of your heart, transformation is on the way. Persevere, and see the “gravestone.”