158 Gutei

The following Sunday it was Dean's turn to give the dharma talk. Dean spoke on Gutei, the Zen master who according to legend cut off the index finger of the boy who had been his attendant.

Here is the story in brief:

Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him. When anyone asked the boy what his master preached, the boy raised his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away. Gutei called and stopped him. When the boy turned his head to look, Gutei raised his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened.

This obscene act of cruelty is offered in the Zen canon as an object lesson to eschew the imitation and repetition of a teaching you do not fully understand. In his commentary Dean interpreted the tale metaphorically. He mentioned how the master in his response to Dean's entries in his practice journal or to his questions in dokusan criticized and even ridiculed Dean's remarks and interrupted Dean's questions, especially when it seemed to the master that Dean was merely imitating or parroting his teacher or simply repeating something Dean had read rather than expressing himself and being himself.

"The master cut off my finger," said Dean.

To Dean this was the main point of the story of Master Gutei and his young attendant.

"The master cut off my finger," said Dean.

But Dean also questioned the cruel irony and blatant hypocrisy and double standard of Gutei, who stated that he himself had learned his one-finger teaching from his own teacher, yet Gutei had not himself incurred the loss that he inflicted upon the innocent boy. I myself remembered many times that the master had repeated verbatim words he had learned from his master Katagiri. Indeed the whole Zen genealogy is the transmission of the Way from teacher to disciple.

"What is the difference?" Dean asked.

He waited for us to hazard a guess.

Silence.

"Perhaps the idea is that one must make the teaching one's own," Dean said.

Dean paused.

"Maybe Gutei had done that and his attendant boy had not."

Hmm.

"The master cut off my finger."

But was the story of Gutei and his attendant boy history, metaphor, or both?

To the master and perhaps to Dean—who seemed to have resolved the problem to his own satisfaction—the distinction did not matter because the point of the lesson was clear.

"The master cut off my finger."

No.

To me it did matter.

Indeed.

I did not know if in my own life I could practice what I preached.

Only time would tell.

But I felt more certain than ever that the right road for me was total repudiation of the cruelty and ignorance intrinsic to the Zen romanticization of physical and verbal abuse.

Enough.