Baishui Zen

What’s in a (dharma) name?

Case 40 of the Wumenkuan is recounted as follows:

When Kuei-shan was studying with Pai-chang, he was the monastery’s head cook. Pai-chang wanted to choose an abbot to found a temple on Mount Takuei, so he invited the head monk and his other disciples to make presentations. Then he took a water-bottle and placed it on the floor, saying, “Don’t call this a bottle, so what is it?” The head monk said, “It can’t be called a tree-stump.” Pai-chang then asked Kuei-shan, who walked up and kicked the bottle over. Laughing, Pai-chang said, “The head monk has been defeated by Kuei-shan,” and therefore ordered Kuei-shan to found the temple.

The purpose of naming things is to identify them, they are signifiers of nouns. In fact, the word “noun” comes from the Latin “nomen” which literally means “name.” Names are fundamental to our way of communication, but it’s interesting to ask what it means to name something, or for something to have a name. How does it get the name and, once it has a name, what information does this carry?

In the 19th century, the logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell offered the view that to name something meant to give it a type of description. By his view, the name was a shorthand for a collection of statements (or to be precise, propositions) about the named thing which were true. In this way, a name is like a definition, these propositions characterize what it means to have the name.

This is a nice and neat view, but there is at least one problem. This collection of propositions is probably not known to every person who knows the name of something. A famous counterexample is given by Frege’s Puzzle, which deals with the planet Venus, known in antiquity as both Hesperus, the Evening Star, as well as Phosphorus, the Morning Star. I don’t know when it was realized that these two celestial objects are actually the same thing, namely, Venus. Nevertheless, if one could ask an ancient person who saw both of these ‘stars,’ they would say that you never see Phosphorus in the evening. In other words, it seems possible that either the name you give something can be wrong, or by virtue of having these propositions unknown to the speaker, to just be wildly wrong about what the referent of a name actually is. Both of these things just seem to not match up with our idea of what it means to name something.

The case responds to this issue by operationalizing what it means to name something. By this I mean, a thing is not its name, a thing is what that thing does. When asked what to call the bottle, the head monk is using a kind of dualistic thinking. He is instructed not to call the bottle by its name, so instead, he says something it isn’t. The trap is that the essence is not in what it is called, what it is made of, or anything of the sort. No matter what you call the bottle, it is a bottle simply because it stores water. There is no need for names, and indeed, Kuei-shan does not need to utter a single word to illustrate what the item is.

Another case, this time, case 43:

Shou-shan held up his bamboo staff and said, “Monks, if you call this a staff, you are committed to a name; if you don’t call it a staff, you are denying the obvious. Tell me, everyone, what will you call it?”

Very similar to the above case, this one’s approach is different, in a sense, it is worse for us. Let’s consider our apparent choices. What does it mean to be committed to a name? Names for things inform how we use them, if we are particularly attached to them. A seat is a seat because it is good for sitting. A staff is a staff because it helps with walking, and can occasionally dole out beatings to unruly monks. This seems fine for simple things, but we can very readily get lost when we start asking questions which skirt the boundary. For example: Is a hotdog a sandwich? I play this game with my students and continue to stir up even very heated arguments to this day. We can play this game ad nauseum: is cereal a kind of soup? Is ketchup a kind of smoothie? When does a pan become a pot? While silly, these questions inform how we actually use these objects. Most of us don’t cook eggs in a pot, although there really isn’t any reason why you couldn’t.

On the other hand, denying the obvious seems patently bad. There is a prohibition against lying, so it seems wrong to point to a staff and say “this is not a staff.” Moreover, we as Buddhists have an obligation to cultivate Right View. We are to understand that the staff has dependent origination, coming from the three causes: the staff is such by virtue of its direct causes, e.g. being carved from wood, from the mutual dependencies in the context, and of course by our mental categorization of it as a staff in the first place. For these reasons, the staff lacks an inherent nature, it is empty. So is it a staff or not? Shou-shan seems to be challenging us to give an exegesis of the doctrine of emptiness, but to do so would arguably not be very Zen. It’s pretty rare that a Zen Master poses a problem to a student, and the student is expected to write an essay explaining his position.

So how should we give an answer to this conundrum? I propose that a simple one-word answer suffices: “無,” the character “wu,” often translated as either “no” or “absence.” There is another usage of this character, in contrast with the character “不” for simple “no.” Instead of meaning the “simple negation,” as Wumen would call it, it means that a category mistake has been made. In other words, that the dichotomy is false, and there is a Middle Way. I think this is also the intended interpretation for the infamous case of Zhaozhou’s case involving dogs and the buddha-nature, but let’s save that for another day. Furthermore, I think that refusing to answer some questions is very much in the spirit of the Zen tradition. We show our mastery over word games by simply not playing them.

So let’s return to the first question. What’s the point of a dharma name? We’ve talked about how names inform our behavior, and they clue us in to certain features that we want to call attention to in something. The same is true for ourselves. We have a robust sense of self-concept, and at the center of this is our name. And this concept isn’t a purely private phenomena either. We have stereotypes associated with names, and we live up to them. Computers are significantly better than chance at guessing our names from a list. The social expectations attached to our names are subtle, but we become clued into them over our lives, and they shape us, both internally and externally, seemingly whether we want them to or not.

Adopting a dharma name is our weapon as Buddhists against this. It’s the way by which we refocus our attention away from these expectations, be they conscious or not, and transfer it to our dharma practice in our day to day lives. It doesn’t have to happen all at once. At least, it hasn’t happened fully yet for me. To my secular students, I am Tom. But here on this blog, and to those who are accompanying me on my own dharma path, I am 白水, baishui, or in English, whitewater. I’ve treated this name as a mantra for some time now, actively using it to put myself in the right frame of mind for study or for practice.

I feel like this has made quite a difference on my outlook. Since our Buddhist philosophy centers on our Buddhist practice, this seems to be like the closest thing one has to “operationalizing” the self. We demonstrate our Zen by embodying it in our daily life, by talking about it, sometimes arguing about it, and all of this stems from having the right internal state. Adopting a dharma name is, for me, the first step in living up to the above case, and was the first time for me that the water could flow freely from the bottle.

As of now, I find myself rather like Venus. Somewhere between Hesperus and Phosphorus, and simply Venus. In one world, a mathematician, teacher, and maybe even a shoddy philosopher, when I’m in the right mood. In another, an aspiring Zen practitioner, and student of literary Chinese. Outside of my muddled mind, just one simple person. In this blog, I’d like to write about all of these things, tracking my journey to read the Zen record in its original writings, offering amateur translations of these great works of history. I’ll also be reading lots of other Buddhist texts in English, as one ancient language will probably be enough to last me a lifetime, and I’d like to share thoughts I have about them and my own dharma path.

I hope you will enjoy walking this path with me, and that you’ll forgive this extremely long-winded introduction. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

-白水