Dharma Talk with Shin Yu Scott Allen: The Bucket Without a Bottom--Chinoyo

Chiyono was a highly educated woman from a samurai family who became a Zen nun and even headed a Zen order. She is celebrated for her enlightenment and calligraphy.

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Scott's Talk Notes

Chiyono was a 13th-century Japanese Buddhist nun credited with becoming the first Zen Abbess. It is believed that she was born into the Japanese warrior-class. As was customary for young women of her time period and class, she married and had a daughter at a young age.

In 1277 when she was thirty-four her husband died, and she could not get over the grief. At some point, she began to visit the monastery of the Chinese Rinzai Zen monk Mugaku Sogen. Although laywomen were not commonly admitted to monasteries at the time, dharma custom assured that any woman who sought Buddhist teachings would receive them. she became determined to live out the rest of her life as a nun and trained under Master Bukko.

According to legend, she meditated and practiced for many years without attaining enlightenment and became very discouraged in her practice. One night she was getting water with an old bucket she had worked hard to repair. She was gazing at the reflection of the moon in the water of the bucket, when the bottom suddenly fell out, spilling water everywhere, and dissolving the moon reflection. In that moment, she realized that all of her ideas about herself and reality were nothing but false reflections like that moon, being held together by a bucket.

She released her delusions and was awakened. She then wrote a poem, which was presented to the teacher:

The flower bucket took the stream water and held it,

And the reflection of the moon through pines lodged

there in purity

It is important to notice that Chiyono’s realization of buddha nature comes when she is engaged in the daily work of fetching water. Enlightenment does not come while she is sitting zazen; it doesn’t arrive while she is chanting, and it isn’t shocked into her during Dharma combat with a brilliant Zen master. Chiyono’s awakening arrives when she is doing samu, simple manual labour.

After that, she had: interviews with the master. In the end, the mental bucket broke, she was awakened, and she presented another poem of this new realization to her teacher. In the end he ‘passed her the robe and bowl’. Chiyono is thought to have been the first nun to receive Dharma transmition from a teacher in the line of the Sixth Patriarch. The poem she later wrote about her experience has become one of the better-known writings of its type:

With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together,

and then the bottom fell out.

Where water does not collect

the moon does not dwell.

In Zen literature, the moon has traditionally been used as a metaphor for Buddha, buddha nature, or enlightenment. In Chiyono’s poem, when the bottom falls out of the bucket, the moon no longer shines. Something is lost; something is gone. When she writes "With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together." "This and that" includes our spirituality , meditation and other practices. When we can no longer find ourselves on the cushion we are well on the way to see the reality.

After Chiyono’s death the nun Nyozen, who had worked in the household of the Uesugi family where she lost her husband and decided to become a nun. Nyozen trained at the nunnery of Tokeiji at a time when it served as a refuge for women who were escaping violent or unhappy marriages.

Nyozen meditated on the enlightenment poem of Chiyono as her theme for realization. In 1313 she, grasped the essence of Zen, presenting this poem to her teacher:

The bottom fell out of the bucket.

of that woman of humble birth (i.e., Nyozen);

the pale moon of dawn

is caught in the rain puddles.

In Nyozen’s poem nothing is lost; nothing is gone. Instead, the moon has multiplied, and it reflects in every puddle. It is neither created nor destroyed by the disintegration of the bucket. The illusion of separation has dropped off. There is nothing to grasp and nothing to grasp with. And there is no one to do the grasping.

The wisdom of Chiyono & Nyozen Chiyono and Nyozen share something in common. They both had their lives fall apart. Life and self fall apart together, for they form a unity. We see the world through how we see ourselves. Both with accomplishment and failure. The two nuns, like us, put forth much effort to keep the sense of self-identity intact. We tend to be attracted to what validates our unreal selves. We habitually turn from what does not support our Egos or False Self. The false self is questioned when calamity strikes. The false self exists because it does not see the world as itis. No one can find the fiction called ego. This is what we tell ourselves about ourselves and what others say about us. You were born, and you were told what and who you are. This naming process continues in overt and subtle ways. The challenge is to realize that the false self is a functional identity, helpful only to the extent we need to use it. You may identify yourself to someone as a writer. That is a skill that you use but not yourself. Hence, this illusion is neither good nor bad. Over time our concept of this false identity hardens and we are unable to see it as false. When the self is deflated the buddha nature appears in the ten thousand things.

A good example of this is our feeling toward getting along with people we don’t agree with. When our ego and mind label others we usually don’t see past the label that we place on them. Today in the news are those people whose political point of view we object to. We have a picture in our mind based on our ego of exactly who they are and how they feel on any subject. However when we stop and have a discussion with them, our label tends to break down and we are forced to see them very much like ourselves. In other words, like the many puddles in Nyozen.s poem.

Chiyono and Nyozen differ in the ending of their poems. Chiyono had written that water no longer reflects the moonafter the bottom falls out of the bucket. There is no water to catch the reflection. She may have referred to the formless, ultimate Reality. Like the heart Sutra says “form is emptiness emptiness itself form”. Nyozen says, in contrast to Chiyono, that the moon is reflected in all the rain puddles. She sees moon-reflections everywhere. The moon refers to Buddha, Buddha-nature, or Dharmakaya.

Nyozen speaks of direct experience. We know by encounter, not belief. Outside of experience, persons speculate on their beliefs. Nyozen reminds us to remain faithful to the direct experiences we have in life. We mature when we have no interest in quibbling or trying to impress others with our experiences.

Nyozen reminds us we are the other. We are puddles made of the same stuff; we each mirror the All. We first come to an acknowledgment of oneness; we then grow into realizing oneness. Hence, it is good news when the bottom of the bucket falls off. We are fortunate to fall out of the individual self and meet the self we all are. This quote came out of Dogen’s Shobogenzo Zuimonki and is the teaching responsible for my Dharma talk. I’ll read it twice and then maybe we can sit quietly for a few minutes and then discuss in small groups our understanding of the passage. When so many of our teachings seem too complex and out of reach, especially Dogen, it is like a breath of fresh air when a complex subject is stated so directly.

The “original face” here refers to the true reality of all beings before it is processed by our discriminating, self-centered minds. This reality beyond thinking is not something metaphysical but simply concrete, phenomenal reality as it is. We are included in it. Yet because we are inside it, we cannot perceive it as the object of our sense organs. Reality lies beyond the separation between subject and object in which a subject conceives of things outside itself.