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Tasty Waves or Shit on a Stick?
Jeffrey
Veteran
I was thinking of this koan. A master was asked what the Buddha was and he said 'shit on a stick'. (I actually thought of this while on the pot 
) So my thinking is that it meant dharma was practical. There is a mud to the lotus. Here is another idea
http://zenwaterman.blogspot.com/2011/02/shit-on-stick-by-len-barrow.html
When I recollected this Koan after dropping my friend off, I began to have a wonderful reflective experience. I wondered why I had such a great time while my friend had the lamest experience possible? Why was I thrilled in such shitty waves? It struck me like a lightning bolt. I WAS PAYING ATTENTION and he was not.
Now is a video of Jeff Spicoli (actor Sean Penn) from Fast Times at Rigmont High just for laughs:
3
Comments
That is so comforting. If the Buddha is shit on a stick, then what am I so uptight about?
Love the Fast Times clip
I was in HS when that came out. It is a jewel of the 80's for sure 
That was a good article, thanks @Jeffrey.
The renowned oJapanese Zen master Bankei Yotaku (1622-93) drew huge multitudes to hear his pithy teaching, Fu-sho! “Unborn!” Meaning, “Don’t get ‘born’—abide as your Unborn Buddha-Nature.” A woman suffering under patriarchal East Asian norms once complained to Master Bankei that her gender was a karmic obstacle. He retorted: “From what time did you become a woman?”
http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/Zen_Humor.html
Q: Do people have 'false awakenings'
A: Yes. All the time. Symptoms include:
Bankei criticized fellow Japanese Zen teachers who hid their own failure to realize Unborn Buddha-nature with, instead, a mish-mash of confusing old Chinese-language koan-anecdotes, the “dregs and slobber of the Chan Patriarchs” as he called the ancient lore! And he chided the overly clever who are deluded by their own cleverness. “I tell my students, 'Be stupid'!... What I'm talking about isn't the stupidity of (mindless) stupidity or (clever) understanding. That which transcends stupidity and understanding is what I mean by stupidity.”
Q: Does Real Enlightenment exist?
A: Yes.
Bankei criticized fellow Japanese Zen teachers who hid their own failure to realize Unborn Buddha-nature with, instead, a mish-mash of confusing old Chinese-language koan-anecdotes, the “dregs and slobber of the Chan Patriarchs” as he called the ancient lore! And he chided the overly clever who are deluded by their own cleverness. “I tell my students, 'Be stupid'!... What I'm talking about isn't the stupidity of (mindless) stupidity or (clever) understanding. That which transcends stupidity and understanding is what I mean by stupidity.”
A monk wondered why Bankei used none of the methods of fabled Chan/Zen masters of yore, such as the stick, the shout, the slap. Bankei replied, “I know how to use the three inches”—i.e., his tongue, to tell people they are really Unborn!
Bankei never wanted anyone to become fascinated by anything other than our Infinite Nature. And so, when a monk stepped forth in a vast assembly and proudly told Bankei, “I diligently chant the Light Mantra night and day and my body emits rays of light,” Bankei replied: “Those rays of light of yours are nothing but the flames of the evil passions consuming your body.”
In a two-line section of his famous poem, Honshin No Uta, Bankei says: “It's the buddhas I feel sorry for: with all those ornaments they wear / They must be dazzled by the glare!”
http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/Zen_Humor.html
I think sometimes we expect Buddhist thought to be all sweetness and light. Not the nature of the beast at all.
I read a sutra about an old monk describing the nature of reality to young monk.
To paraphrase, he said we dilude ourselves with our thoughts of beauty and righteousness. He talked about the fact that "beautiful" people will wind up emitting gas, excreting shit and piss, oozing puss and snot, blood and slobber when they die, just the same as beggars, murderers or any other undesireable character.
It helps to put things in perspective when I begin to think all the people I judge are just like me in the end.
The way I learned it was a little different. Buddha was not referred to as shit on a stick but rather as an excrement stick which was an implement used at the time. So at one time a teacher told me to just take hold of running water if I wanted to realize Buddha nature.
Thank you @grackle. That makes it easier for me to get past my prejudices in language and appreciate the point of this koan
Yeah I read that it means toilet paper
I was already used to these flatulentic metaphors from reading about the Fluid Element (bile, phlegm, pus, etc) and the Vibrating Element (euphemistically described as "the vapours of stomach and intestines") in the Samyutta Nikaya, or in the "Contemplation on the Impurity of the Body" from the Maha-Satipatthana sutta.
Excrement stick is rather new, but coming from a Zen monk, I am not in the least surprised
A far cry from Edwin Arnold's "The Light of Asia..."
Something like this, apparently.
Still prefer my Buddha statue on my altar to that.
Exactly so.
No mud, no lotus. Know lotus, know mud.
We elevate or distance our search initially. The Buddha, the three jewels, the practices we engage in. We separate ignorance, Dukkha and beneficial/skilful behaviour. Rightly so.
Just engaging the one taste of the Buddha Nature in all we experience is sometimes engaged in as a 'Zen head trip'. However it needs Being, not 'being clever' - what is called 'reeking of Zen'.
This grounding our experience and expression in the moment, stops the monkey mind chatter.
As it is Christmas, here is how the Judeo/Christian Mystics talk about it:
http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Meditations/Be_Still/be_still.html
"Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth." (Psalm 46:10)
and of course in Dharma we try to
Be Still
. . . and still be Earthed.
A Still Cup:
For
God
To make love
For the divine alchemy to work
The Pitcher needs a still cup
Why
Ask Hafiz to say
Anything more about
Your most
Vital
Requirement
Sometimes when we are kayak camping on stony islands off the coast, a shit stick (or scatapult) is what is used to catapult ones crap out to sea.
It has definitely been worth a bow from me, sometimes.
Just saying..
.....you do know waves move TOWARDS the shore, right....?
@federica
Just a question of perspective even if said like a true landlubber.
Often with small islands off the coast, one side gets waves towards it, 2 sides gets waves parallel to it and one side has ocean waves meeting and leaving it to carry on their way.
Besides the fact that any lazy kayaker worth their salt is also a tidal current expert, sometimes using a scatapult (Buddha stick) or not, is like comparing the offshore ocean's dilution of something nasty to having it be concentrated right where you clean your dishes.
Bet that's way more info than you sought.
We bought a pair of inflatable kayaks to take fishing this year. The career is winding down so it's time to do some exploring before it's over.
No sticks involved over here. Marine head with a macerator.
@Robot
I've seen "head" signs stating that
Anyone putting their tooth floss in a macerating toilet is the same person
that gets to spend their day dissembling it to get it working again.
How do those inflatable's stand up to the West coast oyster beds?
We will probably be making another run at Brooks this summer.
Yes, my daughter flushed a tampon. That's when I figured out that there was no valve between the holding tank and the pump. Fun.
We've been staying away from the mussels and barnacles with these boats so far. I doubt if they'll stand up too well to it.
I expect to be fishing my way past the Cape in a week or so.
I remember swimming in the Med, on the shore of Elba, and suddenly spotting a rather distasteful floating object heading right for me... whence it came, I do not know, but I didn't stick around long enough to witness its final resting place.
All I can say is that the 'benefactor' had too much roughage in their diet....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_stick
Not one of my favorite koans, but it's one of the most famous because of the shock value, right after "kill the Buddha". Let me see if I can channel Rev Young in one of his Dharma talks before our meditation sessions about this koan. I think I remember the gist of it.
The koan actually says "a dry shit-stick". The Chinese at the time used flat, thin, pieces of bamboo to scrape the shit off their butts. These sticks were not dropped into the hole or discarded, but scraped off on the edge of the hole, tossed into a bucket of water, cleaned and reused. The Chinese monks and later the Japanese monks who used this koan had the same attitude we do about crap: disgust and a desire to hide this necessary function from polite society. Thus this koan, like most of them, has a mind-hook and it's the very word "shit". That word makes us gasp and hooks our mind so we struggle with the koan like a fish being hauled out of water.
In contemplating the koan, notice Yun-men did not simply say "shit" or "shit on a stick" or even "a shit-stick". He said "a dry shit-stick. The monks at the time would have vast experience with walking into a little toilet room with a hole in the floor, and next to the hole would be one bucket filled with water and a bunch of wet sticks that had been used, and a stack of dry sticks for people to use. You don't use the wet ones, not unless there are no dry ones left and the guy before you used the last one and didn't clean the used ones and set them to dry. Don't you hate it when someone uses the last of the toilet paper and you gotta go?
Buddha is a dry shit-stick. The dry shit-stick is perfect in its function. If you want to say our desires are like the shit we have to scrape off, you're misreading the koan. Nothing wrong with shit. It's a necessary part of our biological process. Shit is something left over we no longer need, that's all. Still, you need a shit-stick to help get rid of it.