koan QUESTIONS & ANSWERS


Q. Does a dog have Buddha Nature?

M. Oh, how boring! No? [Master imitates a dog barking, and everyone laughs.] It is like this. In the "Chan" or so-called Zen world people invent so many so-called methods. After the Buddha's Nirvana, everybody became a master overnight. So, and then lacking real power they just invented any kind of dog's Nature, like "Does a dog have a Nature?" And then it becomes like a "Koan". You know that? Koan means a question you have to ask yourself, and you ask until your head becomes broken, or whatever, or your brain explodes. And if you haven't found it then, you must die with shame. Before, there were even worse circumstances in Japan. If a person didn't know what "Moo" was when the Master asked, and he couldn't answer it, then he had to commit suicide. And at that moment he might get enlightened, so-called, but most of the time not. And so people would die with grief and shame, not knowing where they have gone to. We can check though, but it is not very high. A person committing suicide is not good.

They go to a very dark region. It doesn't matter what the purpose of the suicide was, whether for an heroic act or whatever. Because life is given by God, and it is not for us to take away. It is for Him to decide when we leave and how. So the person who commits suicide is in a very, very bad realm of his own dark thinking. Understand? He closes himself up in his own prison of dark thinking, and it's very dangerous. Until this power wears out, billions of years later, he can not get liberation. And then it is not a very normal liberation, I mean he is liberated from that dark region only. He may incarnate as other beings but maybe lower than human existence. God knows! Now, the question of "Does the dog have Buddha Nature?" arose in China thousands of years after the Buddha's Nirvana. People lacking the transmission of the light, lacking the inner lineage, we call "Fa Mai", the lineage of power, they just invented anything. So if people came to ask them how to practice, they would cite any of the ancient master's talks and tell them to investigate it, to ask themselves. And of course when you concentrate on one idea or another, of course it may give rise to some power. You understand? The power of concentration is not to be underrated. But I already told you in my book. It doesn't matter how big an intellectual one is, he is still only an intellectual giant and not a self-liberated person, and not a saint of wisdom. Intellect belongs to the realm of mind and matter, not soul and God. Understand that? Intellect is thinking, and thinking arises from what? From data, from learning, from other people's thinking and brain washing ideas. Soul and God and nature are spontaneously self-born, self-existing, self-supporting, and self-pure. Understand? So anything that is influenced or can be influenced by society, by thinking, by philosophy, by language of any kind, is intellect and intelligence, not wisdom. Therefore, if we use language to ask questions of ourselves, or to be enlightened somehow, it is still in the intellectual realm, is some kind of mind wrestling, and it is very tiring. So, I do not teach this kind of mind wrestling method. Because I think we are tired enough of working every day and wrestling with our problems. There is no need to go home and sit there cross legged and wrestle again. The Buddha never taught this method. I may remind you of this. The Buddha never sat there and asked himself: "Who am I? What am I? Who am I? What I am? Does a dog have Buddha Nature? Does a dog have Buddha Nature? Does he really have Buddha Nature? Does he really...?" He would not do this kind of thing. How did the Buddha become enlightened, you know? He saw the inner realms. He subdued the inner demons. It means that when He saw the inside demons He subdued them, and when He saw the inside stars, and it was recorded that as the Buddha saw the stars, He became enlightened. Now we think we see the stars every day, so how come we're not enlightened? That is because He saw the inner stars not the outer stars. So many of our disciples see the stars, so they also can be called enlightened. Now you may wonder yourself, okay, if you see the inner stars, so what is the big deal about that? It makes a lot of big deals, because it is not seeing the stars that counts. It's what you make out of the stars, and what it makes you become, what it makes you feel. The feeling, the wisdom, the way of life are changed after seeing the stars, or after seeing the inner worlds, or the inner realms, or the inner light, or after hearing the inner sounds. It is not because we like to see the stars, or like to hear the inner sound, but because hearing them and seeing them make us great, make us wise and saintly, and make us become Buddha, become Jesus Christ, become Christ. Therefore, we have to see them. Just like when we eat bread and potatoes, they turn into, and become blood, and become our thinking, become our muscle power. Understand that? Yes, that's it. The stars and the sound are our inner bread, the bread and water of life. So Jesus said that man doesn't live from bread alone. That's what He meant. Because the bread and water of life are inside of us.