Koans, Camouflage, and the Porous Line Between Zen Schools

A Zen teacher stands before a sangha that is partly in the room and partly on a screen, and she admits she cannot see the people online. She says she wrote her talk that afternoon, printed it, and is no longer sure what it says. "So, we'll find out," she tells the room, and the laughter that follows sets the tone for the next half hour. In this talk, recorded for the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer does something that many Dharma talks avoid: she opens the history books. She begins with the centuries-long separation of the two great Zen lineages, moves through a koan collected almost a thousand years ago, and ends with a close look at how the mind works in the body's senses. The thread running through all of it is a question about where things become fixed and where they stay fluid.

How did the Soto and Rinzai schools come apart?

The split between Soto and Rinzai, she explains, did not happen overnight, and it did not happen everywhere at once. It unfolded gradually, primarily in Japan. The figure most associated with its shape is Hakuin, an eighteenth-century Rinzai master who, she says, created the codified curriculum of koan practice, working undoubtedly in collaboration with others. In that curriculum a student receives successive koans and meets repeatedly with the teacher to demonstrate understanding until each one is mastered according to the program's requirements. It is structured, sequential, and accountable, and it is the feature most people now associate with Rinzai training.

Hakuin lived from 1686 to 1769, a period she pins to a vivid historical backdrop: the thirteen American colonies gaining their identities, fighting in the French and Indian Wars, and feeling friction with Britain over taxation and westward expansion into Native lands. The koans that Hakuin's curriculum organized were far older. She points out that the collected koans come from the Tang Dynasty, nearly a thousand years earlier. In between, they were gathered, commented upon, and used as teaching tools and sources of inspiration, a long conversation that Hakuin eventually gave a formal shape.

The most telling detail in her account, though, is about the people, not the institutions. She describes Hongzhi, a Chinese ancestor whom the tradition would regard as Soto, who taught what is called silent illumination. His closest friend and contemporary was Dahui, whom the tradition would regard as a Rinzai teacher, "kind of a kick-butt Rinzai teacher," as she puts it. The two sparred with each other while keeping mutual respect and warm friendship. When Hongzhi died, he left his temple to Dahui and asked him to conduct his memorial service. "So these were close friends," she says, and their styles were different, but they learned from each other and nurtured each other as they developed their own voices.

"So this tells us that the divide between Soto and Rinzai was not really firm and solidified. It became so later in Japan." (Sokaku Kathie Fischer, Upaya Zen Center Dharma talk, about 6:36)

She also sketches the lineage that connects these figures. Hongzhi lived from 1091 to 1157, mostly in the twelfth century. Dogen came to China in 1223, well after Hongzhi's death but within the same century, and met his teacher Rujing, who was Hongzhi's Dharma great-grandson. Hongzhi, Rujing, and Dogen form a continuous line. Another five hundred years passed before Hakuin's codification. The timeline matters because it shows that the walls people now assume between the schools were built later, in a different century and under different pressures.

What makes a koan's question different from its answer?

Three main koan collections are still in use, she notes: the Blue Cliff Record, or Hekiganroku; the Gateless Gate, or Mumonkan; and the Book of Serenity, also called the Book of Equanimity, or Shoyoroku. Many of the same koans appear in two of the three, with slightly different emphases. Then she names a pattern that she wants her listeners to notice: in many koans, the questions are general and the answers are specific.

This observation becomes the hinge of the talk. Her argument is that generalizations are produced by the mind and are intellectual. Direct experience through eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body is specific, and it "cannot be other than specific." She gives ordinary examples. We do not hear a sound as a generalization; it is loud or soft, high or low, with a particular timbre. We do not feel pain as a generalization, either. "Pain is specific," she says, characterized as sharp or dull and located in a particular place.

"We don't perceive sounds as generalizations. They are loud or soft, high or low pitch. They have a timbre, etc." (Sokaku Kathie Fischer, Upaya Zen Center Dharma talk, about 10:23)

For a student working with a koan, this distinction is not academic. A koan question like "What is this?" invites a general answer built from concepts, and the teacher's reply usually lands on something concrete and immediate. The koan works when the student stops reaching for an abstraction and meets the specific moment directly. The talk does not spell out every koan's resolution, but the structure she describes, a broad question met by a particular response, is the engine of the practice.

How does the mind take in the senses, and why does it get so busy?

She turns next to the Heart Sutra, which lists the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind together. In Buddhist teaching, she says, the mind is counted as one of the senses. The Upaya translation that the community chants renders the passage as "realm of eyes" through "realm of mind consciousness." Each realm has its own material basis. The realm of the eyes is light waves, what we see. The realm of the ears is sound waves, what we hear. The realm of mind is synthesis.

"The realm of mind is synthesis. Mind synthesizes. It collaborates with the other senses to create a perceived functional pattern that we can act on." (Sokaku Kathie Fischer, Upaya Zen Center Dharma talk, about 11:49)

To make this concrete, she describes working at her desk when she hears rain on the roof. She looks out and sees the day has grown darker, and she locates an umbrella and sets it by her shoes. The information came from the eyes and ears. The plan came from the mind. The mind is, in her words, "a busy bee," and it can synthesize endlessly without purpose, or toward harmful ends such as repetitive self-doubt, or clinging to something even when the outcome is known to be destructive. It often runs on high function even when nothing is required of it. That is why meditation instructions so often speak of quieting the mind, she says. The aim is not to shut off the synthesizing faculty but to notice when it is working unnecessarily.

What does camouflage have to do with Dharma practice?

The talk's most memorable image comes from evolutionary biology. She recalls reading Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, which came out in the 1990s, and its account of camouflage in animals. Camouflage, she explains, is a defense strategy, often to trick a predator by becoming small, still, and invisible. She connects this to her years as a retired schoolteacher. Some children use the same strategy to avoid being noticed and to avoid speaking up in class, and the habit can follow a person into adulthood.

She sees the same pattern in Dharma discussions. Some people always hold back, while others always come forward. Her point is not to label either type but to notice the strategy underneath. She adds a second form of camouflage: looking like a different creature that carries an effective defense. Her example is the monarch butterfly, which is toxic to birds and other predators that might eat it. Whether one hides by disappearing or by borrowing another's protection, the defense is an adaptation, and it can be just as habitual in the mind as in the wild.

Read against the koan material, the camouflage discussion carries an unstated question: what do we hide behind when we avoid the specific moment? The general answer, the safe abstraction, the borrowed posture, can all function as camouflage. Practice asks us to come out of cover and meet what is actually here, which is the same invitation the koan tradition makes.

Where does this talk leave a listener?

The talk moves in several directions before it ends, from Yunmen, whom she introduces as a teacher whose koans she wants to examine, to a passage about the body exposed in the golden wind, and to a discussion of beginner's mind and the value of an empty vessel. Not every thread is fully developed in the transcript available here, and that is part of its character: this is a teacher thinking aloud, and the lived sense of the talk is in the questions she keeps returning to. Where did the schools actually divide? Why does a question need an answer that is specific? What defense are we using right now?

What the talk offers is a way of reading Zen history that refuses to harden it. The Soto and Rinzai schools have distinct emphases, the koan collections have distinct emphases, and the teachers themselves had their own styles. Yet Hongzhi and Dahui, who sparred and nurtured each other, show that the lines were not firm. Hakuin, who was disgraced by a false accusation, responded with a plain "Oh, is that so?" and never defended himself by blaming anyone else. That response, which the speaker tells as a story of how a teacher holds steady under pressure, is in its own way a specific answer to a general problem.

Where to go from here

If this talk has you curious about koan practice, start with the three collections she names: the Blue Cliff Record, the Gateless Gate, and the Book of Serenity. Reading two of them side by side will show the differences in emphasis she describes. For the mind-and-senses material, the Heart Sutra is the natural companion, since she draws directly on its list of realms. If camouflage and the Moral Animal caught your attention, Robert Wright's book is the source she names. And to continue the practice side, Upaya Zen Center offers daily Zen meditation, weekly Dharma talks, and a Wisdom Library, all described on the center's own website at upaya.org.