Why Chan Masters Shouted: Words, Silence and Direct Experience

On an evening at Upaya Zen Center, a Zen teacher in Santa Fe, New Mexico, begins a fall practice period by taking a small poll. How many people in the room know the Chan master Xiao Xiao? The answer, she jokes, is overwhelmingly a minority, and fewer still know anything about the Chan period itself. What follows in this dharma talk, given by Sensei Ryotan Cynthia Kear and published on the Upaya Zen Center channel, is less a history lesson than an argument about why the old masters behaved so strangely with their students, and why that strangeness still matters. Her central claim is that the most intelligent, language-loving human mind is simultaneously our greatest asset and our most stubborn obstacle to living a direct, intimate life. The Chan teachers, she suggests, understood this centuries ago and built a practice around it, using the very words that blocked students as the vehicle for getting past them.

What was the Chan period, and why does it set the stage?

Sensei Kear frames the whole practice period around a particular moment of history. The Chan period, which she roughly dates to 600 to 900 CE, was a time of enormous contradiction. It was, in her words, "simultaneously like the height of great Chinese civilization in terms of art and literature and culture," but it was also marked by "incredible pockets of violence and disturbing warfare and lots of political upheaval." Those were the conditions under which Buddhism, having traveled from India along the Silk Roads, arrived in China and met Chinese culture, Confucianism and Daoism in particular.

That collision shaped the teaching. Chan Buddhism did not simply transplant an Indian doctrine. It developed what she calls a "special and unique flavor," one that invited each practitioner to have "a direct experience of our own lives." The emphasis on directness is the thread that ties the whole talk together. Xiao Xiao, the master at the center of this practice period, lived near the end of that era, and Sensei Kear treats him as a figure whose questions are the same ones people bring to a cushion today.

What does it mean to "share the feeling" of where you are?

To ground the teaching, Sensei Kear reads from Suzuki Roshi, drawing on a recent collection of his essays titled Becoming Yourself. The passage she chooses is spare and pointed:

"Sharing the feeling we have right here right now is the fundamental thing for Zen practice. Zen in a word is to share our feeling with people with trees and with mountains wherever we are. That is Zen practice." (Suzuki Roshi, as read by Sensei Ryotan Cynthia Kear in this Upaya dharma talk)

What makes the passage land is its candor about the mind's habits. Suzuki Roshi describes a head crowded with "ice cream or bananas or how much soap costs in one store compared to another," with newspaper ads and the day's news provoking reaction after reaction. Sensei Kear adds her own gloss: "It's almost impossible to share the actual feeling we have where we are right now." Even in the middle of the woods, the feeling of the woods is hard to appreciate. The passage's claim is that when that appreciation actually happens, it is zazen, and that it is "our direct experience of our own life."

This is where the talk starts to explain why practice is not primarily about acquiring information. The problem is not a shortage of knowledge. It is that the mind is too full of commentary, of "rubbish," as Suzuki Roshi calls it, to be present with what is actually happening.

Why do questions about life sound so familiar across centuries?

Sensei Kear next turns to Joan Sutherland's book Through the Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans, which she says she has "come to deeply love." Sutherland describes how we set out our lives "shaped like wondering," looking for an answer to "the shared questions about life, death, and meaning," or to a question "uniquely formed in our own lives." The thing that aches on some days, she writes, is "something heavy with a sharp edge that we're carrying next to our skin." Sutherland also speaks of "a soft glowing world in which the defining characteristics are not limitation and repetition but something more spacious and at ease."

Sensei Kear's point is that those desires do not belong to modern people alone. "In the time of Chan these questions these desires were the same as the desires and the questions that we have right now," she says. How can I get inside my life? How can I be more intimate and more relaxed? The Chan masters were responding to the same ache, which is part of why the koan literature still reads as personal rather than antique.

Why do beautiful minds get in the way of experience?

The turn in the talk is a striking one. Sensei Kear calls the human mind "beautiful, beautiful minds that love words, that love stories, that love conceptualizing," and she credits those capacities with "so many wonderful gifts." But she also names the trap in the same breath: that same mind "can be an incredible hindrance to us at the same time."

She describes her own long struggle with this. In late adolescence and early adulthood, she says, she had a sense of "where is my life and how do I get on the inside of it?" It felt, she recalls, "like I was just pressing my nose against the window pane of my real life, unable to kind of somehow get through." Much of her own behavior, she notes, was rehearsing the past in order to make it more palatable, or rehearsing the future, rehearsing lines like "This is what I'm going to say when this happens." Thinking about life, she concludes, "is not the same thing as being inside our life."

That distinction is the core of the talk. Concepts are maps. The map can be accurate and still leave you standing outside the territory.

Why did Zen masters shout and strike their students?

Sensei Kear acknowledges the famous stories directly. "You probably have heard of some of the Zen masters who would suddenly just shout at you," she says, "wake up. What does that feel like? Where are you?" Some struck their students. She is clear that she will not do that, and reassures the room that everyone present is safe. The shouting and striking, though, are a serious teaching device, and she wants listeners to understand the logic behind them.

To explain that logic she turns to Thomas Merton's introduction to The Golden Age of Zen. Merton, she says, identified the paradox at the heart of Zen: humans are deeply word-based, and words are an essential tool for communication, yet words can obstruct. Merton wrote, in the passage she reads:

"Zen however resolutely resists any temptation to be easily communicable and a great deal of the paradox and violence of Zen teaching and practice is aimed at blasting the foundation of ready explanation and comforting symbol out from under the disciple's supposed experience." (Thomas Merton, introduction to The Golden Age of Zen, as quoted in this Upaya dharma talk)

The violence, in Sensei Kear's reading, is not cruelty for its own sake. It is an attempt to shake students out of "the rut of just assuming that we know what life is" and what is happening in it. A shout cuts the chain of explanation before it can settle into comfort.

How can words be used to get past words?

Here the talk reaches its most interesting paradox. If words are the obstruction, why does the practice still rely on them? Sensei Kear points out that "a big piece of the practice is actually using the same thing that can be an obstruction to our freedom and to our experience of our direct life, which is to use words." She admits the terrain "gets very very tricky."

The talk then moves through a sequence of teaching stories, several of which turn on ordinary acts. A monk asks whether he should seek to become a Buddha, and the master's answer is not an explanation but a redirection. Other exchanges turn on washing dishes, on looking in the rearview mirror, and on whether a monk has eaten his rice. In each case the ordinary moment is the teaching. The question the talk keeps returning to is simple and demanding: what is the truth of this, right now? Sensei Kear also references Dogen, the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master, as the talk approaches its conclusion about finding one's own life in the koan. The practice, she suggests, is to let the koan keep the ordinary world from going dead.

What the teaching asks of a listener, then, is not to understand Xiao Xiao intellectually. It is to notice when understanding has become a substitute for presence, and to let the conversation with the koan loosen that substitute.

What does direct experience actually feel like?

The talk leaves the feeling of directness mostly to the listener, which is consistent with its argument. Sensei Kear describes it through its absence and its opposite: the sense of pressing against glass, the rehearsing of past and future, the rubbish that fills the mind. Against those she sets an "uninterrupted flow of authentic" life, a phrase that appears in the talk's later sections, and the "spacious and at ease" world Sutherland describes. Direct experience, in this framing, is not a special state achieved by effort. It is what remains when the commentary lets go for a moment and the trees, the mountains, and the person in front of you are simply there.

For a reader who has never sat in a Zen hall, the practical takeaway is modest and useful. Notice how much of your day is spent narrating it. Notice the moment you turn an experience into a story about the experience. The Chan masters, as Sensei Kear presents them, were not against thinking. They were against mistaking thinking for life.

Where to go from here

• Watch the full talk on the Upaya Zen Center channel, where Sensei Ryotan Cynthia Kear develops the readings from Suzuki Roshi, Sutherland, and Merton at greater length.
• Read Becoming Yourself, the collection of Suzuki Roshi's essays from which the "sharing the feeling" passage is drawn.
• Read Joan Sutherland's Through the Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans for her account of why koans speak to ordinary questions about life, death, and meaning.
• Read Thomas Merton's introduction to The Golden Age of Zen to see the paradox of words in Zen laid out in his own terms.
• Join Upaya's daily zazen practice on Zoom, linked from the video description at upaya.org/program/zazen, or explore the Upaya Wisdom Library for more teachings.

The practice period described in this talk is built around one question: what is the feeling of this moment, before the story about it begins? The Chan masters found their answer in shouts and silence. Sensei Kear offers words, carefully chosen, and asks the listener to use them as a way back to the window, and then through it.