Gateless Reflections

David K. Reynolds, Ph.D.

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Foreword

Here I face again the Mumonkan, the Gateless Gate. I offer a Constructive Living interpretation of the koans in that work. I have no idea whether the writing here has any relation at all to true Zen interpretations. I am grateful to Robert Aitken for his fine translation and commentary titled The Gateless Barrier (North Point Press, San Francisco, 1990)

It might be useful for you to look at the original koans (see the bibliography below) to compare the meaning you glean from them with those here. Another comparison of interest would be with the collection of Constructive Living koans based on the Mumonkan written about ten years earlier.

Nearly all of this book was written in the very early morning hours over a period of months as I sat in a Toyota in a parking lot in Sakado City, Japan. The manuscript was typed on a Palm PDA using a Palm Computing Portable Keyboard.

1. Whatever your past, whatever your preferences, whatever your social status, whatever your luck, whatever your resources, you cannot resist Reality. Your already are merged with it so your best bet is accept it and do your best to affect it with constructive behavior.
   
   
2. No one escapes Reality. So everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is what to do next after making a mistake. A mistake is just more Reality with a gloss you or someone else has added to it. Mistakes merely bring more information about what needs doing next. So get on about the next doing and put the mistake behind you. Bury it with doing.
   
   
3. There is only this one reality to work with. Whether it is painful Reality or joyful Reality, it is all there is for you at this moment, all that is you at this moment. Taste this moment's completeness, its pervasiveness. Whether you are lost in reflection or anticipation, fear or determnation, here you are now. Here Reality is now.
   
   
4. Minds aim to make sense of the world. Minds invent categories and hypotheses and explanations. Minds create feelings and anticipations and ruminations. That is just fine; it is what minds do. I can offer you stories about the causes of these tendencies. But that would just be more mind work, for you and for me just more explanations about explanations, more reasons about reasoning. There is no end to the extended, nested possibilities.
   
   Take a break and look around, listen around, feel around, smell and taste around. While doing so watch your mind go to work.
   
   
5. Here I offer you advice about giving up on stories, even scientific ones, certainly religious ones, definitely psychological ones, admittedly this one.
   
   Whatever stories you treasure, Reality brings you illness, death, losses, joys, challenges and a variety of other experiences. Your stories will not prevent disaster or fortune. Know your stories for what they are and taste this moment's rich flavor.
   
   
6. Reality rears itself up before your eyes. It plays itself on your ears and fingers and nose and tongue. You ignore it at your own peril.
   
   Do you think I can offer you more than this truth? The magic wand to change Reality is called behavior. Your actions will change it, not always in expected or desired ways, of course. Your thoughts and wishes and imaginings and emotions will not affect Reality directly. Do these words bring a smile of recognition?
   
   
7. You, now, are the product of all your actions to date. Your actions have formed you. So if you want to change yourself you must change what you have been doing. This advice is not difficult to understand. However, it may be difficult at times to execute.
   
   Kindly notice the opportunity that Reality offers you and act on it. If your windshield is dirty, clean it. Then, what is next to do?
   
   
8. You are free to call your life anything you want. You can say it is easy or troubled or busy or tragic or anything else. But your life is really just your life. It is replete with all sorts of experiences. The experiential variety doesn't really fit in a single category.
   
   Similarly, it is unrealistic to try to fit your character or personality or psychology or psychiatric diagnosis into a single word or phrase. Word categories shave off Reality to make it fit within them.
   
   
9. It's all right, just as it is. It's a good idea to remind yourself of this truth often. Life may not SEEM to be all right to you at any given time, but it is. All right doesn't mean that life meets your standards or hopes at that time. "All right" means "acceptable". You can disappear within that all right. You can merge with that all right so that you are all right, too.
   
   It is all right for me to be afraid while flying across the Pacific. It is all right to feel exhausted after a long day's work. It is all right to feel grief at the loss of a loved one. It is all right to feel lustful and bored and joyful and reverent and hopeless. Now what needs doing.
   
   
10. There is no salvation except through your own behavior. Yet Reality offers the opportunity for salvation in every fresh moment. This combination of works and grace is ever-present for each of us all of the time.
    
    I never rescued anyone. Constructive Living never saved anyone. We save ourselves, and we are being saved moment by moment. We don't need hope or confidence or a peaceful mind or enlightenment or anything else. Reality is enough, just as it is.
    
    
11. For all the words about Reality being just as it is, we all make evaluations of it. There are feelings we like and feelings we don't like, people we trust and people we don't trust, jobs that are easier to do than other jobs, foods we prefer. Everyone has desires; everyone makes judgments. Such tendencies, too, are Reality, and they are acceptable.
    
    The key here is to notice judgments and preferences and the like as they are. Don't allow them to trap you. Hooked by evaluations you may miss other important information and experiences. Meanwhile, keep doing what you discern as right.
    
    
12. Something watches over you. It suddenly reminds you of a forgotten task; it advises you to hesitate before making a biting rejoinder; it notices the car pulling out from the curb on your right; it provides me with words to offer to you. You may call that something your mind, but then why does it seem sometimes that you have two minds--one warning or advising the other?
    
    There are many me's in two senses. I keep changing. I am not the me that went to high school and college, not the me that taught at UCLA and USC, but we seem to be related somehow. Even the bodies that seemed to have housed those me's kept changing. In another sense, too, there are many me's. At this very moment you are capable of tapping your me reading these words while another me monitors your sitting or standing position and another me checks your surrounding for happenings that might impact you, such as an earthquake or fire. We can quibble about whether to call these phenomena "me's" but surely they are separate functions going on at the same time.
    
    Given this variety, why do you think it is difficult to change your thinking or your level of noticing or your behavior? It's only necessary to change one of your me's within this constantly changing environment right now. And your me's will change anyway, whether in ways you direct or not. You are more like clouds than you are like a closet.
    
    
13. Life is about doing what needs doing next. Sometimes that doing is silent; sometimes that doing requires words. Noticing what needs doing and implementing that information requires guided effort. A quick response may be required, as in returning a tennis volley. A thoughtfully trimmed out response may be required, as in words of consolation to a grieving widow. In all cases, the doing should fit the situation. What do you need to do next?
    
    
14. The past is gone. Discussing it won't bring it back. The future is not yet; dwelling on what might happen won't determine what does happen. Debating theory won't assure proper behavior.
    
    It is easy to be so caught up in words and imagination that the present moment's requirements of us are lost. Our minds quickly fly off into the unreal. Flying is fine, but come back to earth when you need to plant roses. The thorns will remind you.
    
    
15. Have you ever gone over and over a mistake you made in the past? Have you ever ruminated about what might have been? Has your mind dwelt on a criticism you received? Such mental stirring removes your attention from this moment's experiences, this moment's necessary behavior.
    
    You must respond to Reality's messages or lose the chance to do life well.
    
    
16. I am fond of saying that no one knows why anyone does what he or she does. We have personal stories to explain our behavior, and psychology has elaborate theories (many of them) to explain behavior. But none of these myths really explains or predicts behavior accurately. We say that sometimes we act "automatically". We say that sometimes people act in ways that aren't like them. There are so many exceptions to our attempts to understand the why of behavior.
    
    When we fit ourselves to the moment's circumstance, when we lose ourselves in the requirements of the moment, then something special happens. Accessing this moment's needs demands alertness. Neither conformity nor non-conformity to ordinary customs may be necessary. Just what needs doing now. It's okay to build sand castles of whys, but don't forget that playing is only playing.
    
    
17. We must respond to what comes our way. Responding is our responsibility and our challenge. We must respond over and over again, if that response is necessary. We must respond with no action, if necessary. We must respond whether anyone acknowledges our response or not, whether our response is effective or not, whether we are well-prepared or not. Whatever we are feeling we must respond.
    
    You may wonder whether we are the drum or the drumstick or both.
    
    
18. When you drive a care skillfully, there is a sense in which you become the car. Painting a flower or playing tennis or writing a manuscript may have that same quality of losing the self in the activity. Talking allows that possibility, too. In offering the exactly appropriate words we can model the merging of self and situation, we become Reality's representatives in a most intimate sense.
    
    I write here neither of jabbering nor of laconic speech. When the right words appear, they appear. How kind of them!
    
    
19. When you are thinking that you are, at last, able to live constructively, fully, then you are not. When you call yourself a master of this lifeway, then you are not. When you think that you are practicing, mastering, some discipline, then you are not. Separating yourself from your practice is the problem. The headtrip of associations chunks the flow of the moment into artificial cognitive lumps. Slide into your forehand stroke, your dishwashing, your lovemaking, your lecture so far that you and your practice disappear. Practice is fine, but practice so that your practice practices you.
    
    
20. Science may be able to explain (more or less) the physical mechanism by which we speak or move our arms and legs. But there is no scientific way of connecting our experience of desiring an arm to move and its movement. There is no way of knowing why a specific word wells up into our awareness in everyday speech. Your mind is ultimately private and unfathomable. Yet something allows us to string together ideas and words at a rapid pace. Something allows our minds to communicate with our bodies. Or is it just minds communicating with more minds, or Mind communicating with Mind? However you want to talk about it, you do what you do. Whether you are aware that it is a marvel or unaware of it, you do what you do.
    
    
21. No words do your life justice, not even learned psychological or sociological words. No words do justice to this way of life either. So anyone ranting about CL has something else in mind other than CL. Someone with CL printed on his forehead isn't really advertising CL. When you play baseball well you forget the glove. Beware that making a show of not talking about CL is equally off course. So what can you do?
    
    
22. There is only one thing you need to do now. Your mind may be full of things you think may need to be done now, but really there is only one thing you need to do and only one thing you can do properly right now. You may discuss this point or argue about it if that is what needs doing now, but the fact remains. Believe it or not. So you had best be about doing it. That doing may be to continue reading these words or something quite different. It is a mystery how we know what needs to be done. One common human problem is knowing what needs to be done but not doing it. Sometimes resting, playing, waiting needs doing. Sometimes a shout or crash or subpoena or award or telephone call presents an invitation to do what needs doing. Stay alert so as not to miss the messages of circumstance.
    
    
23. Getting down to basics
    
    Did you ever kindly give in to someone even though you knew you were right? Did you ever thoughtfully apologize knowing that you had done no wrong? Did you ever unselfishly give away something you treasured for yourself? In those cases your behavior was in concord with extra-ordinary rules and understanding. The usual self-supporting habits were not operating. Something more important than the self made an appearance. Can there really be something more important than this self that needs to be esteemed and protected and pampered? Why do we tend to ignore how much we take from the world and how much trouble we cause others? What is this self-image that needs so much to massaging in order to be maintained?
    
    
24. The late Takehisa Kora used to read an ancient, boring text at bedtime to help him get to sleep. The time just before sleeping is not a good time to be making elaborate plans or doing difficult calculations. There is a time for deep thought and for reminiscing and for detailed planning, of course. Thoughtless chattering, however, should be avoided. Any verbal response should be appropriate to the situation.
    
    
25. Sometimes no possible choice looks like a good one. Sometimes we are surrounded by such dilemmas that there seems to be no way to turn. Yet something must be done; not choosing is also out of the question. In such situations what is there to do? My advice is to look again, more closely. See if there is information that transcends what you thought was basic to the situation. It may turn out that what you thought was your third choice is actually your first choice, your best choice. Whatever you do, more choices unfold.
    
    
26. All changes involve gain and loss, plusses and minuses. Open the drapes and you gain a view of the sky and lose the view of the closed drapes. Open your mind to new possibilities and you lose the comfort of old preconceptions. Recognizing these dual faces of change allows us to embrace change with less resistance. Change, after all, is inevitable. Within and without, nothing lasts forever.
    
    
27. There is a great deal we don't know. We have no satisfying answers to questions about the orderliness of the universe, the connection between brain and mind, the experience of a self, the emergence of thoughts, creativity, and many others. Even our attempts to frame these unanswered questions with words involves another puzzle. How is it that words allow us to generate frames in our thought world? I don't know. Of course. I just add confusion to chaos by my attempt to write about it. It is futile to define what we don't know...as I just did.
    
    
28. Just when you think you are pretty smart, something comes along to show you the limits of your knowledge. Just when you think you have mastered something, you discover that there is more to it than you had reckoned. Something always waits beyond the boundaries your mind has set. Why is that? Is the mind so bent on grasping that it creates unrealistic categories in order to fool itself? Limited or not, these categories may be useful for setting clocks and catching balls and boiling water. But don't be fooled into thinking that your total array of categories makes up the whole. The whole, after all, is just another category.
    
    
29. Chatter relieves anxiety for some people and serves as a marker that they are members of a group. Chatter also distracts us from attending to a lot of other information Reality presents to us. Intellectual chatter is common in academic circles. Much of anthropology these days is a good example of scholars chatting with other scholars. Adding one's own comments to others' chatter merely adds to the conversational bedlam. The best solution for chatter is silence, not chatter theory. Oops! I'm sorry.
    
    
30. Let's call the reality in which you are embedded right now "your situation." Your situation just is. You may have names for it, names like "troublesome" or "contented" or "divorced" or "retired" or "traveling". You may have desires that it continue or change in some way. You may have regrets or dissatisfaction or some clever analysis of your situation. Nevertheless, it just is. If you want to change your situation in some purposeful way you must first accept the situation as it is. You cannot work on your desired changes if your mind is focused on fantasy or past failures or fears about the future. First you must ground yourself in this here now. Then you can do something to change it. Change begins with acceptance. Allow yourself to be enveloped by reality; then mail yourself toward your destination.
    
    
31. I cannot investigate Reality for you. You must check out how life works for yourself. I sometimes think of myself as a kind of bus guide. "Looking out the window on the right side you may see that notable structure. Now on the left side don't miss the rapids." I call your attention to some familiar phenomena I have passed on this route again and again. A bus guide tries to make the patter interesting, and fortunately the views change with the seasons and the years. But the course is pretty much the same. What do you see out of your window?
    
    
32. Whatever I say or don't say, whatever I do or don't do, life turns out as it does. I don't mean to imply here that talking and other doing is useless. These words don't recommend fatalistic passivity. Nevertheless, we never know exactly what will result next, whatever we do. For all our planning and calculating and preparing and training and hoping and even deserving, life presents twists and turns we didn't envision. Life is like that. Just like that. Get real.
    
    
33. Living your life is not words on a page. Having the sense of what needs to be done now cannot be taught with words. Recognizing the ways in which life lives you is not a question on a written examination. Doing life well may involve talking about it, but that speech is not the whole of it. You know that truth already. You know it both intellectually and somewhere else, too. Your experience grounds that knowledge deeply, permanently. It rings in your ears.
    
    
34. By now you understand that I cannot really teach you how to live. We can enjoy sharing talk about Reality, life, wisdom, foolishness. However, Reality is our best teacher. And Reality just is. It teaches us by example. Your best bet is to imitate it by merging with it, as it is. Are you curious about how one goes about merging with Reality? Shall we talk about it? No need; you just did it.
    
    
35. You have no personality, no fixed character. Those words are attempts to mount you in plastic, like a laser-etched paperweight. But you are more like palm fronds waving in the breeze than you are like a block of plastic. You are even more like the breeze itself. You appear and disappear; now strong, now weak, now warm, now cool, moving, fitting yourself to the palm fronds and garden walls, leaping toward unfettered freedom. You are a kind of interplay that isn't well described with words. Something allows that interplay to happen and to be noticed. You are Reality's participant-observer.
    
    
36. When you encounter the impossible what do you do? When there seems to be no solution to a problem, yet the problem must be solved, what do you do? First, of course, you must accept the impossibility of the problem as given to you. Then you have a couple of choices. One choice is to give up and turn to another problem. Sometimes that is what needs to be done. If the problem you have presented to yourself is to bring back your dead spouse then you had better turn to some other project. Another possibility is to transcend the boundaries of the impossible problem, turning it into something possible. What conditions made the problem unsolvable? What can be done about those conditions? Have words created artificial limitations that need not be observed?
    
    This discussion is not mystical. It is quite practical. You need not have some mystical experience to turn the impossible into the merely difficult. You do, in fact, have mystical experiences daily, but you probably don't define them as such.
    
    
37. You may have the impression that you read these words before, but these words are not the same words. We may categorize words as "the same", but they are not really so. Words are useful and untrustworthy, slippery. Memorizing words, phrases, advice, principles can be useful and binding and harmful. Reality keeps coming to you fresh from its source. Framing reality with words and habits of thought causes us to miss some of the freshness. Nevertheless, I advise you with words.
    
    
38. Some people live in a very small room full of themselves. Their minds are so full of "me" that there is hardly room for anyone or anything else. My misery, my missed chances, my fears--how small and tedious is such an existence! How big are you?
    
    
39. Blind memorization is still blind. Memorable quotes are merely words. Lives are not borrowed from books and films. Life is not lived by philosophy and religion. What did you have for breakfast today? Don't flee from life on word skates.
    
    
40. Your parents, your spouse, your children, your minister, your government representatives, your teacher, your therapist, your friend--nearly anyone is likely to tell you what you need to do. Sometimes their words conflict. Their words are like traffic lights with limited color possibilities. No one sees with your eyes. There is one Reality but many perspectives. By your lights do what is right, do what is best. Traffic lights are there for a reason, but not just the reason considered by most people.
    
    
41. Minds don't really work or rest; minds just are. Minds have no location in space; minds just are. Minds aren't naturally peaceful, happy, agitated, or miserable; minds just are. Minds are sometimes this and sometimes that, but they always are. Trying to make your mind peaceful or deep or contented or intense is unlikely to result in the success you seek. I recommend giving your mind something to do now and then. I suppose that last sentence means that your mind gives your mind something to do. And now that your mind is aware of your mind giving your mind something to do it appears that there are at least three minds in the process, maybe more. Now what happened to that worry that troubled you a few minutes ago?
    
    
42. Let's consider winning. Jesus demonstrated that death can be a kind of victory. I often argue that my major objection to suicide is that it removes the possibility of trying something else to solve a problem. But what if nothing else needs to be done? It is hard for me to imagine such a hypothetical situation because my debt to the world is so great that I dare not limit my time to work on it.
    
    
43. Sometimes we talk too much. Sometimes we don't say enough. So many people would rather talk about their problems than do something about them that a whole business bloomed. It is called "psychotherapy." Or have I said too much?
    
    Do you really believe that there is nothing you can do about your troubles? Do you really believe that talking about your troubles will make them go away? Grab this moment and fit your constructive action to it. That will do for now.
    
    
44. Let's be realistic. I watch your behavior and make guesses about who you are. Such messages from Reality teach me only if I am ready to receive them. The messages guide me if I am alert. The messages are invariably truth, but my interpretation of them is sometimes faulty. The closer I can get to the messages, the less likely I am to be in error. Sometimes I get in my way.
    
    
45. Trust your own experience. It is Reality's gift to you, especially designed to meet your learning needs. On the basis of this learning you are responsible for everything that you do. Any time your body moves you are growing and/or shrinking in some way. In that moment you are right or wrong, good or bad, a hero or a villain. Perhaps you can now see that you are even busier than you thought you were. Nevertheless, you have just enough time.
    
    
46. You really don't know what will present itself to you in the next moment. Sometimes you seem to guess correctly, sometimes not. It is this moment that is yours, is you. So how you invest yourself in this moment is your life. This moment is actually the best moment you will ever have, better than any other moment. Can you understand this truth? So this infinitely precious gift deserves your attention. No one seizes this momentary opportunity all the time. But sometimes...
    
    So stride forth into the unknown using this moment well. Though I cannot see my own future or yours I beckon you to come this way.
    
    
47. It is just fine when you don't understand something. Not-understanding is one of our natural states of mind. Seeking to change from not-understanding to understanding is just fine, too.
    
    You will find yourself in situations with no satisfactory explanation as to why this now is happening to you. No one else can offer you understanding either. All the comforting stories fade away. Then just accept the "don't know." Do what needs doing next.
    
    
48. For all our momentary, effortful behavior vast Reality surrounds us, includes us. For all our concern with this moment eternity stretches about us. Getting from here to there is impossible, yet we seem to do it. This me can never accomplish a future purpose or travel across the street, but I seem to do it. The seeing is in the believing and vice versa.
    
    Welcome home, stranger and friend!

Epilogue

Gateless Gate's Cautionary Advice

1. Don't be limited by the customary way of doing things. You may wish to investigate why certain rules and procedures and laws are as they are. Nevertheless, you are the final judge about what you need to do.
   
   
2. To act only in accord with your own convenience is both foolish and wrong. Always take into consideration the convenience of other creatures and things and the ordinary and acceptable ways of doing life.
   
   
3. Trying to run away from Reality through meditation or games or scholarship or sex or work or culturally prescribed behavior is fruitless and unwise. Fit yourself to Reality's moment.
   
   
4. Recognize your limits. It is fine to be a rock in the river, but it is foolish to seek to reverse the flow. Sometimes I am a fool.
   
   
5. No one is always aware. Claims of special powers are lies. It is acceptable to be ordinary.
   
   
6. Obsession with good and evil produces a mind set with unnatural extremes. Beware thoughtlessly adopting others' definitions of right and wrong, even mine. Yet you ignore this dimension at your own peril.
   
   
7. No lifeway or philosophy or religion will save you. Your identity is not tied to any movement. A characteristic vocabulary and group banners may signify unconsidered mimicry. You can't run away in that direction either.
   
   
8. Life is full of everyday miracles. To single out some thoughts or events as miracles is to diminish the rest. Accept the miraculous ordinary.
   
   
9. Life experience comes from living. Reality is your finest teacher. You don't need to strain to receive the lessons. They come thick and fast again and again. The ordinary mind learns from them naturally.
   
   
10. With your mind in the attic you stumble on the stairs. Don't put your mind in the future and miss paying today's bills.
    
    
11. Similarly, with your mind still in bed you stumble in the shower. Don't dwell on past mistakes or successes and miss the traffic lights. Your childhood is now untouchable. This moment cries for your touch.
    
    
12. Planning and reflecting on the past are useful activities if not carried to excess. Living in the moment includes moments of planning and reflection. Living well incorporates common sense.
    
    
13. What you do now is up to You. What you do now comes from and determines who you are. Herein lies your freedom and your connection with Reality. Immerse yourself in the doing.
    
    
14. Purposeful action allows the mind to focus constructively. You invite regret and anxiety into a lethargic mind. This precious moment awaits your input.

The End