The Layman Sinks His Boat: Thoughts on (Considering) Burning Bridges

by Kevin Geiman

According to the story, Layman Pang one day took all his possessions, loaded them onto a boat, rowed out to the middle of the nearby lake, and sank the lot of them. He didn’t give them away, and he didn’t see to it that they went to some good use. He just destroyed them.

In Case 28 of the Mumonkan, Tokusan, the renowned scholar of the Diamond Sutra, came to a realization under Ryutan. He then proceeded to make a bonfire of his notes and commentaries, burning them all in front of the main hall. He didn’t hold on to them to check them against his insight or to use as materials for future reflection or teaching. He just destroyed them.

Burning in flame and sinking in water are perhaps the most common ways of signifying complete detachment. Fire and water are primordial, basic, fundamental. To commit anything to them is to lose any hope of getting it back in the future. To pass by way of them is to emerge renewed, ready to begin, free of cumber. We are given to understand that the Layman and Tokusan did, indeed, continue to go deeply in the Way, and the tradition holds them out to us with hopes that we might deepen our resolve to do so as well.

These cases raise the age-old question whether we should understand such renunciation figuratively or literally. Certainly we would not be hearing of the Layman or the Sutra Scholar if they hadn’t done such drastic things. Their actions stood enough out of the norm that they stuck fast and hard in the collective consciousness of the tradition. Let’s face it: we don’t hear tell of those who held back, who kept some reserve, who made as if they would be willing to surrender at some future time, but just not yet.

So let’s assume a matter-of-fact renunciation for the moment. What’s the harm? Quickly the objections rise: “Such things might be useful in the future.” “Those things should have been given to the poor.” “Such egos! Why the drama?” It’s this last one we should be most worried about, of course, but it might be a misguided objection here, one that mistakes effect for cause. Let’s look at the Layman again. If he were submerging the goods in order to diminish the self, then there would be a problem. If he thought that doing this would produce some realization, then he would be mistaken. If he thought he was making the difference in the world, he would have been wrong. And we wouldn’t still be hearing of him.

A different reading would suggest that the Layman’s work was already accomplished when he loaded the dinghy and headed away from the dock. John Woolman, the renowned colonial Quaker abolitionist and himself a man of some insight, put it this way: “Rather than renouncing power, wealth, and honor in a noble sacrifice, we simply discover that they no longer hold such interest for us." Perhaps it’s like what we experienced as children and adolescents, now allowed to continue into adulthood. How many of us held on to our teddy bears once we found other more age-appropriate amusements? We didn’t white knuckle our way through cleaning out the toybox; we probably wondered why we hadn’t gotten rid of the stuff sooner. We didn’t leave childhood behind in a great significant act of ego. Childhood had already left us.

Still, the Layman’s story makes the whole thing sound instantaneous. This may not square so neatly with our own experience, for there are times in life when, to return to Woolman, the interest one thing holds for us is waxing while the interest another holds is waning, not as a process of natural growth but as a matter of choice and commitment. These are the times when we begin to know deep in our bones just how different things are going to look from here on out, the times when we need to be opening ourselves completely and honestly to that difference. At these times we are rightly cautioned to not be too hasty. It’s not a matter of still holding back as much as giving ourselves over as deeply and fully in as patient and as thorough a way as possible – a matter of letting go with eyes wide open. Marrying is like this, so we have engagements. Ordaining is like this, so we have novitiate periods.

Our lineage has no Dharma equivalent of a Vegas drive-thru wedding chapel, and for good reason. Asking to ordain is not the same thing as entering on the novice path, nor is entering the novitiate the same thing as ordination.

I had no clue at the beginning of last January’s sesshin that I would be asking to be ordained by the end. (“Just where did that come from?” I still sometimes wonder….) I also had no clue how many nights’ sleep I would lose once I did ask. Little did I know what points of resistance would subsequently emerge, what aspects of ego would show up, what it was about the whole thing I was scared of. Every now and then it becomes clearer to me what further things will have to be left behind. Then I have to pause, consider, discern. Remember, the Layman didn’t wake up one day and just walk away from his home and possessions, either. That would have been too reactive. Rather, he took it all out, bit by bit, looked at it all, saw the things for what they were, and then – only then – paddled them out and away. We only hear of the day on the lake. Who knows how long he took in his mind to get the stuff out of the house? And if he had found that he really couldn’t part with the heirloom credenza, then that would have been good, too, for it would have been honest.

In our life in the sangha we really don’t compare notes with others, so it’s quite easy to make overinflated assumptions about others’ practice, depths of insight, levels of commitment and the rest. Perhaps we see someone getting ordained in the same way – that they are somehow special, have something we don’t, etc. I know I did. When I witnessed Sthaman and then Vinati being ordained, it was like watching the Layman in the boat. It seemed stark and definitive, a moment of real crossing, an act I was incapable of doing. And it was.

But looking at ordination as an isolated incident or as an expected outcome of a natural process misses something, and I now realize how profound and welcome this quiet, patient novice time is. It’s not so much a metamorphosis stage as a trying stage (in the old-fashioned sense in which we speak of trying a case to see what sticks and what doesn’t). Announce your intention to the sangha and see how it sits with them. Wear a black rakusu in a public, non-ZC context for the first time and see how that goes. Clean out everything but the blue, black, gray and collarless from the closest and come up with something to go to work in. Look ahead on the calendar one, five, ten years out and take stock of what won’t be happening that you might have had your eye on. Let the full weight of the tradition you’re looking to bear start to rest on your shoulders and see how it feels to stand.

Perhaps even all this smacks a little too much of calculation and deliberation, for there is throughout this time a growing “right as rain” sense as well. The Verse to Case 7 of the Mumonkan comes to mind:

Because it is so very clear,
It takes long to come to realization.
If you know at once that candlelight is fire
You know the meal has long been cooked.

The Layman’s possessions were already at the bottom of the lake before he packed up the first thing. By the time the novice accepts the new name, so it seems, the ordination will have already taken hold, the letting go will have been accomplished, the destruction of another form of life will be over and done with. At least that’s what I’m guessing. At this stage of the process, though, I sometimes eye my goods still on the boat at the dock and wonder…