Book of Serenity, Case 97
Emperor Tungguang asked Xinghua, “I have the jewel of the Central Plain, but there is no one who can pay the price.”
Xinghua said, “Lend me your majesty’s jewel for a look.”
The emperor pulled down his hat straps.
Xinghua said, “Who could presume to meet the price of the sovereign’s jewel?”
For a tradition that, for most of its 2,500 year history, was passed down primarily by renunciant monks, Buddhism has an incongruous preoccupation with jewels.
First and foremost, we have the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Then there’s the mythic wish-fulfilling jewel carried by the Bodhisattva Jizo to light his way through the hell realms, where he travels to ease the suffering of those who dwell there. There’s the jewel net of Indra, and the celebrated “jewel in the the lotus,” an epithet for Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion.
This last one, by the way, is best known in its Tibetan variant, as the mantra “om mani padme hum,” which many of us chanted together when Losang Samten visited us this past spring.
Jewels play a central role, too, in several teaching stories. One of the most famous comes from the eighth chapter of the Lotus Sutra.
The story tells of a poor man who visited an old friend, now a wealthy public servant. The two men stayed up long into the night, reminiscing and enjoying an excess of food and wine, until eventually the poor man fell into a heavy, drunken sleep. In the morning, the rich man was called away on urgent business before his friend awoke. Wanting to share some of his good fortune with his friend, the rich man sewed a priceless jewel into the lining of the poor man’s old, tattered coat, then went on his way. When the poor man awoke, his friend was nowhere to be found, so he showed himself out, returning to his pauper’s life. Completely ignorant of the gift his friend had given him, he suffered through many lean, miserable years, spending countless cold nights huddled in doorways, trying to shield himself from the elements. He begged for scraps from strangers and, more often than not, went hungry, until his ribs poked out through his clothes and his face was transformed into a gaunt, hollow mask of want. Years later, the rich man happened upon his friend and, shocked by his condition, asked what had become of the extravagant gift he had given him. Confusion spread over the poor man’s face as he looked back at his friend uncomprehendingly. With sinking realization, the rich man took hold of his friend’s coat and felt for the place where he had sewn the jewel into it so many years before. The gem was still there, right where he’d left it. He ripped it out of the coat and showed it to his friend, who discovered for the first time that, through all his years of desperation and lack, he had possessed wealth beyond his wildest imaginings.
Now, to me, this parable has always seemed a bit too Three’s Company-ish, a comedy of errors of unbelievable proportions that begs the question, “So, the rich man had enough time to sew a gem into his friend’s coat, but not to leave a note?” Maybe, like so many of us here at Treetop, the wealthy friend suffered from a touch of ADD?
That aside, I think the jewel in this tale may be the same one Emperor Tungguang showed Xinghua.
This jewel shows up again in a snippet surrounding another poor man, Yu, who traveled around by means of a lame donkey. Early one morning, as he was crossing a bridge, the donkey got its leg stuck in a hole, throwing its rider ass over teakettle, as they say around these parts.
Upon hitting the ground with a pained “OOF!,” Yu exclaimed:
I have one jewel shining bright,
Long buried it was under worldly worries;
This morning the dusty veil is off and restored is its lustre,
Illuminating rivers and mountains and ten thousand things.
By now, perhaps you’re getting a sense of this jewel, but what of its price, the central question of this case. Tungguang says no one can meet that price, so it must be a very valuable jewel, indeed. And what does the emperor letting down his hat straps have to do with any of this?
I’m certainly no expert on Tang Dynasty imperial fashion trends (or 21st Century American fashion trends, for that matter), but one possible explanation is simply that Tunguang wore his priceless jewel perched atop his head, and had to remove his hat to show it off. Some commentaries suggest just that, noting that a topknot of hair adorned with precious metals and stones was a symbol of nobility.
But I don’t think that reasoning quite gets to the warm beating heart of this case. Rather, I see the emperor’s gesture as suggestive of something else, an embodiment of the Zen ideal that Xinghua’s teacher, Rinzai, called “the true person of no rank.”
When we strip away our rank – the habitual roles we fill, and that we think define our very being – what’s left? Who is the emperor when he takes off his crown?
Who are we when we strip away all of our labels? Son, daughter, mother, father, male, female, gay, straight, smart, stupid, ugly, beautiful, sinner, saint, Buddhist …
When we peel down past all of these identities we use to shore up our egos, what do we find?
The answer to that is something the Zen priest, poet, and madman Ikkyu knew something of when he wrote:
Peace isn’t luck
For six years stand facing a silent wall
Until the you of your face
Melts like a candle
Put that way, though, waking up can sound frightening or even perverse, especially when you consider that, here in the zendo, uniformity often serves as a kind of shorthand for the One Body. Taken the wrong way, Zen rituals can seem like a means of pounding out any trace of individuality until we’ve all been assimilated into the Borg.
But that’s not what Ikkyu was talking about. All beings may be inseparable from the One Body, but the One Body is always and only expressed through all beings, in their dazzling diversity. Conformity for its own sake is not the aim of our practice.
No, the price of the emperor’s jewel is not our humanity, or even our singularity. The price is our suffering. And while that may sound like the bargain of all time, in reality, it’s a price few people can stomach.
After all, who would we be without it? What would be left if we stopped feeding into the petty dramas that make us feel like the star in our own personal movie?
Our egos shrink back in terror from the void.
But when we can let that all go, even for an instant, we’re left with our original face, the one we had before our parents were born.
No rank. No pretenses. No one to impress.
One jewel, shining bright. And yet absolutely ordinary.
Emperor Tungguang asked Xinghua, “I have the jewel of the Central Plain, but there is no one who can pay the price.”
Xinghua said, “Lend me your majesty’s jewel for a look.”
The emperor pulled down his hat straps.
Xinghua said, “Who could presume to meet the price of the sovereign’s jewel?”