Snow in a Silver Bowl

Last night we had our first dusting of snow at the Temple, which disappeared almost as soon as it fell to the ground.  The falling flakes reminded me of the koan "Snow in a Silver Bowl" which appears twice in our Boundless Way Zen koan collection, once in our miscellaneous  koans, and once in the Blue Cliff Record, case 19, where it appears with a pointer by Yuanwu.  In the Cleary brothers' translation, Yuanwu says:

Clouds are frozen over the great plains, but the whole world is not hidden.  When snow covers the white flowers, it's hard to distinguish the outlines.  Its coldness is as cold as snow and ice, its fineness is as fine as rice powder.  Its depths are hard for even a Buddha's eye to peer into; its secrets are impossible for demons and outsiders to fathom.  Leaving aside "understanding three when one is raised" for the moment, still he cuts off the tongues of everyone on earth.  Tell me, whose business is this?  To test I cite this: look!

And the case itself is short:

A monk asked Baling, "What is the school of Kanadeva?  Baling said, "Snow n a silver bowl."

A couple of things to clarify before jumping into the koan quality of the case -- and by the way, my Dharma great-grandfather Robert Aitken, Roshi, claimed that there is no koan content here.  Be that as it may, if any part of the koan grabs at your heart and mind, leaving you in a state of wonder and confusion, it's most definitely a koan.  And that has been true for me whenever I have encountered it, first as a student and later as a teacher assigning it to my own students.

Kanadeva was one of our legendary Indian ancestors, the fifteenth counting from Shakyamuni Buddha.  It's said that when he first encountered his teacher, Nagarjuna, the teacher presented him with a bowl of water, and Kanadeva put a needle into the bowl.  If you've ever tried to find a needle in a bowl of water, you may begin to understand Kanadeva's demonstration.  And the school of Kanadeva may mean a number of things, but in one sense, all of us who practice Zen are part of that school, part of that transmission.

When I was first starting out in Zen, one of my new friends in the sangha invited me to her home.  Over her sofa was a beautiful painting of a silver bowl filled with snow.  I asked her about it, and she said, "why, it's snow in a silver bowl!" which was not so helpful.  When I looked confused, she explained that this was someone's demonstration of a koan.  I pretended to understand what she meant, but it wasn't until many years later, when I received the koan from my first teacher, that I began to understand.

Yuanwu's pointer is quite poetic, and full of pointers to some of the many meanings implicit in the case -- the strange paradox of identity and differentiation that is the subject of so many koan cases.  Snow is snow, a silver bowl is a silver bowl.  You are you, and you are also not-you.  We are all different from each other, and everything is unique in its manifestation in the world.  Sometimes we get fooled -- snow sure looks like a silver bowl.  We can mistakenly group together things that appear to be the same, and miss the vividness of their uniqueness.  All women are the same, all people of color are the same, all Republicans, Democrats, white people, gay people, men, non-binary gender people -- we stuff each other into categories.  And yet, if we focus on either the sameness or the differentiation, we miss the point, and the world becomes unavailable in its beauty and strangeness.  As Zen practitioners, we must find a way to avoid clinging to one side or the other.  We must learn to live in a world where equality and differentiation interpenetrate and shift.  Last night it snowed, and this morning there is not a trace left on the ground.