Hyakujo and the Fox

In my days of formal koan study, when I was traveling early mornings before work to meet with Roshi Bob in Jersey City, koan study followed a prescribed order. We began with The Gateless Gate and worked our way from first koan to last, one after the other. We did the next three koan books in the same way, very orderly, very systematically, from first koan to last. It never occurred to question the order of things. It was just the way it was done. “Hyakujo and the Fox” was the second koan that I studied because it was the second koan in the Gate. I was nowhere near ready for Hyakujo.

For a koan, “Hyakujo and the Fox” is a very long, complicated story. Now, thirty years later, Hyakujo is very important to me. I’ve been working with one aspect. Here’s my retelling, very briefly, of that aspect.

Hyakujo is the teacher at a mountain temple when he notices that a stranger has been attending his talks. After one talk, the stranger approaches Hyakujo and reveals that he is not a human being, but in a previous life he had been the abbot of this temple. Because of an error made in his teaching, he has been reborn for 500 lifetimes as a fox.

Never mind for now what the error was.

The stranger asks Hyakujo, when he dies, to receive a priest’s funeral. Later that day, Hyakujo goes out with his monks and on the other side of the mountain finds the fox body. He performs the priest’s funeral.

There’s much more to this koan, but this is enough for me at this moment. Following Ellen Bursten’s Actors Studio approach to koans, I am the fox-teacher and I am Hyakujo.

I am the fox-teacher. This is easy now. The fox-teacher misspoke, misled students. I understand. I am trying to guide students, trying to say things, do things, which will help them to go deeper, to move toward the realization of the oneness of life. And I worry that I have misspoken, misled. There is horror in that. To mislead others when one has received the gift of empowerment is a betrayal. I can feel the horror. Being reborn as a fox is as good a metaphor as I know for the horror. I comfort myself: Any teacher who does not fear misspeaking is a fraud.

Becoming Hyakujo is harder. I look around me, and I see so frequently dharma brothers and sisters who seem to me to misspeak. What do I do? Speak out? Condemn their “errors”? Hyakujo honors the misspeaking, fox-teacher with a priest’s funeral. Hyakujo gets it. As teachers we all make mistakes, we all mislead. We’re human. And yet if we are lucky, we keep teaching. Hyakujo honors the fox-teacher without denying his mistakes, honors him for his courage.

Can I embody Hyakujo? I am smiling, opening myself to my fellow foxes.  Maybe Hyakujo should have been the last of the 300-odd koans that I studied with Bob. Even then, it would have been too soon.