The Circle of the Way: Reading the Gospel of Thomas as a ChristZen Text

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki notes in The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment that Zen experience has "no personal note in it as is observable in Christian mystic experiences....Satori has remained thoroughly impersonal, or rather highly intellectual" (Suzuki, 28). Thomas exhibits this same tendency toward the intellectual rather than the emotional. The sayings invite not ecstasy but insight and reflection. One does not read them in the leotio divina tradition of the Benedictines, in which one meditates on the text in order to reveal its meaning to the spirit, but rather one reads them for enlightenment through reflection that, paradoxically, employs the intellect to deny the intellect. "All koans," Suzuki also says, "are the utterances of satori with no intellectual mediation" (Suzuki, 97).

The great Japanese master Eihei Dogen -- whose Shobogenzo is a particularly rich collection of koan commentaries and essays on Zen practice -- saw spiritual practice (particularly the Zen form of contemplation known as zazen) and enlightenment as inseparable. The way is a circle for Dogen. "At the moment you begin taking a step you have arrived, and you keep arriving each moment thereafter. In this view, you don't journey toward enlightenment, but you let enlightenment unfold. In Dogen's words, 'You experience immeasurable hundreds of eons in one day.' The 'circle of the way' is a translation of the Japanese word dokan, [which] ...represent[s] the heart of his teaching" (Tanahashi, xxviii).

This characterization can be applied to the experience of reading Thomas, which is also a "circle of the way." Considering the Gospel in light of this tradition -- through the consciousness of the koan -- offers an opportunity to reread provocatively Christian tradition. In the remainder of this essay, I offer commentaries on three of the Thomas sayings -- numbers 2, 22, and 42, following the traditional form of koan commentary. First, I record the saying or "case." Second, I provide a commentary. Third, I compose a "capping verse" for each that restates my take on the root case in another form or using a slightly different metaphor. The idea here is to offer a different way of reading that utilizes the literary form of koan commentary. I also hope in this rereading of a Christian text to enter a "circle of the way" that also creatively rereads the Buddhist tradition.

Commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas

2

Jesus said, "Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will rule over all."

Commentary:

Some do stop seeking. They stop looking around. They no longer listen. In time they remain inside with the doors and windows closed and then forget what it was like to be anywhere at all. To seek is always to go somewhere else, to want something, usually better than what we have. And it is never what we expect.

Fishing is like this. I go fishing to catch trout, and I take with me to the river everything I need--artificial Mayflies, monofilament, polarized glasses, the knowledge from previous trips to this same water. Trout live in one place, usually, and one that was under that log yesterday will probably be there again today. You get to know how the trout behave, what they like to eat at different times of the year. I seek to catch a trout.