Tarrant - Bring me the rhinoceros : and other Zen koans that will save your life

John Tarrant is one of the most interesting minds in American Buddhism. He weaves his deep immersion in Buddhist practice, Western psychology, and the arts into a unique yet completely authentic story of the Zen life and its mysteries.

Melvin McLeod, editor-in-chief, the Shambhala Sun

Youve never read a Zen book like this before. Having digested the traditional koan literature, which he has taught for many years, Zen teacher John Tarrant cheerfully goes beyond it. His koan re-tellings read like postmodern short fiction, complete with anti-heroic characters, visible scenery, and attitude. Rather than the usual Zen mystique that treats koans as arcane meditation objects, Tarrant discusses them as open secrets that actually matter for our lives here and now.

Zoketsu Norman Fischer, poet and Zen priest; author of Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homers Odyssey to Navigate Lifes Perils and Pitfalls

Bring Me the Rhinoceros is one of the best books ever written about Zen.

Stephen Mitchell, translator of Gilgamesh: A New English Version

Heres a book to crack the happiness code if ever there was one. Forget about self-improvement, five-point plans, and inspirational seminars that you cant remember a word of a week later. Tarrants is the fix that fixes nothing because there is nothing to fix. Your life is a koan, a deep question whose answer you are already livingthis is the true inspiration, and Tarrant delivers.

Roger Housden, author of the Ten Poems series

Every life is full of koans, and yet you cant learn from a book how to understand them. You need someone to put you in the right frame of mind to see the puzzles and paradoxes of your experience. With intelligence, humor, and steady deep reflection, John Tarrant does this as no one has done it before. This book could take you to a different and important level of experience.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

John Tarrants talent for telling these classic Zen tales transforms them magically into a song in which, as you read, the words disappear as the music continues to echo in your mind and make you happy. Mysteriously, like koans.

Sylvia Boorstein, author of Pay Attention, For Goodness Sake

ABOUT THE BOOK

Bring Me the Rhinoceros is an unusual guide to happiness and a can opener for your thinking. For fifteen hundred years, Zen koans have been passed down through generations of masters, usually in private encounters between teacher and student. This book deftly retells more than a dozen traditional koans, which are partly paradoxical questions dangerous to your beliefs and partly treasure boxes of ancient wisdom. Koans show that you dont have to impress people or change into an improved, more polished version of yourself. Instead you can find happiness by unbuilding, unmaking, throwing overboard, and generally subverting unhappiness. John Tarrant brings the heart of the koan tradition out into the open, reminding us that the old wisdom remains as vital as ever, a deep resource available to anyone in any place or time.

A Zen teacher who has studied koans for thirty years, JOHN TARRANT directs the Pacific Zen Institute, a venture in meditation and the arts, and teaches culture change in organizations. He is the author of several books, including The Light Inside the Dark. He lives among the vineyards near Santa Rosa, California.

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BRING ME THE RHINOCEROS

and Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life

JOHN TARRANT

SHAMBHALA Boston & London 2012

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2004, 2008 by John Tarrant

Cover art by Katie Sloss

Updated edition of Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy originally published by Harmony Books.

Excerpt from Per Diem from Shroud of the Gnome

1997 by James Tate. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Excerpt from Botany Bay from In Possession of a Cow by Alicia Keane. Reprinted by permission of author.

Excerpt from My Dead Friends from What the Living Do by Marie Howe. 1997 by Marie Howe

Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Tarrant, John, 1949

Bring me the rhinoceros: and other Zen koans that will save your life / John Tarrant.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2349-5

ISBN 978-1-5903-0618-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Koan. I. Title.

BQ9289.5.T373 2008

294.34432dc22

2008017136

FOR JOAN

This book is a report on using koans as a way of transformation in the modern world. One of the features of the project is an open culture of collaborationmany hands and hearts have been atwork here.

Thanks to Michael Katz, for conceiving the book, Joan Sutherland, for reimagining koans, editing, and translation, and Byron Katie for her approach to inquiry.

For years, Rachel Howlett, Brian Howlett, David Weinstein, Lyn Bouguereau, and Michelle Riddle have given material generously and collaborated to develop the ideas in this book.

Others who have helped are Susan Murphy, Stephen Mitchell, Ken Ireland, Jon Joseph, Joe Mancuso, Alan Williamson, Rachel Boughton, Mayumi Oda, Rachael Flannery, Roberta Goldfarb, Richie Domingue, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Michael Sierchio, Julian Gresser, Alison Ellett, Ann Hunkins, Linda Brown, Bill Krumbein, Paul Abrahamsen, Tom McConnell, and James Anthony. Thanks. Pacific Zen Institute has given me a home base. Tracy Gaudet and Duke Integrative Medicine provide a proving ground for ideas about transforming consciousness. Wolf Creek Partners also provides a way of implementing these ideas in health care and medicine.

AN IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION MEANS A JOURNEY

This book offers an unusual path into happiness. It doesnt encourage you to strive for things or manipulate people or change yourself into an improved, more polished version of you. Instead, it suggests a way to approach happiness indirectly by unbuilding, unmaking, tossing overboard, and generally subverting unhappiness. And even this indirect approach is not based on a plan. Its hard to plan for something that takes you beyond what you can imagine, which is what this method is designed to do. The method described in this book is based on Zen koans (ko-an) and has been in use for a long time in East Asia, though in the United States, Europe, and Australia it is just getting established. The goal of the Zen koan is enlightenment, which is a profound change of heart. This change of heart makes the world seem like a different place; with it comes a freedom of mind and an awareness of the joy and kindness underlying daily life.

Koans are not intended to prescribe a particular kind of happiness or right way to live. They dont teach you to assemble or make something that didnt exist before. Many psychological and spiritual approaches rely on an engineering metaphor and hope to make your mind more predictable and controllable. Koans go the other way. They encourage you to make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind and to approach your life more as a work of art. The surprise they offer is the one that art offers: inside unpredictability you will find not chaos, but beauty. Koans light up a life that may have been dormant in you; they hold out the possibility of transformation even if you are trying to address unclear or apparently insoluble problems.