Spirit of a Wild Fox (Carter)

 Regarding the old man’s words I was reborn as a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes, what does it mean to be reborn as a wild fox? 

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Out of the corner of my eye I see him enter the courtyard through the open gate, as I sit in repose, meditating on the koan I am to discuss with the Master this evening. It is cold and breezy, but I am beyond the elements now, noticing and yet unaffected, beyond the movements of the world of cause and effect, and close to ocean of original enlightenment. There is no fear of the wild fox. There is no wild fox.

 

And yet…he looks at me intently and moves forward, closer, silently, curiously. He stops about ten feet from me and stares. Our eyes lock. He has red hair along the length of his body and tail and a white beard, not unlike the aged monks in our monastery along the ridge of the Baizhang mountain. This one cannot possibly know cause and effect, because he does not have the mind to question wherefore he comes, why he must search for food, and how to overcome fear of his predators. He is not a monk, he has never received the precepts, participated in summer practice periods, nor had awesome presence.

 

And yet…he looks knowingly at me. He is close enough for me to study his yellow eyes with black pupils. We see each other. “Fox,” I eventually ask, “I shall call you Redbeard. Why do you stare at me as though you question me?” He blinks his eyes, saying nothing, of course. Then he advances and is now about two or three feet from my cushion. “Redbeard,” I mentally transmit, “are you curious about my talk with the Master, as though you were a student yourself?” He turned his head and a thought entered my mind, “Does a person who has cultivated great practice still fall into cause and effect?” Strange. I have never heard this before; it is rare indeed.

 

And so I answer from my years of study and knowing mind, “No, such a person does not fall into cause and effect.” 

 

I hear an ear-shattering howl. The gate slammed, thunder clashed, and the ground of Mount Baizhang shook me off the cushion. The next thing I know, I feel, is my stomach rumbling. Food, must find food. Standing up on four red paws, an instinctual urge forces the leap over the gate. 

 

The mountains are before me now, just as I remember them, but they seem different. It is twilight, a time between worlds they say, and I feel strangely unsettled, as though I’m experiencing my body for the first time after awakening from a long sleep. Tired, weary from extensive travel, yet strangely sated from a dream that took me into the forest of the Baizhang mountain, free from cares and obligations, roaming the ten directions, and lovingly attuned to the cacophony of the natural world all around. The thrill of running with the wind, the eagerness of the chase, and power of rippling muscles throughout my body are faint, but exhilarating feelings.  

 

I shake my head, which seems like a familiar gesture somehow, and look in front of me. About ten feet away is Redbeard, frail, old, clearly dying. I look at my hands and realize I am “I,” and I have hands that I begin to study in penetrating detail. 

 

“Redbeard, what has happened to me? Where are we? What is wrong with you.” We lock eyes, and he mentally transmits a thought, “Come closer and I will tell you.” I move toward him silently and curiously. “Go to the Master, as you had planned, and stand in testament to your koan study, but know that you are nonhuman, that you fell into five hundred lifetimes in fox spirit, and then ask the question.” He walks up to me, licks my face, and lays down beside the rock behind the monastery.  

 

After many talks by the Zen Master, sitting close to him, but at a respectable ten feet, I approach him finally to tell him my story. I am now about two to three feet away from him, the distance of a human arm or a fox body, close enough to fall into yellow eyes with black pupils, the very eyes with which practice penetrates into deep and vast perception. 

 

“Venerable Master, please say a turning word and free me from this body of a wild fox. Does a person who has cultivated great practice still fall into cause and effect?” Baizhang said, “Do not ignore cause and effect.” Falling into fox body after a turning word, falling into nonhuman body, falling into human body, the three three of falling, means I have lived and taught on this mountain. I have lived. Turning from one to another in the vortex of now, the pirouette from world to world, means that if you take up one, you cannot take up another. If you neglect one, you fall into the secondary. And yet, seeing with the eye of practice…

 

Immediately, I howl with delight and Baizhang and I clap our hands, turning each other in circles, and we laughingly spit out wild fox saliva all over each other! Release and return from the wild is instantaneous in the spontaneous celebration of the moment. 

 

Huangbo appears, amazed at the spectacle, and asks the teacher, “But what if he hadn’t given a mistaken answer? Baizhang and I look deeply into Huangbo's yellow eyes with black pupils and we also see the pearl shining in his topknot. 

Simultaneously we exclaim, “Redbeard! You spirit of a wild fox!”

 

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It is not that there was originally a wild fox and it lured the earlier Baizhang to fall into cause and effect, nor is it possible that the earlier Baizhang was originally a wild fox. To say that the earlier Baizhang’s spirit went out and became a wild fox’s skin bag is a statement of someone outside the way. It is not that a wild fox came and suddenly swallowed the earlier Baizhang. If you say the earlier Baizhang fell into the body of a wild fox, then there must be the liberation of the earlier Baizhang’s body for the fox to fall into. And yet, Baizhang may fall into the body of a wild fox again, later. It is not that Baizhang was transposed into a wild fox’s body. Page 707