Myo: Mysterious Wonder of a Small Woman
At Chozen-ji and throughout Zen, we often talk about 妙 (myo in Japanese, miao in Chinese). It is colloquially translated in several ways: mysterious, subtle, clever, happy, strange, etc. Many Zen masters have shared their own commentaries on myo, using mysticism, mythology, and metaphor to point to a meaning that is hard to grasp in any language. But the definition that Chozen-ji founder Tanouye Tenshin Roshi adopted and that we use here today is "mysterious wonder".
Myo comes up so often because it speaks to comprehending something that defies rational intellect, and rational intellect is limited in helping us advance in Zen. Intellectual understanding is necessary, but our total understanding must transcend only it to include more. Our first approach to teaching this at Chozen-ji is to get people into their bodies. This is something we have to drill into new students, as they struggle to understand why they're doing martial arts and manual labor instead of spending their days studying Buddhist scripture. Pointing to this kind of embodied, physical work, Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki (in his book Zen and Japanese Culture) recommends knowing myo through natural phenomena—like a beaver that is born with the raw ingredients of swimming and dam-making in its genes.
(As someone once said to me, "That's right! How does a beaver know how to do that? Does it go to beaver school or something?!")
Something that is myo has both a mystical, mysterious quality, while also being natural and uncontrived, like the beaver. The beaver is a wonderful example of myo because, in part, what's wondrous about it is what the beaver creates—or perhaps more accurately, how the beaver creates day in and day out as an expression of its true nature. There are the mechanics of its genes, of course, and most likely a beaver would need to grow up amongst beavers to learn how to be one. But once these are mastered and thrown away (as “just what beavers do”), there is something magical about how the beaver will go prolifically work and create. The fertile mind of creation is a fundamental aspect of myo, which is made up of two sub-characters: the character for "woman" and the character for "small".
Because the Sino-Tibetan proto language that led to today's written Chinese characters (and 400 other known languages, including Burmese and Tibetan) emerged so long ago, we don't know as much as we'd like about the culture or cultures that gave birth to myo. Historians speculate that the proto language emerged between 4000 and 7000 BC, somewhere between Northeast India, and the Yellow River and Sichuan River Basins in China—a huge swath of both time and space. It is speculated that at least one of the cultures in that region at that time and tied to the early emergence of written language were the Neolithic Yangshao, whom evidence suggests were matriarchal.
These two characters embedded within 妙 suggest that the Yangshao and other earlier peoples saw a young woman or girl as the embodiment of mystery and wondrousness. Or that they saw mysteriousness and wonder in the way a girl sees the world. These are interpretations that still resonate in contemporary Japanese culture and beyond. One way I've thought about this is that there's a reason Disney has made more than the equivalent of $6 billion in US box offices over the decades from princess films. They're cashing in on a Jungian archetype that, by definition, transcends specific cultures and timelines.
And yes, I would be remiss to omit that the power of a fertile female animal to reproduce and create life is also myo. I was particularly reminded of this when I learned recently that some of the many geckos living on our temple grounds—chirping in the Dojo during zazen and sometimes flying from the rafters—are an all female species. They do not require males to fertilize their eggs! Wow. Even Western culture has a phrase that points to the sparkling wondrousness of procreation: "when you were just a twinkle in your mother's eye."
Above our butsudan, or shrine, in the Budo Dojo at Chozen-ji is a large plank of live edged wood with 妙心天 (read right to left: ten shin myo, "mysterious wonder of the universal mind") engraved into it. The calligraphy is by Chozen-ji's other founder and Tanouye Roshi's teacher, Omori Sogen Rotaishi. I often think of it as a play on Tanouye Roshi's priest name, Tenshin. Not only can we see it and reflect on the mysterious wonder of the Mind that exists in accord with the universe. Students at Chozen-ji can also wonder about Tanouye Roshi, himself, and the many stories we've heard about his realization in Zen and his genius in the martial arts.
Indeed, I only have to look around the Budo Dojo, at the others training sincerely by my side, and around the grounds of Chozen-ji carved into this mountain valley in Hawaii to feel the impact of the training method that Tanouye Roshi laid down here. It is mysterious and wondrous in the sense of the scale of transformation achieved in short periods of time. And it's natural, almost mundanely so, in that it can only be maintained by human beings training in this method with discipline and sincerity, day in and day out.
Looking up from my desk overlooking the Chozen-ji entrance, I can observe the grounds and see myo all around. As D. T. Suzuki inscribed on a scroll, having found a perfect description of myo in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, "O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful And yet again wonderful."