I had only been living in China then for about four or five years, so I was still a bit

I had only been living in China then for about four or five years, so I was still a bit surprised to learn in this unusual way about what I would later come to know - and see and even experience myself - as the spiritual life of China’s communist officials, particularly those at the absolute top of the system. The Master my friend was referring to was Master Nan. Though he was largely unknown outside of China - I am sure you had not heard of him until a few pages ago - in China he was an icon. After his return to the mainland in the 1990s, his books about Buddhism and philosophy sold millions of copies. His lectures are watched on DVDs and the Internet, and he owns a fond fame that reaches across generations and transcends politics or art or philosophy. You are as likely to find a copy of his book on the desk of a university President as stuffed into the back pocket of a tea-server in Chengdu. As you can imagine, when my friend first introduced me to the idea of someone like Master Nan serving as a spiritual mentor to the figures struggling to master this huge country, figures I had met and worked with in the brutally rational business of everyday life in a modernizing China, it raised all sorts of questions. We both have the same master? But in China, one thing you discover pretty quickly is that honest understanding of anything isn’t achieved by asking lots of questions, particularly not the direct sort. Yun Men had it right: Ten thousand kinds of clever talk get you nowhere meaningful. But with her one sentence, the dinner conversation, which had been moving pleasantly enough through the eddies of China’s politics and economics, passed into deeper water, where it has stayed in the years since. Master Nan’s particular passion, | learned that night, was a branch of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism that had, about 1000 years ago, provided the seeds for the Japanese school of “instant illumination,” known as Rinzai Zen. Rinzai is famed in the west for asking students to grapple with koans, the sorts of puzzles - “What was your face before your were born?” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or just “Mu!” - that can never be approached or answered by reason alone. They require nothing but pure, trained instinct. Koans are not like math problems or word puzzles, so much as questions that have to be answered with your whole soul. We don’t really have an educational concept like this in the west, but the aim of Rinzai meditation and learning is to arrive at kensho (jianxing in Chinese), a sudden and complete understanding of the true nature of the world. Such “instant illumination” marks a very eastern sensibility: Real truth resists the grasp of mere logic. It can’t be simply explained, or taught with words alone. It calls on more immediate feelings, in the way we night fall in love or get angry. In Rinzai study, the aim is to tighten and compress your mind with meditation and focus and exercise - and the occasional slapping sharpness of a hardwood “enlightenment stick” - as a way to open it, with the goal of instant, blazing enlightenment. In such a moment, all sorts of invisible relations become unforgettably obvious. I] had been a student of Rinzai since | was 16. So it was that, in the springtime of the year after that dinner in Beijing, I was surprisingly, luckily invited to Master Nan’s campus. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018240