The Distant Temple Bell

Advice from Michael Mason

Another version of this koan reads "'Stop the cries of birds and beasts, the sound of the flute, and the reverberations of bells and drums." Back in 1981, the composer John Cage did an interview with journalist David Sears in which he recounted an incident that occurred while he was living in his apartment in New York City. One night, while he was asleep, a burglar alarm sounded and continued to sound for about two hours. Cage said he began to notice that the alarm's rise and fall in pitch took on a shape in his mind, similar to that of a Brancusi sculpture. From a certain perspective, you could say that Cage stopped the burglar alarm by getting so close to it that it revealed something else entirely. That's the hidden beauty of The Distant Bell koan: it invites us into the intimate experience of the sounds of our every day. There's another gem that can inform your practice while sitting with this koan, a well-known Zen haiku by Basho: kane kiete hana no ka wa tsuku yūbe kana The bell has faded; now the flowers’ fragrance strikes through the evening. I sometimes think of it as "the temple bell stopped sounding but the flowers keep ringing." What is so wondrous about this poem is that it not only captures the intimacy of the temple bell koan, it adds a subtle unifying quality between the bell and the flowers and dissolves the sense of separateness between those two objects. It reveals a relationship. While working with this koan, allow yourself to imagine that incessant car alarm, and see if you can feel the ringing of the flowers that Basho noticed.