Recalling the Fox Koan
Recently I've been thinking about a koan from the Gateless Gate, Baizhang's Fox. You can read the full koan here. The gist is that a strange man comes to Baizhang and claims that he used to be a monk but was cursed to live as a fox for 500 lifetimes because he preached that the awakened are above cause and effect. Baizhang offers the correction that the awakened are "one with cause and effect" and at hearing this the monk is free of his curse.
At first glance the lesson of this koan is that the monk was punished for thinking that the awakened are beyond cause and effect. This makes some sense because we know that no amount of spiritual practice will save us from the inevitability of old age, sickness, and death, not to mention more down to earth concerns like having to work for a living or getting along with our neighbors. We are still mortal no matter how much we fantasize about our spiritual practice solving all of our problems.
But recently I've thought that there might be a different way of interpreting the meaning of being incarnated as a fox for 500 lifetimes. In a way, it's the perfect real world crash course in cause and effect because an animal is forced to be one with it just to survive. When I'm birdwatching I'm often struck by how hard the chickadees, cardinals, woodpeckers, etc work just to find enough calories to make it through our cold Minnesota winters. For a more concrete example, the red fox in the photo in this post looked like it was suffering from mange, a condition that can often kill the creature because eventually it makes it too difficult for them to hunt prey. It's hard for a creature to not to be one with cause and effect while living with such a reality.
As humans, especially those of us in wealthy developed nations, we can sometimes forget that we too are animals, and are on the precipice at any given moment. Oftentimes it takes a bout of illness or a natural disaster to remind us that we are at the mercy of cause and effect at all times. Wild animals have no such luxury and this is one reason why we admire them. To humans animals seem to live without conceit or artifice; their lives are all about bare survival.
So in this sense 500 fox lives is less like a punishment than a practical lesson in cause and effect. Getting sick is living a fox life. Having your house burn down is living a fox life. Not getting what you want is living a fox life. As long as we are on this Earth there will be times we succumb to cause and effect, but just like in the koan, realizing this offers some small liberation as well. Knowing that times like this will come and go helps us accept them and be "one with cause and effect."
