Book of Serenity, Case 9; Gateless Barrier, Case 14; Blue Cliff Record, Cases 63 & 64
May 13th, 2026.
At least nine Jesuits have been authorized to teach the koan curriculum, which is by far the largest representation of any specific religious order among Zen teachers, but there haven’t been any Jesuit commentaries on the koans. Today, the opening of Parliament in the UK began with a ceremonial search of the Palace of Westminster's basement, a nod to the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which is also known as the Jesuit Treason. I will take the occasion to write a thoroughly Jesuitical* commentary.
The Koan:
The priest Nanquan found monks of the eastern and western halls arguing about a cat. He held up the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” No one could say a word, so Nanquan cut the cat in two.
That evening, Zhaozhou returned from outside and Nanquan told him what happened.
Zhaozhou removed a sandal from his foot, put it on his head, and walked out. Nanquan said, “If you had been there, the cat would have been spared.”
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A Jesuit Commentary:
1. Equivocation
In my view, this is one of the most consequential koans in the curriculum. Outside the “No,” Mu koan, I’ve spent more time wrestling with this case than any other I’ve tackled.
How did this koan earn a place in three of the collections?
It’s no plate of milk. Many Zen students are repulsed. It even seems to condone violating the first grave precept. The title is “Nanchuan Cuts the Cat,” not “Nanchuan Plays with the Idea of Killing a Cat.” And it doesn’t even settle the moral question of cat killing; that’s not the point. But it doesn’t evade murder and death either: Nanchuan actually kills a helpless, innocent cat who has no say in the matter. We don’t know if it was a cute little house kitty or a nasty old street cat, but for sure, there was splattered blood and two halves of a dead cat.
Most introspection begins with an inner battle. I am no opponent of grandmother Zen. I normally give myself plenty of room for fluid inquiry. However, I will begin this commentary by focusing on another aspect of the story: its language. The request for a response becomes a demand: “If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” I have a say in the matter, a word, or maybe even several. All we know with certainty is that some monks, probably with too much time on their hands, got into an argument about a cat—a few words, a question, perhaps an insult, perhaps a confused answer or no answer, anger, then silence searching for an appropriate response, and finally a dire consequence. It’s easier to leave the koan’s argument without form and content, but (at least in my experience), koans don’t work like that. We fill them with our shadows.
In 2009, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival produced a play by one of my Jesuit classmates. Father Bill Cain’s “Equivocation” was very well received, as I would expect. Bill is a talented, inventive writer and committed Christian. However, I’m not going to borrow much other than the title and the predicament: the setting is England during the reign of James the First; the situation is the plight of the Jesuits who were sent to minister to Roman Catholics in a militantly Protestant country, and the martyrdom of 34 saints and 149 blesseds, even one bearing my surname, Blessed William Ireland, S.J. They were part of a larger movement of “recusant” English Catholics, waiting, hiding and organizing the reestablishment of religion under the Pope. They were divided over tactics; they were hunted down; many were arrested; many would die, and ultimately, they would fail.
The title “Equivocation*” refers to a contemporaneous manual that outlined a highly controversial defense strategy for Roman Catholics to survive the "bloody questions." The Jesuit missionaries were coached, and in turn coached others to use ambiguous language or a "mental reservation," misleading answers that would not reveal the identities of their fellow Catholics. As scrupulous religious people, they had to sort out the moral consequences of lying. Priests had the additional burden of guarding the seal of confession. If anyone refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy, recognizing Elizabeth I, and subsequently James I, as the head of the church, they became “recusants,” and faced severe penalties—fines, property confiscation, and imprisonment. It could include high treason, the punishment for which was horrific: execution by being hanged, drawn, and quartered*.
We do not know the author of “Equivocation,*” though there is a definite Jesuit turn to the argument. In fact, this is the origin of the less-than-flattering definition of “Jesuitical” as someone who uses crafty, deceitful, intricate arguments designed to mislead, dissemble, or dodge direct answers. We know that a copy of the treatise was found among Father Henry Garnet’s books, the Jesuit superior in England, when he was arrested after the failed Gunpowder Plot, also known as the Jesuit Treason of 1605. It was used against him in his trial.
Garnet was a very refined, highly educated priest, a trained musician, and an unlikely leader of a terrorist plot to kill the King, a large number of nobles, and MP’s. Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated to this day with fireworks and the burning of effigies of the man caught guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement of the House of Parliament. Fawkes and Garnet knew one another. Garnet had been seen meeting with Fawkes. Garnet claimed that he’d been trying to persuade Fawkes to find a nonviolent tactic for finding accommodation for Roman Catholics.
We don’t know for certain whether or not any Jesuit actually plotted the terrorist attack, though I think it’s highly likely. Shakespeare knew about it and had an opinion. In Act 2, Scene 3 of Macbeth, the drunken porter, acting as hell’s gatekeeper, welcomes a parade of condemned souls into the castle, including an “equivocator that could swear in both scales against either scale,” . . . the "open and broad lying and forswearing."
When Garnet defended himself, his words seemed to match the circumstances, but canceled out other words. The Privy Council used the handbook that outlined this type of argument, “Equivication,” as evidence to condemn Garnet. The resulting action was swift. He was executed on 3 May 1606, three days after the verdict. Toothless grannies pushed to the front row at his public execution with clean napkins to mop up the martyr’s blood as a talisman.
These events happened more than 400 years ago. How could they enter my life in a real way if I didn’t share something with the martyrs? I have no enthusiasm for converting the Church of England. In fact, I’m quite sympathetic towards the beauty of the language and form of its liturgy. There is a high probability that I am related to Blessed William Ireland, but it still feels worlds away.
When my teacher gave me the koan, the cat’s dark shadow began to appear very slowly in my own life—the fight between the monks became the execution of Jesuits who had been trained at the English College in Rome or Douai. Yet it became personal. We sang the same Te Deum that the 16th-century Jesuits sang when they learned of a Jesuit’s execution in London. We celebrated their feast days. We’d heard stories of their torture and death, which were presented as heroic qualities we should emulate.
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Notes:
*Although many Jesuits of other eras might have entertained the idea that a consistent spiritual and moral tone might be identified as “Jesuitical,” I am afraid that I only use the term to refer to my 11 years in the Society of Jesus. I’ve worked with the koan under a teacher’s guidance on at least 4 occasions without any access to anyone’s commentary. This last time was quite different; connections with my Jesuit training kept me company. At times, it became very difficult. What follows are field notes from that exploration.
Equivocation is a critically acclaimed 2009 play written by American Jesuit priest and playwright Bill Cain. The play premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The definition of equivocation is “the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself; prevarication.”
*Michel Foucault uses a brutal public execution involving drawing and quartering in the opening pages of Chapter 1, "The Body of the Condemned," in his seminal 1975 book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. While the traditional English sentence was precisely "hanged, drawn, and quartered," Foucault specifically details the French variation of the punishment inflicted upon the regicide Robert-François Damiens in 1757. Damiens was condemned for attempting to assassinate King Louis XV.
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2. Obfuscation and Silence
When I entered the Jesuits in 1966, the Second Vatican Council had just ended. The Catholic world was experiencing the exuberance of John the 23rd’s throwing the windows open. A General Congregation of the Jesuits had just elected a Basque priest, Father Pedro Arrupe, as our new Father General. He was charismatic. We younger Jesuits felt he could lead the largest and most educated religious order in the post-Council era. He’d been less than 10 kilometers from the epicenter of the Atomic blast in Hiroshima, a horrific event that weighed heavily on my generation of Americans, including most of the men who entered the Jesuits with me
Arrupe’s predecessor, Father Jean-Baptiste Janssens, had been elected two years after the defeat of the Nazis. We’d heard his reputation as a strict disciplinarian. We also knew that he’d worked with the clandestine Benedyk Grynpas network during the occupation of Belgium, but for some reason, that was rarely acknowledged. He forged baptismal certificates for Jewish children, but never required that they be baptized. He taught them to say the Hail Mary, but only so they could pass a Nazi interrogation if caught. He hid a large group of Jewish children in his own residence. He quietly encouraged other Jesuit houses, monasteries, and convents across Belgium to hide Jews. He undoubtedly knew the 43 Jesuits who died in the camps and the more than 100 other priests who were murdered resisting the Nazi regime. He’d been their superior. He knew that if he were caught by the Gestapo, he would be executed, but he did the right thing. He was honored with the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Knesset of the new State of Israel in 1954.
I didn’t have to go back to 16th-century England to find examples of heroic men of conscience. Most of my superiors, teachers, mentors, and spiritual guides had been trained by this very courageous man. Many had worked with him directly, but he never wore his resistance like a badge. If he ever spoke about it, we never heard it. The job of piecing together the Jesuit order after the war, coupled with managing the largest influx of “vocations” in the order's 500-year history, was enormous, equal to responding to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust. It was another task of matching actions with words and sacred promises, but without the real threat of execution
The stain of antisemitism in the Catholic church is extremely troubling; the record of the institutional Church during the Third Reich has become the topic of a heated debate. There is one group that claims that Pope Pius XII did his duty and maintained absolute neutrality, but to others, he appears cowardly, even sympathetic to the aims of National Socialism. The role of Father Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, the head of the Jesuits during the war, is equally mixed. He certainly saw reports about the extent of the mass murders. Claims that the Nazis were skillful at hiding their atrocity feel like an excuse. Both Pacelli (Pius XII) and Ledóchowski have been described as “benignly” antisemitic. Many old noble European families were. It was part of an ancient class stratification that Americans don’t understand. How could priests, bishops, and popes keep silent unless they were hedging their bets, or even being sympathetic to the Nazis?
After months of wrestling with a vague, undefined flight between Nanquan’s monks of the eastern and western halls, it was no longer speculative. A question whose answer determined life or death was right in my face; it was a question that cut so deeply there was only silence, or an answer whose horrific consequences were impossible to escape.
In my mind, I convened a Board of Examiners—three professed senior priests—to interview the monks of the western and eastern halls—a typical Jesuit tactic. I asked if the English Reformation had been a power grab among 16th-century monarchies, was the Jesuit mission doomed from its conception? Was the sacrifice of the English martyrs even justified? When I extended that hypothesis into the ambiguity of the Catholic response to Hitler, I was told that I was being revisionist in my reading of history. It reeked of the same equivocation that Father Garnet was accused ot. I couldn’t recind the sainthood of the English Jesuit martyrs, though opposing the cause of Eugenio Pacelli might be justified, depending on a more careful review of the historical record. The hard fact that both the Jesuits and the College of Cardinals, right after the War, elected men, Janssens and Roncalli, who were named Righteous Among the Nations, tells me that they wanted to land on the right side of history.
However, my questions missed the point of the koan. I wasn’t being asked to speculate: if a group of Jewish kids showed up at my door, and I knew that helping them would put me in the same grave danger they faced, would I rise to the moment? Right now is not five centuries ago.
The tone is correct. It didn’t have the urgency and the immediacy required, but at least I had managed to put breath and blood into the argument between the eastern and western halls, one that carried the weight of life and death. The koan ends with Zhaozhou taking off his shoes and putting them on his head. We are told, in a scholarly tone, that this was an expression of grief in ancient China.
Could I go through a painful experience of dealing with questions about my entire religious life and end with a funeral joke? I’d caught a few laughing Zen students take off their shoes and prance around, with no sense of how profoundly their world has been turned upside down. But there it was, a note about an ancient Chinese funeral ritual in the marginalia, handed down through at least a dozen roshis, and brought into the dokusan room where we dealt with the question.
I’ve never seen convincing evidence supporting the theory of ancient Chinese funeral rites. I searched Google. Did this practice, display, or joke exist in China during any dynasty? I did find some customs that stretch Western norms. In Taiwan, the bereaved family hires strippers and pole dancers if the obsequies go beyond three days. The motivation is not otherworldly. If the attendees are entertained, they don’t go home, and the priests maintain their minyan, or quorum, for the ceremonies. But we were being asked to believe that it was normal for Chinese mourners to dance with their shoes on their heads. This is at least suspect.
There is a more straightforward answer: Up is down. Down is up.
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References:
Rebellion of the Righteous: Jesuit Partisanship for Jews. In: Journal of Jesuit Studies, James Bernauer S.J.
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, John Cornwell
The Jesuits and the Third Reich, Vincent A. Lapomarda.
The American Jesuits, Schroth, Raymond A. Published by NYU Press
The American Jesuits: A History. NYU Press, 2007. Project MUSE.
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3. A Funeral
July 30th, 2026
"Where is your word when you give your word?" —Werner Erhard
After working on this koan for more than one month, the case was still far too removed from my experience to pass a Zen Master’s criteria. A koan will not ask for an opinion about the moral order or the horrific punishment for recusant Catholics during the first decades of the English Reformation, nor can it coax a life-saving response to the Gestapo during the Second World War. The imagination is not reliable for creating anything other than imaginary heroes.
I felt stuck in a very theoretical dilemma. I went to bed night after night, stupidly hoping that my dreams might save me. Then one day, I woke up with memories of three men at Maitri Hospice who had taken their own lives. That started a flood of memories.
I remember WW* quite clearly. I liked him, though I cannot say we were friends. He told me that there were only a few men whom he considered good friends. He was insistent, but he seemed to fit in that category of men I’d call loners. In gay neighborhoods, there are more than a few men who are always alone, keeping their own company by choice, habit, or temperament. They don’t avoid gathering spots, but when I see them sitting alone in the dark back corner of a bar, I wonder if they are nursing grudges. In WW’s defense, I never heard him say cruel or angry words about others, and he did smile, yet he seemed somehow joyless.
I did know that WW had at least one loyal friend, a friend of Issan, who arranged for him to live at Hartford Street. In the two buildings, there were four small attic rooms. I had one, a Zen priest had another, and the others were usually kept open for Zen students. During the pandemic, there were very few Zen students, especially gays, who wanted to live so close to death. WW had HIV; he’d just been diagnosed with AIDS, though his prognosis was more than 6 months, which put him outside the criteria for hospice. He had nowhere to go. He moved in. He tried to fit in, though I could see that it was difficult. I am sure that he was grateful.
Someone told me that WW had been a member of a strict Catholic monastic community for a few years, perhaps as a postulant. He left; I am not sure who made that decision, and I did not ask. With a few bucks in his pocket, he took a bus to the nearest big city. He ended up in a gay sex club and contracted the virus. That story pulled together a lot of what I’d observed. I’d known several Jesuit lay brothers who had similar effects. I could imagine feeling that life had been unjust, converting sero positive, coming from a cloister where safe sex and HIV were not talked about, where any talking was discouraged, perhaps even forbidden.
WW asked me if he could use the living room to meet with his sister and another woman, perhaps a niece, who were coming to San Francisco. Of course, I said yes. I met his sister and another woman, and drew the pocket doors closed. A few hours later, their reunion ended abruptly. It had not gone well. The women left without saying goodbye. WW went upstairs to his room in a very angry mood. As he passed me, he said they’d used a childhood name he despised. He said firmly that he wanted to be left alone. He did not come to dinner. The next morning, he did not come down for breakfast. Then he skipped lunch.
I went up to his room. The door was closed. I knocked, and WW repeated that he wanted to be left alone; that he was “fine.” When he didn’t come down for dinner, I took a tray upstairs and knocked on his door. He thanked me and told me to leave the food outside the door. The next morning, when he didn’t appear for breakfast, I went up to his room and found the dinner untouched. I knocked and asked if he needed anything. He said that he just wanted to be left alone. Two days became four. The same pattern repeated.
The hospice nurse told me privately that she had to report WW. I reminded her that he was not a hospice patient. I asked Steve for advice; we invited the hospice social worker to join us. One of Issan’s founding principles for Maitri was that each person would have as much control over their lives as possible, as long as we weren’t breaking the law or otherwise acting unethically. If WW had just decided that he’d had enough and wanted to end his life, he had the right to refuse food and drink. In the early 90’s, the questions about the compassionate end of life were unsettled, but even the Catholic church accepted voluntary starvation as a morally acceptable choice.
Part of the background conversation for me was the reality of the possibilities for care. If WW were forced into a psychiatric ward, which seemed the only possible path if our hospice nurse reported him, he would be medicated, and then, after a short time, released. At that point, he would most likely stop the anti-psychotic medication, and, with housing uncertain, live in drug-infested single-occupancy hotels, park benches, alleys, or doorways until he died. There were far too many men in that situation to rule it out. I am sure that was also part of WW’s inner calculation,
And yet, objectively, WW’s situation was ambiguous. He had not made a clear request to refuse food. I had no guarantee that he was of a sound mind. He began to refuse food after an argument. If I were going to defend WW’s right to shut his door, not see anyone, and stave himself, I had to check myself to be sure I was not making assumptions, which was hard when talking through a closed door. I asked Steve to go up and try to talk to him. He did and told me that from what he could tell, yes, WW was competent and able to make decisions. Even if we were uncomfortable with unresolved anger mixed into his motivation, it was not our place to try to arbitrate, nor could we resolve it for WW.
We were a small household of 14 people. More than half were also HIV-positive and faced the same certain death as WW. It was impossible to keep his decision secret. I decided to tell the truth, but keep the conversations brief. I could not add dealing with the anxiety of the hospice patients on top of trying to listen carefully to WW. The hospice social worker, Steve, and his wife, Angelique, took up that responsibility; yet an uncomfortable silence still seemed to descend over our entire house.
I had to call WW’s sister and tell her. I asked if there was anything that she wanted to do, to come back to SF and try to have a conversation, or if she wanted me to ask WW if he would talk to her on the phone. She told me she had to talk to her parish priest before she made any decision and would get back to me. She called later that day and told me she had resolved to let her brother take whatever action he had decided on, and yes, she would talk to him if he wanted to. She was also OK with him not wanting to talk. She asked me to ask WW if he wanted to see a priest. I did, and WW said that he did. I called the priest at Most Holy Redeemer and explained the situation. He came right over, and I showed him up the stairs. I do not remember the length of the meeting, and, of course, I asked no questions. When he came down, he said goodbye and left quickly. For some reason, I remember that goodbye as uncomfortably brief, not what I expected.
I continued to bring up a tray with food, knock on WW’s door, and ask if he needed anything. He repeated that he was OK. Then, it was either Monday or Tuesday morning, I heard nothing. I forced the door open and found WW’s body. I called the medical examiner and answered the usual questions. I called his sister. By mid-afternoon, two men, dressed in black, arrived from a funeral director in his family’s hometown. We accompanied WW’s body respectfully down the stairs and out to the waiting hearse. The traditional rites of passing began.
My whole world had been turned upside down. I don’t remember everything I was feeling. Is this too complex? Sometimes even the predictable is complex. Now, decades later, I wonder if this ambiguity leaves the whole situation and my conduct in the same grey area? Although I might have tried to clarify a few things, I know that I managed to do what WW wanted.
I was exhausted and certainly in no mood to imitate an ancient Chinese funeral custom. My world seemed unrecognizable. For a whole week, every action I took, every decision I made, had not followed any familiar pattern. I had touched something very profound.
Zenshin was there. He liked WW immensely, and WW returned those feelings. I will ask him to sing the verse:
“Walking Beside the Kamogawa. Remembering Nansen and Fudo and Gary’s Poem”
By Philip Whalen
Here are two half-grown black cats perched on a
lump of old teakettle brick plastic garbage
ten feet from the west bank of the River.
I won’t save them. Right here Gary sat with dying Nansen,
The broken cat, warped and sick every day of its life,
Puke & drool on the tatami for Gary to wipe and scold,
“If you get any worse I’m going to have to put you away!”
The vet injected an overdose of nemby and for half an Hour
Nansen was comfortable.
How can we do this, how can we live and die?
How does anybody choose for somebody else.
How dare we appear in the Hell-mouth weeping tears,
Busting our heads in ten fragments making vows &
promises?
Suzuki Roshi said, “If I die, it’s all right. If I should
live, it’s all right. Sun-face Buddha, Moon-face Buddha.”
Why do I always fall for that old line?
We don’t treat each other any better. When will I
Stop writing it down.
Postscript: Always remember the 20th commandment of the Brahmajala
Sutra. Always practice liberation of living beings.
Let's begin WW's Funeral with the traditional Catholic Entrance Hymn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W86XH05Nk6g&list=RDW86XH05Nk6g&start_radio=1
Antonio Salieri De Profundis
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*WW: Even though he’s been dead more than 30 years, I have disguised his identity. I left facts and conversations where necessary to fill out the picture and clarify the situation, or, in several places, to point out that his situation was not entirely clear.
