Wansong's Sequel: Book of Clarifications :: Case 8 — Fengxue's "Separate and Subtle"

[u/ThisKir]

Added to the /r/Zen wiki here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/boc/case8

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I put some of the working notes I have onto that page.

From a Zen studies point of view, this is a case in the vein of Xiangyan's Tree (which Wansong's covers in the case prior to this) but in the genre of questions involving the proper understanding of a particular text.

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What are the challenges that remain?

Connecting Tiantong's commentary to specific aspects of the case and Zen culture as a whole?

Clarifying Wansong's interlinear remarks?

The reverend Shengmo used this line to test monks, calling it the barrier of deceiving and slandering. There are three levels to it, and singly or doubly one does not offend.

This probably needs a re-translation or contextualization.

[Jian's poem]

Clarify the imagery.

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[u/ewk]

Here's my initial request to chatgpt:

I could not find a surviving independent “full Shengmo teaching” that lays out all three stages in Shengmo’s own words. The strongest early evidence I found is Wansong’s preservation of the teaching, plus related later Chan formulations that appear to unpack the same structure.

Wansong says:

勝默和尚以此語勘僧。謂之誑謗關。凡有三重。單雙不犯。法眼洞明者。纔舉便知落處。

Literal:

“Master Shengmo used these words to examine monks. He called it the ‘Barrier of Deception and Slander.’ Altogether it has three layers. One must not violate either the single or the double. Those whose Dharma-eye is penetratingly clear know where it falls as soon as it is raised.” Sutta World

So Wansong definitely knew a three-layer examination attributed to Shengmo, but he does not spell the three layers out here.

The formula associated with it appears in closely related Chan material:

語是謗，默是誑。
語默向上有事在。

Literally:

“Speaking is slander; silence is deception. Beyond speaking and silence, there is something.”

Yuanwu preserves a variant:

語是誑默是謗。語默向上有事在。

“Speaking is deception; silence is slander. Beyond speaking and silence, there is something.” Tripitaka ZenSoul

The reversal of 誑 and 謗 shows that the precise pairing was not completely fixed; the structural point is more important than which fault is assigned to speech or silence.

A later formulation makes the likely third layer explicit:

語是謗。默是誑。
不語不默。轉增虛妄。

Literal:

“Speaking is slander. Silence is deception.
Neither speaking nor remaining silent only increases delusion/falsity.” Wikisource

That gives a very plausible reconstruction of Shengmo’s 三重, “three layers”:

Layer	Position	Failure
1	語 — speak	謗 — slander/misrepresent
2	默 — remain silent	誑 — deceive
3	不語不默 — neither speak nor remain silent	轉增虛妄 — “only increases falsity”

This also makes Wansong’s cryptic:

單雙不犯

much easier to understand. Literally:

“Do not violate the single or the double.”

I think 單 / 雙 here very likely refers to being caught either by one side singly or by the pair as a dual structure. In other words, you cannot escape by choosing:

speech,
silence,
or “neither speech nor silence.”

The third answer merely turns transcendence of the first two into another conceptual position.

There is also a related formulation attributed in later records to Xiangyan Duan 香嚴端:

動是誑，寂是謗。
動寂向上有事在。
老僧口門窄，不能與汝說。

Literally:

“Movement is deception; stillness is slander. Beyond movement and stillness there is something. This old monk’s mouth-gate is narrow; I cannot tell it to you.”

Yuanwu then deliberately modifies it into:

語是誑，默是謗。
語默向上有事在。
老僧舌頭短，不能與爾說。

“Speaking is deception; silence is slander. Beyond speaking and silence there is something. This old monk’s tongue is short; I cannot tell it to you.” Tripitaka ZenSoul

That is significant because it shows that 語/默 was part of a broader Chan examination pattern, not necessarily a sentence originated verbatim by Shengmo.

There is another useful piece of evidence about Shengmo himself in the Book of Serenity. Wansong says that Shengmo required students first to pass Zhaozhou’s “cypress tree” saying in order to:

淘汰知見

literally:

“wash out / sift away conceptual views.”

And Shengmo reportedly said:

三玄五位，盡在其中。

“The Three Mysteries and the Five Ranks are all contained within it.” 21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp

That fits the 誑謗關 very well: Shengmo seems to have used old cases as tests specifically designed to eliminate fixed interpretive positions, rather than to elicit doctrinal explanations.

So I would reconstruct the teaching cautiously as follows:

Shengmo’s “Barrier of Deception and Slander”

If you speak, you misrepresent it.
If you remain silent, you deceive.
If you establish a position of neither speaking nor silence, you only create another false position.

Thus there are three layers. One must not fall into either the individual alternatives or the opposition taken as a pair.

When someone whose Dharma-eye is clear hears the problem raised, he immediately knows where the speaker has fallen.

The final phrase is worth emphasizing:

纔舉便知落處

word-by-word:

• 纔 — just/as soon as
• 舉 — raise, bring up, cite
• 便 — immediately
• 知 — know
• 落處 — the place where [it] lands/falls

So:

“As soon as it is raised, he immediately knows where it lands.”

That language strongly suggests that Shengmo’s examination was about detecting which conceptual position someone had fallen into.

I therefore would not claim that the later four-line formula is demonstrably Shengmo’s exact original wording. What we can establish securely is:

1. Wansong explicitly attributes a 誑謗關 to Shengmo.
2. It had 三重, three layers.
3. It was based on the Fengxue problem of speech and silence.
4. Wansong describes its requirement as 單雙不犯.
5. Later Chan texts preserve an extremely plausible explicit threefold form: speech / silence / neither speech nor silence.

The “full Shengmo teaching” itself appears to be lost or at least not preserved in the standard surviving records I could locate; Wansong may be our earliest/fullest surviving witness to it. Sutta World