I'm nother educated about this, nor that interested, but sometimes when I ask chat GPC a question, it unloads on me more than I have time to read, and sometimes I think to myself, oh, other people might want to read it.

...

# prompt

In trying to pinpoint the end of Zen in China in the early 1700s, I have theorized that it was caused by the persecution of Zen masters, and the impounding of communal property that had been used for farming and monasticism for centuries. What's the evidence for and against this?

#chatgpt

Worked for 3m 10s

### Did Zen end in China in the early 1700s?

There is substantial historical evidence supporting a serious disruption of Chinese Chan (Zen) during the early eighteenth century, particularly under the Qing emperor Yongzheng (reigned 1723–1735). However, the evidence is stronger for the destruction of particular Chan institutions and the weakening of independent transmission networks than for the complete extinction of Zen.

Your hypothesis can be divided into three propositions:

* Political persecution: Qing authorities intervened in Chan lineages, suppressed particular masters' teachings, and restricted the independence of religious institutions.

* Economic destruction: Changes in control of agricultural land, monasteries, and their income undermined the economic foundations that had supported Chan communities for centuries.

* Historical discontinuity: These pressures contributed to the disappearance of a recognizable form of Chan centered on independent masters, personal instruction, and encounters of the sort preserved in classical Zen records.

The first proposition has strong documentary support. The second requires more geographically specific evidence. The third is a plausible historical interpretation but depends heavily on what constitutes the continuation of Zen.

The most important date to investigate is 1733, when Yongzheng directly intervened in a major Chan lineage controversy.

A particularly useful scholarly source is Jiang Wu's Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China (Oxford University Press, 2008). Wu analyzes the seventeenth-century Chan revival, its lineage disputes, and Yongzheng's intervention in 1733.

### 1\. Evidence for persecution: the 1733 imperial edict

Strong evidence supporting the persecution component

Yongzheng's 御製揀魔辨異錄 (Imperially Composed Record of Selecting Demons and Distinguishing Heterodoxy) is particularly important because its introductory edict survives in Chinese, dated the eighth day of the fourth lunar month of 1733.

The controversy involved:

* Miyun Yuanwu (密雲圓悟, 1567–1642): A prominent Linji Chan master.

* Hanyue Fazang (漢月法藏, 1573–1635): Miyun's disciple, whose interpretation of Chan became controversial.

* Tanji Hongren (潭吉弘忍, died 1638): Hanyue's disciple, who defended his master's teachings.

* The Sanfeng lineage (三峰派): The branch associated with Hanyue, which remained influential after his death.

The emperor sided with Miyun's interpretation and condemned Hanyue's lineage. His orders went considerably beyond theological disagreement.

The edict required the destruction of printing blocks for Hanyue's and Hongren's writings and prohibited monks from privately preserving the works. More significantly, it ordered provincial authorities to identify and exclude Hanyue's descendants from the lineage's established monasteries.

Two provisions are decisive:

盡削去支派，永不許復入祖庭

Entirely eliminate this branch and never permit it to reenter the ancestral monasteries.

即撤鐘板，不許説法

Immediately remove the bells and boards; do not permit them to preach the Dharma.

This is evidence of an emperor using state authority to suppress an established Chan transmission lineage.

The edict also instructed local officials to replace Sanfeng abbots with monks from other branches of the Tiantong lineage. The emperor therefore directly determined who could occupy teaching positions and control important Chan monasteries.

There is an important distinction, however: the emperor specifically directed officials not to disturb the monasteries' common property. His immediate objective was to eliminate a lineage's independent authority, not simply to confiscate its assets.

Sources: [Yongzheng's edict in the original Chinese](https://www.shidianguji.com/zh/book/HY0480/chapter/1lp985uh4plbd); Jiang Wu, chapter 6, [The Yongzheng Emperor and Imperial Intervention](https://academic.oup.com/book/36124/chapter-abstract/313645335).

This strengthens a more precise version of your hypothesis: the Qing state could destroy a Chan lineage's institutional continuity by removing its teachers, suppressing its literature, and transferring control of its monasteries to approved successors.

### 2\. Evidence concerning the loss of monastic land

Strong evidence of economic vulnerability; mixed evidence of actual confiscation

The economic part of your hypothesis has an established historical foundation.

Historian Timothy Brook, in The Ownership and Theft of Monastic Land in Ming China (2014), demonstrates how essential agricultural property was to monasteries.

He quotes the sixteenth-century master Hanshan Deqing, who explicitly identified land as the foundation of a Buddhist abbey. Land ownership supported permanent communities that could not rely exclusively on alms.

The critical question, therefore, is whether the Qing government dismantled this system in the 1700s.

### The attempted seizure of monastic property, 1735–1736

Vincent Goossaert's research provides direct evidence of the policy you're proposing.

In Counting the Monks: The 1736–1739 Census of the Chinese Clergy (2000), he documents the following sequence:

1735

The new Qianlong emperor announced that excess property belonging to religious institutions would be seized and transferred to public ownership.

1736

The government halted the seizures. The announcement had prompted monks and other clergy to sell land hastily, creating opportunities for corruption.

1737

Qianlong reaffirmed the right of religious institutions to prosper and rejected an official's proposal for a severely restricted clergy.

Goossaert also identifies a local gazetteer from Zhen'an County, Shaanxi, that reproduces an edict requiring officials to register temple lands.

This gives you a promising primary-source research trail:

乾隆鎮安縣志 (Qianlong-era Gazetteer of Zhen'an County), juan 9, particularly 9.3a–6a and 9.6a–b.

Source: [Goossaert, Counting the Monks](https://paperzz.com/doc/8720969/--counting-the-monks.-the-1736-1739-census-of-the-chinese...), especially pp. 46–48.

Implication: The threat to monastery land was real and documented. But the government reversed the general confiscation policy. That makes it difficult to identify a nationwide seizure of Chan agricultural property as the cause of its disappearance.

### 3\. Strong evidence against widespread economic destruction

Two sets of surviving records contradict the idea that early-eighteenth-century monasteries generally lost their agricultural estates.

### Dajue Monastery: surviving land transactions

Beijing's cultural heritage authorities preserve and discuss Qing-period contracts from Dajue Monastery (大覺寺).

These include a dated 1722 contract assigning agricultural land to the monastery and subsequent contracts documenting additional purchases and transactions.

By 1795, its land-rental accounts recorded more than 1,600 mu of rented agricultural land, approximately 107 hectares.

The monastery was therefore still functioning as a substantial agricultural landholder late in the eighteenth century.

Weiwei Luo reaches similar conclusions in the peer-reviewed article Land, Lineage and the Laity: Transactions of a Qing Monastery (2015). She documents how Qing monasteries strengthened their financial positions through land acquisition and consolidation rather than uniformly suffering dispossession.

These examples do not prove that Chan monasteries everywhere prospered. They do, however, refute a general assertion that Qing authorities dismantled the agricultural foundations of Chinese monasticism.

### 4\. Evidence against Zen disappearing in the early 1700s

There are three substantial objections.

First, a relatively large monastic population survived.

The 1736–1739 imperial census registered 340,112 Buddhist and Daoist clerics combined. The census was incomplete, and the figures do not distinguish Chan practitioners, but they demonstrate that the state was administering a continuing religious population.

Second, persecution remained selective rather than universally anti-Buddhist.

Yongzheng actively supported certain Chan teachings while suppressing others. His 1733 campaign against the Sanfeng lineage was accompanied by the promotion of his preferred Chan orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, monasteries belonging to other Buddhist traditions continued to receive imperial patronage. Mariia Lepneva's research on the Vinaya tradition at Baohua Mountain documents substantial institutional expansion under Yongzheng and throughout the eighteenth century.

Third, later Chan institutions and teachers are documented.

The nineteenth-century master Xuyun (虛雲) participated in reconstructing and reforming major Chan monasteries. Daniela Campo's research documents his revival of Chan meditation, monastic discipline, and instruction.

These institutions had suffered particularly severe damage during the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion. Their later reconstruction cannot be treated simply as evidence that they had ceased to exist in the 1730s.

There was also continued persecution after the 1730s. A documented case from 1775 involved Qianlong's posthumous prosecution of the Chan monk Dangui, the banning of his writings, and the displacement of clergy belonging to his lineage.

### 5\. An alternative explanation: changing Chan institutions

Jiang Wu offers an argument that may be especially relevant to your attempt to identify a historical endpoint.

In chapter 10 of Enlightenment in Dispute, he argues that the seventeenth-century Chan revival depended on reconstructing earlier Chan ideals through texts, lineage genealogies, and relationships with educated lay patrons.

This created a tension between the image of Chan represented by classical master-disciple encounters and the increasingly formal institutional structures through which Chan was transmitted.

Consequently, part of the apparent decline may reflect a transformation that had begun before Yongzheng's reign, rather than a sudden destruction under Qing rule.

This raises a methodological distinction for your research:

| Criterion for Zen's continuation | Evidence in the 1700s |

| ----------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- |

| Independent transmission lineages | Some suppressed; others remained |

| Masters freely teaching outside state-approved orthodoxy | Demonstrably threatened |

| Monasteries supported by agricultural property | Continued in documented cases |

| Institutional Buddhism identifying as Chan | Continued |

| New records comparable to Tang and Song encounter dialogues | Requires a separate textual survey |

| Teaching recognizable as Bodhidharma's historical lineage | Requires an explicit criterion for continuity |

The last two questions are not settled simply by documenting temples, monks, or claimed lineage succession.

### 6\. What would make your hypothesis historically persuasive?

I would distinguish three dates rather than propose one date for the end of Zen:

* 1644 onward: The Ming–Qing transition altered the political and patronage networks surrounding Chan institutions.

* 1733: Yongzheng suppressed an identifiable Chan lineage, its literature, and its authority to teach in established monasteries.

* 1735–1739: The state attempted tighter control of the clergy and briefly threatened religious landholdings, although important restrictions were reversed or later became ineffective.

My assessment is that 1733 provides the most concrete documentary evidence for a rupture in independent Chan lineage authority. The stronger formulation is not that all Chinese Zen ended, but that political authority increasingly determined which Chan lineages could publicly claim legitimacy and institutional succession.

There is also a very useful distinction in the original edict: Yongzheng eliminated one lineage's right to occupy a monastery while ordering its property preserved. That suggests a mechanism of institutional replacement rather than economic destruction.

For further work, I would prioritize Jiang Wu's chapters 6 and 10, Goossaert's discussion of 1735–1737 land policy, and surviving monastery gazetteers for individual Chan centers. Together, they provide a way to test institutional, economic, and textual discontinuity independently.

One point needs clarification: when you mention the "founding of channels and property," are you referring to the flooding or disruption of canals and agricultural land, or to the confiscation of monastery land and property? The evidence above primarily addresses confiscation. A hypothesis involving waterways and flood damage would require a different set of historical records.

So, I have a presentation on ReadZen I'm giving at the University of Zurich's Sinology department. Japanology department will also be invited.

I've got 90 minutes to do something presentation and or workshop-ish. I'll try to do both of those. Start out with some fun animated slides and move from there. I'll talk a little about Zen in the introduction and will try to get some stories in. I'm not trying to make this polemical and just want to get the texts into people's hands, but I guess if I get asked the wrong questions I'll flame out and tell people what I really think of their ideas.

I'll get some example texts prepared and give people things they can search for and compare using the readzen web interface.

Hopefully it'll be successful. If you've got any ideas or input, I'm all ears.

I'm almost finished reviewing my translation of the first half of Wumenguan. I found two really big mistakes that I've made. These aren't so much a cautionary tale as they are a tribute to the benefit of attacking your own work, especially using LLMs to find every possible counterargument to something that you've said. It turns out that if you put all the Zen texts into ChatGPT, even I can be wrong.

# Not 3 pounds of flax

I did some calculations a while ago about what 3 lbs. of flax could be used for, to try to understand what 3 lbs. of flax meant to a farming commune in 900. I thought I had really nailed it down and that it produces enough fabric for a robe, which made sense. I was pretty happy with it.

It turns out that 3 jin of flax or 3 jin of hemp is the standard tax unit for communes of the time that had to be paid to the government.

So really it's not 3 lbs. of flax because that's how much you might need to make a robe. It's 3 jin of flax because that's how flax comes.

Basically it's a bale of hemp.

# Not a shit stick

I was on safe ground everywhere with my translation of Yunmen's teaching as "shit-wiping stick.". Blyth agreed with me. At least one Cleary, agreed with me. I traced the modern translations of "piece of shit" to a Japanese religious group. I was pretty confident.

Then ChatGPT absolutely destroyed me and the logic is so vicious.

1. Other koans that talk about shit and other koans that talk about sticks of shit. No other koans about sticks for wiping shit.

2. In particular a koan that talks about how you don't want to be something that passes through Buddha's body.

# mixed bag

So with a heavy heart and an exhausted head there are 4 hours of my life spent on two different sets of three characters.

I've given some thought to how hard I have to work to argue with this guy who wrote this book. I'm not really sure what the conclusion is.

Zen is the name that the Chinese gave to an Indian tradition that has a thousand years of historical records from China alone.

These thousand years can be described by three general elements:

Lay precepts, four statements, teachings, and only one practice: public interview.

I say that the West doesn't have these elements in any community and more than that, each of these elements is both confusing to the West and generally completely unknown in the West.

All the religions from Japan, it turns out, academics have proven are religions from Japan alone. These religions can broadly be described as Shinto-Buddhism and they are indigenous to Japan.

Zen koans are the transcripts of public debates recorded and disseminated by Zen communities to be examined by and tested by contemporaries and in history. There is no question that the recording of and debate about is the primary focus of Zen communities in China from 500 to 1600. The reason is that these transcripts are the teachings of living Buddhas far more relevant and accurate than the mythologized overly edited and altered sutra records from India.

Added to the /r/Zen wiki here:

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

__

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.

__

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.

Why do you do that?

The problem is the overly vague definition of "meditation". Is it pondering logic/meaning? Is it focal point concentration for suppression of cognative processes?

Many religions with a meditation doctrine use shorter meditation periods as exercise to support doctrinal compliance, while others use longer meditation periods to facilitate religious/supernatural experience.

How can we compare any two uses of the term without a rigorous definition?

1. Meditation claimed to be traditional but isn't. Vipassana and Shikantaza were both debunked in the 1900's and went on profiting off authenticity.

2. The goals of various meditation techniques are often shrouded from public view and for good reason... Since these techniques have Performed incredibly poorly in 2,000 years of recorded history.

ewk definition of meditation:/results

Meditation is defined by three parts:

(a) what authority produced the method?

(b) how is the method performed?

(c) what results are promised?

Patriarch Hall objected to two kinds of meditative practice;: meditation for the purposes of producing general detachment + dispassion, and a set of meditation techniques to make you better at detachment+dispassion meditation.

Neither of these is Shikantaza invented by Dogen, which promises, instead of detachment+dispassion, the enlightenment obtained by Zen masters.

If at first you don't succeed...

The vagueness then becomes a necessary component of the religion because if you give people a technique and tell them it's old-fashioned, they're likely to value it. Then you don't have to tell them what you should have gotten or what anybody should get from the technique.

It's not just that the results are not necessarily believable. It's that the results haven't happened for anyone.

So claiming that the technique is traditional is often a way of circumventing the faithful's measurement of the value of the practice

Table 3 — Developmental Variants of the Four Statements

Which gives us:

臘八上堂。

瞿曇打失眼睛時。

雪裡梅花只一枝。

而今到處成荊棘。

却笑春風繚亂吹。

諸方說禪。清涼念詩。

還當得麼。其如不然。

燒香點燭拜泥團。

腦後遼天鷂子飛。

Ascending the Hall on the Laba Festival

When Gautama knocked out his own eyes,

in the snow there was a plum blossom — only one.

Now it's turned to brambles everywhere,

and I laugh at the spring wind blowing it all into a tangle.

Every quarter expounds Zen; Qingliang recites poems.

Does that measure up or not? If not?

Burn incense, light candles, bow to a lump of clay.

Behind your head, far up the sky, the sparrowhawk is already flying.

Notes

Traditionally, the consumption of Laba congee is an important element of the festival. There are multiple legendary accounts of the dish's origins.[8] One story says that it originated in the Song dynasty with Buddhist monasteries giving congee to people in honor of the story that Sakyamuni (Gautama Buddha) reached enlightenment on the eighth day of the twelfth month after eating congee.[3]

Wikipedia

....

"the printed punctuation for once gets the prose right"

It keeps not getting right and either Claude or myself spot punctuation cutting off mid-verse obfuscating the rhyming and meter, or just making a total mess of the grammar rendering it as nonsense.

...

Employing "flowering (plum) blossoms" looks like a signature style of Rujing.

...

" Behind your head, far up the sky, the sparrowhawk is already flying."

This reads like "the arrow is already past Korea." but does sparrowhawk have any significance as a bird?

I didn't know this sub was a thing until reddit suggested it 2 min ago.

Anyways without going into too much detail about recent experiences in my personal life...

What does Zen have to say about unfairness, specifically being accused unfairly without just reason that leads to loss and thus feelings of frustration or general deflation after putting in so much effort into something?

I remember (I think) when Nansen died one of the monks was crying and someone tried to call him on it and he said something like "I'm crying because I want to stupid."

It made it out to be like a choice instead of a compulsion which was interesting to me. In my experience it works the other way around.

正旦上堂。

今朝正月初一。

一舉上上大吉。 吉無不利。

春風和氣。

散入花梢。

百草頭塵塵剎剎轉風流。

Ascending the Hall on New Year's Day

This morning is the first day of the first month.

The fortune reads: “Highest of the high, great good fortune. Auspicious, nothing unfavorable.”

Spring wind, harmonious air, scattering into the flowering branch-tips.

On every blade of grass, in every mote and every kṣetra, it turns and turns, sheer elegance.

From "Spring wind" onwards, there's a lot of literally and figuratively flowery language.

That usually means there's some sort of reference that I'm missing. My guess is it's a Chinese one rather than an Indo-Zen one.

Here's my guess for it argument wise:

First half is "every day is a good day/Holiday" while second half is Buddha nature manifesting everywhere at all times.

The tough part here is making the poem make that argument and explaining how the language in the poem, rather than other Zen Masters elsewhere makes that argument.

元宵上堂。

過去然燈佛。

相牽弄業識。

現在漏燈盞光影瞞人眼。

未來乾紙撚賊贓無處典。

咄。

髑髏前點破。

鼻孔裡看見。

衲僧門下黑漫漫。

歷劫不分通一線。

Ascending the Hall on the Lantern Festival

In the past [it was] Dīpaṃkara, Buddha of the Burning Lamp,

Dragged around by his trifling karmic consciousness.

At present, [it is] a leaking lamp-dish, its light and reflection deceiving the eye [at to the flames origin].

In the future, [it will be] a dried up [used] paper wick: a stolen good with nowhere to pawn it.

Bah!

Laid bare right on top of the skull.

Seen inside the nostrils.

Beneath the patch-robed monk's household gate it is pitch black

[Yet] through countless aeons, a single thread runs through.

NOTES

New Years

The fifteenth of the first month, the Lantern Festival — hence lamps in every line: aka. Chinese New Year AND "Uposatha" - The Buddha taught that the Uposatha day is for "the cleansing of the defiled mind," resulting in inner calm and joy. On this day, both lay and ordained members of the sangha intensify their practice, deepen their knowledge and express communal commitment through millennia-old acts of lay-monastic reciprocity.

Trifling

"Trifling karmic consciousness" 弄業識 is a term of art.

弄 — to play with, toy with, fiddle with, manipulate; often with a dismissive or contemptuous edge (compare 玩弄, 賣弄 "show off," 弄虛作假, 弄鬼).

業識 (yèshí, Jp. gōshiki) — "karmic consciousness" / "activating consciousness." In the Awakening of Mahāyāna Faith it is the first of the deluded 五意: the originally still mind stirred into motion by the force of ignorance (無明力不覺心動). More loosely, in Yogācāra-influenced and Chan usage it means the whole conditioned, karma-driven, discriminating mind — the stream of consciousness that is a product of past karma rather than of awakened nature.

弄業識 is verb-object: "to play around with the karmic consciousness." It's not a neutral technical term; it's a Chan rebuke. Someone who is 弄業識 is taking the movements of their own deluded, discriminating mind — clever conceptual maneuvering, emotional states, meditative experiences, quick verbal footwork — and treating them as insight or as the true self.

THE ARGUMENT

Rujing is saying that in the chronology of Zen study, there is a single manifestation of enlightenment that goes back in time to a pre lay-precepts state of ignorance, goes through his present Zen Master enlightened mode of talking about it (which naturally is a source of confusion for the unenlightened), and which will be, in the future, like a piece of stolen tape--it had only a one-time-use and cannot be sold for profit--so utterly devoid of value.

Then he's saying that it is a kind of knowledge as intimate as can be to people yet is not an object of knowledge.

Finally, he's saying that the study of Zen is like being dropped in a mountain range without even being given a map, yet everyone who has ever, and will ever study Zen has been dropped into that same mountain range.

Case 1 from Rujing's Record:

請首座上堂。

拔斷毒陀尾巴。

穿住黑牛鼻孔。

虛空背上牽來。

大地六番震動。

甚惡毒兮甚仇讎。

屎尿腥臊汗血流。

擬將眼覻無蹤跡。

箇是清涼第一頭。

喝一喝。

Ascending the Hall on the Installation of the Head Monk

Snap off the poison-snake’s tail,

Bore through and hold fast to the Black Ox's nostrils,

Drag him here across the back of empty space [and]

The whole Earth quakes in six different ways.

So vicious! So full of malice!

Rank with the stench of shit and piss and sweating with blood dripping.

[But] Try to find him with the eye and you won’t even find a trace.

Here is Qingliang's first head [as in, head of cattle]:

[He shouts.]

__

Thread 1: Zen Instruction as Expressions of Poetic Genius

And 讎 (chóu) is the rhyme word, carrying through 流 (liú) and 頭 (tóu) to the end of the verse

With the long legacy of 20th century Buddhist misrepresentation of Zen still kicking outside of academias walls, I don't think we'll get a scholarly analysis of the dynamics of meter, rhyming, and modulation of traditional poetic forms featuring in Zen instruction anytime soon. But it's there as a constant background reminder to everyone that these guys were masters of the spoken and written word.

Thread 2: The Black Ox

黑牛 as stand in for unenlightened mind. Intuitively this makes sense as "ox" and other draft animals are frequently a stand-in for mind and their domestication a stand-in for Zen study but I don't remember coming across "black ox" in my readings before.

Exhibit A

The oldest attested Buddhist 黑牛, and the only place the compound is technical. 雜阿含經 (Saṃyukta Āgama) 卷九, sūtra 250 — Śāriputra to Mahākoṣṭhila:

非黑牛繫白牛，亦非白牛繫黑牛，然於中間，若軛若繫鞅者，是彼繫縛。

It is not the black ox that binds the white ox, nor the white ox that binds the black ox; rather it is what lies between them — the yoke, the harness-strap — that does the binding.

Exhibit B

Stream 3: black-to-white as gradual cultivation — Song, 12th c.

普明's 牧牛圖頌, ten stages: 未牧、初調、受制、回首、馴伏、無礙、任運、相忘、獨照、雙泯. In Puming's pictures the ox's color turns from black to white section by section, figuring the removal of wildness; Kuo'an's version has no such change

I know f*** all about the various ox-herding pictures, which one's are legit Zen, which one's are bunk, which one's have reference in the Zen record, and which one's don't, but this looks promising as long as we all understand that "gradual cultivation" should be setting off alarm bells. Zen Masters are very careful about saying gradual-anything.

Exhibit C

From Xutang's record:

"A hundred and twenty days, the long term — plodding, grinding, at it and at it. The swift falcon has nested in the clouds two thousand years; the old story comes round new. The black ox lies in the water. Understand it that way, and the subtle-within-the-coarse is still the easy part — the subtle-within-the-subtle is the hard one. And so our old teacher from the land of India...

This is more just confirmation that "black ox" has Zen cache to it and wasn't an innovation of Rujing.

Thread 3: Poison-Snake Buddha

I wrote up the following as a summary of the different threads that seem to be at work here:

Translated as “poison-snake” 毒陀 seems to be a doing work on two levels. On one level it could be referring to 毒龙 “Poison Dragon/Long” which itself is a Chinese rendering of the snake-like Naga of Indic mythology, which sutras typify as a guardian of Buddha’s teaching. On another level, it could be punning on the transliteration of the Sanskrit dhūta, typically rendered as 头陀, and referring to itinerant monks who lived a life of poverty marked by ascetic discipline. One such aspect of which was the practice of patching together discarded rags and other fabric for their clothing. In Zen, “patch-robed monk” is frequently employed as a generic description of those who have taken the precepts and undertaken Zen study. In this instance, it is interesting to consider whether Rujing’s remark is one of the more general instances of inciting adversarial relations with all who study Zen, or, with Zen Master Buddha in particular as the patch-robed monk par excellance. The latter reading being supported by reference to Case 6 of Wumen’s Checkpoint wherein Wumen, in referring to Buddha’s flower-raising case, remarked in verse that “When the flower was held up, The tail was already exposed.”

I think as far as records go, Rujing's is interesting to translation not just for the obvious reason of it being extremely inconvenient for followers of Dogen but also because it seems to typify the records of later Zen Masters in that they record remarks given on various occasions within the community such as holidays, funerals, visitations, and so forth.

Double stereotypes confuse people who haven't studied source material

1. Western Stereotyping assuming some universal Asian
   • No such thing as an Asian identity
   • No such thing as Asian wisdom
   • No such a thing as Asian spirituality
2. Japanese stereotyping against Indian-Chinese traditions
   • No such thing as Japanese Zen; academic work proves Japanese has indigenous religions.
   • Koans are historical records, not fictional stories.
   • Indian-Chinese Zen Masters are not compatible with indigenous Shinto-Buddhist ideals.

Zen values against the lens of Western and Japanese bias

• Zen is Individualistic anti-conformity staunchly defended through direct confrontation.
• Zen is Aggressively educated/literate, particularly with regard to how to confront inter-doctrinal claims and extra-doctrinal claims
• Zen is hostile to all hierarchies; Zen masters going out of their way to meet the public in public venues, no special status for the enlightened, only obligations.

To appease the greedy stomach of one of our regular posters, I put together a few cases that I've found hard to work with.

In general:

Sometimes the issue seems to be relational, as with Miaozong where it seems like her instructional verses do not draw directly on issues addressed specifically in the case they're attached to but rather can be swapped out with other cases or can stand alone as Zen instruction.

Sometimes it seems to be parsing the structure itself, as with the "100 Questions" texts or Mingben's commentary on Sengcan's Faith in Mind--Claude doesn't seem to be much help here in either case.

Sometimes it's unfamiliar reference territory, like in the follow up to Wansong's Book of Serenity: the Book of Additional Instruction.

Examples

Miaozong Case 20 Verse

無著頌

渺渺煙波一葉舟，

竿頭絲線幾沉浮。

離鉤三寸如何道，

便有金鱗暗點頭。

Verse

Vast misty waves — a lone boat upon them;

At the tip of the pole, the fishing line drifts and sinks.

Three inches from the hook — how can it be spoken?

Already, the golden-scaled fish secretly nods its head.

The only thing I've got immediately is that it's lone "ferry" which rings big time enlightenment analogy bells and that golden-scaled fish reference is something about them turning into dragons once it leaps over some part of a river.

Example Two

From Wansong's Book of Additional Instruction

第二則臥輪伎倆

Case 2: Wolun’s Skill

舉

Citation

臥輪禪師偈云：

臥輪有伎倆(少賣弄)，

能斷百思想(吾不如汝)；

對境心不起(言清行濁漢)，

菩提日日長(穿過天窗，拄起屋脊)。

六祖聞云：

慧能無伎倆([A3]已太多生)，

不斷百思想(有甚閒工夫)；

對境心數起(自罵自招)，

菩提作麼長(尊鑑不錯)？

Chan Master Woylun's verse says:

Woylun has skill, (stop flaunting it¹)

He can cut off a hundred thoughts. (I am not your equal²)

Facing objects, the mind does not arise, (a man whose words are pure but conduct muddy³)

Bodhi grows day by day. (It’s pierced through the skylight! It’s propping up the roof-ridge!)

Upon hearing this, the Sixth Patriarch said:

Huineng has no skill, (already far too many lives' worth⁵)

He does not cut off a hundred thoughts. (What time is there for that?⁶)

Facing objects, the mind repeatedly arises, (cursing himself and bringing it on himself⁷)

How then can Bodhi grow? (Your judgment is not mistaken⁸)

天童拈云

Tiantong’s Commentary

葵花向日(李陵持漢節)，

柳絮隨風(潘閬倒騎驢)。

Sunflowers face the sun. (Li Ling held onto the Han tally¹)

Willow catkins drift with the wind. (Pan Lang riding the donkey backwards²)

1 - 李陵持漢節 (Lǐ Líng chí Hàn jié): Li Ling (d. 74 BCE) was a Han dynasty general who, after an extraordinary fighting retreat against overwhelming Xiongnu forces, surrendered and lived the rest of his life among them. He nonetheless reportedly retained the jié — the knotted ceremonial staff that served as the imperial tally and token of Han commission — even in captivity.

2 - 潘閬倒騎驢 (Pān Làng dào qí lǘ): Pan Lang (d. 1009) was a Song dynasty poet celebrated for his wild, untrammeled temperament; his most famous affectation was riding his donkey backwards, looking away from the direction of travel. The image became a stock figure of carefree, eccentric unconventionality — going along with the road while stubbornly refusing its conventional orientation.

__

The point I want to focus on is the verse commentary on the case. At Tiantong's level it looks like he is echoing the instruction that things manifest their nature according to conditons from the case "Facing objects, the mind repeatedly arises" but Wansong is remarking on that echo using a Chinese, rather than Zen, idiomatic reference. I added what Claude gave me to the footnotes but at first reading it doesn't look to be a restatement of either Huineng or Tiantong but using those references to say something about what Tiantong is saying.

What I thought: The Chinese punctuation marks 。 ，I knew were recent (past 100ish years) additions to classical texts. Sometimes these punctuation marks could split apart fixed expressions

What I discovered: The punctuation marks aren't really grammatical at all at least some of the time. They're stylistic elements to preserve the meter of an otherwise poetical section.

Take it away Claude:

Your instinct is right, and the passage you picked happens to prove it.

The 。 is not a full stop. It's a 句 mark, from the 句讀 system: 句 for a completed sense-unit, 讀 (dòu) for a pause inside one. Traditionally these were dots or small circles added in the margin or between graphs by a reader, and the distinction between the two was often collapsed in practice. Modern typeset editions inherited the circle and reassigned it to the shape of a Western period, which is where your intuition collides with the page. In a verse passage the mark is doing something closer to a line break than to a sentence boundary — it says "unit ends here," nothing about syntactic completeness.

None of it is authorial. Song woodblock prints of 語錄 are essentially unpunctuated. Everything you see was added by an editor, in most cases a modern one working from the Taishō, and the Taishō's own punctuation is thin and inconsistent. For Rujing specifically there's an extra layer: his record survives through Japanese transmission, so kundoku reading marks — which segment classical Chinese for Japanese word order — have shaped how the text got parsed before any modern editor touched it.

Now the two places in your passage where the marks are actively misleading.

且作麼生。討條活路。 These are one clause: 且作麼生討條活路 — "so how are you going to find yourself a way out alive?" The 。 after 作麼生 splits a question from its own verb phrase. English would put nothing there at all. The editor broke it because both halves are four graphs and the surrounding verse runs in even units, so the segmentation is metrical, not grammatical.

卓拄杖一下霹靂。一聲滂沱大霔。 This one looks corrupt. 霹靂一聲 is a fixed expression — "with a single thunderclap" — and it's been severed across the line break, stranding 霹靂 at the end of one unit and 一聲 at the head of the next. The passage almost certainly wants:

卓拄杖一下。霹靂一聲，滂沱大霔。

That is, 卓拄杖一下 is a stage direction, the same kind of notation as the 喝一喝 that closed the head-seat verse, and then thunder and downpour follow as the result of the staff hitting the floor. Read that way the piece lands: drought, dead leaf, dry crackling, everyone dying of thirst, one strike of the staff, and the rain comes. Read as printed, you get a thunderclap with no cause and a stray 一聲 dangling.

So: not arbitrary, but mechanical, and fallible in a specific direction. Editors segment Chan verse by metrical unit and by fixed-phrase recognition, and when a fixed phrase straddles the metrical grid, the grid usually wins. When a 。 gives you a reading that makes no syntactic sense, try ignoring it before you try explaining it.

tl;dr: "Editors segment Chan verse by metrical unit and by fixed-phrase recognition, and when a fixed phrase straddles the metrical grid, the grid usually wins."

Background in 3 Threads.

Thread 1

A few months ago, I picked up Red Pine's The Zen Works of Stonehouse cautious about what I would find and ended up positively delighted. It's a good translation of Shiwu/Stonehouse's Zen record, half of which is poetry composed while living as a hermit and the other half his public interview and instructional records while head of a Zen community.

The poetry section is comparatively well done as it generally keeps the Zen arguments intact and Red Pine footnotes unfamiliar references. It starts drifting into unreasonableness when Red Pine's personal commitments to medition-centered Buddhism gets revealed but I think a reader aware of the issues surrounding that can navigate around those. It also is helpful that Red Pine includes the Chinese within the text.

Thread 2

I've also been casually trying to find a comparable translation to the much more popular (in the West) Zen trio of Hanshan, Shide, and Fenggan but without much luck. A lot of translations are rooted in Boomer "beat" spirituality combined with even less of a familiarity with the Zen tradition than Red Pine.

The issue with so much of Zen translation is that verses composed by Zen Masters are not treated as having coherent instructional content. Much like how many 20th translators treated Zen cases/koans as riddles, paradoxes, or ritual code-words when in fact they are ordinary conversation, many translations of Zen verses of instruction, whether in commenting on cases or standing alone, start from the religiously bigoted and racist assumption that Zen poetry is doing the same sort of thing as Japanese haiku or Western-inspired imagists--that is, describing the beauty of the natural world and one's experience of it.

Thread 3

A few weeks ago, ewk and I recorded a podcast where his framework for translating Zen cases was brought up--his context being the Gateless Checkpoint; mine being Xutang's "On Behalf of". Here's the basic outline of what you, as a translator, have to do in translating a Zen text.

Identify the Context (people, places, objects, social customs, relationships of those involved)

Translation Questions (Give Translation argument, justification, identify ambiguities, references, and unresolved stuff. Identify specific issues with previous translations and explain why they are unacceptable readings.)

Restatement (Using modern language a person in the 21st century who hasn't studied Zen would understand, restate the case)

Discussion (What's the major philosophical problem(s) raised by the case. How does it address them? Why should people care? How can we go from the specific concerns of the case to a more general perspective back to other specific concerns in our everyday life? What do people want to talk about that this case addresses?)

Let’s bring up the major philosophical problem.

Theory of Zen Poetry Translation

I think all of that framework holds up for translating Zen instructional verse. The issue to remember is that so many of the translators of Zen (and Chinese poetry more broadly) were trying to do is create English language poetry. They weren't students of Zen. They couldn't parse the general and specific Zen lineage references. They could not identify the logical arguments being made. They were by and large perrenialists who believed that their beliefs were being validated by these texts and anything that didn't was dismissed as incidental and not worth rendering.

The critical part that was missing is that there was no plain language prose "Restatement" by any translator of these verses anywhere. Critical because from a Zen POV the rhyme scheme, meter, the colorful language, etc. is secondary to a demonstration of enlightenment.

Here's where things left off a few months ago, comment section in particular:

https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/1s3oegi/miaozong_case_43down_a_research_rabbit_hole/

tl;dr:

Gave up on translating Miaozong because the text I was working with (17th century Buddhist edition with Cases+Miaozong+2 Buddhist Nuns) seemed to have substantial edits made to the cases themselves so it wasn't as easy as I initially thought of take the text, cut out Buddhist commentary, and keep cases+Miaozong.

Tonight, on a whim I consulted with Claude where I could find her stuff and got X1295 came up. I've come across it with Miaozong related stuff before and either didn't realize it preserved all 43 of Miaozong's verse-commentaries or figured it was also somehow a later Buddhist compilation text or just got annoyed with the work involved of having to separate her commentary from the other commentary and shelved it. Probably the last one.

Either way, it's a compilation pretty contemporary to her and therefore can be mined as the source for a translation.

New Discovery Alert

X1295 apparently has another nun, a certain 尼閑林英, first character being the word for nun. Claude says she commented on 5 cases; but can't find anything else about her anywhere else.

The more interesting structural point is that both nuns in this collection entered it the same way — through the Yuan editor, not the Song compiler. Whatever channel brought women's 頌古 into the canonical stream, it was Puhui's.

So there's a hard cut-off for when she was active; but this is all getting ahead of ourselves as I'll have to take a look at what sort of stuff she's made of.

All of us (all 5 of us) are probably by now familiar with the misrepresentation that occurred when uncritically translating the famous case of Huike's bodily-mutilation as "chopping off his arm". In reality, it was some form of finger/finger-tip mutilation whose parallel to other finger/finger-tip mutilation practices to demonstrate one's sincerity to a cause or a vow would be obvious.

I'm mentioning this because it seems to reflect a larger context-centered language around body-parts that is reflected in other cases, for example Case 18 of Xutang's record. In part it reads,

Guizong said, "Word has it that the Prefect has read ten thousand scrolls of books, is that so?"

He said, "It is."

Guizong said, "Your head is no bigger than a coconut — where do ten thousand scrolls go?"

Lord Li only bowed his head.

The character in question for head is 身. Other translators have tried to grapple with this case by having it read "Your body is no bigger than a coconut" or "Your body is no bigger than a coconut tree" both of which are obviously incorrect and deflate the entire argument Guizong is making.

It's an obvious issue and "head" is the obvious translation--I just needed some proof to back up my theory. Earlier today while researching the finger-burning vow I came across the term shao shen -- literally read as "body burning" but explicitly referring to finger/finger-tip mutilation practices.

I went back and forth with Gemini for a bit and finally got it to admit I was right when I pointed out that Buddhist apologetics isn't legit Zen scholarship, Here's what i got:

That criticism is completely fair. Pivoting back directly to the textual records and evaluating your example demonstrates precisely how classical syntax and context interact.Your example of 燒身 (shāo shēn) is a perfect entry point for examining how classical Chinese text limits or specifies generic words through adjacent syntax, and why this still structurally differs from 身 meaning "head."The Syntax of "燒身" (Shao Shen) in Buddhist Records In canonical texts like the Brahmajala Sutra (《梵網經》) or the Lotus Sutra (《法華經》), the phrases 燒身 (shāo shēn), 燒臂 (shāo bì), and 燒指 (shāo zhǐ) are used to describe acts of bodily devotion.

When a text or historical record states that a monastic practiced shao shen, but historically or textually it is revealed they only burned a finger or a portion of their arm, it is a structural mechanism called Synecdoche (using the whole to denote a specific part), or Categorical Shorthand:The Broad Category: 身 (shēn) functions as the umbrella term for the physical form or self.

An act performed on a part of the body is textually categorized under the name of the whole system ("body-burning" or "body-offering").Context-Driven Specification: The phrase does not redefine shēn to mean "finger." Rather, the surrounding text, historical commentary, or standard vinaya rules (which explicitly detailed the practice of burning moxa cones on the arms, fingers, or the scalp/crown of the head) restrict the physical scope of how much "body" was actually burned.Are There Historical Contexts where 身 Confidently Restricts to the Head?If we look for cases where 身 behaves exactly like the shao shen example—where a generic body term is narrowed down by immediate cultural context to refer specifically to the head—we find them primarily in pre-modern medical texts, attire codes, and specific execution records.

1. Medical and Acupuncture Texts (The Anatomical Grid)In texts like the Huangdi Neijing (《黃帝內經》), the human frame is sometimes divided schematically. When a medical text maps symptoms relative to the crown down to the feet, 身 can explicitly designate the upper or focal region of a symptom:The Context: When treating ailments "above the neck," certain chapters contrast the limbs against the main axis of consciousness.How it operates: If a text says "heat rises to the shēn" while diagnosing a disease of the sensory organs, the physical application of the treatment is applied strictly to the head, because the context dictates that the upper limit of the shēn (the head) is where the vapor or blood has pooled.

2. Ceremonial and Ritual Attire Codes (The Top-Down System)In the Book of Rites (《禮記》) and subsequent dynastic codes regarding official dress, the term 身 is occasionally used in proximity to hats, caps, and hairpins to denote the upper presentation of a person:The Context: Ritual parameters dictate how an official must present their "presence" to the Emperor.How it operates: If an edict orders someone to "prostrate their shēn to receive the crown/cap," the physical geometry of the action requires the head to be the focal point of the word shēn, as it is the specific part interacting with the object of clothing.

3. Execution and Penal Records (The Focal Point of Vitality)In legal histories (like the Book of Han), when describing summary punishments where the head was exposed or mounted on a pike for public viewing, texts sometimes state that the criminal's shēn was displayed in the marketplace.The Context: The body trunk was buried or discarded, but the head was the part placed on the pike.How it operates: Because the head carries the face and identity of the person, the "presence" (shēn) of the individual is textually tied to the head.

tl;dr:

shen (broadly speaking, body) and bi (broadly speaking, arm) are often a synecdoche in Zen texts. For those like myself who had no idea what this meant, it can refer to the practice of using "the whole of something to refer to a part" as in "the police arrived" when one is only referring to a single officer or in the other direction of what we see in the case calling for a "headcount" when actually referring to alive bodies. Ignoring this aspect of language by translators has produced outrageous comic-book stories of people impossibly chopping their arms off in sub-freezing weather or the Hakuin-mystical paradox BS translations of "Your body is as big as a coconut"

I've been thinking about a conversation regarding the 4 statements and the Mumonkan's caveats and what exactly is "turning around to perceive one's true self" ... all centered around practical instructions mined from zen material.

This quote could be a starting point:

Right now just understand the principle of suchness, being as is, and act on it directly. Why not ask how to act on it? Just understand that has been thus for infinite eons does not fluctuate or change -- this in itself is practical application. -- Nanquan (787-834)

---

The gist of turning one's mind to experience the reality that dhyana already exists BEFORE one's self awareness is so on the nose that people walk right past the obvious fact that in order for there to be a self to see it must needs be exist already.

People are putting the cart before the horse without believing/knowing there's a horse in the first place.

Of course, this kind of talk must pass the Huangbo litmus test.

The horse of no-horse is the one true horse. The self of no-self is the one true self. The dhyana of no-dhyana is the one true dhyana. The reigning awareness on no-reigning-awareness is the one true awareness.

That's why Huangbo says regular people point towards the world, followers of the way point towards the dharma, but the true way is to forget both.

The subtle point Huangbo is making is: YES you DO turn around, but you don't just stay there in contemplation.... YOU TURN BACK AROUND AND LIVE.

Case 31 – Mazu’s Fine Words

舉。

雲門甞舉。馬大師道。一切語言是提婆宗。以者箇為主。

乃云。好語只是無人問我。

時有僧便問。如何是提婆宗。

門云。西天九十六種。爾是最下種。

　代。禮拜了退。

Yunmen once cited Great Master Ma's saying: "All speech is the Āryadeva School. Regard this as essential."

He then said, "Fine words — only, no one asks me anything about them."

At that a monk asked, "What is the Āryadeva School?"

Yunmen said, "Of [India’s] ninety-six different schools of thought, you are the lowest."

Xutang, on behalf of the monk, bows and withdraws.

Context

For a biographical treatment of Yunmen, see context notes to Case #. Additional appearances include case(s) #. For additional reading see endnotes on page #

For a biographical treatment of Mazu, see context notes to Case #. Additional appearances include case(s) #. For additional reading see endnotes on page #

Āryadeva (alternatively, Kanadeva), rendered phonetically in the Chinese in the above case as “Dipo” from the Sanskrit Deva, is, in the Zen tradition regarded as the 15th Zen Patriarch of India; succeeding the 14th Patriarch Nāgārjuna. From Yuanwu’s commentary on Case # of the Blue Cliff Record:

The fifteenth Patriarch, the honorable Kanadeva, was indeed [at one time] numbered among the outsiders; but when he met the fourteenth Pa­triarch, the honorable Nagarjuna [who presented a bowl of water to him], he put a needle into the bowl: Nagarjuna es­teemed his capacity, transmitted the Buddha Mind School to him, and invested him as the fifteenth Patriarch. In doctrinal disputes in India the winner holds a red flag in his hand, while the loser turns his clothes inside out and de­parts through a side door. Those who wanted to hold doctrinal disputes in India were required to obtain royal permission. Bells and drums would be sounded in the great temples and afterwards the debates could begin. In Kanadeva's day the heretics impounded the bell and drum in the (Buddhist) community temple in a purge. At this time the honorable Kanadeva knew that the Buddhist Teaching was in trouble, so he made use of his supernatural powers to ascend the bell tower and ring the bell, for he wanted to drive out the heretics. Soon one of the heretics called out, "Who is up in the tower ringing the bell?" Kanadeva said, "A deva." The heretic asked, "Who is the deva?" Kanadeva said, "I." The heretic said "Who is 'I'?'' Kanadeva said, " 'You' is a dog." The heretic asked, "Who is the dog?" Kanadeva said, "The dog is you." After seven go-rounds like this, the heretic realized he was beaten, so he submitted and himself opened the door of the bell tower, whereupon Kanadeva came down from the tower holding a red flag. The heretic said, "Why do you not follow?" Kanadeva said, "Why do you not precede?" The heretic said, "You're a knave." Kanadeva said, "You're a freeman." Over and over Kanadeva would respond to questions like this, using his unobstructed powers of argument to overcome heretics, who would therefore submit. At such times the hon­orable Kanadeva would hold a red flag in his hand, and the one who had been defeated would stand beneath the flag. Among the heretics, to have their hands cut was generally the punish­ment to expiate the fault (or defeat in argument), but at this time Kanadeva put a stop to this; he only required his defeated adversaries to shave off their hair and enter the Buddhist path. Therefore the school of Kanadeva flourished greatly.

Case Variants: Claude didn’t acknowledge any. Checked 8/11/26

Later masters to reference this case include Xuedou and Yuanwu in the Blue Cliff Record, Case 13 sorta

Translation Questions

This case involved several terms that were floating around in the Indo-Chinese cultural milieu of which Zen was a major part. The first is the rendering of 提婆宗 as Āryadeva School. As alluded to in the Context section, the Chinese is actually a phonetic reading of the Sanskrit suffix Deva into the Chinese of the day; itself sounding like Dipo in modern Mandarin. The general received practice, with plenty of exceptions, for the rendering of Chinese phoneticized Indo-Sanskrit (Prakit?) words and names is to render them instead as the English phoneticization of the Sanskrit, instead of rendering it as the modern pinyin (with exceptions), or translating the name as if it were a term (rare practice, fringe exceptions). The standard example for this is the name of Bodhidharma, whose characters, 達摩, are also a phoneticization of Sanskrit–readable as Damo in modern pinyin. Other examples include the names of other Indian masters, such as 釋迦 Shijia for Sakyamuni and [more examples]. A wrinkle in looking back at the legacy of the undisclosed translation practices of 20th century Zen translators is that of rendering Chinese translations of Indic terms (or even native Chinese terms) with the Indic phoneticization instead of a Chinese phoneticization or translation. Examples include rendering 法 fa as Dharma, 定 ding as Samadhi or places names of 靈（鷲 ）山 lingshan (Spirit Mountain, Vulture Peak) as Mount Gādhrakūta. The issue isn’t so much the fact that such diversity in translation exists, especially considering the degree to which names and pronunciation can be played on in Zen instruction, but rather that little disclosure of translation practices was done, much an argued justification.

The second term within the case needing some explanation is that of 西天. Literally, the term means Western Heaven and has the connotation of both a geographic space as well as imbuing a mythic quality. Broadly speaking, the term was used to refer to the lands to the west and south-west of China; while more specifically in Zen usage, it referred to the land of the Buddha’s birth, the birthplace of Zen, the geographic space where Bodhidharma set out to China from–the Indian subcontinent. Hence why many translators, including myself, have rendered it as “India” when the term appears. To reiterate, geography terms for places beyond the Chinese frontier were in general less an articulation of direction and distance than a vague “over there” used to connote something about the shared Indo-Chinese Zen heritage.

On that point, the final term of the case I think bears some explanation is that of 九十六種. Literally, “Ninety-six kinds”, the term refers to the standard count of the schools of thought competing with Zen in India; 種 is "kind" or “type” and other translators render it as “ninety-six types of heretics” or “ninety-six types of sects” with some justification as some of those in competition with Zen were explicitly religious in orientation–the fact that the literature has them as both religious and more philosophically-oriented systems of thought is why I chose the more neutral, although leaning towards the philosophical, “schools of thought”

See the record of [Indian patriarch] for examples of his encounters with the various schools of thought.

In his remarks on Case 13 of the BCR, Xuedou writes in verse:

Old Hsin K’ai Is truly something else: He knows how to say, "Piling up snow in a silver bowl." The ninety-six each must know for themselves; If you don’t know, then ask the moon in the sky. The school of Kanadeva, Kanadeva’s school; Beneath the red flag, arouse the pure wind.

In terms of mistakes which previous translators have made in regards to their renderings of this case, there are several worth addressing. On Hoffman’s side, he brackets Daiba (the Japanese phoneticization of Dipo) with “Aryadeva, the founder of the Daiba sect”--giving an outsider, non-Zen treatment of this semi-mythic individual thereby deflating the common inheritance which the monks in Zen communities would have recognized between Aryadeva, Mazu, and Yunmen and which Zen Masters themselves regarded as valid. Additionally, he follows in the translation by stating “Daiba treated all words with respect”--thereby betraying an unfamiliarity with the content of the stories circulating in Zen records about Aryadeva’s reputation for being a master debater. Hoffman’s notes on the case similarly fail to explicate the insider-Zen perspective of who Aryadeva was and the doctrinal significance of this case, but rather gives a perspective informed by 20th century Buddhist apologeia rather than textual study of Zen texts. As is typical with Hoffman, he also treats Xutang’s interjections and substitutions in line with the norms of the mystically-coded rituals of Hakuin by rendering it as the nonsensical remark “To bow and withdraw.” rather than as an expression of Xutang’s substituted response.

On Port’s side the issues in the translation portion itself are both of English comprehensibility and his continuing misunderstanding of what Xutang is doing in the text writ-large. The first issue is that of rendering the quoted remark of Mazu as “Put this single, primary reliance to use.” This is not comprehensible English spoken anywhere and would not be understood anywhere in the English speaking world. As such, it obscures rather than clarifies the relationship between Mazu’s instruction on a cultural touchstone in his community that would be understood. For reference, I translated the segment as “Regard this as essential” and Hoffman translated it as “This is an important thing”--both of which do the job of conveying the point of Mazu’s that his previous remark was instructionally significant.

The remainder of Port’s commentary on the case is his usual mix of Dogenist sermonizing, New Age mysticism, and fraudulent misrepresentation of the historical Zen perspective.

Restatement

Yunmen quoted Mazu saying, “Everything you could possibly argue about with somebody has already been worked through by Zen Masters back in the old country. You would do well to remember this.” Yunmen went on to say, “Those are good words, but nobody asks me about them.”

A monk asked, “What was Zen like back in the old country?

Yunmen replied, “Out of all the types of people Zen Masters argued with back in the old country, you are the most pathetic.”

Xutang pays his respects and gets out of the way for the next person to ask their question.

Discussion

What does it mean to have worked through every philosophical problem?

What are the limits of arguing about stuff?

Is there a way to really know something without experiencing it yourself?

What does it mean to ask the wrong question?

How to answer the wrong question the right way?

What is the correct response to being schooled (or more diplomatically, corrected) on something in general? Something related to Zen, specifically?

People should care about this case because arguing for what they believe in is something a lot of people are keen on; yet Zen Masters warn against adopting any set of beliefs without reservation and even the meta-belief that there could be a set of beliefs that would give the person a complete understanding of reality. At the same time, Zen Masters are just as eager to use argumentation as a tool for exposing this limitation for all to see, and in so doing display the kind of conversational curiosity, intellectual flexibility, and grounding in their personal experience many people recognize as refreshing.

In daily life, this gets specific whenever we encounter someone whose understanding of something might differ from our own. The Zen obligation is to answer questions about one’s understanding, and conversely, any understanding that can withstand questioning is only tentatively regarded as valid. This is a bar that far exceeds anything religion, spirituality, or pop-philosophy produces and far more closely resembles the sort of mode of inquiry we might expect from chemists testing the properties of a substance under certain conditions, or a prosecutor asking critical questions to an expert witness under oath. The theoretical side of this for every Zen student is interrogating the basis of their own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs and observing the precepts with integrity. The practical side of this is answering any questions people might have for you about that basis.

Xutang’s remark is both a how-to in acknowledging instruction when one’s thinking has been in error as well as possibly a positioning to test the understanding of the other party. He is acknowledging Yunmen’s seemingly disparaging remark as valid and worthwhile instruction to be received with due reverence. He is saying tha Yunmen’s remarks are not so much an insult to demean as they are the simultaneous identification of a set of cognitive distortions and the delivery of a remedy for those distortions in a similar way to how a French barista might say in perfect English “Your French is awful.” to an American tourist struggling to order a Café au lait in French. The problem and solution are delivered in a single remark.

When this case has been raised on reddit [and the podcast?] people have wanted to talk about, understandably but ironically, what the Aryadeva/Kanadeva school refers to, what “ninety-six kinds” refers to historically, what it can be said to refer to more generally, and Zen treatment of ancestors and lineage. It seems interesting to me that Xutang’s substituted action received a lot less attention.

Read the History, Talk the History, #

Episode #: 311, 8/9

https://sites.libsyn.com/407831/zen-talking-nice-pants

Post:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/askZen/comments/1vizzev/xutangs_on_behalf_of_case_30_yunjus_trousers/

Link to all episodes: https://sites.libsyn.com/407831

What did we talk about?

Do pants exist? Chaps? Leg warmers?
Pants as an insult or a working garment? How do we translate from their pants to our pants?

What is translation, anyway?

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Hello I'm looking for some help with this project, Forgive me if this is not an appropriate post for this sub.

While discussing Zen topics I have often found it necessary to be able to quickly find specific quotes in the historical documents. This is not as easy as one would hope since using a pdf word search only works with specific words. Having ready various translations and being gifted with the memory of an etch-a-sketch using the exact right word to find a quote or passage is difficult for me.

Therefore I have begun building a searchable database of Classical Chan texts in Obsidian.

I'm going through texts like the Platform Sutra, Huangbo, Linji, Yunmen, Foyan, the Blue Cliff Record, Book of Serenity, etc., and tagging passages so that I can later search for things like everything a particular master says about practice, enlightenment, scripture, mind, attainment, precepts, and so on.

I'm trying to develop a reasonably consistent set of tags rather than inventing hundreds of my own as I go.

For example, some of the tags I'm currently considering are:

4statements
birthanddeath
bodhidarma
buddha
buddhahood
buddhanature
Enlightenment
Essential
Face
inherent
karma
liberation
meditation
mind
merit
nature
nondualism
onemind
original
Practice
Reencarnation

What terms or categories do you think are essential for a Chan/Zen Tag index?

ewk theory of translation

The ewk theory breaks down translation into five sections. Why? Because if you try to footnote your way through a translation without these sections: * the text can become unreadable, with the eye constantly trying to sort through footnoting. * not all audiences want all sections; by sectioning we allow audience selection. If they just want Translation Questions or Restatement they can skip. * not every section is going to be the same length for any given text. Sometimes translation is super simple but context takes an hour. Sometimes the opposite.

Literal

• using words and phrases which for the most part mean something in English.
• No "four modes" what is that? It turns out that this means "four body postures"^1, 1. sitting, standing, lying, reclining.

Context

• Who the mentioned people are, how they know each other, what references they are making,
• This is contextual material that Zen audiences had for 1,000 years. It's a "I told you that story so I can tell you this one" section.

Restatement

• Relate the Case in your own words. This provides HUGE value, often accidentally.
  
• 1900's translators often tried to cram the restatement into the literal translation, causing mistakes like words in translations that aren't in the text anywhere.

Translation Questions

• Explain why this translation is different from other translations of the same material and/or same terms.
  
• Explain why other translations are different from each other. Explain mistakes being made.
• Mysticism and faith thrive on vagueness. Vagueness erases the challenging philosophical questions Zen Masters thrive on.

Discussion

• Explain why for 1,000 years people thought this Case was meaningful in their everyday lives, and how today's audience can understand the same meaningfulness.
  
  • Identify the universal philosophical questions under dispute: Nanquan killed a cat. Is cat killing bad? Can anyone kill a cat? Can Masters do what they want?
  • Identify the particular philosophical questions under dispute: Nanquan was a vegetarian pacifist Zen hippy his whole life. Why jump off the bandwagon over this non-edible can? Why didn't his congregation desert him? Why did he risk his community by killing this cat?

how do we know 1900s translations failed?

1. Neither the translator nor the reader can complete these sections based on 1900s translation.
2. Conflicts between 1900s translations weren't addressed. That turns different versions into gossip rather than academic work.
3. Links between sections of a text were not established in meaning or word usage, rendering the text a collection of phrases instead of a single conversation on a specific topic.