The masters generally go about with a kind of short stick known as shippé (chu-pi), or at least they did so in old China. It does not matter whether it is a shippé or not, anything in fact will answer our purpose. Shuzan, a noted Zen master of the tenth century, held out his stick and said to a group of his disciples:[6.13] “Call it not a shippé; if you do, you assert. Nor do you deny its being a shippé; if you do, you negate. Apart from affirmation and negation, speak, speak!” The idea is to get our heads free from dualistic tangles and philosophic subtleties. A monk came out of the rank, took the shippé away from the master’s hand, and threw it down on the floor. Is this the answer? Is this the way to respond to the master’s request “to speak”? Is this the way to transcend the four propositions—the logical conditions of thinking? In short, is this the way to be free? Nothing is stereotyped in Zen, and somebody else may solve the difficulty in quite a different manner. This is where Zen is original and creative.
Ummon expressed the same idea with his staff, which he held up, saying,[6.14] “What is this? If you say it is a staff, you go right to hell; but if it is not a staff, what is it?” Hima’s (Pi-mo) way somewhat deviated from this. He used to carry a forked stick and whenever a monk came up to him and made a bow, he applied the stick on the neck of the monk, and said,[6.15] “What devil taught you to be a homeless monk? What devil taught you to go round? Whether you can say something, or whether you cannot say anything, all the same you are to die under my fork: speak, speak, be quick!” Tokusan (Tê-shan) was another master who flourished a stick to the same effect; for he used to say[6.16]: “No matter what you say, or what you say not, just the same thirty blows for you?”
When the ownership of a kitten was disputed between two parties of monks, the Master Nansen (Nan-ch‘üan P‘u-yüan, 749–835) came out, took hold of the animal, and said to them,[6.17] “If you can say a word, this will be saved: if not, it will be slain.” By “a word” of course he meant one that transcended both affirmation and negation, as when Jōshu was asked for “One word of the ultimate truth.” No one made a response, whereupon the master slew the poor creature. Nansen looks like a hard-hearted Buddhist, but his point is: To say it is, involves us in a dilemma; to say it is not, puts us in the same predicament. To attain to the truth, this dualism must be avoided. How do you avoid it? It may not only be the loss of the life of a kitten, but the loss of your own life and soul, if you fail to ride over this impasse. Hence Nansen’s drastic procedure. Later, in the evening Jōshu who was one of his disciples came back, when the master told him of the incident of the day. Jōshu at once took off one of his straw sandals and putting it over his head began to depart. Upon this, said the master, “What a pity you were not to-day with us, for you could have saved the kitten.” This strange behaviour, however, was Jōshu’s way of affirming the truth transcending the dualism of “to be” (sat) and “not to be” (asat).
While Kyōzan (Yang-shan, 804–890) was residing at Tōhei (Tung-ping) of Shao-chou, his master Isan (Wei-shan, 771–853),—both of whom were noted Zen masters of the T‘ang dynasty—sent him a mirror accompanied with a letter.[6.18] Kyōzan held forth the mirror before a congregation of monks and said, “O monks, Isan has sent here a mirror. Is this Isan’s mirror or mine own? If you say it is Isan’s, how is it that the mirror is in my hands? If you say it is mine own, has it not come from Isan? If you make a proper statement, it will be retained here. If you cannot, it will be smashed in pieces.” He said this for three times but nobody even made an attempt to answer. The mirror was then smashed. This was somewhat like the case of Nansen’s kitten. In both cases the monks failed to save the innocent victim or the precious treasure, simply because their minds were not yet free from intellectualism and were unable to break through the entanglements purposely set up by Nansen in one case and by Kyōzan in the other. The Zen method of training its followers thus appears so altogether out of reason and unnecessarily inhuman. But the master’s eyes are always upon the truth absolute and yet attainable in this world of particulars. If this can be gained, what does it matter whether a thing known as precious be broken and an animal be sacrificed? Is not the recovering of the soul more important than the loss of a kingdom?
Kyōgen (Hsiang-yen),[6.19] a disciple of Isan (Wei-shan), with whom we got acquainted just now, said in one of his sermons: “It is like a man over a precipice one thousand feet high, he is hanging himself there with a branch of a tree between his teeth, the feet are far off the ground, and his hands are not taking hold of anything. Suppose another man coming to him to propose a question, ‘What is the meaning of the first patriarch coming over here from the west?’ If this man should open the mouth to answer, he is sure to fall and lose his life; but if he would make no answer, he must be said to ignore the inquirer. At this critical moment what should he do?” This is putting the negation of opposites in a most graphically illustrative manner. The man over the precipice is caught in a dilemma of life and death, and there can be no logical quibblings. The cat may be sacrificed at the altar of Zen, the mirror may be smashed on the ground, but how about one’s own life? The Buddha in one of his former lives is said to have thrown himself down into the maw of a man-devouring monster, in order to get the whole stanza of the truth. Zen being practical wants us to make the same noble determination to give up our dualistic life for the sake of enlightenment and eternal peace. For it says that its gate will open when this determination is reached.
The logical dualism of “to be” (asti) and “not to be” (nasti) is frequently expressed by Zen masters by such terms of contrast as are used in our daily parlance: “taking life” and “giving life,” “capturing” and “releasing,” “giving” and “taking away,” “coming in contact” and “turning away from,”[6.20] etc. Ummon once held up his staff and declared: “The whole world, heaven and earth, altogether owes its life and death to this staff.” A monk came out and asked, “How is it killed?” “Writhing in agony!” “How is it restored to life?” “You had better be a chéf.” “When it is neither put to death nor living, what would you say?” Ummon rose from his seat and said, “Mo-hê-pan-jê-po-lo-mi-ta!” (Mahā-prajñā-pāramitā).[6.21] This was Ummon’s synthesis—“the one word” of the ultimate truth, in which thesis and antithesis are concretely unified, and to which the four propositions are inapplicable (rahita).
IV
We now come to the third class I have styled, “Contradiction,” by which I mean the Zen master’s negation, implicitly or expressly, of what he himself has stated or what has been stated by another. To one and the same question his answer is sometimes “No,” sometimes “Yes.” Or to a well-known and fully-established fact he gives an unqualified denial. From an ordinary point of view he is altogether unreliable, yet he seems to think that the truth of Zen requires such contradictions and denials; for Zen has a standard of its own, which, to our common-sense minds, consists just in negating everything we properly hold true and real. In spite of these apparent confusions, the philosophy of Zen is guided by a thorough-going principle which, when once grasped, its topsy-turviness becomes the plainest truth.
A monk asked the sixth patriarch of the Zen sect in China, who flourished late in the seventh and early in the eighth century, “Who has attained to the secrets of Wobai (Huang-mei)?” Wobai is the name of the mountain where the fifth patriarch, Hung-jên used to reside, and, it was a well-known fact that Hui-nêng, the sixth patriarch, studied Zen under him and succeeded in the orthodox line of transmission. The question was therefore really not a plain regular one, seeking an information about facts. It had quite an ulterior object. The reply of the sixth patriarch was, “One who understands Buddhism has attained to the secrets of Wobai.”
“Have you then attained them?”