However, his real immortality derives from his contribution to the arsenal of methods for shocking novices into enlightenment. It will be recalled that the legendary Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng, neglected to explain exactly what a person should do to "see into one's own nature." Ma-tsu apparently was the first master who developed non-meditative tricks for nudging a disciple into the state of "no-thought." He was an experimenter, and he pioneered a number of methods that later were perfected by his followers and the descendants of his followers. He was the first master to ask a novice an unanswerable question, and then while the person struggled for an answer, to shout in his ear (he liked the syllable "Ho!")—hoping to jolt the pupil into a non-dualistic mind state. Another similar technique was to call out someone's name just as the person was leaving the room, a surprise that seemed to bring the person up short and cause him to suddenly experience his original nature. A similar device was to deliver the student a sharp blow as he pondered a point, using violence to focus his attention completely on reality and abort ratiocination. Other tricks included responding to a question with a seemingly irrelevant answer, causing the student to sense the irrelevancy of his question. He would also sometimes send a pupil on a "goose chase" between himself and some other enlightened individual at the monastery, perhaps in the hope that bouncing the novice from one personality to another would somehow shake his complacency. Whatever the technique, his goal was always to force a novice to uncover his original nature for himself. He did this by never giving a straight answer or a predictable response and therefore never allowing a disciple to lapse into a passive mental mode.
Ma-tsu also seems to have simplified the idea of what constitutes enlightenment. As he defined it, "seeing into one's own nature" simply meant understanding (intuitively, not rationally) who you are and what you are. This truth could be taught with whatever method seemed appropriate at a given moment. As Hu Shih so eloquently describes his teaching,
". . . any gesture or motion, or even silence, might be used to communicate a truth. [Recall the Buddha once enlightened a follower by holding up a flower.] Ma-tsu developed this idea into a pedagogical method for the new Zen. There is no need to seek any special faculty in the mind for the enlightenment. Every behavior is the mind, the manifestation of the Buddha-nature. Snapping a finger, frowning or stretching the brow, coughing, smiling, anger, sorrow, or desire . . . is the functioning of the Buddhahead: it is the Tao, the Way. There is no need to perform any special act, be it dhyana or worship, in order to achieve the Tao. To be natural is the Way. Walk naturally, sit naturally, sleep naturally, live naturally—that is the Way. Let the mind be free: do not purposely do evil; nor purposely do good. There is no Law to abide, no Buddhahood to attain. Maintain a free mind and cling to nothing: that is Tao."8
Thus it seems that the most preeminent Ch'an master of the eighth century not only repudiated all the apparatus of traditional Buddhism, he also simplified enlightenment down to a quite secular condition of acceptance of the natural state of human affairs. For instance, although he was familiar with the great Mahayana sutras, Ma-tsu never mentions Hui-neng or the Diamond Sutra. His Ch'an, expressed in simple everyday language, seems merely so many ways of finding out who you are and what you are. Furthermore, there seems to be nothing specifically that you can do to accelerate the occurrence of sudden enlightenment, other than use traditional practices to make your psyche as uncomplicated as possible and then wait for the moment to strike (he, of course, experimented to find ways to accelerate the arrival of that moment). But he has nothing encouraging to say about the effectiveness of meditation as an aid to finding the desired non-rational insight, which he sometimes described using the borrowed term "Tao":
Cultivation is of no use for the attainment of Tao. The only
thing that one can do is to be free of defilement. When one's
mind is stained with thoughts of life and death, or deliberate action, that is defilement. The grasping of the Truth is the function of everyday-mindedness. Everyday-mindedness is free from intentional action, free from concepts of right and wrong, taking and giving, the finite or the infinite. . . . All our daily activities—walking, standing, sitting, lying down—all response to situations, our dealings with circumstances as they arise: all this is Tao.9
Ma-tsu eventually left Huai-jang (if, in fact, he ever met him in the first place) and presided over a community of Ch'an disciples at K'ai-yuan temple in Kiangsi. This was to be the incubator for the greatest thinkers of the eighth century, and the setting for some of the finest Ch'an anecdotes. The anecdote, incidentally, is the perfect Ch'an teaching device, since it forces the listener to find its meaning in his own inner experience. The sermon provided the theoretical basis for an idea, but the anecdote showed the theory in action and made the listener share in a real experience, if only vicariously. But first we will begin with a sermon credited to him, in which he summarizes the philosophical position he held. There was nothing particularly new about his understanding; it was his method that was novel. His sermon said, in essence, that reality is merely our mind, and that enlightenment comprised the nonrational recognition of this.
All of you should realize that your own mind is Buddha, that is, this mind is Buddha's Mind. . . . Those who seek for the Truth should realize that there is nothing to seek. There is no Buddha but Mind; there is no Mind but Buddha.10