The Zen Experience Part 45

This story is famous and found in many sources.

4.As evidenced by a common saying of the time: "In Kiangsi the Master is Ma-tsu; in Hunan the Master is Shih-t'ou. People go back and forth between them all the time, and those who do not know these two great Masters are completely ignorant." Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 55.

5.Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 46.

6.See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 145.

7.See Ibid., p. 175.

8.Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 47.

9.Luk, Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, p. 42.

10.Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 58.

11.Ibid., p. 69.

12.Ibid., p. 71

13.Ibid., p.47.

14.Ibid., p. 88.

15.Ibid., pp. 54-55. The translators explain the last two verses as follows: "This is derived from the old Chinese proverb: 'To win by a fluke is to fall into a fluke' (and thus to lose by a fluke)."

Concerning the meaning of this exchange, it would seem that water is here being used as a metaphor for the undifferentiated Void, which subsumes the temporary individuality of its parts the way the sea is undifferentiated, yet contains waves. When Tan-hsia accepts this premise a little too automatically, P'ang is forced to show him (via a splash) that water (and by extension, physical manifestations of the components of the Void) can also a.s.sume a physical reality that impinges on daily life. Tan-hsia tries feebly to respond by returning the splash, but he clearly lost the exchange.

16. Ibid. p. 73.

17. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p.

176. Also see Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Lay man P'ang, p. 75.

18. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 177.

19. Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 42. Watson, Cold Mountain, p. 50. Watson explains that the

20. Arthur Waley, "27 Poems by Han-shan," Encounter, 3, 3 (September 1954), p. 3.

21.opening line about taking along books while hoeing in the field was "From the story of an impoverished scholar of the former Han Dynasty who was so fond of learning that he carried his copies of the Confucian cla.s.sics along when he went to work in the fields." The last line is "An allusion to the perch, stranded in a carriage rut in the road, who asked the philosopher Chuang Tzu for a dipperful of water so that he could go on living."

22.

23.Ibid., p. 56.

24.

23. Waley, "27 Poems by Han-shan," p. 6.

24. From Wu Chi-yu, "A Study of Han Shan," T'oung Pao, 45, 4-5 (1957), p. 432.

26.Gary Snyder, "Han-shan," In Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature, (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 201.

27.

28.See Ibid., pp. 194-96.

29.

27. See Watson, Cold Mountain, p. 14. Watson says, "Zen commentators have therefore been forced to regard Han-shan's professions of loneliness, doubt, and discouragement not as revelations of his own feelings but as vicarious recitals of the ills of unenlightened men which he can still sympathize with, though he himself has transcended them. He thus becomes the traditional Bodhisattva figure--compa.s.sionate, in the world, but not of it." Watson rejects this interpretation.

28. Ibid., p. 67.

29. Ibid., p. 88.

30. Ibid., p. 78.

31. Ibid., p. 81.

32. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

33. Snyder, "Han-shan," p. 202.

10. HUANG-PO: MASTER OF THE UNIVERSAL MIND

1.Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 102.

2.This probably was during the last decade of the eighth century, since Ma-tsu died in 788.

3.This volume actually consists of two books, known as the Chun-chou Record (843) and the Wan-iing Record (849). They are translated and published together by John Blofeld as The Zen Teaching of Huang Po.

(New York: Grove Press, 1958). This appears to have been the source for biographical and anecdotal material later included in The Transmission of the Lamp, portions of which are translated in Chang Chung-yuan.

Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism. Another translation of biographical, didactic, and anecdotal material may be found in Charles Luk, Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, whose source is unattributed but which possibly could be a translation of the 1602 work Records of Pointing at The Moon, a compilation of Ch'an materials.

4.Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 28.

5.Ibid., p. 27.

6.Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 103.

7.Ibid.

8.Ibid., p. 90.

9.Ibid., p. 103.

10.Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 99.

11.This gesture of defeat is reported elsewhere to have been a triple prostration. Huang-po apparently claimed victory in these exchanges when he either kept silent or walked away.

12.Wan-ling is reported by Chang Chung-yuan to be the modern town of Hsuan-ch'eng in southern Anhwei province (Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 123). According to The Transmission of the Lamp the prime minister built a monastery and invited Huang-po to come lecture there, which the master did. The monastery was then named after a mountain where the master had once lived.