Terebess Collection 無門慧開 Wumen Huikai (1183–1260) 無門關 Wumen guan (Rōmaji:) Mumon Ekai: 無門関 Mumonkan (English:) The Gateless Gate / The Barrier That Has No Gate / Wumen's Gate (Magyar:) Vu-men Huj-kaj: Kapujanincs átjáró* / Át a seholkapun** *©Miklós Pál **©Terebess Gábor 48 gong-an cases compiled by Wumen Huikai in 1228, with prose and verse commentary. A forty-ninth gong'an by the lay- disciple An-wan (安晚 Jap.: Amban) is usually included. Edited by Zongshao 宗紹 (Jap.: Shūshō). Chinese texts: Taisho No. 2005 (Vol. XLVIII, pp. 292a-299c) 1 The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan) Translated and with a Commentary by Robert Aitken Illustrations by 仙厓義梵 Sengai Gibon (1750-1837) Table of Contents Preface CASE 1: Chao-chou’s Dog CASE 2: Pai-chang’s Fox CASE 3: Chü-chih Raises One Finger CASE 4: Huo-an’s Beardless Barbarian CASE 5: Hsiang-yen: Up a Tree CASE 6: The World-Honored One Twirls a Flower CASE 7: Chao-chou: “Wash Your Bowl” CASE 8: Hsi-chung Builds Carts CASE 9: Ch’ing-jang’s Nonattained Buddha CASE 10: Ch’ing-shui: Solitary and Destitute CASE 11: Chao-chou and the Hermits CASE 12: Jui-yen Calls “Master” CASE 13: Te-shan: Bowls in Hand CASE 14: Nan-ch’üan Kills the Cat CASE 15: Tung-shan’s Sixty Blows CASE 16: Yün-men: The Sound of the Bell CASE 17: Kuo-shih’s Three Calls CASE 18: Tung-shan’s Three Pounds of Flax CASE 19: Nan-ch’üan: “Ordinary Mind Is the Tao” CASE 20: Sung-yüan’s Person of Great Strength CASE 21: Yün-men’s Dried Shitstick CASE 22: Mahākāśyapa’s Flagpole CASE 23: Hui-neng: “Neither Good Nor Evil” CASE 24: Feng-hsüeh: Equality and Differentiation CASE 25: Yang-shan’s Sermon from the Third Seat CASE 26: Fa-yen: Two Monks Roll Up the Blinds CASE 27: Nan-ch’üan: “Not Mind, Not Buddha, Not Beings” CASE 28: Lung-t’an: Renowned Far and Wide CASE 29: Hui-neng: “Not the Wind; Not the Flag” CASE 30: Ma-tsu: “This Very Mind Is Buddha” CASE 31: Chao-chou Investigates the Old Woman CASE 32: The Buddha Responds to an Outsider CASE 33: Ma-tsu: “Not Mind, Not Buddha” CASE 34: Nan-ch’üan: Mind and Buddha CASE 35: Wu-tsu: “Which Is the True Ch’ien?” CASE 36: Wu-tsu: Meeting Someone Attained in the Tao CASE 37: Chao-chou: The Oak Tree in the Courtyard CASE 38: Wu-tsu’s Buffalo Passes Through the Window CASE 39: Yün-men: “You Have Misspoken” CASE 40: Kuei-shan Kicks Over the Water Bottle CASE 41: Bodhidharma Pacifies the Mind CASE 42: Mañjuśrī and the Young Woman in Samādhi CASE 43: Shou-shan’s Short Bamboo Staff CASE 44: Pa-chiao’s Staff CASE 45: Wu-tsu: “Who Is That Other?” CASE 46: Shih-shuang: “Step from the Top of the Pole” CASE 47: Tou-shuai’s Three Barriers CASE 48: Kan-feng’s One Road Wu-men’s Postscript Wu-men’s Cautions 2 Preface WU-MEN’S PREFACE The Buddha mind and words point the way; the Gateless Barrier is the Dharma entry. There is no gate from the beginning, so how do you pass through it? Haven’t you heard that things which come through the gate are not the family treasure? Things gained from causal circumstances have a beginning and an end—formation and destruction. Such talk raises waves where there is no wind and gouges wounds in healthy flesh. How much more foolish are those who depend upon words and seek understanding by their intellect! They try to hit the moon with a stick. They scratch their shoes when their feet itch. In the summer of the first year of Shao-ting,1 I was head of the assembly at Lunghsiang in Tung-chia. When the monks asked for instruction, I took up kōans of ancient teachers and used them as brickbats to batter at the gate, guiding the monks in accord with their various capacities. I recorded these cases and thus, without my intending it, they have become a collection. I did not arrange the kōans in any particular order. There are forty-eight cases in all, and I call the collection The Gateless Barrier. The person of courage unflinchingly cuts straight through the barrier, unhindered even by Nata, the eight-armed demon king. In the presence of such valor, the twenty-eight Indian ancestors and six Chinese ancestors beg for their lives. If you hesitate, however, you’ll be like someone watching a horse gallop past a window. With a blink, it is gone. WU-MEN’S VERSE The Great Way has no gate; there are a thousand different paths; once you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone. Wu-men (Mumon) Hui-k’ai was a Sung period master of the Lin-chi (Rinzai) school who lived from 1183 to 1260. He worked on the kōan “Mu” ardently for six years, sometimes, it is said, pacing the corridors at night and knocking his head intentionally against the pillars. One day he heard the drum announcing the noon meal—and suddenly, like the Buddha seeing the morning star, he had a profound experience of understanding. His poem on that occasion reads: A thunderclap under the clear blue sky; all beings on earth open their eyes; everything under heaven bows together; Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances. After receiving transmission from his master, Yüeh-lin (Gatsurin), Wu-men wandered as a teacher from temple to temple, never settling long in one place. Toward the end of his life, he retired to a hermitage but was regularly disturbed by visitors seeking guidance. An unconventional Zen master in many respects, Wu-men let his hair and beard grow and wore old soiled robes. He worked in the fields and carried his own slops. Called “Hui-k’ai the Lay Monk,” he is a wonderful archetype for us monkish lay people in the West.2 Wu-men’s Preface is straightforward and needs little comment: “Things which come through the gate” are those, as the next line indicates, that have a beginning and an end—fame and fortune, for example. These are not the family treasure. What is the family treasure? I think Wu-men is talking about human vision and human fulfillment, not anything grandiose. In Stevenson’s “The Poor Thing,” a fisherman proposes marriage to the daughter of an earl by saying, “Come, behold a vision of our children, the busy hearth, and the white heads. And let that suffice, for it is all God offers.”3 Zen practice shows us how to cherish what we are and what we have—and what the earth is and has. “You’ll be like someone watching a horse gallop past a window. With a blink it is gone.” Quick as a wink, you’ll find that life has passed you by—grasp the chance before you now! Wu-men’s verse begins: “The Great Way has no gate”—as broad as the world, with no barriers! “There are a thousand different paths”—every event is a path on that Great Way: the advice of a friend, the song of the thrush in the early morning, the smell of rain in dusty fields. D. T. Suzuki translates the last line “in royal solitude you walk the universe,” which adds a word to the original and indicates the pleasure of such solitude.4 Wu-men said that he did not arrange the cases of his book in any particular order, but the order he did choose is well established after all this time, and my commentary builds from case to case. It is all right to skip around on first reading, of course, but eventually, to gain the most from the book, I think it would be best to begin at the beginning and persevere chapter by chapter. CASE 1 Chao-chou’s Dog THE CASE A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?” Chao-chou said, “Mu.”1 WU-MEN’S COMMENT For the practice of Zen it is imperative that you pass through the barrier set up by the Ancestral Teachers. For subtle realization it is of the utmost importance that you cut off the mind road. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses. What is the barrier of the Ancestral Teachers? It is just this one word “Mu”—the one barrier of our faith. We call it the Gateless Barrier of the Zen tradition. When you pass through this barrier, you will not only interview Chao-chou intimately. You will walk hand in hand with all the Ancestral Teachers in the successive generations of our lineage—the hair of your eyebrows entangled with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. Won’t that be fulfilling? Is there anyone who would not want to pass this barrier? So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t. PLATE 1: A Dog and Its Buddha Nature.