Two Recent Chinese Views on the Zen Koan:

Pa Hu-t’ien, Ripples on the Art Sea

(Taipei: Kuang Wen Books, 1972) ;

Wu Yi, "Ten Types of Zen Koans" in

(Taipei: Tong-Ta, 1981)

Left out in the discussion are the views of two Chinese scholars who dispute the excess of irrationality in Suzuki and Japanese Zen training in general and opt for identifying the hidden logic in the koan instead. Since their Chinese writings are not that easily accessible to the English reader, this essay is meant to make their views better known.

Pa Hu-t’ien, a professor of Chinese literature in Taiwan who recently passed away, had spent thirty and more years working on the literature of the koan (kung-an). His published essays are scattered; his unpublished manuscript fills volumes. Pa works at cataloguing the koans and deducing from the recurrent patters, a certain meaning hidden therein. Attentive to literary allusions, Pa is opposed to the freewheeling exegesis of the Japanese practitioners, charging that the original meaning is sometimes simply just been lost in the translations into Japanese.

The usual bewilderment that comes with koan studies Pa sees as being due either to ignorance of its principle or else its language or both. Not knowing the principle makes one wonder why, for example, a wayfaring monk would spit on the Buddha. His answer—"Show me a place where there is no Buddha for me to spit on"—should provide the clue, namely, the Mahayana recognition of the Omnipresence of the Dharmakaya.

Slightly more difficult to decipher are some of the antics of Zen masters. While hoeing the ground, Hsing-kuang accidentally cut an earthworm into two. With both halves wiggling still, he wondered aloud which half possessed life. Tzu-lu Shen-li took a shovel and hit the earth-worm on one end and then on the other (presumably not that kindly in killing it). He then hit the empty space in between. That turns out to be the Zen way of expressing the Madhyamika philosophy which holds that neither extremes are true. Only the Emptiness of the Middle points to reality.

But such teachings might be buried still deeper in certain metaphors nursed by repeated Zen usage. For example, Chao-chou Tsung-nien once asked a visitor if he had had his morning porridge yet. "If you have, go wash the bowl." That seems to mean just the Zen celebration of the Everyday, much as the Ba’al Shem would tie his shoelaces in utter piety. It takes Pa making a cross reference to the obscure Tsung-chien fa-lin text where Yen-t’ou once asked Huang-lung Hui-chi and Hsuan-chuan whether they knew how to "wash clean glutinous rice" (Hui-chi answered yes) and Hsuan-chuan broke a branch off a honey lotus tree and mimed washing it) to find the still more specific meaning. Namely, Hui-chi approved both responses, which point up the common quality of the glutinous rice, the honey lotus plant and the starchy film left by the porridge on the bowl: these are all sticky substances difficult to remove. Not unlike the defilements of the mind (clesa) which Zen meditationists must learn to remove.

However, no known Japanese exegesis of the following case from the Chuan-teng-lu has figured out the meaning of the last line.

Chao-chou Tsung-nien asked Master T’ou-tzu, "How do you feel after being as one dead?"

"It is prohibited to make trips at night, but still one must arrive in the morning."

The question is about how one would act after attaining nirv~ na ("one dead"). The answer shows how T’ou-tzu knew that a person needs not leave here (sams~ ra) to get there (nirv~ na). But what is Hou White and Hou Black? Some texts even emend that to read a white and black monkey (hou).

It took Pa to find a "Tale of Two Hous" native to the Fukien area in the Huai-hai chi compiled by Sung poet Ch’in Shao-yiu to make sense of the final rejoinder. Hou Pai was a prankster who hoodwinked everybody until Hou He, a girl, one-uped him. The girl pretended to have lost a pair of earrings in the well. Promised the reward of half the find, Hou Pai went down the well scheming to pocket the whole find by denying he found any. No sooner than he climbed down the well, Hou He took off with his clothing. The final remark by Chao-chou therefore is saying, "You bettered me there." Overall, Pa brings to the study of koans an attention to literary details only a philologist can muster.

Wu Yi, who once studied under Pa, has followed Pa in making the "indirect discourse" of Zen more intelligible by classifying them under ten types. Briefly:

The following exchange ends in a famous double entendre.

The capital Ch’ang-an also means the "eternal peace" of nirv~ na.

10. Unrelenting Pursuit are long exchanges like:

Coming after the popular reading of Zen in the 50s and 60s which says "Anything Goes," these two Chinese reminders of how there are definite form and content to the Zen discourse is refreshing and in keeping with the recent trend to restoring doctrinal contents to mysticism spearheaded by Steven Katz.

The Chinese scholarship however also shows up the difference between China and Japan. China never codified the koan training the way Japan has. Now it can be argued both ways: that in the transmission of Chinese Ch’an into Japanese Zen, some of the meaning of the koan system developed in Sung China was lost; or that, as Dogen charged, it is the Sung development of a koan scholasticism that led to the demise of the true Zen spirit in China and its preservation in Japan.

That ideological difference is too wide to bridge. Perhaps it is more realistic to accept pendulum swings between the more structured and the less structured understanding of the Zen koan, past as well as recently. Among recent scholarship on the koan, William Powell’s approach may help to clarify this. Powell’s method can bracket off the issue of what a koan really means (the content) and simply look at the structure of the exchange by noting the hidden cues given, received, scored, or missed in the process. Structure and antistructure can then be seen within one exchange itself. To give a very simple example:

Now Pa’s reading would focus on the meaning of the metaphor. The fullness of water refers to the fullness of the Buddha-nature in man. Considering that two other answers offered and approved by Ma-tsu insisted on said fullness, Pa seems to be right. Wu Yi would probably classify the exchange according to one or more of ten types.

Powell, however, shifted the analysis to the nature of the dialectics itself. He would see how Ma-tsu first asked a simple question and the monk gave an informational answer (one at the level of mundane, samvrt§ -satya discourse). Ma-tsu then shifted to a wisdom question, seeking more than information as he solicited for signs of wisdom from the student who was supposed to come back with a aparmartha or wisdom response. But the monk returned with another mundane answer. He had missed the cue. For that, Ma-tsu gave his negative judgment (his regret).

Powell’s method allows one to appreciate how an exchange progresses even if we cannot decipher the meaning involved. Sometimes Zen masters do judge two identical answers differently, thus showing how meaning—decipherable meaning—is not the only factor involved here. That would allow us to better evaluate why, even if Pa’s reading is scholarly and correct, he may not be judged a true Zenist; and why, even if the Japanese Zen masters misread some of the literary allusions, their use of the koan in the training setting might nonetheless carry weight.

By so separating content from form (which Pa has done) and then form from structure (as Wu and Powell represent), we may also have a better handle on how to trace the development of this in history. In my studies, I prefer to think that form and content went hand in hand in the day so f Ma-tsu Tao-i who initiated this training method. Both form and content were fairly simple then. In time, however, the form outgrew the content. The overlaying and frequency of usage has allowed many more types of set formulas as well as hidden cues to evolve, giving us now the depth structure in the koan. At the same time in the Sung, the once radical and liberating meaning-dictum like Ma-tsu’s "Your Mind is Buddha" had well become common and stale knowledge or overly commented upon as to become scholastic. Perhaps in reaction to that rationalism, structure then re-esotericized the wisdom and kept it fresh by intentional obscurity, favoring in the long run the less structured (the seemingly more irrational) approach. The latter, being kept up better in Japan, became widely accepted into the U.S. during the revolt against reason in the 60s—which leaves us with the dilemma of how to make better sense of the exchanges in the 80s.

Pa Hu-ti’ien’s articles on the Zen koan are not in one place. The discussion above is taken just from one essay of his called "A Penetrating Look at Ch’an Kung-an" in a book of his, I-hai wei-lan [Ripples on the Art Sea] also known as Ch’an yu shih [Zen and Poetry] (Taipei: Kuang-wen, 1972), pp. 127-144.

Wu Yi’s "Ten Types of Zen Koans" was a paper read at the Confucian seminar at Berkeley, now included his Chung-kuo che-hsueh te sheng-ming ho fang-fa [The Life and Method of Chinese Philosophy] (Taipei: Tung-ta, 1981), pp. 69-81.

William Frederick Powell’s analysis is developed in his "The Record of Tung-shan: An Analysis of Pedagogic Style in Ch’an Buddhism," University of California, Berkeley, doctoral dissertation, 1982.

My view is found summarized in Lai, "Ma-Tsu Tao-I and the Unfolding of Southern Zen," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 12, no. 4 (1985), pp. 173-102.

Steven Katz Cf., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University, 1978).