Jōshū's Three Turning Words

Engo's commentary on the clay-buddha verse

Why invoke Shenguang? Lineage biography says light filled the room at the Second Patriarch's birth and a spirit directed him south, hence the name. Learned in Confucian and Daoist texts, he visited Bodhidharma at Shōrin. Bodhidharma sat facing the wall. Recalling ancient seekers who broke bones, shed blood, spread hair over mud, or fed tigers with their bodies, Shenguang stood in heavy snow overnight. Asked what he sought, he begged for the gate of Dharma. After Bodhidharma rebuked easy aspiration, the story says Shenguang secretly cut off his left arm and presented it. He asked Bodhidharma to pacify his mind. “Bring the mind,” said Bodhidharma. “I have searched and cannot obtain it.” “I have pacified it.” Bodhidharma renamed him Huike. Later accounts link Huike with Sengcan and periods of anti-Buddhist persecution, though Engo notes Daoxuan's biography does not fully report the matter. Setchō's “If standing in snow has not ceased” criticizes outward perpetuation: deferential flatterers would imitate the act and become counterfeit. Engo therefore connects clay's dissolution not to valorizing self-injury but to a mind free of one speck beneath conceptual intention. He then cites deliberately impossible verses: clouds cooking rice, dogs urinating sky, monkeys winnowing coins; a Huazhou ox eating grain that makes a Yizhou horse swell; walking while riding an ox; a bridge flowing while water does not. Understand these and understand Setchō. Why invoke a visitor to Zihu? One needs an adept's furnace and bellows. Zihu erected a gate sign: “Zihu has a dog: above it takes a person's head, in the middle the waist, below the feet. Deliberate and lose body and life.” When a newcomer arrived Zihu shouted, “Watch the dog!” If the monk turned his head, Zihu returned to his room. Why could this dog not bite Jōshū? One night Zihu cried “Catch the thief!” and seized a monk in darkness. The monk protested he was not a thief. Zihu said, “That is so, but you refuse to take responsibility.” Understand and one may “bite everyone to death,” with clear wind everywhere. Otherwise a few words on a sign can do nothing. Penetrate completely to see. The unnamed hermit Stove-Breaker Fallen lived on Mount Song. He entered a shrine centered on a clay stove where continual sacrifices involved cooking and killing many living creatures. He struck the stove and said, “You are made from brick and earth. From where do spirit and sanctity arise, that you cook and kill life this way?” He struck again; the stove collapsed. The story says a person in ceremonial dress appeared, identified himself as the stove deity, thanked the teacher for expounding unborn Dharma, and said he was released from karmic retribution to heavenly birth. The teacher replied that the deity's nature was originally present, not imposed by his words. Attendants asked why they had received no such instruction. He repeated: brick and earth—where do spirit and sanctity arise? They had no reply. He told one to bow, then cried, “Broken! Broken! Fallen! Fallen!” The attendant awakened. National Teacher An later praised this as realizing the one suchness of things and self: the deity and five-aggregate human both “break and fall.” Are body and brick-earth same or different? Why then does Setchō say the staff's strike shows failure? Engo says one has not yet obtained the staff. The link between wooden buddha and stove is seen only beyond gain/loss, emotional dust, and ideation, cleanly bare.