Shukusō Asks About the Ten-Bodied Tamer

Engo's commentary on the case

Shukusō studied with Nan’yō Echū Zhong while crown prince. As emperor he honored him more deeply and personally supported the teacher's carriage in greeting and farewell. Zhong's spine was normally hard as raw iron, yet before the emperor he resembled soft mud. His delicate answer still had merit: to understand, the donor must walk atop Vairocana's crown. The emperor missed it. Zhong then descended compassionately into weeds and annotated his own line: “Do not mistake your own pure Dharma body”—said to be fully present in everyone. See his release and gathering, able to face attack on eight sides. A good teacher adapts to the occasion and trims the sail to the wind. Ōbaku gave Rinzai sixty blows across three meetings, yet made many vines for Minister Pei; both were skillful teaching. Zhong likewise had methods on every side for receiving the emperor. Engo glosses the ten-bodied Tamer as ten kinds of other-enjoyment body and invokes Dharma, reward, and transformation bodies. “Tamer” belongs among a buddha's ten epithets. Reward and transformation are neither the true buddha nor the speaker of Dharma; on the Dharma-body side there is one empty, congealed expanse, numinously bright and silently illuminating. Senior Fu of Taigen lectured on the Nirvāṇa Sūtra at Guangxiao. A traveling monk—Kassan's cook—laughed during his account of buddha-nature and Dharma body. Fu asked what was lacking. The cook said Fu knew only the Dharma body's measurable side, not the Dharma body itself. At the cook's instruction Fu suspended lectures, sat quietly, and released good and bad conditions. Hearing drum and horn before dawn, he reportedly realized. The cook rebuked him: commissioned to transmit great teaching, why lie drunk in the street at midnight? Fu said he had long twisted his parents' nostrils through scripture lectures and would stop. Do not merely recognize something lucid and numinous, falling behind donkey and horse. Break karmic consciousness until no hair-tip remains—and even that is half. An ancient warns: know constant quiescence but do not recognize sounds/forms; know numinous awareness but do not identify delusive thought. Huike's mind-pacification exchange likewise asks where the Dharma body is when mind cannot be found. Chōsa said students fail because they mistake the knowing spirit—the root of birth and death—for the original person. Staring and playing with a bright consciousness has no connection. Why does Zhong warn against recognizing even “your own pure Dharma body,” the doctrinal ultimate? Recognition fixes it and remains wrong. Setchō finds Zhong grandmotherly but a thorn hides in the mud. Dongshan offered three routes: dark road, bird path, and extending the hand. Asked about the bird path, he said, “Meet not one person” and walk without private footing. When a monk called this original face, Dongshan said he mistook servant for master. Asked the original face, he said, “Do not walk the bird path.” Even eliminating traces and swallowing sound remains novice understanding. One must turn back toward dusty toil so abundant active function arises. A perfected person has no name, so “Nan’yō Echū” is forced. Yet Nan’yō Zhong's way is incomparable and skillfully receives people. A clear-eyed monk must walk atop Vairocana's crown to see the ten-bodied Tamer. One body transforms into ten, ten into hundreds and billions; broadly all are one body. The verse's first half is easy. Its second, versifying “Do not mistake your pure Dharma body,” is difficult to speak. “An iron hammer smashes golden bones” praises Zhong: reified purity is smashed. No thing remains between heaven and earth, cleanly bare—the native landscape. It resembles the three-thousand realm-seas sunk in deep night, all heaven and earth clear and still. Do not understand this as closing the eyes. That falls into a poisonous sea. “Who enters the azure dragon's cave?” Extend or draw in the legs—who is it? Setchō has pierced everyone's nostrils.