Jōshū's Dog

Mumon's commentary

Mumon said: To investigate Zen, you must pass the ancestral teachers' barrier. For a subtle awakening, you must exhaust the road of the mind until it breaks off. If you do not pass the ancestral barrier and the road of the mind does not break off, you are all ghostly spirits leaning on grasses and clinging to trees.² Now tell me: what is the ancestral teachers' barrier? Just this one word wú is the single barrier of our lineage. So I title it The Zen Lineage's Gateless Barrier.³ Those who pass through it do more than meet Jōshū face-to-face. They can walk hand in hand with the ancestral teachers of every generation, their eyebrows tangled together, seeing with the same eye, hearing with the same ear. Wouldn't that be cause for delight? Does anyone want to pass the barrier? Then, with your 360 bones and joints and your 84,000 pores, make your whole body one mass of doubt and investigate this word wú. Keep it before you day and night. Do not understand it as empty nothingness. Do not understand it in terms of being and nonbeing. It should be like swallowing a red-hot iron ball: you try to spit it out, but cannot.⁴ Scour away all your former false knowing and false awareness. As time passes and the work ripens, inside and outside will naturally be beaten into one piece. It will be like a mute person having a dream: only that person can know it. Suddenly it breaks open, astonishing heaven and shaking earth. It is as if you have seized General Guan's great sword. When you meet a buddha, kill the buddha; when you meet an ancestral teacher, kill the ancestral teacher. At the shore of birth and death you gain great freedom; among the six courses and four modes of birth, you roam and play in samādhi.⁵ How, then, do you keep it before you? Use your whole life's strength to raise this word wú. If you do not let it break off, it will be like a fǎzhú: touched once, it catches fire.⁶