Mumonkan / Wumenguan · CASE 16
The Bell and the Seven-Panel Robe
The Gateless Gate
Case
Unmon said, “The world is so vast and wide. Why do you put on your seven-panel robe within the sound of the bell?”1
Verse
Understand, and things belong to one household; fail to understand, and they differ in a thousand ways. Fail to understand, and things belong to one household; understand, and they differ in a thousand ways.
Footnotes 1
- 七條 designates the seven-panel monastic outer robe. The bell regulates communal activity; 裏, “inside,” makes that routine response spatially strange. ↩
About this version and its sources
- Full source citation
- 鐘聲七條 — CBETA T2005: T48n2005_p0295a11–p0295a22.
- Method
- Direct critical-edition translation from the cited received base text. Source claims, hagiography, uncertainty, and unresolved readings remain identified in the notes and project record.
- Editorial uncertainty
- Independent philological and reader review remain pending.
- Rights
- Project translation © Tulsa Zen Center Critical Edition contributors. Source text is cited by edition; redistribution policy requires final organizational approval.
- Revision identifier
- 2b8b8a02d65a
Wumen's commentary
In studying Zen and learning the Way, above all avoid following sound and pursuing form. Even awakening on hearing sound or clarifying mind on seeing form is still ordinary. The patch-robed monk rides sound and overtops form, clear in each thing and wondrous in every move. Even so: does sound come to the edge of the ear, or the ear to the edge of sound? Even if sound and silence are both forgotten, how will you speak? Listening with the ear is hard to understand. Only when you hear sound with the eye does it become intimate.