Denkōroku · PROJECT CASE 47
Tanka Shijun and the Empty Kalpa
The Record of the Transmission of the Light
Transmission case
The Forty-Sixth Ancestor was Zen Master Tanka Shijun.1 He asked Fuyō, “What is the one phrase transmitted by the sages from ancient times?” Fuyō said, “By calling it ‘one phrase,’ you nearly bury the house style.” At these words the teacher greatly awakened.2
Keizan's verse
The clear wind circles several times, freely shaking the earth; Who can bring it here and show it to you?7
Footnotes 7
- Tanka Shijun (1064–1117) is presented as Fuyō Dōkai's successor. “Tanka” is his teaching-place name, not the earlier Tang master Tanka Tianran. ↩
- Fuyō's reply does not simply reject words. It reveals that even the phrase “one phrase” can convert living succession into an object imagined to pass unchanged between people. ↩
- “Emptiness that is not empty” rejects nihilism without positing a permanent self or metaphysical substance. Keizan's next sentences define it through universal completeness and nongraspability. ↩
- 空亡外道 is an intra-Buddhist polemical label for annihilationism. “Outsider” here does not denote a modern religious or ethnic out-group. ↩
- The paradox is deliberate: there is transmission, but nothing objectifiable is handed over. Recognition and authorization occur without a detachable content traveling from one mind-container to another. ↩
- Sovereign and minister, along with “mutual inclusion,” belong to Caodong relational vocabulary often associated with the Five Ranks. The political hierarchy functions here as a premodern analogy; it is not a political prescription. ↩
- Wind cannot be carried as an exhibit, but its repeated circling shakes the earth. The verse images efficacy without a transferable object. ↩
About this version and its sources
- Full source citation
- Source heading: 丹霞淳禪師. Base: SAT T2585, T2585_.82.0399b24–T2585_.82.0400a01. Project Case 47 corresponds to source ancestral chapter 46.
- 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
- 7cbea01907db
Keizan's commentary
The teacher's personal name was Zichun. He was a son of the Jia family in Jianzhou. Around the age of twenty he left home. He penetrated and verified thoroughly in Fuyō's room. He first resided at Seppō and later at Tanka. His first question was, “What is the one phrase transmitted by the sages from ancient times?” Buddha after buddha and ancestor after ancestor have exchanged faces and turned their heads as they came forward. Yet what they mutually transmit necessarily has no back or front, no above or below, no boundary, no self or other. This is called emptiness that is not empty. It is precisely the place of true return for every person. There is not one among them who is not completely and perfectly endowed with it.3 Yet students often make a mistake. They think that originally there is nothing, that there is nothing further for the mouth to say and nothing for the mind to retain. Ancient people called such a person an outsider fallen into annihilating emptiness. Though one passes through eons as numerous as dust and sand, one has no share in liberation.4 Therefore be exact and continuous. Though everything is exhausted and empty through and through, there is still that which cannot be emptied any further. Investigate and penetrate it in detail. If once you see through it, you will necessarily be able to take up and carry through a phrase. Therefore it is called “the one phrase mutually transmitted.” At that time Fuyō showed him: “By calling it ‘one phrase,’ you nearly bury the house style.” Truly, at this ground it should not be called one phrase. Mistakenly setting down a name or word is like leaving a bird's track on snow. Therefore it is said, “Where the body is concealed, no trace remains.” When seeing, hearing, sensing, and knowing have all ceased, and skin, flesh, bones, and marrow have all been exhausted, what thing could remain as a trace? If you can leave not even a hair's breadth of a track, it plainly appears. It is not a place another can know. Therefore it is not a place that can be mutually transmitted.5 Nevertheless, when this ground is understood, it is called transmission from mind to mind. At this time it is called the accord of the ways of sovereign and minister—wondrous accord and mutual inclusion.6 Now say: what form and condition does this ground have?