Schlütter on the origins of "looking at the head word" of a koan.

It is sometimes argued that Dahui, in telling his students to focus on Zhouzhou's wu, was following an old tradition of Chan. As proof, the legendary Tang Chan master Huangbo Xiyun (d. between 847 and 859) is sometimes cited. We do find a passage tagged onto the very end of the Ming dynasty edition of the Wanling lu (Record of Wanling) in which Huangbo advocates contemplating Zhaozhou's "no" (wu) twenty-four hours a day, "whether sitting, lying, eating, or defecating." After a long time like this," he says, "one will inevitably have a breakthrough." This passage is clearly a quite late addition, however, since the Song editions of the Wanling lu do not include it.

More difficult to refute are the indications that Wuzu Fayan, the master of Yuanwu Keqin, advocated contemplation of the Zhaozhou's wu. Dahui himself may have claimed that he was following Wuzu Fayan in advocating this practice. In the very last collection of his letters, perhaps written around 1154, Dahui cites a letter that Wuzu Fayan is said to have written to a monk. According to Dahui, Wuzu wrote: "This summer the villages have nothing to harvest, but that doesn't worry me. What worries me is that in my hall of several hundred monks not one of them over the course of the summer [meditation period] penetrated and understood the story about a dog not having Buddha-nature. I fear the Buddhist teachings are about to be obliterated."

In Wuzu Fayan's extant recorded sayings, there is indeed a passage in which Wuzu expresses a similar sentiment. In a sermon, after quoting the story about a dog not having the Buddha-nature, Wuzu said: "All of you in the assembly, how do you not understand this? This old monk always simply just holds up the word 'no' [wu]. If you can penetrate and understand this one word, then no one in the whole world will have anything on you. How will you all penetrate this? Has any one of you penetrated and clearly understood? If so, come forth and speak our for all to see. I don't want you to say that [the dog] has [the Buddha-nature], I don't want you to say it doesn't have it, and I don't want you to say that it neither does nor doesn't have it. What will you say?" This is the only passage I have located in all of Chan literature in which a Chan master prior to Dahui advocated focusing on just the "no" (wu) of the gongan about Zhaozhou's dog, and nowhere else does Wuzu (or anyone else) recommend focusing on just one part of any other gongan story. Wuzu's remark here could simply be understood as a way of urging his audience to grasp the essential meaning of the story, however, not as advocating contemplation of the word wu itself.

~ M. Schlütter: How Zen Became Zen pp.114-5

Submitted February 28, 2018 at 07:33AM by Emmajhtr http://ift.tt/2CMlQyw