Wumen's attitude toward enlightenment

you will realize how old Hyakujõ would have enjoyed five hundred rebirths as a fox.

We'll come back to this.

1- Case 5

Mumon's Verse 頌曰

Xiangyan has bad taste

His vice and poison are endless.

He stops up the mouths of the monks,

And devil's eyes sprout from their bodies.

So, this reads like an insult, but is it?

2- Case 6

Golden-faced Kudon impudently forced the good people into depravity

Advertising sheep's heads, he sells dog flesh (with some genius)

.

Holding out a flower,

The snake shows his tail.

This, again, sounds insulting... are enlightened people, descendents of Buddha, to be despised and distrusted?

3- Case 13

As for the last word, neither Yantou nor Deshan has ever dreamed of it!

When you look into the matter, you find they are like puppets on the shelf!

So, these famous Zen Masters are merely puppets that nobody uses anymore?

4- Case 17

The National Teacher called three times, and his tongue fell to the ground.

The attendant responded three times, and he gave his answer with brilliance.

The National Teacher was old and lonely; he held the cow's head and forced it to eat grass.

The attendant would have none of it;

Isn't the surface reading something like "Zen Masters are old senile fakes"? The next few Cases include similar comments about Tozan, Nansen, Ummon. The Joshu. Case 36 is if you meet a Zen Master, punch him/her in the face.

5-. Case 41:

The broken-toothed old Hindu came so importantly, thousands of miles over the sea.

This was raising waves where there was no wind.

In his last years he induced enlightenment in his disciple, who, to make matters worse, was defective in the six roots.

I don't think any of these would be used to describe enlightened people in any other tradition; defective senile losers who can't be trusted.

Submitted January 18, 2019 at 08:48AM by ewk http://bit.ly/2DfXhNU