I knew that I could open up my Joshu book (Recorded Sayings, Trans. James Green) at any random page and the message I found there would be the same message that is repeated by most of these jokers we've been reading about.
Here is the selection my finger landed upon:
318
A monk asked, "What is a person that goes beyond Buddha?"
The master came down from his seat, looked the monk up and down and said, "This fellow is just this tall, he can probably be cut into three pieces. What 'upper' and 'lower' are you asking about?"1
1. The words for "above" and "below" are the same as those for "goes beyond" and "lesser than". Chao-chou (Joshu) is again freely playing with the monk's wrrds.
wrrdgrrl: How can a person go "beyond Buddha"? This whole existence is the Buddha. Chao-chou expresses this neatly by asking which of his dissected portions the monk wishes to send "beyond". Before he even opened his mouth to speak, the monk has failed. Eventually, everyone will be dead and we'll have a great laugh about all this foolishness. Goodnight.
Submitted January 23, 2020 at 08:22AM by wrrdgrrl https://ift.tt/2NSgPfZ
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