You may know Old Man Tcheng, or you will soon if you care to google his sayings.
I picture a cheerfully grumpy old fella who scolds monks and slaps them with the truth at random times somewhere outside the monastery gates, drawing a big crowd, to the distress of the monastery C-level executives.
Whilst his sayings stink of Zen (QUOTE QUOTE they scream, just browse his sayings man), he is obviously not a lineaged name, or at least not one that has been recorded under such a name. Who knows what type of anonymous ranting old fellas one could meet stepping on eggplants at the edge of a forest long ago.
The source of the text and lack of external references within it is not conducive to placing the text in time, since we can't compare translation styles. It is definitely the straightforward style of later periods or a modern rewrite.
Combined and dodgy website sources say this:
- First appeared in the French journal Etre, in 1974.
- Document given by a Buddhist monk to a Frenchman on an Indochina trip
- Unknown author/source/time period.
- Commonly known English text has been translated from French
- The name J. Garillot comes up, not sure if he is the 1974 publishing author, or the travelling Frenchman, or Nansen forbid, both.
- Indications of style suggest that it may belong to the school of Zen founded by Hui Neng, the 6th Zen patriarch.
If picked up in "Indochina" then that's surely where Huineng and his boys ran around (Guangdong). Going by the destination of the trip, there would be at least some decades between that handover and its publication in 1974.
Did anyone ever care to look into this a bit? Do I need to find my Indiana Jones hat?
Submitted June 17, 2020 at 05:38AM by Coinionaire https://ift.tt/3eb4f6J
No comments:
Post a Comment