Sixteenth case: Ching Ch'ing's Man in the Weeds
What do Zen Masters know? Do they know things? Let's find out!
I am an unreliable poster. Maybe I should just make peace with that and stop pretending to myself that I'm gonna do one of these every day.
Case
A monk asked Ching Ch'ing, "I am breaking out; I ask the Teacher to break in."
Ching Ch'ing said, "Can you live or not?"
The monk said, "If I weren't alive, I'd be laughed at by people."
Ching Ch'ing said, "You too are a man in the weeds."
astrocomments:
-As soon as the monk opened his mouth, he was stirring up trouble. The pointer says "The truth is not seeing or hearing; words and thoughts are far removed from it." Does that mean any and all words are wrong? Maybe. I could keep my comments on the cases shorter, and that would be a better demonstration of my understanding, but it's worse for engaging all of you, which is the point of posting.
-"When the mother hen wants to break in, the chick must break out, and when the chick wants to break out, the mother hen must break in." Does that mean we need a teacher in order to break out? What ever will we do without a proper Zen Master now that the lineage has died out? Here's a fun question to ponder on: do chicks really need the hen to break in? Or can they do it on their own? From a website about hatching eggs: "if the chick is left alone it will eventually make its way out of the egg all on its own… but it could take hours. Other times, a chick could be in distress, ill, or too exhausted to complete the hatching process, and simply give up and die." So what's it gonna be? There's no hen to help you out. Are you gonna make your way out or give up and die?
-"When the chick awakens, there is no shell". Wait but what about all that time it spent breaking out? Maybe Yuanwu is pointing towards something, I wonder what that could be. Or maybe the metaphor broke down at this point, who's to say.
Submitted April 21, 2021 at 02:36AM by astroemi https://ift.tt/3ehlUuW
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