21Zhimen's Lotus

Introduction 垂示

建法幢，立宗旨，錦上鋪花；脫籠頭，卸角馱，太平時節。或若辨得格外句，舉一明三；其或未然，依舊伏聽處分。

Raise the banner, plant the teaching, and you're piling flowers on silk. Slip off the halter, drop the saddle: peacetime at last. Catch the line that lands outside the lines, name one and see three, and fine. If not, go back and stand there, waiting for your sentence.

僧問智門：「蓮花未出水時如何？」智門云：「蓮花。」僧云：「出水後如何？」門云：「荷葉。」

A monk asked Zhimen, "Before the lotus breaks the surface, what is it?"
Zhimen said, "A lotus."
The monk said, "And after it clears the water?"
Zhimen said, "Lotus leaves."

Verse 頌

蓮花荷葉報君知，
出水何如未出時。
江北江南問王老，
一狐疑了一狐疑。

Lotus, lotus leaves: there's your answer.
Out of the water, still in it, what's the difference?
North of the river, south of the river, go ask old Wang.
One doubt put to rest, and here comes the next.

Pointer

The monk is fishing for a clean distinction: the lotus before it breaks the surface, hidden and not yet, against the lotus after, open and realized. He wants Zhimen to confirm that awakening runs on a before-and-after, a thing you lack and then possess. Zhimen will not grant the split. It is a lotus underwater and a lotus above it, leaves either way, one plant with no seam between its phases. "Old Wang" is a stock name for any plain country teacher, roughly "go ask the next guy down the road." The verse's punchline is that chasing this kind of answer only swaps one nagging doubt for the next in line. The refusal to divide before from after is the same instinct Zhimen's contemporaries keep showing, the lotus already complete in the mud the way Buddha is already three pounds of flax at case 12.