69Nanquan Draws a Circle

Introduction 垂示

無啗啄處，祖師心印，狀似鐵牛之機，透荊棘林。衲僧家如紅爐上一點雪，平地上七穿八穴則且止。不落寅緣，又作麼生？試舉看。

Nothing to bite down on, no place to peck. The mind-seal of the ancestors works like an iron ox: try to move it and it won't budge. It cuts clean through the thicket of thorns. The real monk is a single snowflake landing on a red-hot stove, gone before it touches. Leave aside running rings around everyone on level ground. When you're not snagged on cause and effect, then what? Here's a case. Look.

南泉、歸宗、麻谷同去禮拜忠國師。至中路，南泉於地上畫一圓相云：「道得即去。」歸宗於圓相中坐，麻谷便作女人拜。泉云：「恁麼則不去也。」歸宗云：「是什麼心行？」

Nanquan, Guizong, and Magu set out together to pay their respects to National Teacher Zhong. Halfway there, Nanquan drew a circle on the ground and said, "Say the right word and we go on."

Guizong sat down inside the circle. Magu dropped a curtsy, the way a woman would.

Nanquan said, "In that case, we don't go."

Guizong said, "What kind of game is this?"

Verse 頌

由基箭射猿，
遶樹何太直。
千箇與萬箇，
是誰曾中的？
相呼相喚歸去來，
曹溪路上休登陟。

Yang Youji's arrow brought the gibbon down.
Why circle the tree? The shot flew straight.
A thousand archers, ten thousand more,
which of them ever hit the mark?
Calling back and forth: come on, let's head home.
On the road to Caoxi, quit the climbing.

Pointer

Three monks are walking to visit a famous teacher when one of them, Nanquan, scratches a circle in the dirt and makes it a test: speak the right word and we go on. There's no correct sentence to say, and that's the snag; the right "word" isn't a word. So Guizong sits down inside the circle and Magu drops a mock curtsy, each answering with a move rather than a statement. Nanquan flips it again: in that case we don't go. Guizong's closing "what kind of game is this?" reads as a player naming the next play, not as bewilderment. The verse name-drops Yang Youji, the Spring-and-Autumn archer of legend who could pierce a willow leaf at a hundred paces: a true hit goes straight in, no circling the tree. Caoxi is the home ground of Zen, where the Sixth Patriarch taught, so "quit climbing the road to Caoxi" tells you to stop straining toward a place you're already standing in.