8Baizhang's Fox百丈野狐

Introduction 示眾

記箇元字脚在心，入地獄如箭射。一點野狐涎，嚥下三十年，吐不出。不是西天令嚴，只為獃郎業重。曾有誤犯者麼？

Get one word wrong and down you go: hell, fast as an arrow. Swallow a single drop of fox spit and you'll choke on it thirty years and never get it back up. It isn't that the law from the West is harsh. It's that fools pile up heavy karma. Has anyone here ever tripped over this one by mistake?

百丈上堂，常有一老人聽法，隨眾散去。一日不去，丈乃問：「立者何人？」老人云：「某甲於過去迦葉佛時，曾住此山。有學人問：『大修行底人還落因果也無？』對他道：『不落因果。』墮野狐身五百生。今請和尚代一轉語。」丈云：「不昧因果。」老人於言下大悟。

Whenever Baizhang gave a talk, an old man would show up, listen with the crowd, and leave when they did. One day he stayed. Baizhang asked him, "Who's this, standing here?"

The old man said, "Ages ago, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I was the teacher on this mountain. A student asked me, 'Does a person of deep practice still fall under cause and effect, or not?' I told him, 'He does not fall under cause and effect.' For that I've been reborn a fox five hundred times. Please, give me one turning word in his place."

Baizhang said, "He is not blind to cause and effect."

At those words the old man woke up.

Verse 頌

一尺水，一丈波，
五百生前不奈何。
不落不昧商量也，
依前撞入葛藤窠。
阿呵呵，
會也麼？
若是爾灑灑落落，
不妨我哆哆和和。
神歌社舞自成曲，
拍手其間唱哩囉。

A foot of water, a ten-foot wave.
Five hundred lives, and no way out.
"Doesn't fall," "isn't blind": keep splitting that hair
and back you go, tangled in the vines.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Got it yet?
If you're loose and clear and free of it all,
I don't mind babbling and humming along.
Folk songs, a village dance, the tune makes itself.
Clap your hands and join in: la-di-da.

Pointer

Baizhang is a great Tang master, and this is the famous fox, told here beside Wumen's sharper handling of it in the Gateless Gate (case 2). An old man confesses that he was once a teacher on this same mountain and got reborn as a fox five hundred times over a single answer. The fatal question was whether an enlightened person still falls under cause and effect, the law that actions carry consequences, and his fatal reply was no, the awakened are above it, as if enlightenment were a permanent exemption. Baizhang changes one word: not "does not fall under" cause and effect but "is not blind to" it. The point is not to climb out of the machinery of consequence, it is to see it clearly and quit pretending you stand outside it. The verse's joke is that even this clean fix becomes another hair to split if you would rather analyze it than simply live it.