61Qianfeng's One Stroke乾峯一畫

Introduction 示眾

曲說易會，一手分付；直說難會，十字打開。勸君不用分明語，語得分明出轉難。不信試舉看。

Talk around it and it goes down easy: you hand it over a fingertip at a time. Say it straight and it's hard to take: the whole thing cracks open at once. Take my advice and don't bother spelling it out. The clearer you make it, the harder it is to get away. Don't believe me? Here's a case. Watch.

僧問乾峯：「十方薄伽梵，一路涅盤門，未審路頭在甚麼處？」峯以拄杖一畫云：「在這裏。」僧舉問雲門，門云：「扇子𨁝跳上三十三天，築著帝釋鼻孔；東海鯉魚打一棒，雨似盆傾。會麼？會麼？」

A monk asked Qianfeng, "The buddhas of every direction, one road to the gate of nirvana. Where does that road begin?"

Qianfeng drew a line in the air with his staff. "Right here."

Later the monk brought this to Yunmen. Yunmen said, "The fan leaps up to the highest heaven and rams the god Indra in the nose. One whack, and the carp of the Eastern Sea brings down rain by the bucketful. Get it? Get it?"

Verse 頌

入手還將死馬醫，
返魂香欲起君危。
一期拶出通身汗，
方信儂家不惜眉。

He takes it in hand the way a vet doctors a dead horse,
burns soul-returning incense to raise you from the brink.
One hard squeeze and your whole body breaks into sweat —
only then do you trust I never spared my own eyebrows.

Pointer

A monk wants the one true path to enlightenment, straight and certain and mapped, and asks where it begins. Qianfeng's answer is to scratch a single line in the air with his staff: "Right here." No doctrine, no direction handed over, only this spot under his stick. Then the monk carries the same question to Yunmen, the tenth-century master famous for one-word hammer-blows, and Yunmen goes completely off the rails: a fan flying up to the highest heaven to ram the king of the gods in the nose, a fish in the ocean somehow triggering a downpour. He hasn't changed the subject. He's making Qianfeng's point at full volume, that the "road" was never somewhere else to reach; it's the whole wild world already going off in your face. In Chan lore a teacher who over-explains "loses his eyebrows," they drop out as karmic payment for spelling out what can't really be said, and the verse's narrator brags he risked his own.