69Nanquan's Water Buffalo南泉白牯

Introduction 示眾

成佛作祖，嫌帶污名；戴角披毛，推居上位。所以真光不耀，大智若愚。更有箇便宜聾，佯不采底，知是阿誰？

Become a Buddha, become a patriarch, and you've earned a dirty name. Grow horns, put on fur, and they move you up to the head seat. So the true light gives off no glare, and the greatest wisdom looks like stupidity. There's also the trick of playing deaf, pretending not to notice. Who is that?

南泉示眾云：「三世諸佛不知有，狸奴白牯却知有。」

Nanquan said to the assembly: "The buddhas of the three worlds don't know it is. Cats and water buffalo know it is."

Verse 頌

跛跛挈挈，
㲯㲯毿毿。
百不可取，一無所堪。
默默自知田地穩，
騰騰誰謂肚皮憨。
普周法界渾成飯，
鼻孔纍垂信飽參。

Limping along, hobbled and lame,
shaggy coat, ragged and matted.
Worth nothing, fit for nothing,
yet it quietly knows its own ground is firm.
Ambling free, who calls that belly dull?
The whole Dharma-realm cooks down to a bowl of rice;
nose to the dirt, it has eaten its fill of the teaching.

Pointer

Nanquan, the Tang master, turns the obvious ranking on its head. You would assume the enlightened buddhas of past, present and future "have" the deepest thing and dumb animals plainly do not, and he says it the other way: the buddhas do not know it, the cat and the water buffalo do. The thing worth knowing is not a rarefied attainment you climb toward; it is so plain that a beast nosing through grass is already living it, while all the effort to "become a Buddha" is exactly what gets in the way of it. The phrase "don't know it is" cuts both directions, too, since the buffalo does not stand around knowing it either, it just lives it. Hongzhi's verse lingers on that animal, mangy, lame, useless to look at, and insists it is completely at home, fed by the whole world without trying for any of it.