91Nanquan's Peony南泉牡丹

Introduction 示眾

仰山以夢中為實，南泉指覺處為虛。若知覺夢元無，始信虛實絕待。且道：斯人具甚麼眼？

Yangshan takes the dream for the real thing. Nanquan points at the waking world and calls it empty. Once you see that waking and dreaming never had any ground to stand on, you begin to trust that "empty" and "real" leave nothing to set against each other. So tell me: what kind of eyes does this person have?

南泉因陸亘大夫云：「肇法師也甚奇特，解道『天地同根，萬物一體』。」泉指庭前牡丹云：「大夫，時人見此一株花，如夢相似。」

Minister Lu Geng said to Nanquan, "Master Sengzhao was really something. He could say, 'Heaven and earth share one root; the ten thousand things are one body.'"

Nanquan pointed at a peony blooming in the courtyard. "Minister," he said, "people these days look at a flower like this as if it were a dream."

Verse 頌

照徹離微造化根，
紛紛出沒見其門。
游神劫外問何有，
著眼身前知妙存。
虎嘯蕭蕭巖吹作，
龍吟冉冉洞雲昏。
南泉點破時人夢，
要識堂堂補處尊。

Light burns through to the root of subtle and gross.
Things crowd in and out by the same gate.
Roam past the end of time, ask what is there: nothing.
Set your eyes on what stands before you: the marvel is here.
A tiger roars, and wind tears off the cliff.
A dragon hums, and the cave-mist darkens.
Nanquan breaks open everyone's dream
to show the next Buddha, standing tall.

Pointer

Minister Lu Geng is a senior official and a committed Buddhist student; he is quoting a famous line by Sengzhao, the brilliant fourth-to-fifth-century monk, on how heaven and earth share one root and all things are a single body. It is a soaring idea, and Lu is plainly pleased to have it ready on his tongue. Nanquan doesn't argue the metaphysics. He points at an actual peony in the courtyard and says people look at a flower like this as if it were a dream, walking past the real thing as a pretty abstraction. The needle is soft and exact: you can recite the oneness of all things all day, but if you are sleepwalking past the bloom in front of you, the recitation bought you nothing. Set beside the previous case (90), the pairing turns over: there the dream told the truth, here treating waking life as a dream is the whole failure.