98Dongshan's "Always At It"洞山常切

Introduction 示眾

九峯截舌，追和石霜；曹山斫頭，不辜洞嶺。古人三寸得恁麼密，且為人手段在甚麼處？

Jiufeng would sooner bite off his own tongue than betray Shishuang. Caoshan would take an axe to his own head before he failed Dongshan's teaching. The old masters packed all that into three inches of tongue. So where does their skill in helping people actually lie?

僧問洞山：「三身中，那身不墮諸數？」山云：「吾常于此切。」

A monk asked Dongshan, "Of the buddha's three bodies, which one falls into no category?"
Dongshan said, "I'm always hard at work on just that."

Verse 頌

不入世，未循緣，劫壺空處有家傳。白蘋風細秋江暮，古岸舡歸一帶煙。

Not stepping into the world,
not chasing conditions:
even in the empty kalpa
there's a house with an heir.
White duckweed, thin wind,
autumn river at dusk;
off the old bank a boat heads home,
trailing one long ribbon of mist.

Pointer

Buddhism gives a buddha "three bodies": the everyday human form, a glorified visionary form, and the formless truth-body, three ways of carving up what a buddha is. The monk's trap sits in the carving itself; he asks which body escapes being a category while the question crams everything into categories. Dongshan, the ninth-century Caodong founder, doesn't pick a body. He says he is always hard at work right here, in this, declining to name some item that floats above the labels and instead just living it. The closing verse paints that "this" as a plain autumn river at dusk, thin wind, a boat trailing mist, nothing remarkable and the whole of it. The intro frames the case by praising Jiufeng, from case 96, who would bite off his tongue before betraying his teacher, the same fidelity that keeps Dongshan from selling the monk a tidy answer.