19Who's Listening?

居士甞遊講肆，隨喜金剛經，至無我無人處，致問曰：「座主既無我無人，是誰講？誰聽？」主無對。士曰：「某甲雖是俗人，粗知信向。」主曰：「祇如居士，意作麼生？」士以偈答曰：
無我復無人，作麼有疎親。
勸君休歷座，不似直求真。
金剛般若性，外絕一纖塵。
我聞并信受，總是假名陳。
主聞偈，欣然仰嘆。居士所至之處，老宿多往復，酧問皆隨機應響，非格量軌轍之可拘也。

One day Layman Pang stopped in at a lecture hall, glad to hear a talk on the Diamond Sutra. The teacher reached the line about "no self, no other," and Pang spoke up.

"Master," he said, "if there's no self and no other, then who is giving this lecture? Who is listening?"

The teacher had no answer.

"I'm only a layman," Pang said, "but I've a rough grasp of the faith."

"Then how do you read it?" the teacher asked.

Pang answered with a verse:

No self, and no other —
so where is the line between stranger and friend?
Take my advice, quit working the lecture circuit.
It can't touch going straight for the real thing.
The nature of diamond wisdom
holds not one speck of dust.
"I have heard," "I believe and accept" —
all borrowed names, only talk.

Hearing the verse, the teacher was delighted, full of admiration.

Everywhere Pang went, the old masters traded rounds with him. Every reply rolled with whatever came at it, an echo answering a sound, never anything you could pin to a fixed rule or formula.

Pointer

The Diamond Sutra is a core Buddhist text, and its central claim is that the solid-seeming "self" and "other" everyone assumes are empty, not really there as separate things. Pang catches a lecturer reciting exactly that line and springs the obvious trap: if there is truly no self and no other, who is up there talking and who is sitting here listening? The teacher freezes, having recited the words without standing inside them. Pang's verse twists gently, noting that even the sutra's own famous tags, "thus I have heard" and "I believe and accept," are borrowed labels, so quit performing the text on the lecture circuit and go straight for what it points at. The cruelty is mild, the teacher ends up delighted, and the closing remark is the real tribute to Pang: he carried no canned answer, he simply returned whatever came at him, like an echo answering a sound.