6On the Sword's Edge上堂

上堂，僧問：「如何是劍刃上事？」師云：「禍事，禍事！」僧擬議，師便打。問：「秖如石室行者，踏碓忘却移脚，向什麼處去？」師云：「沒溺深泉。」師乃云：「但有來者，不虧欠伊，總識伊來處。若與麼來，恰似失却；不與麼來，無繩自縛。一切時中莫亂斟酌，會與不會都來是錯。分明與麼道，一任天下人貶剝。久立珍重。」

Linji took the high seat. A monk asked, "How is it on the sword's edge?"
Linji said, "Disaster. Disaster."
The monk started to speak, and Linji hit him.

Another asked, "There's the workman at Stone Room, treading the pestle so hard he forgets his feet are moving. Where has he gone?"
Linji said, "Drowned in the deep spring."

Then Linji said: "Whoever comes here, I shortchange no one. I know exactly where each of you comes from. Come at me one way, and it's as if you'd lost yourself. Come the other way, and you've bound yourself with no rope. Don't sit weighing it endlessly. Get it or miss it, either way you're wrong. I say it plainly: let everyone under heaven pick me apart. You've stood a long while. Take care."

Pointer

"How is it on the sword's edge?" asks what the do-or-die instant of awakening is like, and Linji's answer is the trap closing: "Disaster," because the second the monk pauses to consider the reply, he has already stepped off the edge into thinking, and he gets hit for it. The Stone Room workman is a stock figure, a man pounding grain so absorbed he forgets his own legs are moving, and "drowned in the deep spring" means he is in so far there's no telling where he went. The closing speech is the warning Linji repeats in different words for the rest of the book: come at him one way and you've lost yourself, come the other way and you've tied yourself up with no rope, so quit sizing things up, because the moment you turn this into a problem to solve you've missed it. Get it or miss it, he says, either way you're wrong, which is his way of refusing to let "right answer" be a thing you can hold.