30Saint or Stump?勘辨

師因入軍營赴齋，門首見員僚，師指露柱問：「是凡？是聖？」員僚無語。師打露柱，云：「直饒道得，也秖是箇木橛。」便入去。

Linji was invited to a meal at an army camp. At the gate he ran into one of the officers. Pointing to a pillar, Linji asked, "Ordinary, or holy?"

The officer had nothing to say.

Linji struck the pillar and said, "Even if you'd found an answer, it's still just a block of wood." Then he went in.

Pointer

Linji takes his testing on the road, to an army camp, and works over an officer instead of a monk. He points at a plain wooden pillar and forces a choice: ordinary, or holy? The question is rigged, because it assumes the world sorts into two bins, sacred over here and mundane over there, and any answer accepts the bins. The officer freezes. Then comes the actual teaching in the punchline: pick either label and you have still missed it, it is a block of wood, and Linji whacks the pillar to shove the bare thing forward, the pillar itself before a word gets stuck to it. This is the same split he refuses with Puhua a few cases back, and it runs straight from his core claim that there is nothing holy to attain because the real person is already standing here, in the camp, looking at the wood.