39Ding's Slap勘辨

有定上座到參，問：「如何是佛法大意？」師下繩床，擒住與一掌便托開，定佇立。傍僧云：「定上座何不禮拜？」定方禮拜，忽然大悟。

The senior monk Ding came to study with Linji. He asked, "What is the real point of the Buddha's teaching?"

Linji came down off his seat, seized him, gave him a slap, and shoved him off. Ding stood there, frozen.

A monk standing nearby said, "Ding, why don't you bow?"

As Ding bowed, he suddenly broke wide open.

Pointer

Most of this section ends in stalemate, two pros trading taps and nobody pinned; this is the rare scene where the testing cracks someone open. Ding is a senior monk, and he leads with the largest question there is, kin to the one Zhaozhou and Longya lob at masters nearby (cases 38, 43, which ask why Bodhidharma came from the West): what is the Buddha's teaching actually about? Linji comes off his seat, grabs him, slaps him, shoves him away, refusing to hand over a sentence Ding could pocket and thereby miss. Ding stands there with nothing to hold. Then the detail that matters: a bystander says bow, and it is in the bowing, an ordinary reflex and not a thought, that the whole thing finally lands on him. The point was never going to arrive as an explanation, which is exactly why the slap could do what no answer would.