One of these utterances by the Zen masters that will stir a revolution in our minds is this: Hōkoji (P‘ang-yün), formerly a Confucian, asked Baso (Ma-tsu, –788), “What kind of man is he who does not keep company with any thing?” Replied the master, “I will tell you when you have swallowed up in one draught all the waters in the West River.”[1.15] What an irrelevant reply to the most serious question one can ever raise in the history of thought! It sounds almost sacrilegious when we know how many souls there are who go down under the weight of this question. But Baso’s earnestness leaves no room for doubt as is quite well known to all the students of Zen. In fact, the rise of Zen after the sixth patriarch, Hui-nêng, was due to the brilliant career of Baso under whom there arose more than eighty fully-qualified masters, and Hōkoji who was one of the foremost lay disciples of Zen, earned a well-deserved reputation as the Vimalakīrti of Chinese Buddhism. A talk between two such veteran Zen masters could not be an idle sport. However easy and even careless it may appear, there is hidden in it a most precious gem in the literature of Zen. We do not know how many students of Zen were made to sweat and cry in tears because of the inscrutability of this statement of Baso’s. To give another instance: a monk asked the master Shin of Chōsa (Chang-sha Ching-ch‘ên), “Where has Nansen (Nan-ch‘üan) gone after his death?” Replied the master, “When Sekito (Shih-tou) was still in the order of young novitiates, he saw the sixth patriarch.” “I am not asking about the young novitiate. What I wish to know is, where is Nansen gone after his death?” “As to that,” said the master, “it makes one think.”[1.16]