Life delineates itself on the canvas called time; and time never repeats, once gone, forever gone; and so is an act, once done, it is never undone. Life is a _sumiye_-painting, which must be executed once and for all time and without hesitation, without intellection, and no corrections are permissible or possible. Life is not like an oil-painting which can be rubbed out and done over time and again until the artist is satisfied. With a _sumiye_-painting, any brush stroke painted over a second time results in a smudge; the life has left it. All corrections show when the ink dries. So is life. We can never retract what we have once committed to deeds, nay, what has once passed through consciousness can never be rubbed out. Zen therefore ought to be caught while the thing is going on, neither before nor after. It is an act of one instant. When Dharma was leaving China, as the legend has it, he asked his disciples what was their understanding of Zen, and one of them who happened to be a nun, replied, “It is like Ānanda’s looking into the kingdom of Akshobhya Buddha, it is seen once and has never been repeated.” This fleeting, unrepeatable, and ungraspable character of life is delineated graphically by Zen masters who have compared it to lightning or spark produced by the percussion of stones: 閃電光, 擊石火 (_shan tien kuang, chi shih huo_) is the phrase.[6.61] The idea of direct method appealed to by the masters is to get hold of this fleeting life as it flees and not after it has flown. While it is fleeing, there is no time to recall memory or to build ideas. No reasoning avails here. Language may be used, but this has been associated too long with ideation, and has lost directness or being by itself. As soon as words are used, they express meaning, reasoning; they represent something not belonging to themselves; they have no direct connection with life, except being a faint echo or image of something that is no longer here. This is the reason why the masters often avoid such expressions or statements as are intelligible in any logical way. Their aim is to have the pupil’s attention concentrated in the thing itself which he wishes to grasp and not in anything that is in the remotest possible connection liable to disturb him. Therefore when we attempt to find meaning in dharanis or exclamations or a nonsensical string of sounds taken as such, we are far away from the truth of Zen. We must penetrate into the mind itself as the spring of life, from which all these words are produced. The swinging of a stick, the crying of a “Kwats!” or the kicking of a ball must be understood in this sense, that is, as the directest demonstration of life, no, even as life itself. The direct method is thus not always the violent assertion of life-force, but a gentle movement of the body, the responding to a call, the listening to a murmuring stream, or to a singing bird, or any of our most ordinary everyday assertions of life.