Again the nun shouted. The Master hit her.20
_
What Lin-chi also brought to Ch'an was a dialectical inquiry into the
relationship between master and pupil, together with a similar analysis
of the mind states that lead to enlightenment. He seems remarkably
sophisticated for the ninth century, and indeed we would be hard
pressed to find this kind of psychological analysis anywhere in the
West that early. The puzzling, contradictory quality about all this is
that Lin-chi believed fervently in intuitive intelligence, and in the
uselessness of words--even warning that questions were irrelevant:
_Does anyone have a question? If so, let him ask it now. But the
instant you open your mouth you are already way off.21
_
Among his dialectical creations were various fourfold categorizations
of the intangible. We have already seen his four categories of the
shout. He also created the four categories of relationship between
subject and object, also sometimes called the Four Processes of
Liberation from Subjectivity and Objectivity. Some believe this served
to structure the "four standpoints or points of view which Lin-chi used
in instructing his students."22 Lin-chi's original proposition, the
basis of all the later commentary, is provided in _The Record of Lin-
chi _as follows:
_At the evening gathering the Master addressed the assembly, saying:
"Sometimes I take away man and do not take away the surroundings;
sometimes I take away the surroundings and do not take away man;
sometimes I take away both man and the surroundings; sometimes I take
away neither man nor the surroundings._"23_
_As Chang Chung-yuan describes these four arrangements, the first is to
"take away the man but not his objective situation," i.e., to take away
all interpretation and just experience the world without subjective
associations.24 (This is quite similar to the approach of the Japanese
haiku poem, in which a description of something is provided completely
devoid of interpretation or explicit emotional response.)
The second arrangement is to let the man remain but take away
objectivity. As John Wu interprets this, "In the second stage, people
of normal vision, who see mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers,
must be reminded of the part that their own mind contributes to the
appearance of things, and that what they naively take for objectivity
is inextricably mixed with subjectivity. Once aware of subjectivity,
one is initiated into the first stages of Ch'an, when one no longer
sees mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers."25 This is merely the
Ch'an commonplace that "non-attachment or objectivity liberates one's
self from bondage to the outside and thus leads to enlightenment."26 As
Dumoulin describes these, "In the first and second stages, illusion
departs first from the subject and then from the object; clinging to
subjective intellectual perception and to the objective world is
overcome."27
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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