This credo is remembered most vividly in two anecdotes that were later
enshrined in a famous collection of koans called the Wu-men Kuan (or
Mumonkan in Japanese). In both of these anecdotes, Ma-tsu is asked,
"What is Buddha?"--meaning what is the spirituality that all seek. In
one he replied, "Mind is Buddha" (Mumonkan, Case 30), and in the other
anecdote he said, "No mind, no Buddha" (Mumonkan, Case 33), which
merely affirms that spirituality is in the mind, and for its
realization one must realize the mind.13 In either instance he is merely
following the earlier idea that there is no reality and thus no
enlightenment outside the mind.
These two exchanges are part of a single anecdote of Ma-tsu recorded in
the chronicles.
_A monk asked why the Master maintained, "The Mind is the Buddha." The
Master answered, "Because I want to stop the crying of a baby." The
monk persisted, "When the crying has stopped, what is it then?" "Not
Mind, not Buddha," was the answer. "How do you teach a man who does not
uphold either of these?" The Master said, "I would tell him, 'Not
things.' " The monk again questioned, "If you met a man free from
attachment to all things, what would you tell him?" The Master replied,
"I would let him experience the Great Tao._"14_
_As the scholar John Wu has pointed out, "This dialogue reveals an
important secret about Ma-tsu's art of teaching. Sometimes he used a
positive formula, sometimes he used a negative formula. On the surface
they are contradictory to each other. But when we remember that he was
using them in answering persons of different grades of attainments and
intelligence, the contradiction disappears at once in the light of a
higher unity of purpose, which was in all cases to lead the questioner
to transcend his present state."15 Another example of a seemingly
contradictory position is recorded as a koan in another famous
collection, the Blue Cliff Record (Case 3). In this anecdote, Ma-tsu is
asked one day about his health, and he responded with, "Sun-faced
Buddhas, Moon-faced Buddhas."16 According to a Buddhist tradition, a
Sun-faced Buddha lives for eighteen hundred years, a Moon-faced Buddha
lives only a day and a night. Perhaps he was proposing these two
contradictory cases to demonstrate the irrelevance of an inquiry after
his physical state. It would have been far better if the question had
concerned his mind.
A story describing how Ma-tsu handled other teachers who wandered by
depicts very well the way that he could undermine logic and
categorization. In a particularly famous anecdote, a visiting teacher
proposed a condition of duality, a condition equivalent to that of a
switch that can be either off or on. Having permitted the teacher to
adopt this very un-Zen position, Ma-tsu proceeds to demolish him. The
story goes as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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