Baishui Zen

In this post we’re continuing to read Outline of Practice. We’ll follow the same format as before, discussing the difference between Red Pine’s translation of the text and my own amateur one, from the original Chinese included. Stuff in my translation that is arguably missing from Red Pine is in blue. Stuff that Red Pine writes that disagrees with my translation is in red. Nothing is meant by the color coding, it’s just selected to stand out.

First we have:

The Text

三無所求行者。世人長迷處處貪著名之為求。智者悟真理將俗反。安心無為形隨運轉。萬有斯空無所願樂。功德黑暗常相隨逐。三界久居猶如火宅。有身皆苦誰得而安。了達此處故捨諸有止想無求。經曰。有求皆苦。無求即樂。判知無求真為道行。故言無所求行。

Next, I will offer my translation:

Third is the practice of not seeking anything. A generation of people have long been confused. Everywhere they are greedy and desirous; broadly speaking, they are seeking. The wise apprehend the essential reason and return from social mores. A peaceful mind doesn’t act, appearances follow shifting circumstances. Everything that is, is empty, with no place for desire or joy. Meritorious virtue and the deepest ignorance frequently pursue each other. Dwelling in the three realms for a long time is like residing in a burning house. Having a body, all is suffering; who can obtain peace? With complete realization of this place, one therefore discards all existence and stops thoughts, and no longer seeks anything. The sutras say, “seeking, everything is suffering; not seeking is immediate bliss.” To discern and know without seeking is the true act of practice on the path. This is what is called the practice of not seeking anything.

And now, for Red Pine:

Third, seeking nothing. People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. Calamity forever alternates with Prosperity. To dwell in the three realms is to dwell in a burning house. To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

Analysis

In spite of the general lack of highlighting in the text, I feel like there’s a lot of stuff to unpack here. There’s Chinese stuff I want to talk about, as well as stuff about Chan. Perhaps ironically, our translations for this passage do not disagree on much in spirit, but there are some particular places where I feel like Red Pine goes wrong or too far in his desire to streamline the text in English, for a non-Buddhist audience. Let’s jump into it.

To start with, looking back on my own translation, I feel it shows a degree of idiosyncrasy, but I decided that if a quirk of mine made it through my own revisions on my hard drive, it should make it to this blog for the point of the discussion. That is why we’re doing this after all, right?

One such idiosyncrasy is apparent immediately. 世, and in particular, 世人, should probably be read as “people of the world,” or, maybe slightly more critically, “worldly people.” In Rouzer’s book on literary Chinese, he says it means, “human society, the world, the age, a generation.” Pleco, on the other hand, gives “a generation” first, so this is what I wrote. I think the shift between one or the other depends on when the writing is being done, and I can’t say when one usage fell in popularity relative to another. To be clear, in my own notes, I wrote to myself that I do not think Bodhidharma is telling the kids to get off his lawn – I don’t read him as saying there is some recent moral failure that he is calling attention to in this generation. Rather, Soothill and Hodous have a plethora of usages where the character means “age,” now in the sense of Buddhist cosmology. By that reading, he’s not limiting himself to currently living people, or people who live in India or China. A Buddhist age is some unfathomably long number of years – so by this reading, it would be referring to essentially all beings who find themselves human in this universe.

A third reading I mentioned briefly above is, “worldly people,” which is a straightforward reading as well that would be very simple and match the tone. I avoided it because I couldn’t find any indication that this phrase’s usage in English had a Chinese counterpart. Common analogies often do seem to pop up across the language barrier, but I’m not sure about here. In fact, 世人 seems to usually be read with a more neutral connotation – it is more likely to mean “average people” or “normal people” or “the public” than to have this particular negative connotation. So I think this is a weaker choice, and we should probably read it as a broad statement about humankind’s base tendency, which is to seek material gain.

The sentence continues, 處處貪著, another instance of my favorite grammatical quirk, which is repetition for intensity or emphasis. 處 means “place,” and two of them together means “every place.” We recall that “place” is often interpreted as “circumstance” or “situation,” and so we can also get that as “always.” 著 usually means “manifest,” but in our Chan context, “to be attached” is quite common.. I picked “desirous” for lack of a better English word. If you think of one, point out below how bad my English skills are.

The next significant hanzi I want to talk about is 悟, which I translate in line with pleco as “apprehend.” Chinese has several different words which can be used to mean “know,” reflecting different modes of understanding. For example, in English, we could say the simple sentence: “I know Chinese.” In Chinese, such as sentence would be unclear, without a good grip on the intention of the speaker. Most native English speakers would probably intuitively interpret that sentence as “I am capable of speaking Chinese,” but at least in classical Chinese, this is a different mode of knowledge, which we would use 會 for, and this gives that character the meaning “can” in many contexts. On the other hand, the sentence could also mean “I know of Chinese,” for which 知 would be appropriate, which typically means “to know.” Both of these are different from 悟, which furthermore stands in contrast with 判, the latter of which means “to judge” or as I translate later, as “to discern.”

So, returning to the text, Bodhidharma says 智者悟真理, and it’s worthwhile to point out that 智 is potentially also a key word here. It is pronounced the same way as 知 (possibly with different tone), but means “wisdom,” rather than knowledge. Readers who are following the Approaching the Path series will know (ha!) that “wisdom” is a very meaningful term, referring to the absence of Buddhist ignorance, and correct understanding of reality. Furthermore, 理, translated as “reason,” is the same usage of the word “reason” as in the very beginning of Outline. My translation in the above is thus very close to completely literal: wisdom that which apprehend essential reason. “Reason” here being that correct understanding. So I think Red Pine is missing the point. It’s not that the wise merely wake up from being greedy, although that will be true and follows from what I believe is the intended statement. It’s that wisdom itself means apprehending the essential nature of reality. Not just understanding it, intuitively “grokking” it, and thus are shaken from seeking.

Continuing on, we have a minor point of disagreement between the translations, but perhaps one worth pausing for a moment to discuss anyway. In the Chinese, we have 安心無為 for which my translation is somewhat literal in my usual fashion. Nevertheless, there are at least two alternative readings of this phrase I want to point out. The first stems from the character 為, wei, which means to make, do, act, etc. If instead I had chosen “make” as the translation, it would be somewhat stilted in English, but it would again be a statement about non-discrimination. A peaceful mind does not make, make what? Make categories and opinions and judgments. I think this is close to the intended reading. On the other hand, throughout this text, we have seen many instances of Bodhidiharma essentially casting Buddhist thought through a folk-Chinese or Daoist lens for simple practitioners. If that was the case, you might read it as “a peaceful mind has effortless (non)-action,” following Daoist conceptions of wu wei. I don’t think this is significantly different in terms of content, but it does make one wonder about the intended reading and connotation.

The next comments I want to make are about are sort of in the opposite direction. In Red Pine’s reading, the alternation of calamity and prosperity, good and bad fortune, is very in line with a Daoist reading of the text. However, here I take the opposite interpretation, that this sentence should be read through a Buddhist lens. I offer: “meritorious virtue and deepest ignorance frequently pursue one another.” To understand this phrase, we should consider both the Chinese itself, as well as call upon some of the readings from the Nirvana sutra we’ve been looking at, in particular, discuss the lesser vehicle, the sravaka vehicle.

First, in the Chinese, we break it down into four parts 功德, 黑暗, and 常相隨逐. For the first, they offer: virtue achieved; achievement; power to do meritorious works; merit; meritorious virtue; the reward of virtue, of which I opted for the latter choice(s). This is because they are clearly intended to contrast against 黑暗. These two characters are similar, meaning black and dark, and connote the darkness of ignorance. Since the text says they pursue/chase/follow each other, it’s clear they are intended to contrast each other, but one would not be entirely remiss to read it more in the line of “great deeds and evil deeds” instead. The last part is unambiguous, it literally means frequently/always pursue each other, and “always” doesn’t seem to read correctly. I read the text as saying that good actions, virtuous actions worthy of merit, can be accompanied by fundamental ignorance. In particular, it’s not enough to do these good actions without understanding the wisdom of emptiness. Since ignorance is the root of birth and death, without correct understanding, apparent progress towards spiritual growth or connecting with the buddha-nature will be given back and lost as quickly as it is gained, as it is also merely circumstantially arising and departing.

On the other side of things, I want to direct your attention to Nirvana Sutra – Chapter 8, where near the end, we discuss the sravakayana, the method of attaining enlightenment for disciple or listener of the buddhadharma. These are the disciples that appear throughout the sutra lamenting the passing of the buddha, the people who cry that without him, they will be without the dharma. The sutra doesn’t treat these guys too well, because dharma is all around us, all the time, and these guys kind of get portrayed as helpless.

In the commentary to that chapter, I point out that there’s really nothing wrong with being a listener. That it is possible to be a listener, learn some good practices and habits, and use them to build a foundation upon which you might then try to approach Mahayana or perhaps even more specifically Chan. With this in mind, we can get another read on what Bodhidharma is referring to, it is a similar criticism to those we have seen already many times in the Nirvana sutra. Virtue and vice follow each other among listeners, because those who only listen to the path but never actually gain any practices are doomed to make the same mistakes repeatedly. This is also a context clue as to why we translate 常 as “frequently,” and not “always.” Those who are on the path that Bodhidharma writes about are a select few, even among people who call themselves Buddhists. They have fully dedicated themselves to attaining their enlightenment, in this lifetime if at all possible. And we know this must be the case, because he continues, urging all of us with a body in the three realms to depart as quickly as possible to find peace, calling it a “burning house.”

Let’s finish our discussion for today with this quote from the sutras. I’m sure I’ve seen this sentiment in Nirvana, I’m also sure it’s abundant elsewhere, as it’s a cornerstone of Buddhist thought. At the risk of nitpicking Red Pine, I’m going to point out a small difference in the Chinese that speaks to me. The Chinese contains this hanzi 皆, which means “all, everything, always, in every circumstance,” and so on. Red Pine says that the sutras say ‘to seek is to suffer,’ and I think this is slightly off. It is not that the act of seeking produces some localized suffering which pollutes your experience. It’s that when you seek, everything is suffering. Not merely the thing you are chasing, your body, your world, each and every experience is warped by that desire. Seeking is like a flame – it consumes what it comes in contact with, and grows bigger. This is why we use the word “extinguish.” It is not an accident, it is also the case in the Chinese. We use 滅 with its water radical, killing the fire.

This is why Bodhidharma instructs us, “To discern and know without seeking is the true act of practice on the path.” He writes 判, for discernment or judgment, as we indicated above. To judge without seeking is a difficult task for us, often. Part of seeking and certainly of conceptual thought can be questions of right and wrong, either ethically or just simply factually. We can be caught up in things like “the principle of the matter” and want to settle questions in some vast generalities that don’t really apply. For us as lay practitioners, Bodhidharma tells us, no. Judge from your experience, yes, but do not let your judgments be transformed into new sources of fuel for the flames.

Conclusion

The upshot to this discussion about modes of knowledge is that the manner by which knowledge comes about is of the utmost importance in Chan. There is a famous saying throughout the record: “I allow that the barbarian (Bodhidharma) knows, I do not allow that he understands.” Rendered in Chinese 只許老胡知。不許老胡會。Notice, 知 and 會, as we discussed above. In this instance and in general, the kind of knowledge that 知 refers to is not merely a store of knowledge, but rather, a skill of making correct judgments regarding the character of things. It can also refer to technical savvy that stems from such intuition. So you could summarize it as “intuitive know-how,” and often stems from experience. Intuitive understanding based on direct perception of reality is a Chan cornerstone. Our read of the rest very much depends on the perceived connotation of “I do not allow that he understands.” In light of Bodhidharma telling us that full realization entails the stopping of thoughts, we can read this sentence with a sense of irony, that he knows in the direct and fluid sense, without this knowledge passing through a layer of intellectualized understanding.

Toward assembling a coherent overall picture of Chan teachings, I think this passage has been very helpful!