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Sansui kyô Notes
1. "Preceptor Kai of Mt. Dayang" is better known as
Furong Daokai (1043-1119), seventh ancestor of Dôgen's
Caodong house of Chan after the founder, Tongshan.
2. "Swift as the wind" alludes to a line in the Lotus
Sutra describing the speed of the supreme, buddha vehicle.
"A flower opening within the world" probably alludes
to the line, "A flower opens and the world arises",
in the transmission verse attributed to Bodhidharma's master,
Prajñâtâra.
3. Dôgen is playing here with the term "stepping back",
often used in Chan texts in the sense, "returning the mind
to its enlightened source".
4. The four views of mountains here are probably drawn from a
similar list in Buddhist scripture.
5. Dôgen is here playing with the term "stone woman",
a standard idiom for a barren woman. The references to male and
female, heavenly and earthly stones invoke passages in Chinese
literature.
6. "The Great Master Yunmen Kuangzhen" is better known
Yunmen Wenyan (864-949), founder of the Yunmen house of Chan.
7. "Nanquan's 'sickle'" refers to a well-known conversation
attributed to the early ninth-century master Nanquan Puyuan;
"Huangbo's 'stick' and Linji's 'roar'" refers to the
famous Chan teaching techniques of beating and shouting attributed
to these two ninth-century masters.
8. "Son of Mâra [The Evil One] is a standard Buddhist
term of approbation; "gang of six" refers to a notorious
group of lawless monks among the followers of the Buddha.
9. Or "children of a non-Buddhist naturalism". "Naturalism"
here may well refer to what Buddhists consider the false view
that things arise, not from causes and conditions, but spontaneously.
10. "Seven high and eight across" indicates a state
of total spiritual freedom; "practice and verification are
not non-existent", from a dialogue between the Sixth Patriarch,
Huineng, and his disciple Nanyue Huairang, is often used by Dôgen
to indicate the mystery of enlightened spiritual practice.
11. These various ways of seeing are based on the Vijñânavâda
teaching known as "the four views of water": gods see
water as jewels; humans see it as water; hungry ghosts, as blood;
and fish, as a dwelling.
12. Buddhist cosmology posits a set of disks, or "wheels",
beneath the earth, composed, in descending order, of the "elements"
of water, wind, and space.
13. The exact source of this saying is unidentified.
14. After a line in book I of this "Daoist" classic.
15. From the Zheng dao ge ("Song of Verification
of the Way") attributed to the early eighth-century Chan
figure Yongjia Xuanjue.
16. Dôgen seems to be running together two stories from
the ancient Daoist classic the Zhuangzi, one dealing with
the Yellow Emperor's interview with Guang Chengzi of Mt. Kongtong,
the other with Emperor Yao's instruction by the Hua Guard.
17. At the time of the Tang government persecution of Buddhism
(845) Chuanzi Decheng left his teacher, Yueshan Weiyan, and became
a boatman on the Huating River. There he met Jiashan Shanhui.
After transmitting the dharma to Shanhui by throwing him in the
river, Decheng himself leaped into the water and disappeared.
18. The "true dragon" refers to "the real thing";
from the well-known Chinese story of the man, famous for his
love of carved dragons, who was one day visited by a real dragon
and frightened out of his wits.
19. There are several possible sources for this saying; e.g.,
a saying of the early tenth-century figure Yunmen Wenyan: "Monks,
do not have deluded notions. Heaven is heaven, earth is earth;
mountains are mountains, waters are waters; monks are monks,
laymen are laymen."
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