We now come to the third class I have styled, “Contradiction,” by which
I mean the Zen master’s negation, implicitly or expressly, of what he
himself has stated or what has been stated by another. To one and the
same question his answer is sometimes “No,” sometimes “Yes.” Or to a
well-known and fully-established fact he gives an unqualified denial.
From an ordinary point of view he is altogether unreliable, yet he
seems to think that the truth of Zen requires such contradictions and
denials; for Zen has a standard of its own, which, to our common-sense
minds, consists just in negating everything we properly hold true and
real. In spite of these apparent confusions, the philosophy of Zen is
guided by a thorough-going principle which, when once grasped, its
topsy-turviness becomes the plainest truth.
A monk asked the sixth patriarch of the Zen sect in China, who
flourished late in the seventh and early in the eighth century, “Who
has attained to the secrets of Wobai (Huang-mei)?” Wobai is the name of
the mountain where the fifth patriarch, Hung-jên used to reside, and,
it was a well-known fact that Hui-nêng, the sixth patriarch, studied
Zen under him and succeeded in the orthodox line of transmission. The
question was therefore really not a plain regular one, seeking an
information about facts. It had quite an ulterior object. The reply
of the sixth patriarch was, “One who understands Buddhism has
attained to the secrets of Wobai.”
“Have you then attained them?”
“No, I have not.”
“How is it,” asked the monk, “that you have not?”